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Brian Clegg was always fascinated by Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series of books, in which the future is predicted using sophisticated mathematical modelling of human psychology and behaviour.
Only much later did he realise that Asimov's 'psychohistory' had a real-world equivalent: game theory.
Originating in the study of probabilistic gambling games that depend on a random source - the throw of a dice or the toss of a coin - game theory soon came to be applied to human interactions: essentially, what was the best strategy to win, whatever you were doing? Its mathematical techniques have been applied, with varying degrees of wisdom, to fields such as economics, evolution, and questions such as how to win a nuclear war.
Clegg delves into game theory's colourful history and significant findings, and shows what we can all learn from this oft-misunderstood field of study.
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Brian's latest science books, The Reality Frame and Are Numbers Real? are now available, joining his new murder mystery novels. Brian Clegg has written many other science titles, including the bestselling Inflight Science, The God Effect, Before the Big Bang, Ecologic, A Brief History of Infinity, Build Your Own Time Machine, The Universe Inside You, Gravity, Extra Sensory and Dice World, which was on the longlist for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. Born in Rochdale, Lancashire, UK, Brian read Natural Sciences (specializing in experimental physics) at Cambridge University. After graduating, he spent a year at Lancaster University where he gained a second MA in Operational Research, a discipline developed during the Second World War to apply mathematics and probability to warfare and since widely applied to business problem solving. |
| Category: | Popular Science |
| ISBN: | 9781785788321 |
| Publisher: | Icon Books |
| On sale: | May 2022 |
| Format: | Paperback |
| eBook ISBN |
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