Quotes About Game Theory

#1. Fair Game Theory: If you are dumb enough to be drained by people then you are fair game.

Frederick Lenz

#2. A thorough understanding of game theory, should dim these greedy hopes. Knowledge of game theory does not make one a better card player, businessman or military strategist.

Anatol Rapoport

#3. In its first 30 years of existence, up to the mid 1970s, the practical applications of game theory were very limited, probably as a result of excessive preoccupation by game theorists with cooperative solution concepts.

John Harsanyi

#4. Although a large branch of game theory is devoted to the study of expected utility, we generally consider each player's payoffs as a ranking of his most preferred outcome to his least preferred outcome.

William Spaniel

#5. 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

#6. (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

#7. In terms of game theory, the opposite of a failed tactic is not necessarily success.

Robert Ferrigno

#8. A proven theorem of game theory states that every game with complete information possesses a saddle point and therefore a solution.

Richard Arnold Epstein

#9. I think game theory creates ideas that are important in solving and approaching conflict in general.

Robert Aumann

#10. I think almost all strategic problems could at least be improved upon if people would do more careful game-theoretic analysis. The reason game theory works in predicting is because people intuit how to behave game-theoretically.

Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

#11. I think voting for the lesser of two evils in game theory always leads to more evil.

Penn Jillette

#12. I did several types of work about several investigations of application of game theory to international relations.

Reinhard Selten

#13. 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

#14. Contrary to conventional military and game theory, the most effective offense is sometimes a direct attack against your political opponent's greatest strength - not his weaknesses - to place him immediately on the defensive.

Mark McKinnon

#15. In 1958, Anne and I returned to Australia, where I got a very attractive research position at the Australian National University in Canberra. But soon I felt very isolated because at that time game theory was virtually unknown in Australia.

John Harsanyi

#16. 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

#17. My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

Dave Hickey

#18. 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

#19. Interactive Decision Theory would perhaps be a more descriptive name for the discipline usually called Game Theory.

Robert Aumann

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. My first contact with game theory was a popular article in 'Fortune Magazine' which I read in my last high school year. I was immediately attracted to the subject matter, and when I studied mathematics, I found the fundamental book by von Neumann and Morgenstern in the library and studied it.

Reinhard Selten

#23. I use game theory to help myself understand conflict situations and opportunities.

Thomas Schelling

#24. 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

#25. I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy, and one of my specializations was the logic and mathematics of game theory. I've also got a degree in drama, so I know about stories, characterizations, plot arcs, and the like. Lots of game designers can do one or the other: I've got the skills for both.

Brendan Myers

#26. 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

#27. I engage in the use of game theory. Game theory is a branch of mathematics, and that means, sorry, that even in the study of politics, math has come into the picture. We can no longer pretend that we just speculate about politics; we need to look at this in a rigorous way.

Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

#28. It was a game she sometimes played, ever since she learned about the theory of infinite parallels, the idea that a person's path through life wasn't really a line, but a tree, every decision a divergent branch, resulting in a divergent you.

Victoria Schwab

#29. Danny: You can be as morally righteous as you want - in a vacuum - but throw in a second entity and you gotta start acting in response to the other.

Angry Zodd

#30. Things happen in baseball, even if, in theory, it's something you don't do. Stats are a tool, but it doesn't mean that's how a game is being played at that moment. There's more than one way to win a game, or have a winning team.

Jon Miller

#31. Forfeit the game
Before somebody else
Takes you out of the frame
And puts your name to shame
Cover up your face
You can't run the race
The pace is too fast
You just won't last

Linkin Park

#32. Technique! The very word is like a shriek of outraged Art. It is the idiot name given to effort by those who are too weak, too weary, or too dull to play the game. The mighty have no theory of technique.

Leonard Bacon

#33. 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

#34. The Game gives you a Purpose. The Real Game is, to Find a Purpose.

Vineet Raj Kapoor

#35. If skeptic can weakly force E, then he can force E.

Glenn Shafer

#36. 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

#37. It is difficult to play against Einstein's theory -on his first loss to Fischer

Mikhail Tal

#38. If you are a leader or someone who works for the interest of a community, first make sure that you understand the interest of the people who make up that community. In this way, you will have a good chance of minimizing, perhaps, avoiding the us versus them mentality.

Duop Chak Wuol

#39. Hugh is now playing a game on his mobile phone. His greasy fat fingers with bitten down nails surprisingly agile on the keys. The concentration on his face is admirable in a way. It was probably with a similar level of concentration that the theory of relativity was formulated.

Glenn Haybittle

#40. Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories! Darwinism, unlike 'Einsteinism', seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance.

Richard Dawkins

#41. That is why one day I said my game will be like the Pythagorean Theorem - hard to figure out. A lot of people really don't know the Pythagorean Theory. They don't make them like me anymore. They don't want to make them like that anymore.

Shaquille O'Neal

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. The point is, if you treat reality like a game, it's going to show in your decisions.

Karl Schroeder

#45. I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory.

Leslie Fiedler

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. Here some one thrust these cards into these old hands of mine, swears that I must play them, and no others. And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right, live in the game, and die in it.

Herman Melville

#49. The ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes, and everything else is just theory.

Sepp Herberger

#50. I worked at a place that followed a system where the quarterback was taught to take the sack rather than force the throw. That's kind of an old-school theory, but it has existed in this game.

Mike McCarthy