Significant Dates
The year game theory was invented
What is 1944?
The inventors of game theory
Who are John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern?
The definition of game theory
What is the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers?
Game theory got its name from this hypothetical situation
What is prisoner's dilemma?
Those points for which unilateral changes in strategy are unprofitable to everyone
What are equilibrium points?
Game theory did not really exist as a unique field until John von Neumann published a paper in this year.
What is 1928?
He introduced his solution concept of subgame perfect equilibria in 1965
Who is Reinhard Selten?
A game is this if the players are able to form binding commitments externally enforced
What is cooperative?
This is a type of a zero-sum game
What is poker?
A specialized branch of game theory that deals with trade and production and typically with a relatively large number of individual consumers and producers
What is general equilibrium theory?
The first mathematical discussion of the prisoner's dilemma appeared in this year.
What is 1950?
This scholar sees game theory not as a predictive tool for the behavior of human beings, but as a suggestion for how people ought to behave
Who is Leonard Savage?
A game is this when the payoffs for playing a particular strategy depends only on the other strategies employed, not on who is playing
What is symmetric?
A player uses this type of strategy if he or she uses the same strategy at each round of the game
What is pure strategy?
This form of a game, given in terms of successive moves and countermoves, can be represented mathematically by a game tree, which describes the players at the moment of each choice, and the alternatives for choices available to each player at each occasion
What is the extensive form?
Game theory was explicitly applied to biology in these years
What are the 1970s?
In 1913, he proved that the optimal chess strategy is strictly determined, which paved the way for more general theorems
Who is Ernst Zermelo?
This is a special case of constant-sum games, in which choices by players can neither increase nor decrease the available resources
What are zero-sum games?
These type of games are continuous games where the evolution of the players' state variables is governed by differential equations
What are differential games?
This is designed to determine maxima and minima, but in games, as well as in politics, these are not defined, because the outcome of a player's actions does not depend on his actions alone
What is differential calculus?
Game theory experienced a flurry of activity in these years
1950s
This Spanish conqueror, when landing in Mexico with a small force who had good reason to fear their capacity to repel attack from the far more numerous Aztecs, removed the risk that his troops might think their way into a retreat by burning the ships on which they had landed
Who is Cortez?
Games in which the difficulty of finding an optimal strategy stems from the multiplicity of possible moves
What are combinatorial games?
Game theory has played a role in this problem, which has been referred to as games with moving costs and request-answer games
What are k-server games?
Although it is this, game theory doesn't tend to look at games of chance (Roulette), rather it studies game of strategy with concrete and quantifiable rule-sets (Chess or Go)
What is statistics-based?