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Title: Prisoner's Dilemma/John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb by William Poundstone ISBN: 038541580X Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: February, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56
Rating: 5
Summary: Essential introduction to game theory and its history
Comment: Game phrases such as, zero-sum, non-zero sum, payoff, and etc have been integrated into our speech and written work. I have serious doubts about the extent of game theoretic competency of those who use it on a daily basis. However, that's another point. This book explains why a few mathematicians at a building in Santa Monica, California, came to be great influences on our foreign policy to this very day through the introduction of a thing called game theory. In addition, game theory has been integrated into our educational curriculum as well. Look at any social sciences department in the US and you will come across various scholars with research emphasis on games. Read this book and you will understand the significance this phenomenon a little bit better.
Rating: 5
Summary: To defect or cooperate?
Comment: This is a first rate book for both greenhorns and experts. It starts with a mini-biography of both von Neumann and the RAND Corporation, and covers Nash's idea of equilibrium in context. Symmetric and asymmetric games, pure and mixed strategies, zero and nonzero sum games are defined and discussed. More than ten separate games are presented as very readably as examples. The famous Flood-Dresher experiment is also presented and discussed, indicating that repeated plays do not lead to (Nash) equilibria (optimization ala neo-classical economic theory is not the answer). We are told about von Neumann's awful advice to the US Government to nuke' the USSR immediately in the early fifties, and the reader will not be blamed if she calls to mind the preemptive war in Iraq' based on the Bush Administration's aim/claim to find weapons of mass destruction'. The latter is courtesy of Nietzschean-Bloomian neo-cons like Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz.
Poundstone (a former physics student) informs us that war games started with the Prussian military, who invented the mother of all war games, Kriegspiel(=wargame). Von Neumann supposedly played Kriegspiel as a kid. We also learn that the game was still popular among Princeton mathematicians in Nash's time. Psychologically interesting is that vN also experienced a sequence of Cartesian-like dreams in an attempt to prove the key conjecture by Hilbert that Turing later showed to be wrong. vN's belief that neo-classical economic theory is completely wrong is also mentioned. There, as opposed to his advice about preventive war', history has shown him to be dead right.
In the context of the prisoner's dilemma, political conservatives are defined as defectors' while liberals tend to play cooperate'. The Bush administration provides a working, daily example of playing defect against the rest of the world. See, e.g., Kagan's book Of Paradise and Power: America vs. Europe in the New World Order' and Kristol's The War Over Iraq' for details of how the neo-cons advise playing defect. The book ends with a discussion of the ways in which game theory fails to answer basic socio-economic questions. That, in spite of the fact that game theory has been promoted as a basis for mathematizing Darwinian ideas (see the interesting but very mathematical book Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics' by Hofbauer and Sigmund, where Eigen's replicator dynamics is given a game theoretic interpretation).
We learn from the iterated prisoner's dilemma experiment that people tend to cooperate in the long run, that Nash equilibria are not realized in practice (are unstable). To the question: Why do people cooperate at all?' Poundstone asserts that most situations in real life are more like iterated prisoner's dilemmas, but this reasoning is a circular.
This is an excellent book. I enjoyed it thoroughly and (as greenhorn) benefited from it enormously.
Rating: 5
Summary: Exemplary Treatment of a 20th century Renaissance Man
Comment: "Prisoner's Dilemma" is one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read. It alternates chapters on von Neumann's biography with straightforward expositions of game theory and 20th century political history, seamlessly integrating all three elements.
Von Neumann is not exactly a household name like Einstein, yet his genius equalled (and some would say surpassed) the latter's, because he produced major contributions to the fields of physics, mathematics, economics, and computer science. A decided non-pacifist, he worked enthusiastically on the Manhattan Project (but may have been, along with Werner von Braun, a source for the character Dr. Strangelove)...He had a genuine photographic memory, reciting entire chapters of books verbatim he'd read decades earlier. He virtually invented the field of game theory singlehandedly, which has found deep ramifications in political science, economics, and psychology.
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Title: How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers by William Poundstone ISBN: 0316919160 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Game Theory : A Nontechnical Introduction by Morton D. Davis ISBN: 0486296725 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: July, 1997 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Labyrinths of Reason : Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge by William Poundstone ISBN: 0385242719 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 December, 1989 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: The Complete Strategyst : Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy by J. D. Williams ISBN: 0486251012 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: May, 1986 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod ISBN: 0465021212 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: September, 1985 List Price(USD): $21.50 |
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