Games Theory Quotes & Sayings

It is the shortcomings of game theory (as originally formulated) which force the consideration of the role of ethics, of the dynamics of social structure, and of social structure and of individual psychology in situations of conflict. — Anatol Rapoport

Selling Atari when I did - I think that's my biggest regret. And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years. — Nolan Bushnell

In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way. — George Leonard

The theory is that if you take interest rates negative, people are going to say, "That's a silly game! I'm not going to lend my money to governments who want me to pay them. I am going to go into the stock market where I can get positive returns!" — Mohamed El-Erian

Fair Game Theory: If you are dumb enough to be drained by people then you are fair game. — Frederick Lenz

The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:
a certain amount of difficulty
plus
a certain amount of your friends
plus
a certain amount of interesting strangers
plus
a certain amount of reward
plus
a certain amount of opportunity
equaled
fun — Cory Doctorow

Anthroposophy is not a game, nor just a theory; it is a task that must be faced for the sake of human evolution. — Rudolf Steiner

Be careful ... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Whether game theory leads to clear-cut solutions, to vague solutions, or to impasses, it does achieve one thing. In bringing techniques of logical and mathematical analysis gives men an opportunity to bring conflicts up from the level of fights, where the intellect is beclouded by passions, to the level of games, where the intellect has a chance to operate. — Anatol Rapoport

My brother and I have always had this theory that, as stupid as it sounds, in video games, there is a certain hand-eye coordination and a thought process that you can learn. — Landon Donovan

Game theory, however, deals only with the way in which ultrasmart, all knowing people should behave in competitive situations, and has little to say to Mr. X as he confronts the morass of his problem. — Howard Raiffa

The ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes, and everything else is just theory. — Sepp Herberger

The modern brand builder faces a difficult issue; communications theory is based on attitude change, and has limited implications for behaviour change. Games are characterised by interaction and behaviour rather than attitude, making the principles of gaming suited to brand building. I believe that games provide a practical template for brands that actively change behaviour. — Craig Atkinson

Characters may lend the action a certain colouring, but it is what happens that comes first. To overlook this while watching a tragedy would be like treating a football game simply as the acts of a set of solitary individuals, or as chance for each of them to display 'personality'. The fact that some players behave as though this is precisely what football games are about should not distract us from this point. — Terry Eagleton

Interactive Decision Theory would perhaps be a more descriptive name for the discipline usually called Game Theory. — Robert Aumann

To figure out what people think, look at the stories that they tell. We might never get away from the image of Sheldon from 'The Big Bang Theory' breaking down in the middle of the store, not knowing which console to buy, but we can see in TV and movies how regular characters are more and more starting to play games. — Rob Manuel

So far has Western society departed from the ancient taboos against murder, theft, and rape that we are now faced with juvenile delinquents who have no inner check against wantonly assaulting other human beings at random 'for kicks' while we have adult delinquents capable of deliberately planning the extermination of tens of millions of human beings, in carrying out, also doubtless for kicks, a mathematical theory of games. Today our civilization is relapsing into a state far more primitive, far more irrational, than any taboo-ridden society now known-for lack of any effective taboos. If Western man could establish an inviolate taboo against random extermination, our society would enjoy a far more effective safeguard against both private violence and still impending collective nuclear horrors than the United Nations or the fallible mechanisms of Fail-Safe. — Lewis Mumford

Evolutionary game theory is a way of thinking about evolution at the phenotypic level when the fitnesses of particular phenotypes depend on their frequencies in the population. — John Maynard Smith

(Game theory is) essentially a structural theory. It uncovers the logical structure of a great variety of conflict situations and describes this structure in mathematical terms. Sometimes the logical structure of a conflict situation admits rational decisions; sometimes it does not. — Anatol Rapoport

Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona's theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. — Robin McKinley

Zero-sum games deal with resources that neither increase nor decrease in amount - they only shift from one player to the other. Given your present frame of mind, were you to speak now, I'm afraid you might say something rash. I would feel it incumbent to offer a rejoinder. As a result of this exchange, you would be mortified and humiliated, which - as dictated by the rules of game theory - would increase my influence and status at your expense. — Douglas Preston

Among top grandmasters the Dutch is a rare defense, which is good reason to play it! It has not been studied very deeply by many opponents, and theory, based on a small number of 'reliable' games, must be rather unreliable. — Bent Larsen

Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed — John Maynard Smith

There is a history of mathematical models of oligopolistic competition dating from Cournot to the theory of games. There is also a literature generated by institutional economists, lawyers, and administrators interested in formulating and implementing public policy. It has been the tendency of these groups to work almost as though the other did not exist. — Martin Shubik

The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate. — Richard P. Feynman

We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things. — Richard Lewontin

Every great master will find it useful to have his own theory on the openings, which only he himself knows, a theory which is closely linked with plans for the middle game. — Mikhail Botvinnik

The implication of game theory, which is also the implication of the third image, is, however, that the freedom of choice of any one state is limited by the actions of the others. — Kenneth Waltz

I use game theory to help myself understand conflict situations and opportunities. — Thomas Schelling

I think game theory creates ideas that are important in solving and approaching conflict in general. — Robert Aumann

For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generatly it is a simple circle, dyutamandalam, drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged their obligations. But, sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground. The Mahabharata devotes a whole chapter to the erection of the dicing hall - sabha - where the Pandavas are to meet their prtners. Games, of chance, therefore, have their serious side. They are included in ritual. — Johan Huizinga

Although the drama of games of strategy is strongly linked with the psychological aspects of the conflict, game theory is not concerned with these aspects. Game theory, so to speak, plays the board. It is concerned only with the logical aspects of strategy. — Anatol Rapoport

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose. — Neil Patrick Harris

When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.' page 21 — Jane McGonigal

The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages. — Naomi Klein

In the early days of the video game business, everybody played. The question is, what happened? My theory - and I think it's pretty well borne out - is that in the '80s, games got gory, and that lost the women. And then they got complex, and that lost the casual gamer. — Nolan Bushnell

A proven theorem of game theory states that every game with complete information possesses a saddle point and therefore a solution. — Richard Arnold Epstein

After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' published in 1944. — John Harsanyi

And when attacked by a Capitol-aligned soldier in District 2, she tells him that fighting in the Capitol's wars makes them all slaves: "It just goes around and around and who wins? Not us. Not the districts. Always the Capitol. But I'm tired of being a piece in their Games." Game theory is not about games. It's about politics and psychology, war and strategy. For Katniss Everdeen, it is life and death, and in the end, everyone in Panem comes to learn that the only way to truly win the game is not to play at all. — Leah Wilson

There is much of economic theory which is pursued for no better reason than its intellectual attraction; it is a good game. We have no reason to be ashamed of that, since the same would hold for many branches of mathematics. — Sir John Richard Hicks

Some scientist needs to explain to spectators Einstein's relativity theory. Before his explanation, he says: 'I have to suffer a lot explaining something I don't understand myself.' This relates to my game: I didn't understand anything! — Vassily Ivanchuk

It's a bit counter-intuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But ... I've learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires - to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives - remain the same.' p 5 — Jane McGonigal

Vampires are fond of their games. But the games that They play are different than the variants that I'm familiar with. The rules were made to be bent, broken, shattered - and somebody always gets hurt.
Always. — Nenia Campbell

Theory regards this opening as incorrect, but it is impossible to agree with this. Out of the five tournament games played by me with the King's Gambit, I have won all five. — David Bronstein

Capablanca did not apply himself to opening theory (in which he never therefore achieved much), but delved deeply into the study of end-games and other simple positions which respond to technique rather than to imagination. — Max Euwe