Prisoner’s dilemmas ponder what happens when two rational agents, unable to communicate with one another, must choose between betraying the other for a large individual reward or cooperating for a more modest shared reward. These thought experiments are accompanied by a caveat – if both agents betray one another, they’re left with nothing. One of the best-known examples of game theory, the implications of prisoner’s dilemmas are more than just theoretical, extending to real-life matters of government and diplomacy. Illustrated with whimsical felt stop-motion, this TED-Ed animation puzzles through two prisoner’s-dilemma scenarios in which gingerbread men are forced to chew over how to keep the maximum number of limbs.
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Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
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Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
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Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
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Virtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
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History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
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Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
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Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
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Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
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Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
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