ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS: GAME THEORY IN EVERYDAY LIFE
How I Came to Write It

WHY ARE WE SO BAD AT COOPERATING, when cooperation brings such obvious benefits? It’s a question that has been bugging me for the past 20 years or so i.e. from the ripe old age of 45, which is the sort of age when many of us start to think about these things.

AFTER A FEW YEARS OF FUTILE PUZZLEMENT, I turned to the academic study of philosophy in a search for answers. I soon found that the whole field of ethics (i.e. questions relating to how we should behave as members of a society) revolved around a classical logical problem known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, whose roots are to be found in the science of game theory. The attempts of all of the great philosophers, from Plato to Berkeley to the American John Rawls and his “New Theory of Justice”, to work out how societies should best operate to the benefit of all, turned out to be a series of futile attempts to get around the problems posed by the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM lie in a genuine logical dilemma, whose consequences for our everyday lives I was eventually to explore in “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” For many years, though, having caught on to the dilemma, I simply contented myself with collecting examples from newspapers and anecdotes provided by my friends. It was fear that stopped me from writing – fear that I wasn’t an expert (although I did manage an M.A. in logic while I was studying philosophy), that others were better qualified, and even who did I think I was trying to change the world.

I EVENTUALLY DECIDED that if I couldn’t change the world, I could at least try to help and provide information forthose who might, by giving them the information about these underlying problems in digestible form. And that’s where it all started … …

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."