In the little prince,there are some amusingly queer images of tiny asteroids ,about the size of a hostel bog,each inhabited by just one human being and nothing else.One asteroid is ruled by a king,another bears the burden of a man who counts and records the position and number of stars in the night sky,a third belongs to a tippler who just keeps drinking all day.What strikes me most is the remarkable simplicity of their lives.An isolated man in the middle of nowhere is no more interesting than a deserted ant walking up a spotless,white wall.But just increase the number of men(in our hypothetical situation)by one,and you see the birth of friendship and war.Now,throw in a woman,and you witness the beginning of competition and betrayal .Keep doing this till you have over six billion sources of confusion swarming on ,in this silently constant spectator called earth.The obvious ,yet routinely eschewed question is to ask for an underlying cause which bears some semblance of an explanation to the complexity of human thought and emotion.Is there a unifying pattern in all love,war,treachery,cooperation and partnership?Can a group of human beings be really studied like the pieces of your chessboard?The momentary adaptation of a particular emotion to be deemed as the most profitable move?Can a continual observation of a group yield results akin to the study of ant colonies by social scientists and optimization experts(All Genetic Algorithm guys will know I am talking about ant colony optimizations)?
A certain school of mathematicians say the answer lies in game theory.Lovers of the movie "The Beautiful Mind" might feel I am about to tread upon repulsively arcane stuff, but all I wish to do is to provide a little window to a distant probability.To those who are not fully aware,game theory is to consider a situation,identify the players the options available to them individually and to then calculate the set of choices which lead to the maximization of profit for a particular player or the entire group.The not-so-pleasant part is that it most often,leads to complicacies whose resolution demands some really tricky mathematics.It has been used everywhere from sports to politics ,from the dynamics of relationship to animal mating and breeding habits.Recently,one of my closest friends( he is in BITS Pilani),was involved in a start-up where they use game theory based models to simulate behaviour ,to be used for recruiting employees.
One of the most shocking and for me,the most interesting results out of game theory application was W V Quine's mathematical derivation of morality from self interest.To rephrase it loosely ,is to say that it is the inherent selfishness of man,which leads him to maintain a moral code,or to say it ,in the mercilessly candid game theory lingo,being "righteous" ensures highest payoff.(Oh! my dear philosopher friends,can you hear the echoes of Nietzsche?,So,we finally found something,concrete,that was beyond good and evil ;))If I have managed to stir up your curiosity enough,I direct you to this absolutely brilliant excerpt from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene where he shows exactly why nice guys finish first.Dawkins has his characteristic style of making complex ideas seem almost pedantic!!!In this article,he explains game theoretically,how being nice is usually the dominant evolutionary stable strategy,ensuring your survival and the subsequent passage of your genes to the next generation.A little contemplation really justifies this viewpoint.The human sense of morality has to be a product of evolution.We did not sleep a savage gorilla one night to wake up with a halo around our heads the next morning.
Even love has failed to avoid the scanner of game theorists.To quote from an article that appeared in The Independent, Saturday 5 April 1997, "The glorious irrationality of the emotion called love? Not at all, according to new research. Your choice of lover has subconsciously been made coolly and rationally, based on a mathematical model - similar to how job applications are processed - which analyses the best mate you're likely to get."And you thought love is blind ;) ?
Having long harboured this secret ambition to learn the nitty- gritties of game theory and experiment with its application in real life situations,I finally took a first baby step this summer, reading Thomas Schelling's Strategy of Conflict supplemented by a collection of Harvard lectures on game theory (so as to not to miss out on the flavour of the mathematics producing the conclusions).Brilliantly written ,Schelling(he is the Economics Nobel) elicits his observations with tons of fascinating examples ranging from military policies to dilemmas besetting chain smokers trying to quit.I highly recommend it to interested readers.So,next time,you are the latest prisoner of an old,familiar dilemma try breaking out by turning to the last page of your notebook,constructing a neat matrix and filling up the cells with your options and payoffs.Who knows u may find your doubts melting away in a trifle?(excuse my due frivolity with Mathematics ;))
What with all this renewed vigour in game theory research,we are looking forward to a day when Elliot's famous clairvoyante Madame Sosostris would foretell the future,not on the basis of a random pick of a Tarot card but out of the apparently mysterious,yet stubbornly logical travails of game-theoretic calculation.I see signs of a God,in atleast some of his promised prescience,in the lost notebooks of John Nash. :)
One of the most shocking and for me,the most interesting results out of game theory application was W V Quine's mathematical derivation of morality from self interest.To rephrase it loosely ,is to say that it is the inherent selfishness of man,which leads him to maintain a moral code,or to say it ,in the mercilessly candid game theory lingo,being "righteous" ensures highest payoff.(Oh! my dear philosopher friends,can you hear the echoes of Nietzsche?,So,we finally found something,concrete,that was beyond good and evil ;))If I have managed to stir up your curiosity enough,I direct you to this absolutely brilliant excerpt from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene where he shows exactly why nice guys finish first.Dawkins has his characteristic style of making complex ideas seem almost pedantic!!!In this article,he explains game theoretically,how being nice is usually the dominant evolutionary stable strategy,ensuring your survival and the subsequent passage of your genes to the next generation.A little contemplation really justifies this viewpoint.The human sense of morality has to be a product of evolution.We did not sleep a savage gorilla one night to wake up with a halo around our heads the next morning.
Even love has failed to avoid the scanner of game theorists.To quote from an article that appeared in The Independent, Saturday 5 April 1997, "The glorious irrationality of the emotion called love? Not at all, according to new research. Your choice of lover has subconsciously been made coolly and rationally, based on a mathematical model - similar to how job applications are processed - which analyses the best mate you're likely to get."And you thought love is blind ;) ?
Having long harboured this secret ambition to learn the nitty- gritties of game theory and experiment with its application in real life situations,I finally took a first baby step this summer, reading Thomas Schelling's Strategy of Conflict supplemented by a collection of Harvard lectures on game theory (so as to not to miss out on the flavour of the mathematics producing the conclusions).Brilliantly written ,Schelling(he is the Economics Nobel) elicits his observations with tons of fascinating examples ranging from military policies to dilemmas besetting chain smokers trying to quit.I highly recommend it to interested readers.So,next time,you are the latest prisoner of an old,familiar dilemma try breaking out by turning to the last page of your notebook,constructing a neat matrix and filling up the cells with your options and payoffs.Who knows u may find your doubts melting away in a trifle?(excuse my due frivolity with Mathematics ;))
What with all this renewed vigour in game theory research,we are looking forward to a day when Elliot's famous clairvoyante Madame Sosostris would foretell the future,not on the basis of a random pick of a Tarot card but out of the apparently mysterious,yet stubbornly logical travails of game-theoretic calculation.I see signs of a God,in atleast some of his promised prescience,in the lost notebooks of John Nash. :)
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