4 ms·

I have had this great book for 10+ years, and still find it fascinating it's called "Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bo

• triclops200 5y ago
  He was a super genius. Just a super genius who repeatedly called for genocide and nuclear first strikes. He was removed from the target selection committee for the Japan bombings because he kept advocating for high civilian targets with no military value and even the generals at the table viewed him as crazy. The ability to be a genius and a lunatic aren't mutually exclusive and the recent efforts to build a hagiography around him are concerning.
  • vishho 5y ago
    A first strike is not lunacy. It is a rational decision, if the nuclear arms race is viewed under game theory. He was a consultant, not had his hand on the button. The people with the hand on the button were talking about the rising threat and how to deal with it in the future. Neumann rightly reasoned that if there ever came a conflict, the winning move would have been an early first strike. If you look at his statements, these are statements of mathematical fact, not political strategy. If anything, he showed the hypocracy of target selection and its justifications for war. You want to play to win, or worry about rules and perceptions, unsure of if your opponent employs similarly intelligent analysts and game theorists? Look at the target selection of American adversaries in their information warfare. Made by lunatics? Or made to win a shadow war and damage American culture and politics without regard to military status?
    • gonehome 5y ago
      In the prisoner's dilemma isn't a core constraint that the prisoners can't collaborate? Therefore you can't cooperate for the best outcome and both are independently incentivized to defect. In global diplomacy the goal is to coordinate for the best outcome. So I'm not sure a strike first 'defection' is the rational move.
      • dragontamer 5y ago
        There's no such restriction in the prisoner's dilemma. Lets make it explicit. Let me _pretend_ that I'm going to work with you on the prisoner's dilemma game. I pretend that I'm trustworthy, and coordinate with you that we both trust each other. That's when I betray you and take all the money for myself. ------------ In an *iterated* prisoner's dilemma, I simply work with you for the first X-1 trials (where X is the number of trials), and then betray you on the final trial. Since you know I'm going to betray you on the final trial, you betray me on the 2nd to last final trial. Etc. etc. This follows like induction all the way to the 1st trial. Which means my best move is to betray you in the 1st trial, as per the rule of induction. But you know, pretend that I'm going to work with you (so that you choose trust in the 1st trial). --------- Where things go sideways is iterated + public prisoner's dilemma. That is, there are 3 players, and the 3rd player watches what the other 2 players do. Each iteration, we rotate who plays the game. Finally, we have a situation where trust is a good move: if only to "prove" to the other player that you're trustworthy and possibly get more gains over the long term.
      • vishho 5y ago
        Game Theory eventually settled on Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD can be seen as the tit-for-tat strategy in an iterated PD with multiple level thinking (If we have crazy von Neumann, do they have similar consultants? Do they know that we think Neumann is a lunatic? etc.) and super rationality (we are all players on the same board, damaging other players reduces our own chances to grow, we should be competing against those urging for war, on either side). Von Neumann was consultant on game theory, not on geopolitical diplomatic strategy. War generals wanted to talk about future conflicts. Von Neumann reminded them that all talk of winning future conflicts could be made moot by a single move. And he reasoned that intelligent analysts on the other side would inform their generals similarly. Both did a good job, and the generals are commended for taking things outside pure maths into consideration. What is our solution for when Russia joins the game and gets access to its own nukes? The Spockian rational answer is: make this question irrelevant and increase our power on the board, by making sure Russia cannot even join the game we are currently winning. To make good decisions you need diverse expert input like this. All in all, I think von Neumann's work helped keep the nuclear war on paper, instead of reality. His input of a first strike evolved into MAD and allowed us to reach an equilibrium.
  • dilyevsky 5y ago
    He was a living proof that general ai is extremely dangerous as he was basically Skynet from Terminator movies in human form.