2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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C HESS, GAMES, AND FLIES
their analysis, first to multi-person games and then to non-zero-sum games. 21 This program
brings game-theory farther and farther away from real games people play and into more
and more complicated examples of “games” that have little, if anything, in common with
games as we know them. In fact, the only link between “games” and the “theory of games”
is provided by the general definition illustrated above. An immediate consequence of the
program is that any interest in “empirical” games is lacking in game theory. In fact, “Theory
of Games” should be considered a misnomer for the original work that came out in 1944:
a less glamorous but more accurate description would probably be “a game-inspired math-
ematical theory of rational behavior.” A game like chess, therefore, lacks any interest for
game-theorists and, as a consequence, the game-theoretic community who set to work to
expand von Neumann and Morgenstern’s basic theory, in the 1950s, did not initiated any
backward loop toward a direct investigation of the game itself with the tools they had pro-
vided. 22
The gap between the complexity of a concrete game of chess and the sophisticated ma-
chinery provided by von Neumann and Morgenstern was so paradoxically big that it started
to be used as an objection against game-theory. Martin Shubik, for example, remembers
that when he went to Princeton to study economics and game theory with Morgenstern, im-
mediately after the war, encountered considerable skepticism in the economics department.
The standard objection raised by the economists was that if “game theory could not even
solve the game of chess, how could it be of use in the study of economic life, which is con-
siderably more complex than chess?” 23 The game theorists responded with what has now
21. The two steps are in fact closely linked in TGEB, since the programmatic strategy is to treat a n-person
non-zero sum game as a n+1-person zero-sum game. This strategy has been questioned in the following
development of game theory.
22. The most well-known debate in the years immediately following the publication of TGEB is the discovery,
by Arnold Tucker, of the famous Prisoners’ dilemma, an example of a two-person, incomplete
information game with no equilibrium point that was bound to become one of the paradigmatic
“thought experiments” in game-theory. In spite of being formally called a “game,” however, it is
doubtful whether the Prisoners’ dilemma should be called a “game” in the common sense of the word.
See H. Kuhn and A. W. Tucker, Contributions to the Theory of Games, vol. 2, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1953) and the popular work by Richard Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York:
Beach Tree Books, 1988). A brief historical recollection on the invention of the dilemma can be found
in Howard Raiffa,” Game Theory at the University of Michigan, 1948-1952,” Toward a History…,
Roy Weintraub, ed., 171-173.