INVITATION TO CYBERSECURITY 142 the idea is that whichever side allocates the most money to a particular state will win that state. This is clearly a simplifying assumption, but this type of analysis can still provide helpful insight into making strategic choices. There are many variations of the basic Colonel Blotto game, including the numbers of battlefields and soldiers and the values of the battlefields, and there are also different ways to resolve ties, including not awarding the utility to either player or splitting it between the players. The Colonel Blotto game is important because scarce resource allocation is an everyday phenomenon. It is especially critical in security contexts because, as we know, there is no such thing as 100% security. Protective resources are always limited. Defenders need to allocate their man hours and dollars as efficiently as possible to get the “biggest bang for their buck.” In the specific Colonel Blotto game outlined above (see Figure 6.7), the three battlefields labeled X, Y, and Z, are all equally valuable and each colonel wants to win as many battlefields as possible. Because companies of soldiers cannot be broken up, and each colonel has the same number of companies, it is impossible to win all three battlefields. The best each colonel can hope for is to win two which would result in an overall victory. Figure 6.7 The Colonel Blotto game. Since there are nine companies and three battlefields, the instinctual strategy is to allocate three companies per battlefield [3, 3, 3]. This is known as the proportional allocation strategy. While it is indeed mathematically efficient, it is not very strategic—it is the level-0 strategy in this game. Many different strategies could qualify as level-1 responses to the level-0 strategy, but the most straightforward might be [1, 4, 4]. This strategy loses the first battlefield but wins the second and third for an overall victory. Anticipating this strategy would lead to a level-2 strategy and so on. The Colonel Blotto game involves level-k reasoning in multiple dimensions. How many battlefields should be prioritized? Which battlefields should be prioritized (this involves focal point biases)? How many soldiers should be allocated to “abandoned” battlefields? The Colonel Blotto game sheds light on the complexity of the scarce resource allocation problem. It makes it clear there
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