Nash, Shapley, Shubic, and McCarthy, along with another student at Princeton invented a game involving coalitions and double-crosses. Nash called the game "Fuck You, Buddy." It was later published under the name "So Long, Sucker." Nash and the gang created a complicated set of rules designed to force players to join forces with one another to advance, but ultimately to double-cross each other in order to win. The point of the game was to produce psychological mayhem, and apparently, it worked. Sylvia Nasar records that McCarthy remembers losing his temper after Nash cold-bloodedly dumped him on the second-to-last round and Nash was absolutely astonished that McCarthy could get so emotional. "But I didn't need you anymore," Nash kept saying over and over again.
Keep this game in mind because it is the essence of Nash's ideas: to force cooperation to advance, followed by a big double cross in which only one player is the winner.
Sounds a lot like the current day craze of "survival" shows, yes? Which of course, leads us to wonder what kind of "programming," or example such things are setting up as models for human behavior. More importantly: why?
Nash's game theory was all the buzz at RAND even before he arrived there under contract. RAND had been, prior to Nash's ideas, preoccupied with games of total conflict between two players, as defined by von Neumann, since that seemed to fit the problem of nuclear issues between two superpowers. However, as weapons got ever more destructive, the idea of all-out war was seen as a situation in which both players might have a common interest. Bombing the enemy back to the Stone Age no longer made any sense because it could lead to a war of complete extermination on both sides.
Von Neumann had long believed that RAND ought to focus on "cooperative games." That is, games ought to be played "sequentially." Games should involve "moves" based on information, such as in chess or tic-tac-toe. Players ought to communicate and discuss the situation and agree on rational, joint action. In such games, there is cooperation and collaboration, and an umpire around to enforce the agreement.
Economists, however, did not like Von Neumann's ideas. They said that it was like saying that our only hope for preventing a dangerous and wasteful arms race lay in appointing a world government with the power to enforce simultaneous disarmament. As it happens, a One World Government, composed of member nations, was a very popular idea among mathematicians and scientists at the time.
But the social scientists, the economists, were doubtful of the idea that any nation, much less the Russians, would cede sovereignty to such an organization. In other words, in cooperative game theory, who's going to force the other side to cooperate?
But Nash came along and solved the problem. He demonstrated that noncooperative games COULD have stable solutions. In short, one "player" could have a strategy in which they "force players to join forces with one another to advance, but ultimately to double-cross the other players in order to win."
To put this in practical terms: a One World Government might be advocated by a major player, promoted, setup, and all the other players might follow the rules - but that one player has every intention of BEING the One World Government and overthrowing the powers of all the other players at the last instant.
Now, just what government in the world today seems to be playing Nash's strategy? Take your time. There's no hurry.
