Book Review: Rock, Paper, Scissors Game Theory in Everyday Life

My first introduction to Game Theory was in College Economics.  It immediately captured me and found its way into my Computer Science research papers.  Most notably, my resarch into Peer To Peer distributed file systems and the application of the tit-for-tat solution to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in Bit Torrent.  I'm not excited by the mathematics as much as I am about the simple (if often unintuitive) solutions to simple puzzles and then those solutions being used to explain everyday life.  That's why I wanted to love this book.

I almost did.  Most of the information in this book I had already picked up elsewhere, so the material was a presented too slowly to keep my interest.  I think that most readers may find the same.  Additionally, the opinions of the author seemed to drift into scepticism rather than settling into using proper logic to link causal relationships between the everyday life scenarios and the game theory puzzles used to explain them.

If you are new to Game Theory, this is a nice read, but if you have even had the modest introduction that I have, you will likely find yourself a little bored with chunks of the book.

No comments

Post a Comment