Game theorists wanted!

Each time I make a book review, I made it a point to research on the meaning of the topic it will discuss. In this new book review, curiously entitled “Rock, Paper, Scissors” written by Len Fisher, the topic is about a yet another branch of mathematics concerned with the analysis of strategies for dealing with competitive situations where the outcome of a participant's choice of action depends critically on the actions of other participants. Interestingly, this topic has been applied to contexts in war, business, and biology. I welcome you to the niche of game theorists.

But actually, the plot twist is that the author is also trying to understand this subject as he was writing about it in this book. It’s amazing how he constructed the studies he found into explanations common people could surely understand. His work doesn’t talk like a boring professor, although I noticed the first parts as dryly introduced. While other books focused on its depth and complex meanings, this book on the other hand connects you in a way that you could easily understand as the author himself also discovers how game theory made interplay with everyday situations and suggests several strategies for achieving cooperation.

The first chapter, “Trapped in a matrix”, started off by describing the Prisoner’s dilemma and gives us the idea that the Nash equilibrium is a logical trap, in a negative way. There are matric graphics but the fun wasn’t really unveiled until the next chapter.

The second chapter, “I cut and you choose”, introduced us to the concepts of minimax and fair division. He offered us a story about fair division like how he met trouble as a child shooting fireworks and consequently yield fireworks with his brother. This is due to application of minimax principle as Fisher’s realization. Impressively, he discussed also the principle of equal division of the contested sum.

Chapter three is about “the seven deadly dilemmas” as the author named it. Here Fisher offers a great summary of such problems as the free rider issue and the game of chicken. The first is the Prisoner’s dilemma while the other six includes the tragedy of the commons, the free rider problem, chicken (also known as Brinkmanship), the volunteer’s dilemma, the battle of the sexes and the stag hunt. In this chapter’s introduction, the author said that these dilemmas are the same in a sense. Huh, you don’t say.

Chapter four turned out to be really fun as it tackles about the titular game. I’m surprised how rock, paper and scissors is also the same as the other games I already know and how it can be used in conflict resolution. The reason is that the game has no pure strategy that dominates the others. Hence situations and games can be solved by adding strategies and converting them to rock-paper-scissors situations.

At the last four chapters, it’s all about cooperation, cooperation, cooperation and cooperation respectively. Good thing he doesn’t get tired of writing down the same essence of this topic in four chapters. And yet, we know cooperation would take more than just four chapters for us to fully understand its mechanism. It teaches us how we can achieve trust, bargain effectively, and change the game to avoid the “trap” of the Prisoner’s dilemma and other undesirable outcomes. He complimented it with humorous narratives and cool exemplary samples from the fields of science.

His conclusion was dramatically awesome since he really pointed out how he finally discovered game theory in his journey of finding out how it could affect our world’s present social status. I don’t even know if he’s lying or not about having no clear knowledge about this topic. Anyway, he concluded that game theory can add to our chances of resolving such problems in two main ways:

1. By helping us to view them from a new perspective that exposes their true underlying causes, and

2. By providing new strategies to help us resolve them.

“This is not to say that game theory provides complete answers, but it provides strategies that can often help to tip thedelicate balance between cooperation and conflict.”

He listed out 10 tips for cooperation in our daily lives.

Ø  Stay if you win, shift if you lose.

Ø  Bring an extra player in.

Ø  Set up some form of reciprocity.

Ø  Restrict your own future options so that you will lose out if you defect on cooperation.

Ø  Offer trust.

Ø  Create a situation that neither party can independently escape from without loss.

Ø  Use side payments to create and maintain cooperative coalitions.

Ø  Be aware of the seven deadly dilemmas, and try to reorganize the benefits and costs to different players so that the dilemma disappears.

Ø  Divide goods, responsibilities, jobs, and penalties so that the result is envy free.

Ø  Divide large groups into smaller ones.

‘Game theory adds extra dimensions by showing just why and how they work in different circumstances. Some can seem quite counterintuitive, and these have emerged directly from game theory itself. It should also be recognized that they are only a start. Game theory is a young science; it is advancing rapidly now, and we will continue to see advances in the years to come. One direction in which those advances are already occurring is through the use of complexity theory, which deals with complex systems, such as society as a whole, rather than breaking them down into smaller units that are easier to think about and analyze. Complexity theory is now beginning to address some of the social dilemmas identified by game theory.’

Overall, I was overwhelmed at how such a small game can truly affect the problems we are facing now. It actually has more to offer. Once again, game theory came out as a mathematical perspective and another species of mathematical origin has then again thrived to save the world in its pursuit of a better world when games abound in bigger dimensions we never did imagine. Game theorists wanted! The world of mathematics only proves to be so much darker, and so much madder, and so much better.