CS 224M Multi Agent Systems Spring 2011-12

Main Website

Syllabus

Course Format:

The Flipped Classroom

This class will be following an emerging educational paradigm known as the flipped classroom. Each week, we will ask you to watch a number of short videos outside of lecture (approximately 2 hours per week). These videos may have a number of in-video questions embedded in them, which you should answer (but which are not counted towards your final score). It should be mentioned that much of the material from the first part of class will be borrowed from an online game theory class held by Prof. Shoham along with Prof. Matt Jackson from the econ department. The class period itself will be devoted to going into more detailed information by either giving supplemental information or by augmenting understanding of concepts from the lectures. We stress that this is largely experimental for us as it is our first time with such a format so let's try to work together to make this class a success.

Time and Location

Mondays 2:15-4:05pm in 380-380c (Note this is a change from the original room, 200-030).

Textbook

All lecture slides are available on the course website. Additional optional reading material will be the textbook by Professor Shoham, co-authored with Kevin Leyton-Brown: Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations (Cambridge University Press, 2009). A slightly rough version is available here.

Homework, Final Exam, and Grading Policies

We will have 4 homeworks, an in class midterm on 5/21, and a final paper. Your grade will depend on all of them, and only them. The grade allocation to each of these components will be:

Homeworks = 40%

Midterm = 30%

Final Paper = 30%

Homeworks will be handed out in lectures on Mondays and available online afterwards. They will be due the following Wednesday at 10AM in a box outside the TA's office. For all homeworks there will be 3 late days to be enforced in units of days. These can be used in any combination on any of the homeworks. While we do our best to make questions unambiguous, some questions may still remain unclear. Please ask on the forums if you are confused.

Quizzes

Instructors and Office Hours

• Gates 140
• Office Hours: Monday 4:15-5:30
• email: shoham@cs.stanford.edu

• Gates 128
• Office Hours: Tuesday 2:00-4:00
• email: amarple@stanford.edu

Lab Exercises

You will have the opportunity to participate in some periodic online ``lab exercises'' which will allow you to play some of the games that we discuss in the lectures. The web site for the lab exercises is http://game-theory-lab.org/users/sign_in Like the quizzes, these will not be graded. We will usually ask you to complete these before the corresponding material is covered in lecture, so that you have a chance to experience some of the games before we provide a formal game theoretic analysis of them.

Honor Code

We encourage students to form study groups and discuss the lecture videos (including in-video questions). We also encourage you to get together with friends to watch the videos together as a group. However, the answers that you submit for the problem sets and final exam should be your own work; students should not discuss the problem sets or check answers with one another. Lastly, we ask that you do not share your solutions to any of the problem sets and final exam with any other students. This includes any sort of sharing, whether face-to-face, by email, uploading onto public sites, etc. Doing so will drastically detract from the learning experience of your fellow students, and any attempt to do so will be considered a clear honor code violation.

Lectures and Important Dates

Dates	Content	Readings	Released	Due
4/2	Week 1: Normal Form Games Ch 3 Normal Form Definitions, Dominance, and Nash Equilibrium	Ch 3
4/9	Week 2: Extensive Form Games Extensive Form Definitions, Centipede Game, Backward Inductions, Imperfect Information, and Subgame Perfect Equilibrium	Ch 5	HW #1
4/16	Week 3: Repeated and Stochastic Games Finitely Repeated Games, Indefinitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, Folk Theorems and Stochastic Games	Ch 6.1-6.2		4/18	HW #1
4/23	Week 4: Games of Incomplete Information and Auctions Bayesian Games, First Price Auctions, and other basic auction formats	Ch 6.3, Ch 11.1	HW #2
4/30	Week 5: Computation in Game Theory Computing Nash Equilibrium, Complexity of Nash Equilibrium, Compact Representation, and Coalition Game Theory	Ch 4, Ch 6.5, Ch 12.1-12.2		5/2	HW #2
5/7	Week 6: Multi-Agent Learning Rational Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Replicator Dynamics and Evolutionarily Stable Strategies	Ch 7	HW #3
5/14	Week 7: Social Choice Social Choice, Computational Social Choice and Voting Manipulation	Ch 9		5/16	HW #3
5/21	MIDTERM Week 8: Mechanism Design Basic Mechanism Design, Applications and Constrained Mechanism Design	Ch 10
5/28	Week 9: Combinatorial Auctions Beyond Single Unit Auctions, Bidding Languages, and the Winner Determination Problem	Ch 11.2-11.4	HW #4
6/4	Week 10: Wrap-up and Bonus Material	TBD		6/6	HW #4
6/11				6/13	Final Paper