From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Feb 24 2003 - 19:31:03 MST
At least a couple of posters have implicitly assumed the usefulness
of a game-theoretic approach to pursuing international questions,
and, I think that I once implied as much myself.
But I am very skeptical that any new insights will obtain
in this fashion, at least at the amateur level of everyone
here, and the extremely likely oversimplifications of the
formalism. But the main reason is that evolution has
already equipped us with an awesome ability in this area.
(Ever notice the language substitution God --> nature --> evolution?)
We extremely easily imagine "if I do this, then he (they) could
do that, and then... there would be three cases, and in case one..."
and so on. People who play games such as chess and Go do this
almost exclusively (although, in addition, much of their learning
comes from something akin to language acquisition). Yet they
almost never find it of much use to actually diagram tree
decisions, even if they were allowed to do so; one's natural
abilities are admirably well-suited, as I say. (It is true: is not
permitted to "make notes" while playing OTB (over-the-board), and
I shall have to consult people I know who do a lot of correspondence
chess whether or not they resort to that. I doubt it.)
Now "Game Theory" usually means something rather different. It
mostly connotes the situation in which one's plays
are not laid out so neatly as in chess, tic-tac-toe, or Go.
Instead, one has moves whose consequences (and the resulting
part of the game tree) are hidden from one. The bulk of the
work in game theory concerns moves constituting "mixed strategies",
where randomness is used to select a move; GT then allows one in
many cases to compute a probability density over one's possible
choices.
I know specifically of two or three historical situations in
which the generals could very well have used a game-theoretic
approach in this way. One was an ancient battle in the Mideast
(Meggido), in which the Egyptian army had to choose between
attacking their opponent head-on, or from behind through a
mountain pass. Neither possibility would be optimal if
the opposing general guessed their strategy. Likewise, Luce
and Raiffa give the example, in their classic "Games and
Decisions", of the naval game between Admiral Kenney and
the Japanese in their struggle for New Guinea, "The Battle
of the Bismarck Sea". Normally, though, as in the D-Day
campaign, good old deception is used if you can get away
with it.
Now sometimes GT could be useful, it seems to me, in helping
some people see over their ideological blinders. But even
there, I would really like to know of any actual cases. People
who simply never could grasp the Cold War in abstract terms
would nonetheless excel in understanding a precisely
equivalent contest between, say, union and management.
Lee
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