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

However, one-person games (including Solitaire) may be regarded as a special kind of two-person game in which you are one of the players and Nature is the other.

We believe it possible that Game Theory, as it develops—or something like it—may become an important concept and force in many phases of life.

The average so found is called by mathematicians the expected value. It is evident that this is a use of language which requires special care in interpretation. We do not expect the value (in this case 6) to turn up when Blue and Red use the strategies which lead to this box—indeed, the payoff ‘6’ is actually impossible of occurrence in this box—bu

I owe a very special debt to Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation, who was driven, by friendship and by interest in the topic, to read it very hard. His single-minded insistence on clarity of exposition was always of great value and sometimes a nuisance—especially in instances where his style and skill were better suited than my own to the p

In this chapter we shall describe a method, called the pivot method, which is powerful enough to ferret out all solutions, and which is efficient enough to be practical; that is, it usually reaches the exact solution in a few steps. The method is more complicated—particularly to describe—than the methods discussed earlier, but we believe the carefu

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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