Games may be life with all the hard bits removed, but they provide a way to study why people make the choices they make. Traditional games are usually played against a static background: the rewards per outcome are constant. That limits their relevance to behavior because, in real life, the rewards and consequences of strategic choices are ever changing. Now, researchers have used a mathematical model to study a series of games that include evolving strategies and randomly varying returns.

A bit of history

Perhaps the most famous game-theory contest is the prisoner’s dilemma. In the prisoner’s dilemma, a pair of thieves have been captured and are being separately interrogated by the police. If both clam up, they will be punished for a lesser crime. If one prisoner makes a deal (defects) then that prisoner gets to go free and the other gets a heavier sentence. If both make a deal, they both get an in-between punishment.

The person running the game can start it with different rewards for cooperating and defecting to explore how the optimum strategy varies with reward and risk, which the players can figure out by varying the strategies across multiple rounds. Depending on the balance between the reward for staying silent (cooperating) and betrayal, the game stabilizes with everyone betraying everyone. In this simple situation, everyone loses.

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A photon is a single particle of light, and under normal circumstances, it can't be divided. But a photon is also not a particle, in the sense that it does not have a specific location. Instead, it is an extended object.

So if a photon is only partway through the process of reflecting from a perfect mirror and you yank the mirror away, what happens? The answer, from a trio of Norwegian physicists, turns out (arxiv.org link) to be more complex than I expected.

A photon divided?

Let’s first talk briefly about dividing and combining photons. If this were a common experience in our lives, then shining a single color of light through a piece of glass or reflecting it from a surface might cause photons to divide or combine. This would lead to an amazing array of colors: Our universe would be the most fantastic and legal LSD trip you could imagine. But this doesn't generally happen, hence LSD.

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