Hey everyone! About a year ago I wrote up an article for the Diplomacy Pouch, and it was published some while ago! I basically completely forgot about it until now, but I thought I would share the article with you all. Check it out here:

http://uk.diplom.org/pouch/Zine/F2018M/Zhang/study.html

Anyway, it’s basically my high school AP Research paper, but rewritten for people who are already familiar with Diplomacy. I’m not very proud of that paper, because I wrote most of it in the span of about 2 weeks even though I had well over six months to do it. I know that some of my classmates were in similar situations, but if I’m being honest with myself I probably should have worked harder in that class. Despite that, it’s still a pretty cool article and a short read, and goes over some very interesting trends that were captured from the data of about 100 online games of Diplomacy. A lot of the trends, like “you are more likely to be stabbed if your opponent borders more of your supply centers” seem to be obvious truths, but it is nice to see that confirmed with data (and interesting that this seems to level off in some cases!).

I was inspired by this study, called the LINGUISTIC HARBINGERS OF BETRAYAL, which is honestly fantastic. It showed that people are more vague, more optimistic, and more polite when they are just about to betray you. That’s freaking cool! I highly recommend the read if you are into that kind of stuff. Also, it’s even further confirmation that robots are going to be taking over our lives in the near future: robots could predict when someone was going to betray at a higher rate than humans on the basis of the linguistic cues alone. Woah!

What do you think of these studies? Let me know in the comments below, and thanks for reading!