Playing games with reality

            Game theory is commonly known as a branch of mathematics that is concerned with the analysis of strategies in dealing with competitive situations where the outcome of a participant's choice of action depends critically on the action of his/her opponent. The book written by Len Fisher is mainly about game theory and how we mainly use it in our daily lives.

            I myself could really not understand the phenomenon behind game theory because as a personal opinion there are different factors to consider when a person decides during a critical decision. There are a lot of books that talk about game theory however; those books were hard to understand for they are full of mathematical equations and explanations which are off of my interests. Things had changed when I read the book of Fisher for he had explained the book in a manner that non-mathematics lover could understand. His book is flexible to all different preferences of human.

            Game theory is also known to revolve about competitions, contests, battle, match, games and the like which all leads to clashes and contradictions. Fisher used game theory in another way; he used it to provide linkage, relation and cooperation among humans which is the total opposite of the common belief about game theory.

            The introduction of the book had gotten my interest which had leaded me to read the book even faster. The first part of the chapter was a bit boring but it indeed had gotten my interest. The chapter was entitled "trap in a matrix" is mainly about the Prisoner's dilemma and the negative connotation that the Nash equilibrium is a logical trap. There was a matrix shown unfortunately the graphics was poor and a little bit boring. However the content of the book was still interesting which encouraged me to read the rest of the book.

            The second chapter entitles "I cut and you choose" is where the book started to be back on track. This chapter offers a quick and nice introduction to the concepts of minimax and fair division. Fischer used his experience back when he was a child when he got in trouble because he was shooting fireworks and as a consequence he had to yield fireworks with his brother as an anecdote to explain fair division. He realized that what he had done when he was a kid is an answer that he intuitively arrived; this was an example of the minimax principle. He also further discussed the principle of equal division of the contested sum, which I had interest into.

            The third chapter is about the seven deadly dilemmas. This chapter talks about the seven most interesting game theory problems. He pointed out and discussed each problem and provided a little summary of the problems as the rider issue and the game of chicken.

The funniest chapter of his book is the fourth chapter which is about the game rock, paper, scissors. He mentioned that this game is used worldwide in different countries, cultures and races. It is amusing when he mentioned that this game that I usually play; rock, paper, scissors is often used in conflict resolution. I agree with his idea because sometimes in tough decision or when a friend and I are having a dilemma because of contrasting ideas we use rock-paper-scissors to know whose idea would be followed. Fischer explained that the reason is that the game has no pure strategy that dominates the others. The game is commonly played by a person's chance of choosing the right weapon. He mentioned that situations and games that are seem to be at a standstill it can be solved by adding strategies and converting them into rock-paper-scissors.

            The last four chapters of the book mainly talk about the concept of cooperation. It is about how we can achieve trust, bargain effectively, and change the game to avoid the "trap" of the mentioned problem in chapter 1 the Prisoner's dilemma and other unwanted and undesirable outcomes.

            The last 50 pages of the book have a "notes" section. It was an additional part of the book that is full of jokes, random trivia and narratives. This part of the book was fun because different ideas about the game theory are talked about.

            It is amazing how Fischer was able to write a book about a very difficult and complicated topic to the public and still he was able to make his readers to have an ease in reading. I also like his idea about cooperation. He had deviated from the norm which had resulted to give me a new viewpoint about game theory. I like the physiological approach of Fischer in relating and discussing game theory which is easier to understand and more interesting. This book has also given me some lectures about life and how I could apply game theory in my daily life decisions.