Missile vs. Laser: The Game of Terminal Maneuvers

This is what I come to this website for

Delightful reading, thanks for posting!

Very cool! I find it very fascinating how game theory has a lot of applications outside of game design. It feels like game design is actually the field where game theory is least useful sometimes!

Very cool!

This is very interesting, and I’m thinking of using “Missile vs Laser” as a toy example for some technologies I want to learn.

(I might even, crediting the author, as part of didactic examples when teaching programming topics: there are some core topics, e.g., generator coroutines, that this might motivate nicely. It’s actually surprisingly hard to find games that are extremely simple while still being interesting.)

I wonder why the author fixed the missile fuel to 7 units, if that means that the laser wins 75% of the time. Since fuel level is such a small discrete space, why not search for the value that gives even odds? Would this make the game more sensitive to “strategy”?

Presumably the author could not derive (nor prove) an “optimum strategy,” despite having some background in game theory. How would one go about proving whether such an optimum strategy does or does not exist? (Does the author’s intuition suggest that such a strategy must or must not exist?)

Finally, in the absence of an optimum strategy, has the author published any comparisons of strategies? I see from the code that there are a few choices for AI-strategy (though they are largely random). Would this tell us anything interesting about the “structure” of the game?