The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy (Dover Books on Mathematics)

the sensible object of the player is to gain as much from the game as he can, safely, in the face of a skillful opponent who is pursuing an antithetical goal. This is our model of rational behavior. As with all models, the shoe has to be tried on each time an application comes along to see whether the fit is tolerable; but it is well known in the M

Thus we come to believe it is significant. to count the number of sets of opposing interests around the table, rather than the bodies.

A perennial difficulty in modelmaking of the analytical (as opposed to wooden) variety is the illness which might well be known as criterion-trouble. What is the criterion in terms of which the outcome of the game is judged? Or should be judged?

A strategy. is a plan so complete that it cannot be upset by enemy action or Nature; for everything that the enemy or Nature may choose to do, together with a set of possible actions for yourself, is just part of the description of the strategy. So the strategy of Game Theory differs in two important respects from the conventional meaning: It must

The Theory of Games is a method of analyzing a conflict, according to the following abstraction: The conflict is a situation in which there are two sets of opposing interests; it may be regarded as a game between two players, each of whom represents one set of interests. Each player has a finite set of strategies from which he may, on any given pla

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Generally, when the larger of the row minima is equal to the smaller of the column maxima, the game is said to have a saddle-point; and the players should stick to the strategies which intersect at the saddle-point. To discover that there is a saddle-point, each player must examine the game both from his own and the enemy’s point of view. He lists

Game Theory is very similar in spirit to the Theory of Gravitation. Both attempt to treat broad classes of events according to abstract models. Neither tries to model all the complexities present in any situation.

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