On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 15:18:06 -0400 Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com>
writes:
> Doug wrote:
> >[game theory always struck me as mostly empty wankery - can someone
>
> >convince me to the contrary? not to be too literal-minded, but what
>
> >town has five identical tire stores, anyway?]
>
> "Empty wankery" it is. What can be said for a "theory" whose
> proudest accomplishment--the "Prisoner's Dilemma"--is patently
> self-contradictory because it postulates that a *rational* prisoner
> will believe anything said by the imprisoners?
Well, I don't see why you cannot have variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma game where rational prisoners distrust what they are being told by their jailers, and we can analytically work out the implications of that sort of situation. In the end, still more wankery but not necessarily empty wankery. As I pointed out before the study of iterated prisoner's dilemma games by people like Hamilton & Axelrod has found applications to such fields as evolutionary biology.
> Or for a theory
> whose principal challenge--demonstration of whether a completely
> rational game (chess) has a determinate solution (of the problem
> whether, with best strategy, white wins, black wins, or both draw)
> remains after 60 years without even an approach to a solution. Or
> for a "theory" of games that has nothing whatever to say about
> complex
> real-world games like contract bridge or poker? Or a "theory"
> that claims to contribute to a problem--rational oligopolistic
> behavior-- already fully analyzed (by Robinson and by Chamberlain)
> 75
> years ago?
Arguably, game theory may make possible more elegant restatements of the analysis of imperfect competition that had originally been worked out by Robinson and Chamberlain, and as such, may help make possible the formulation of more general theories of such phenomena. And as Justin has pointed out, much of the Bearded One's analysis of the contradictions of capitalism can be restated in terms or Prisoner's Dilemma Games.
> Oh yes, game theory does work on tic-tac-toe.
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
> things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even
> downright silly.
>
> When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that
> all
> things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N.
> Weiner)
>
>
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