Hajiaghayi Leads Multi-Institutional Team in Solving Complex Game Theory Scenario

Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi, the Jack and Rita G. Minker Associate Professor of Computer Science with an appointment in UMIACS, recently led a team of computer scientists in solving a game theory scenario that has vexed researchers for nearly a century.

The game, known as “Colonel Blotto,” has been used to analyze the potential outcomes of elections and other similar two-party conflicts since its invention in 1921. But until now, the game has been of limited use because it lacked a definitive solution.

The large variety of possible strategies has been the key obstacle to finding a computational solution to the game.

Hajiaghayi and his team—which included collaborators from the University of Maryland, Stanford University and Microsoft Research—overcame this issue by limiting the total number of possible strategies to a relative handful of representative choices.

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