THE STR
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THE KGPIAN GAME THEORY SOCIETY
JULY, 2015
Evolution and Game Theory
A Beautiful Mind
SEVENTH EDITION
Duck Duck Go
KGP Funda
Advertising Industry loves Ad-Block Believe it or not. Advertising industry loves Ad-Block. It's the same logic why Nigerian scammers continue to use broken English. Really, can't Nigerian scammers use good English and have their message understood by more people? Surprisingly, Nigerian scammers figured out that using bad English makes them more profit, just like users using ad-block make Advertisers more profit. From the point of view of game theory, there is no difference between the advertising industry and Nigerian scams. Both work on the principle that by broadcasting ”bait" to as many people as possible, you increase the chances that some people will take the bait, and you will be able to "hook" some of them. In the case of the Nigerian scams, the bait is a promise of immense riches described in broken English, and the hook is the scam itself. In the case of advertising, the bait is the shiny advertising; the hook is the click on the ad, and the eventual sale. So, you will ask, why would they want you to block their ads/use bad English? Why would they want to stop the bait from going to as many people as possible? The problem is that there is a cost to sending the bait. The Advertiser has to pay the website for showing the ad. They pay them a very tiny amount, but when you are showing millions of ads everyday those costs add up. The middle men in the advertising industry get their money back when you click the ad, and the advertiser makes money when you purchase. So, really, what the advertiser wants to do is maximize the click-to-view ratio. Views cost them money. Clicks make them money.
Minimize views while maximizing clicks. Make more money. Simple, right? No, it is not that simple. Because maximizing click-to-view requires the advertiser to figure out what you need before you need it. That's a crazy difficult task. They have to attempt to read your mind. Imagine if you were hungry, and you opened your browser, and out popped an ad for pizza delivery...You are a lot more likely to click it, right? That's the advertiser's dream! But the problem is the advertiser can't read your mind. So, what it does is try to observe everything about you to make a guess. It can use strategies like showing more food ads during lunch time. Or tracking your search history to figure out what you are looking for. Then there's the user who is completely annoyed by ads. S/he will never click on an ad. S/he will never look at it. And if the ad tries to grab his/her attention, then s/he will complain to everyone s/he knows on social media so that no one will want to buy the product you are selling, or go to the website that is hosting your advertisement. There is a certain segment of population who hates ads with a vengeance. If you show them an ad, you lose money. Now, if only there was some way that allowed these people who are hostile to ads to opt out of ads... that will work great for everyone, right? They don't get bothered; Advertisers don't waste views on them and create negative publicity. The problem is that this kind of user is also going to vehemently object to register somewhere to opt-out of ads. You mean to stop a nnoying ads, I have to
give you information about me, and put a cookie in my browser. Are you kidding? In the meantime, here comes AdBlock! Not only does it allow the hostile users to opt-out of ads, it's also designed by the very people that hostile users identify with, so they are more likely to feel good using it. It's a huge victory for you when your sworn enemy does something that works in your favor. It's the same thing with Nigerian scams. The average user who gets annoyed with bad English is also likely to smell a scam. The Nigerian scammers are looking for the person who is willing to put up with the inconvenience of parsing bad English, because they know this person is either greedy or susceptible enough. The bad English acts as a filter against hostility just like ad-block works as a filter against hostility. In short, when the haters don't want to view ads, why show and annoy them, a complete waste of money for the advertisers? Increase the click to view ratio. So, who gets affected by AdBlock? It's the website that loses revenue. Remember: the website, especially the smaller ones, gets paid per view. Taking views away takes away their revenue. Personally, when I like a site, I turn off AdBlock for that site. Developers spend huge amount of time, making and publishing and updating their websites. It isn't morally correct to steal their bread. If I'm using it frequently enough and they are ad funded, I consider the views I generate as "payment" for the use of the site. - Darvin
Gambit: A Chess Tactic Gambit is a clever action in a game or other situations which is intended to achieve an advantage and usually involves taking a risk. A gambit is a chess opening in which a player, more often white, sacrifices material, using a pawn with the hope of achieving a resulting advantageous position. Some of the wellknown examples are the King's gambit (1.e4 e5 2.f4) and Queen's gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4).Gambits offered to an opponent may be accepted or declined. If a player who is offered a gambit captures the piece (gains material) the gambit is said to be accepted. If the player who was offered the gambit ignores it and instead continues his or her
THE STRATEGIST
development, then the gambit is said to be declined. Declining or accepting a gambit is a strategy in and itself too. Here is another famous gambit known as the Danish gambit (1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3) in which white will sacrifice one or two pawns for the sake of rapid development and attack. However, with care, black can accept one or both pawns saf ely, or simply decline the gambit altogether with good chances. A real life gambit:-Otto Von Bismarck , c h a n c e l l o r o f P r u s s i a , s u c c e s s f u l ly manipulated his enemies to unify Germany, using its ally Austria to defeat Denmark, then caused Austria to declare war on Prussia, and
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finally manipulated France into another war, thus creating the political climate to unite many German states into single one. He pulled some of this off by taking advantage of pre-existing circumstances and he lured enemies into traps several times. “You must be willing to make sacrifices at times, knowing that the outcome will be worth it!” - Harshitha
THE KGPIAN GAME THEORY SOCIETY
JULY, 2015
SEVENTH EDITION
Welcome! Hello everyone! Welcome to the place that's about to become your second home. Welcome to IIT Kharagpur. As you are bombarded with a new life style, with a lot of choices, it helps to know what you are going to get into. So let me give you a short run down about our society. We are called The KGPian Game Theory Society. And it is our dream and aim to promote game theory and with it strategic thinking in our Alma Mater and beyond. I guess the first question in your mind will be "What is this game theory?” Well, game theory is the study of strategic decision making. It means putting yourself in your opponent's position in order to predict his moves, thus maximizing your own profit. Which also means that it is a tool to analyse decisions that you make in your daily life? Right from whether or not to bunk a class to
competitive market decisions to wars between nations. And we as a society aim at promoting this concept throughout the campus and outside of it too. That's done with the formal intro. Founded on 19th August 2010, the KGTS is an initiative by Manoj Gadia. For us, it's more than just a society. It's a place where you can actually put to use your analytical skills. As you will see in some of the articles that have been included in this newsletter, we try and make sense of real life scenarios. We design analytical games which will make you think as you haven't before. Open up new ways to strategize. Think about what your opponent would do and act accordingly. Apart from all this, our society organizes offline as well as online events. We have created and successfully executed the event War of Wits on our own and Nashify in
coordination with Kshitij 2014, which are game theory based events for everyone to participate in. Our online game Brethren of the coast was a first of its kind online game theory event, which saw an in house participation of about 500. We have our newsletter which comes out each semester in which have immersed yourself now! We also regularly post comic strips, having an online reach of over 16k. While in the society you get exposed to every type of job imaginable, right from web designing to content design to sponsorship runs to on stage handling. As I said, everything. You learn everything to know about game theory and how to use it. You get to be a part of something bigger than yourself, a part of a family.
A Mind that Beautiful would never be lost! So what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you read these words “A Beautiful Mind”? John Nash. That's right, folks! Imagine a world without him and you wouldn't possibly know the strategy to be able to date the hotter woman, when you go to a bar with your friends without blocking each other out! Born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia, John was a renowned American Mathematician with fundamental contributions in Game Theory, Differential Geometry, and Partial Differential Equations; who won a Nobel Prize in 1994 for his work in Economic Sciences and Abel Prize in 2015 for his work on the latter. Eminent Professor Avinash Dixit stated once that, “If Nash got a dollar for every time someone wrote or said 'Nash equilibrium', he would be a rich man!" Now if you're reading the word 'Game Theory' for the first time, then you would surely wonder, what on Earth could 'Nash Equilibrium' possibly mean? A Nash Equilibrium is the optimal outcome of any given game, in which none of the players would change their strategy, even if they knew the other players' choices! To make this clearer, let's have an example. Pr isoner's Dilemma! Let's say two suspects are arrested for a crime and interviewed separately, and are not allowed to speak to each other. The police have enough evidence to charge them with a lesser crime and jail each for two years. However, they are both suspected of a more serious crime, which carries a ten year sentence. The police offer each a two year reduction in whichever sentence he/she will receive if the suspect gives evidence against the other suspect. Now that would create a simultaneous 2 player game, where each player has 2 choices, either to talk or remain silent! So what would each do? If the Suspect A talks, then Suspect B (who doesn't know what the other has done) will get ten years if he chooses to remain silent and eight years if he talks. If the Suspect A
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could be applied to military, economic and political situations. In Nash's framework each player takes the others' strategies as given and chooses his own strategy; equilibrium is where all these choices are mutually consistent. Nash's theorem works for any number of players, and with arbitrary mixtures of common interests and conflicts of interest; this is needed in economics where many people interact, and there are potential mutual gains from trade as well as distributive conflicts. He also made significant contributions to the theory of nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations and to singularity theory. However, just like every good thing must come to an end, the story and research of Prof. John Nash too hit the end of the road when he was diagnosed with a mental illness. His mental illness first began to manifest in the form of paranoia; his wife later describing his behaviour as erratic. Nash seemed to believe that all men who wore red ties were part of a communist conspiracy against him; Nash mailed letters to embassies in Washington, D.C., declaring that they were establishing a government. He was moved to McLean Hospital in April 1959 which confirmed his paranoid schizophrenia. His struggles with his illness and his recovery became the basis for Sylvia Nasar's biography, A Beautiful Mind, as well as a film of the same name starring Russell Crowe. Interesting, huh? Coming back. Nash's work in game theory On May 23, 2015, Nash and his wife Alicia began with his PhD, awarded by Princeton Nash were killed in a car crash while riding in University in 1950. Legend has it that his a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike. Just like a recommendation letter to Pr inceton's good song never gets old, the applications of Graduate School was one simple sentence: his theory and equilibrium will remain “This man is a genius”. Nash's work on game ringing in our memories, and in turn will pave theory played a role in developing U.S. path for new deeper concepts of Game military and diplomatic strategy while he Theory. served as a consultant in the early 1950s for After all, a Mind that Beautiful can never be the RAND Corporation, a civilian think-tank lost! - Maunik funded by the military. RAND published a book in 1961 describing how game theory remains silent, then Suspect B will get two years if he remains silent and will walk free if he talks. In either case, Suspect A cannot improve his own outcome by remaining silent rather than talking. The Nash equilibrium for this problem is therefore that both suspects give evidence against the other. But this is not the optimal solution – they get eight years jail each as opposed to a potential two each – but it is the only position from which each prisoner cannot improve his position by changing.
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THE KGPIAN GAME THEORY SOCIETY
JULY, 2015
Game Theory in Evolution Game Theory is an important concept that has played a crucial role in development of society and economy. But guess what! It has been playing its role in the evolution of species from billions of years ago. The basis of evolution revolves around the idea of natural selection or as Charles Darwin said “Survival of the Fittest”. The nature itself selects the games and the players and the winner of such games evolve into better species while the losers are eliminated. Let us take a small example to illustrate this concept: In an isolated island with limited supply of food two kinds of beetle population thrive. One with a smaller size and a weaker shell and other with a relatively larger size and a harder shell. The latter one appeared as a result of genetic mutations which lead to speciation. Now since the food is limited in the island so t h e i n d iv i d u a l b e e t l e s wo u l d f a c e a competition for survival. To simplify the situation let's take the case of one on one competition only over a given source of food. If we draw the pay-off table for such a competition or rather a game we get the payoff table as show in the figure:
The numbers in the brackets represent a relative payoff for each beetle if it gets into the competition. From the pay-off table it could be seen that the best outcome would come if both the beetles would be small. But if one of the beetles is
small and other is large then the larger one will have an advantage over the smaller one and it would secure itself more food. So in any competition, the beetle with a larger size would have an advantage. Hence, eventually the smaller beetles would be eliminated and finally the population would be predominated by the larger beetles. So in this case the Nash equilibrium would be achieved only when both the beetles would be large. - Adarsh
SEVENTH EDITION
For Cricket Fanatics Would you let your no. 11 batsman open the innings? In Australian conditions? On a 'sticky' wicket? Well, if you are Sir Don Bradman you certainly can!! Here is an account of a tactical brilliance made by Bradman in the 1936-37 Ashes held in Australia: "Bradman won the toss on New Year's Day 1937, but again failed with the bat, scoring just 13. The Australians could not take advantage of a pitch that favoured batting, and finished the day at 6/181. On the second day, rain dramatically altered the course of the game. With the sun drying the pitch (in those days, covers could not be used during matches) Bradman declared to get England in to bat while the pitch was "sticky"; England also declared early to get Australia back in, conceding a lead of 124. Bradman countered by reversing his batting order to protect his run-makers while conditions improved. The ploy worked and Bradman went in at number seven. In an innings spread over three days, he battled influenza while scoring 270 of 375 balls, sharing a record partnership of 346 with Jack Fingleton and Australia went on to victory. - Tejas
Behavioural Game Theory in Online Social Network For a long time, economists and game t h e o r i s t s h ave b e e n i n t e re s t e d i n understanding how individuals (people) or institutions (businesses, corporation, and countries) behave in different economic situations. This knowledge is extremely valuable and can be used, for instance, to build more accurate and robust economic models. Classical game theory predicts how rational agents behave in strategic settings, such as in the domain of advertising, during business interactions, and on the job market. Although it does allow for making predictions regarding human behaviour, it makes very strong assumptions. Agents in classical game theory are assumed to be fully rational. But humans in real world are different, their behaviour is sometimes emotional and sometimes they take decisions based on concept such as fairness and reciprocity. They will be rational only to some extent. So b e h av i o u ra l ga m e t h e o r y h a s t o b e developed. In order to study how agents behave in different game theoretic situations, many researches are being conducted, but they couldn't study properly because these researches are restricted to small groups of people. In order to overcome this an attempt is made to gather the human behaviour data using social networks. People all over the world are involved in Social networks like Fa c e b o o k , s o i t i s e a s y t o c o n d u c t experiments through it and analyse the data. A n d s e c o n d ly we w i l l a l s o h ave t h e information about how the users are related to each other. Therefore a game called Project Waterloo has been introduced in Facebook.
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PROJECT WATERLOO An application has been created which allows the users to play a two player turn based zerosum game called COLONEL BLOTTO game. Calculating the equilibrium of this game is so difficult and so is the optimal strategy. The mechanics of the game are as follows: Two players are tasked simultaneously to distribute limited resources over several, let's take 5 objects. These objects could represent cities, products, or battle elds. To make the game appealing to users, we decided to use battlefields/territories as objects, and troops as resources. In our implementation, each player has 100 troops and distributes them over five battlefields. Then they send this distribution as a challenge to another player. The responding player distributes their 100 troops among the battlefields and finalizes the game. If a player allocates more troops in a territory than their opponent does, they win that territory. The player who wins more battlefields wins the game. THEORETICAL ANALYSIS AND OPTIMAL STRATEGIES: The analysis of the optimal strategy for Blotto games is quite difficult. The general formulation of discrete Blotto games with N players and K battlefields has been analysed by Hart. The optimal strategy is a randomized strategy which allocates troops to battlfields symmetr ically while maintaining that the marginal distribution of the troops in each battlefield is uniform in the interval [0,2N/K]. THE PROJECT WATERLOO APPLICATION ON FACEBOOK A game has been developed which allows the users to play blotto game with their friends or
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strangers. It relies on entertainment and reputation incentives to attract users to play the game. The reputation incentive is realized by showing users their ranking (based on performance) among all players and players in their friend network. Users are ranked according to their rating (R) which is computed as: R = (#Games Won)/ (#Games Played+10) ×100. This measure encourages users to play more games as it makes sure that people who have played a very small number of games are not given a high rating. ANALYSIS OF DATA: EFFECT OF THE KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE OPPONENT: Playing the blotto games involves reasoning about the strategy about the opponent. Deploying the game on an online social network provides access to the friend relationships of the players. It is observed that the distribution of troops selected by the users is different in situations when the opponent is 'hidden' as compared to being a friend. NUMBER OF REINFORCED CITIES: Another indicator of the level of reasoning employed by players in the Blotto game is the number of reinforced territories. A territory is called reinforced if it has more troops than the uniform allocation of troops. Analysis shows that the number of reinforced territories in the distributions made by players of our game was large. This may be interpreted in favour of the hypothesis that players of the 'Project Waterloo' game are employing multiple levels of iterative reasoning. - Manisha
JULY, 2015
THE KGPIAN GAME THEORY SOCIETY
SEVENTH EDITION
IIT KGP’s Lingo 2.2 - n. A 2.2 Kilometres round in central part of IIT-KGP campus. Usu. A run of it. Acads - n. Academics. Atthi - n. A C.G.P.A. in between 8 and 9. Banda - n. Any boy. Bandi - n. Any girl. Cali - n. Calibre. Candi - n. Candidate (For elections). Convo - n. Convocation. Chhedis - n. A dhaba just outside campus. Chhagi - n. A C.G.P.A. in between 6 and 7. Dehli - n. A C.G.P.A. of 10. Dep - n. Department. D.O.S.A. - abbr., n. Dean Of Student Affairs. Responsible for maintaining discipline in students. Disco - n. Short for Disciplinary Committee. Despo - n. Desperate. DepC - v.t., v.i. To have a Department change under the provisions specified by IIT-KGP. Requires excellent academic performance in first year B.Tech. course. Eggies - n. The shop adjacent to Vegies Restaurant that serves eggs during nighttime. FacAd - n. Faculty Advisor. FacAd - n. Faculty Advisor. Fatka - n. Loss. Facca - n. An F-grade in any subject, meaning fail. Faccha - n. A first year male student. Usu. a B. Tech. student. Facchi - n. A first year female student. Usu. a
B.Tech. student. Fight - n., v.t., v.i. Difficulty in achieving something. Frust - v.t. Frustrated. Generally due to academics and lack of female population. Also Frustoo. Funda - n. The basic knowledge of anything. G.C. - abbr., n. General Championship. Either of the Soc-n-cult, Sports, Technology or Hall Affairs. God - n. An achiever in any field, academics or otherwise. See also: Stud. G.Sec. - abbr., n. General Secretary. Of Halls or Gymkhana. In Gymkhana, always a third year student. GolB - n. The Gol Bazaar Market. GolC - n. The circle (Gol Chakkar) just outside the Main Building of the Institute. Also known as Bidhan Chowk. G.P.L. - adv. Rejection. v.i., n. The act of kicking someone's behind. Happa - n. Hall President. Hawa - n. J.E.E. All India Rank. Illu - n. Illumination(on Dipawali). A competition involving all Halls for best illumination and rangoli on Dipawali. Junta - n. The human population. Of IIT-KGP or elsewhere. Khoj - n. A treasure hunt competition organized by Azad Hall. Load - n. Tension; v.i.To Have Tension. Maggu - n. Student who mugs. Makhana - v.t. To spoil a job. To do something
DepC Funda Hello, fresher junta of KGP. By now you may have been well versed about the DepC funda if you want to opt for a Department Change in your 2nd year. For a Department Change, you need to score a CGPA above 8.5 and your department rank must be in top 10% of total department seats. No need to say for the departments like CS and ECE, competition is very tough. So accordingly work hard and it will definitely pay off! Through the graph, we are giving here previous year minimum cut-off CG for various departments so you can get a further boost in your motivation for working more and more hard. All the very best!
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insincerely.To play spoil-sport. Menty - n. The Maintenance Secretary of any Hall. Mug - v.t., v.i.To rote. O.P. - abbr., n. Orientation Period. More commonly used word for ragging in IIT-KGP. It includes mentally harassing junior students and testing their Hall-funda. A commonly used synonym is I.P. (Interaction Period). Pain - v.t., v.i. Difficult to do. PAN Loop - n. The set of Halls: Patel, Azad and Nehru. The area bounded by them. These were the first to be constructed hence known as Old Campus. Peace - excl., n., v.i., To be tension-free. A tension-free state. Prof - n. Professor. Rep - suf., n. Representative. Senti - n., v.i. Sentiments. Sentimental. Stud - n. Any student who is good in academics as well as other fields like sports, etc. Tut. - n. Tutorials. T.O.A.T. - abbr., n. Tagore Open Air Theatre. Tempo shout - v.i. To shout in a singing manner "KGP Ka Tempo High Hai". Of KGP or of some similar affiliations like Hall; n. The shout "KGP Ka Tempo High Hai". Tempo - n. Enthusiasm and vigour. Tech-mart - n. Technology Market. A market inside IIT-KGP premises. V.P. - abbr., n. Vice President of Gymkhana. A fourth year student.
THE KGPIAN GAME THEORY SOCIETY
JULY, 2015
SEVENTH EDITION
Conversation Games: Rock Paper Scissors One of the timeless attributes of humans has been the skill of conversation. Since time immemor ial, humans have intr icately developed some very productive and intelligent games based on this attribute. We call such games, conversation games. Conversation games are an outcome of intensive human interaction mixed with perennial perspicacious nature of man. It's a well-known fact in psychology, ready wit and suggestive acumen thrill us all. People love to be quizzed and be a part of something intelligent. Also, the fact that conversation games can be played with all the excitement over and over again, anytime and anywhere with minimal or absolutely no props at all, make them exceedingly popular. As a result, conversation games have never witnessed downfall in the sands of time and meanwhile, several such games have evolved over the years. One such game that is exceptionally popular is ROCK, PAPER AND SCISSOR. Here are a few insights to this game which can be really
handy the next time you challenge someone into this...!!!! “Rock, Paper and Scissor” is a zero-sum (meaning: the gains of a player are exactly balanced by the loss of another) hand game of which maybe, all of you are somewhat aware. But for the sake of completeness, it involves two players who can each choose between anyone of the three elements of the game, as evident in the name itself, each represented by a certain hand symbol. It is a circular game where rock beats scissor, scissor beats paper and paper beats rock. Since the game is simultaneous, we don't know the opponent's chance beforehand (obvious, isn't it?). Hence, the only road to win the fixture goes through two lands, luck and psychology. “Luck” is that aspect which we certainly can't help you with, so we work to turn tides in your favour by boosting your psychological skills and attacking your opponent's psychology. Here are a few tips and tricks you'll need to have a potential advantage over your
opponent. But you have to make sure your opponent hasn't read this article beforehand as well. Males, especially newbies, mostly throw rock first as rock is perceived to be the most masculine of the three Females, especially newbies, are more likely to play paper first. Men have the genetic disposition to argue things out in a fight (with rocks, in this case) while women are more cultured and prefer to work it out in a proper manner (with a pen and paper) Paper is the least common throw (less than 30%, instead of being 33.33%). If someone is losing, they are more likely to play rock (rock is perceived as strong) If someone is winning, they are more likely to play scissors. People are more likely to play what beat them in the previous round. So if you play rock and your opponent played scissor, they are more likely to play rock next time, and you can beat them with paper. - Vaibhav
Duck Duck Go! DuckDuckGo is a search engine just like Google or Bing, but it has quite a few strategies up its sleeves that set it apart from the competition. The first being its privacy policy, which does not collect or share any personal information. Unlike other search engines, DuckDuckGo staunchly refuses to track its users. It also has a policy that users will not be placed into filter bubbles, and the engine automatically diverts users to the encrypted versions (HTTPS) of websites to protect them, even when they are not searching. It shows same results for a search term to all its users unlike Google which filters search results based on the sites you have been visiting. It doesn't track your IP or search history. However, they do maintain logs of all search terms used. Apple in its latest version of iOS 8 has allowed the users to select DDG, the “self-proclaimed search engine that focusses on smarter answers, less clutter, and real privacy” as the iPhone iOS 8's default search engine to ensure a greater degree of privacy while searching the mobile web. It's another well-known feature which makes it unique is “!Bang” which allows user to search on other websites directly from DDG's search box. For example, writing “!gmail quora” in its search box directly takes
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you to a search for Quora on your Gmail account. As DDG says “use of !bangs will forever change the way you search, leaving you with more free time and less frustration”. It enables many more features like category pages, facilitates regional search, ad-free search, user friendly insight search. But the very feature that makes it unique is also what creates limitations. Without the benefits of personalization and automatic localization, searching can involve extra steps when compared to the efficiency and relevance of Google. Since, its inception in 2008 founded by Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo has been steadily increasing its audience and its inclusion in the Apple operating systems has given it a significant boost. However, Google is undoubtedly the most used search engine. In 2010, Google passed one-billion monthly unique visitors, and served more than onetrillion searches. In 2014, Google served more than two-trillion searches, while DuckDuckGo managed two-billion for the first time. As of the current revelations, it handles around three-billion searches a year although it is around the same volume that Google processes in 24 hours. DDG's own traffic statistics say that it has reached the
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mark of 10 million searches a day in the last month of June though it is almost negligible and tiny when compared to Google. However, surveys say that people definitely have some level of concern about their online privacy and with more consumer awareness of alternatives like DDG, the tripping point might not be too far in the future. In short, the best thing about DDG is “It gives a lot of control back into the hands of users”. There have been privacy moves in the past but, search privacy as a selling point had not made any remarkable impact. Yet, amid growing privacy concerns and a deal with Apple, DuckDuckGo might have the potential to become a major player in search. The search engine which promotes itself as 'fair search' competitor to Google, has been extensively endorsed by sites as a long term threat to the monopoly of Google search domination. It has majorly focussed attention on privacy that people should be aware of, so they can make informed decisions. But its figures of search traffic are plucky little when compared to Google. Nevertheless, this type of healthy pressure can help improve the major players, in compelling change and checking themselves. - Srilekha
JULY, 2015
THE KGPIAN GAME THEORY SOCIETY
SEVENTH EDITION
TEAM STRATEGIST Advisor Manoj Gadia
Vice President Abhijeet Senchandra
Editors Adarsh Aman Aradhya Maunik Mythri Rhushikesh
Like us on Facebook www.facebook.com/The.KGTS
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