Prisoner's Dilemma
- The Source
- Jan 1
- 1 min read
"Two bank robbers happen to meet. They decide to pull a job together.
The cops nab them, but without enough evidence to convict. They need a confession. And they know both robbers are unlikely to talk, since if neither implicates the other, the cops can keep them in jail for only 30 days.
So they put the two in separate cells. They go to the first prisoner and say:
“If you rat on your partner and he stays mum, we’ll let you go and he’ll do ten years.”
“If you both rat on each other, you’ll both do eight years.”
Then they go to the second prisoner and say the same thing.
The first prisoner thinks it over.
“If he rats on me and I don’t rat on him, then I lose big-time. If I rat on him and he doesn’t rat on me, then I win big-time. Either way, the smart move is to rat on him. I’ll just hope he’s a sucker and doesn’t rat on me.”
The second prisoner reasons the same way.
So they rat on each other, and the cops get their two convictions.
If the prisoners had cooperated, both would have gotten off easy. Instead, the rational pursuit of self-interest has put them both in a world of pain.
That is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It is the most famous puzzle in the scientific field called game theory, the mathematical analysis of strategic interactions between rivals".
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