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Friday, January 25, 2013

Friday lab meet

We are four people in our lab including our project guide. Me, Ahmed and Vaishali. We are trying to make photosynthetic organisms to produce large quantities of alkanes or fatty acids so that they could be used as biofuel.
To get to know what each one of us is working on, we all meet together once a week on Friday and tell in brief what we have done this week. This is generally a practice in most labs. In addition to this one person has to give a presentation on some research work he/she has read. There's a week in one month where we can discuss any topic about science. Today was this day.

I chose to discuss shortly about the prisoner's dilemma. In this, two prisoners isolated from each other are asked to confess the crime which they did together. They can confess or remain silent. They are told that if they both confess then they will get 5 years' imprisonment and if one of them confesses, then the person who remained silent will be sent to jail for 10 years and the confessor will be set free.
I both remain silent then both of them would get 1 year imprisonment.

None of them know what the other person would say. "What if he confessed? I would rust in jail for 10 years."; is the natural thought of the prisoners. Being prisoners they most probably would act selfish and confess, so that they would be set free. However, the mos beneficial strategy for both of them is to stay silent. They would both get 1 year's term which is the least amount of sum of the term (2 years) anyone would get by their response to their query.

The whole point of discussing this in the meet was to emphasize upon the lab members that we all lab members should always cooperate among ourselves.

I really don't know if they got the point but even if someone defects, in real life, the loser always have a chance to play again. I don't know who came upon the strategy of "Tit for Tat".