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Summer Reading
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Math need not be a passion for this book to be understood and enjoyed. The various games that are explained and, "played", for the reader actually utilize little in the way of math. Game Theory in practice is about the number of participants, the choices they have, how the games should rationally be played, and how there are played when people replace theory. The results of these games are applicable to daily life, whether it explains how a network will decide the placement of their commercials, why a person will stand in a line of unknown length, or pay more than the true value of an item (like a dollar bill). Peoples behavior often crosses from the irrational to the absurd, and many of these games will point out courses of action almost all readers will have taken at one time or another, when the rational decision was the opposite of what they chose to do.
The book is also a good primer for further reading on Bertrand Russell, John Nash the subject of the movie, "A Beautiful Mind", and John von Neumann, who many considered the most brilliant man alive during his career, and many other great scientists of the 20th Century.
... Read more ›You see, it's one big story that consists of several sub-stories. In part it's a biography (intellectual and otherwise) of John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. It's also a popular exposition of game theory and some of the decision-theoretic puzzles that arise in it (most obviously the one of the book's title). And it's _also_ a history of the Cold War, at least on its strategic side.
You pretty much have to be William Poundstone to weave all this together into a coherent and readable narrative. Fortunately, William Poundstone _is_ William Poundstone, and he pulls it off with panache.
There's something here for everybody. My favorite parts are the chapters on the various game-theoretic dilemmas (including a _very_ nice exposition of Robert Axelrod's _The Evolution of Cooperation_ that correctly captures what Axelrod did and did not show in his famous computer tournaments). But the biography of von Neumann is fascinating too; great mathematicians tend to be odd and interesting characters, and von Neumann was one of the greatest. And all the Cold War-era history is riveting in its own right, even apart from its relationship to von Neumann (who may have been at least one of the real-life models for Dr. Strangelove).
Poundstone is a fine writer with a real gift for this sort of thing.
... Read more ›As fascinating as all this was (and he tells the story well), I was most interested in the final third of the book which discusses games other than the prisoner's dilemma: chicken, the volunteer's dilemma, deadlock, stag hunt, the largest-number game, and especially the dollar auction. The games are described not just in terms of numerical payouts, but in situations that can be imagined in real life. And Poundstone also mentions game theory in relation to evolution, and tit for tat strategies in iterated prisoner's dilemmas.
This is a book for the general reader. You need not be a mathematician to understand the contents. Indeed, it is a pretty simple book, and you will only learn basic aspects of game theory if you haven't encountered it before. What you can expect is a story about von Neumann and the cold war and the interesting paradoxes that such situations create.
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