Mary Rose Cook's notebook

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Playing the Prisoner's Dilemma with your family

Every Saturday, my family have a pub quiz over Zoom. [A pub quiz is a quiz held in a pub or bar.]


The teams are usually:



Each team Zooms in from their bunker. Each team makes up a round of five questions.


This week, our round was a bit different.


Alice and Bob are arrested for murder and held at the police station.



Each team played a round of Prisoner's Dilemma against each other team. For example: My brother and his wife played against my mum and step-dad. On the count of three, the two teams did a thumbs-up if they wanted to say nothing, or a thumbs-down if they wanted to blame the other team. Then, depending on what the teams did, each would get some number of years in prison between 0 and 3.


Every team played against every other team. Pub quiz points were awarded based on a team's total years in prison across all the rounds they'd played.


One thing I learnt was that my other other sister and her boyfriend are total saints. They only blamed the other team once out of five rounds. Whereas my mum and step-dad, well, I won't say any more.


I created an Airtable base that made running the game super easy. It explained the game, assigned years in prison for each round and summed the total years in prison.


https://airtable.com/shrCR87qMRLKjLhuO


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