Many logical-minded people swear that Mafia can be boiled down to probabilities and numbers, whereas others claim that mafia is purely social (social psychology).
I personally think it is a mix. We can use social psychology to make reads on people, and use numbers to guess/support our reads.
Was just wondering what you all thought.
Mafia
14
Social Psychology
5
Statistics
deletedover 9 years
omg.... the vampire diaries is...... over after 6 years :(
When you've got a more representative sample of games (20, really?) and a positive win ratio, based purely on your mathematical approach to Epic Mafia, I will accept that this 'probability' approach works.
I should have added a 3rd category for a mix of the two, and also clarified further what I meant by my statement. I agree with most of the comments saying that scumreads and other social aspects override probabilities, but I still have numbers as a baseline.
on this site mechanics play a huge role. you can be utter crap at scum-hunting and win most of your games simply by being town-read and responding correctly to mechanical dynamics.
I got bored with epicmafia and spend most of my time on mafiascum. scumhunting seems to matter more there.
I like that people are gambling on me not ever getting a positive win ratio. Should it ever happen that my ratio is above half, they might need to get some new pants.
There are a lot of factors. The luck of the draw on who you're playing with is one. How much effort any given person wants to put into it is another. "Social psychology" has very little to do with who does what, in my mind. A thousand monkeys at a thousands typewriters and all that. It's not exactly a hideously complex game, and the people who play it habitually even less so. There are a finite number of possibilities for any given game, and, unless you're cheating, the most you're making is an informed guess rather than deeply psychoanalyzing the people you're playing with. To say this game involves any kind of skill at "reading people" or an in-depth knowledge of psychology beyond things that were published in Reader's Digest since 1977 is to grossly overestimate one's self, a bit like saying that, if you can play chess, you're a master tactician, or that playing Guitar Hero will turn you into Jimi Hendrix. You might have a lot of knowledge or good intuition in the game, but these are highly specialized circumstances with a lot of silly, restrictive rules that translate very poorly into actually reading people's emotions, since it discounts two enormous factors of human interaction: body language and vocal pitch. This is predominantly a game of numbers, but not necessarily one of chance, and being skilled at mafia doesn't mean you're the next Carl Jung, and, likewise, being able to read people very well and having a good instinct about the way they're feeling, if they're lying, what kind of mood they're in etc. can translate poorly into a game of Mafia.
It's both, I do probabilities first and so my answers will be biased in that direction. There's a few scenarios where human fallibility in itself super-cedes expected placement. When the Mafia gets innocent on the Cop for example.
Even without instances of human error, you can add social skills on top of the probabilities. If things are simply not obvious, pick based on stats, and you'll see that over time you'll have a baseline of correct answers that's over 50%.
Statistics only gets more accurate over time. After 100 Games you'll find it's embarrassingly hard for the server to hide how it assigns roles. After 1,000 It's even better.
tl;dr; Like in science, maths is the foundation of all subsets.
deletedover 9 years
The only way in which it can be "boiled down" to probability and statistics is in the program functioning on the server. The game strategy itself cannot be COMPLETELY simplified that way.
statistics is a weird term for it, because it isn't statistics. social dynamics alter the probabilities, but you can mathematically examine each scenario. it's just a question of applying the logic correctly.
Yeah, stats aren't used to win games, they're used to analyze different options. Skill is just a measurement of how good your reads are. Skill also encompasses knowledge of stats
deletedover 9 years
"Many logical-minded people swear that Mafia can be boiled down to probabilities and numbers..." -Kellyn
"Well none of us are clear, one is mafia and the rest are blue, so if I put that in to my calculator, figure out this equation here... and... Twist is GUILTY! That settles it!"
