Rating: 
Summary: Introduction to the history of game theory
Review: The subtitle of this book is more informative than the title. The prisoner's dilemma itself is a central point, but this book is more about "John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb." In a sense, William Poundstone takes the prisoner's dilemma as a reference point, and looks at its history. As he does so, he provides a brief biography of John von Neumann, discusses the development of game theory by von Neumann, its further development by the other members at the RAND Corporation, and game theory's relevance to the nuclear bomb and the cold war. As fascinating as all this was (and he tells the story well), I was most interested in the final third of the book which discusses games other than the prisoner's dilemma: chicken, the volunteer's dilemma, deadlock, stag hunt, the largest-number game, and especially the dollar auction. The games are described not just in terms of numerical payouts, but in situations that can be imagined in real life. And Poundstone also mentions game theory in relation to evolution, and tit for tat strategies in iterated prisoner's dilemmas. This is a book for the general reader. You need not be a mathematician to understand the contents. Indeed, it is a pretty simple book, and you will only learn basic aspects of game theory if you haven't encountered it before. What you can expect is a story about von Neumann and the cold war and the interesting paradoxes that such situations create.
Rating:
Summary: This is a book about Jon Von Neuman!
Review: This book does introduce game theory and prisoner's dilemma , but first and formemost and primarily this is a book about John Von Neumann.
It was very interesting to go through the details of Neuman's personality as described in this book. Being a student of computer science , i was already aware of the great influence that he had on the computer architecture revolution.
But what was new to me was that how great a mathematician and how big a genius he was . He truly was a gifted man. During his days of illness , he was quite afraid of death and what was humbling for me is that every man how great or ordinary has to approach death similarly and even has similar insecurities and apprehensions about what would happen to him after death.
a good read for someone who wants to get introduced to game theory and know about some of cold war history , but even a better reading for someone who wants to know about John Von Neuman .. the man.
Rating:
Summary: Testimonial to arrogance...
Review: This book uses 'Johnny' von Neumann as a central theme to discuss the development of game theory and how it interacted and influenced the Cold War. There is a very basic description of game theory which is likely to give some understanding to those without any mathematical background. More interesting is the history of von Neumann including glimpses into his family life when he was a child. It was quite interesting to read how he grew up in an environment of anti-Semitism in Hungary yet his parents seemed to promote a funny type of mish-mash of beliefs such as having Christmas presents! In fact, many aspects of von Neumann's personal and spiritual side, including his early conversion to Catholocism and later call for a priest as he lay dying are unfortunately only hinted at. I point this out because the other aspects of von Neumann's character, his prodigious mathematical talent and his fervent belief that the US strike first with atomic bombs against the then-developing USSR, are quite evident here. What comes across is a general sense that von Neumann was very arrogant about his knowledge and ability to solve everything within the theoretical world. It appears that von Neumann truly believed he was the most intelligent mathematician at that time and one gets the feeling that anyone who might have come close (John Nash comes to mind) was downplayed as working on something 'trivial'. Luckily, we also get a glimpse into von Neumann's marriage where his mathematical abilities certainly didn't help him to acheive much happiness. Judging by the many references to his constant fights and stream of rather childish letters his emotional development lagged far behind his other abilities. This is also seen in his one-upmanship demonstrated during the many parties he and his wife threw for colleagues during his years at Princeton. But it is the interplay of his arrogance with the development of the atomic bomb that is the most interesting. It is scary to see how close the world came to all-out war due to the constant preaching by von Neumann (and some of the others in RAND) that game theory absolutely demonstrated that the US must strike first or there could be no resolution to the developing political conflict. I suspect von Neumann's seemingly purposive (probably due to his ego) ignorance of Turing played a deeper role here since one wonders why he didn't develop the theories, later put forward by Chaitin and Kolmogorov, about the limitations of knowledge. That is, it is surprising how arrogant he was based on the fact that Godel was there at the same time! Oh well, it is lucky for us that we can look back and read about the history with the knowledge that people didn't take von Neumann as seriously as Dr. Strangelove - since it certainly appears that von Neumann could have been used as the basis for that character. Anyway, this is certainly worth reading for a fascinating glimpse into the times. One just hopes that the arrogance and ego will one day fade so that we can move the hands of the 'doomsday' clock back.
Rating:
Summary: Testimonial to arrogance...
Review: This book uses 'Johnny' von Neumann as a central theme to discuss the development of game theory and how it interacted and influenced the Cold War. There is a very basic description of game theory which is likely to give some understanding to those without any mathematical background. More interesting is the history of von Neumann including glimpses into his family life when he was a child. It was quite interesting to read how he grew up in an environment of anti-Semitism in Hungary yet his parents seemed to promote a funny type of mish-mash of beliefs such as having Christmas presents! In fact, many aspects of von Neumann's personal and spiritual side, including his early conversion to Catholocism and later call for a priest as he lay dying are unfortunately only hinted at. I point this out because the other aspects of von Neumann's character, his prodigious mathematical talent and his fervent belief that the US strike first with atomic bombs against the then-developing USSR, are quite evident here. What comes across is a general sense that von Neumann was very arrogant about his knowledge and ability to solve everything within the theoretical world. It appears that von Neumann truly believed he was the most intelligent mathematician at that time and one gets the feeling that anyone who might have come close (John Nash comes to mind) was downplayed as working on something 'trivial'. Luckily, we also get a glimpse into von Neumann's marriage where his mathematical abilities certainly didn't help him to acheive much happiness. Judging by the many references to his constant fights and stream of rather childish letters his emotional development lagged far behind his other abilities. This is also seen in his one-upmanship demonstrated during the many parties he and his wife threw for colleagues during his years at Princeton. But it is the interplay of his arrogance with the development of the atomic bomb that is the most interesting. It is scary to see how close the world came to all-out war due to the constant preaching by von Neumann (and some of the others in RAND) that game theory absolutely demonstrated that the US must strike first or there could be no resolution to the developing political conflict. I suspect von Neumann's seemingly purposive (probably due to his ego) ignorance of Turing played a deeper role here since one wonders why he didn't develop the theories, later put forward by Chaitin and Kolmogorov, about the limitations of knowledge. That is, it is surprising how arrogant he was based on the fact that Godel was there at the same time! Oh well, it is lucky for us that we can look back and read about the history with the knowledge that people didn't take von Neumann as seriously as Dr. Strangelove - since it certainly appears that von Neumann could have been used as the basis for that character. Anyway, this is certainly worth reading for a fascinating glimpse into the times. One just hopes that the arrogance and ego will one day fade so that we can move the hands of the 'doomsday' clock back.
Rating:
Summary: Very good for the common reader
Review: This book was a very good discussion of game theory and Prisoner's Dilemma type games. It was interesting to see how so many real-life situations and conflicts can be reduced down to variations on some pretty basic games. I only wish the book didn't keep returning to the atomic bomb and the arms race so frequently. The point was made early.. and often.
Rating:
Summary: Very good for the common reader
Review: This book was a very good discussion of game theory and Prisoner's Dilemma type games. It was interesting to see how so many real-life situations and conflicts can be reduced down to variations on some pretty basic games. I only wish the book didn't keep returning to the atomic bomb and the arms race so frequently. The point was made early.. and often.
Rating: 
Summary: To defect or cooperate?
Review: This is a first rate book for both greenhorns and experts. It starts with a mini-biography of both von Neumann and the RAND Corporation, and covers Nash's idea of equilibrium in context. Symmetric and asymmetric games, pure and mixed strategies, zero and nonzero sum games are defined and discussed. More than ten separate games are presented as very readably as examples. The famous Flood-Dresher experiment is also presented and discussed, indicating that repeated plays do not lead to (Nash) equilibria (optimization ala neo-classical economic theory is not the answer). We are told about von Neumann's awful advice to the US Government to ‚nuke' the USSR immediately in the early fifties, and the reader will not be blamed if she calls to mind the ‚preemptive war in Iraq' based on the Bush Administration's aim/claim ‚to find weapons of mass destruction'. The latter is courtesy of Nietzschean-Bloomian neo-cons like Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz. Poundstone (a former physics student) informs us that war games started with the Prussian military, who invented the mother of all war games, Kriegspiel(=wargame). Von Neumann supposedly played Kriegspiel as a kid. We also learn that the game was still popular among Princeton mathematicians in Nash's time. Psychologically interesting is that vN also experienced a sequence of Cartesian-like dreams in an attempt to prove the key conjecture by Hilbert that Turing later showed to be wrong. vN's belief that neo-classical economic theory is completely wrong is also mentioned. There, as opposed to his advice about ‚preventive war', history has shown him to be dead right. In the context of the prisoner's dilemma, political conservatives are defined as ‚defectors' while liberals tend to play ‚cooperate'. The Bush administration provides a working, daily example of playing defect against the rest of the world. See, e.g., Kagan's book ‚Of Paradise and Power: America vs. Europe in the New World Order' and Kristol's ‚The War Over Iraq' for details of how the neo-cons advise playing defect. The book ends with a discussion of the ways in which game theory fails to answer basic socio-economic questions. That, in spite of the fact that game theory has been promoted as a basis for mathematizing Darwinian ideas (see the interesting but very mathematical book ‚Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics' by Hofbauer and Sigmund, where Eigen's replicator dynamics is given a game theoretic interpretation). We learn from the iterated prisoner's dilemma experiment that people tend to cooperate in the long run, that Nash equilibria are not realized in practice (are unstable). To the question: ‚Why do people cooperate at all?' Poundstone asserts that most situations in real life are more like iterated prisoner's dilemmas, but this reasoning is a circular. This is an excellent book. I enjoyed it thoroughly and (as greenhorn) benefited from it enormously.
Rating:
Summary: Mind triggering!!!
Review: This is an excellent book. One of the best I have ever read in my life. While you read it you get so many ideas about life, research, people...For me, as a doctoral student making a thesis on multicriterion optimization, it is a revelation.
I highly recommend it to everyone, since it is not a technical book, but written with ease for a layman. For the people in the business of decision making, I bet that you will be amazed with the impressions you get from it.
Rating:
Summary: Mind triggering!!!
Review: This is an excellent book. One of the best I have ever read in my life. While you read it you get so many ideas about life, research, people...For me, as a doctoral student making a thesis on multicriterion optimization of ship structures, it a revelation.
I highly recommend it to everyone, since it is not a technical book, but written with ease for a layman. For the people in the business of decision making, I bet that you will be amazed with the impressions you get from it.
Rating:
Summary: A good introduction to both game theory and von Neumann
Review: This should be of interest to both readers concerned with Cold War policy and the development of game theory. Poundstone is one of the more gifted writers (at least regarding narrative skills) to address game theory, an often perplexingly technical subject, offering an interesting, fairly comprehensive introduction to the subject without becoming mired in its more technical aspects. And his characterization of von Neumann, an interesting intellect, is able and compelling.
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