Friday, October 19, 2007

Inside the Mathematical Universe

This Nobel Prize award was of interest to me.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007


"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory"

Leonid Hurwicz

Eric S.Maskin


Roger B. Myerson

I first started to come to the conclusion in regards to the "social construct" and the relationship it had to the mathematical environmental when I saw the movie, "The Beautiful Mind." It was based on the story of John Nash.

A Theory is Born

This science is unusual in the breadth of its potential applications. Unlike physics or chemistry, which have a clearly defined and narrow scope, the precepts of game theory are useful in a whole range of activities, from everyday social interactions and sports to business and economics, politics, law, diplomacy and war. Biologists have recognized that the Darwinian struggle for survival involves strategic interactions, and modern evolutionary theory has close links with game theory.

Game theory got its start with the work of John von Neumann in the 1920s, which culminated in his book with Oskar Morgenstern. They studied "zero-sum" games where the interests of two players were strictly opposed. John Nash treated the more general and realistic case of a mixture of common interests and rivalry and any number of players. Other theorists, most notably Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi who shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize with Nash, studied even more complex games with sequences of moves, and games where one player has more information than others.


It was then that I realized that a "mathematical mind," although one which had it's fair share of problems, as in John Nash's case, was one deeply entrenched in finding "the pattern." The pattern is a interesting conclusion "about reality." It is about the math that lies at it's basis.

It was at this point being involved in Province wide negotiation, that I thought of trying to implement some of "this strategy" albeit unbeknownst to others, by bringing in factors that would change and alter the current negotiation practises.

I was not sure I understood the full implication of game theory or it's structure, but it was important enough to see if it's applicability could influence the current negotiation process. This was trying to implement the mathematics lying at the basis of reality and bringing new directions to a current process currently at the hands of two opposing bodies.

It is not important how I went about this, just that such applicability is brought back into the social sphere for demonstrative purposes.

See: The Information Triangle

Backreaction: The Information Triangle

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