NEW BOOK: ROCK. PAPER, SCISSORS

AFTER A GESTATION TIME considerably longer than that of an elephant, my new book is finally due for release by Basic Books in New York on November 11. It is the one that I have been building towards ever since I started writing - a book on the underlying problems that bedevil our attempts to cooperate, using the modern science of game theory to understand what these problems are and what we can do about them.

I KNEW LITTLE ABOUT GAME THEORY WHEN I STARTED - just that it seemed terribly important in understanding the problems that we face today, from global warming and resource depletion to terrorism and war. I took the advice of an American scientist called Charles Tanford, whom I met many years ago, and who told me that his way of understanding a new subject was to write a book about it.

I DIDN'T QUITE BELIEVE HIM, but now having done it in this new book, I understand exactly what he meant. In this occasional blog I will tell the story of how I went about it, in the hope that this might encourage other writers to do the same with topics that they believe are vitally important, but which they are worried that they do not know enough about. To quote Sylvanus P. Thompson, author of a marvellous little book "Calculus Made Easy"from which I learned calculus at an age when I wasn't supposed to be able to: "What one fool can do, another can."