fel dn hs fata pica Ueland fF VAY i NY POUNDSTONE aPRISONER’S DILEMMA WILLIAM POUNDSTONE Q Ancuor Booxs A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC. New YorkFIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1993 Copyright © 1992 by William Poundstone All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions, Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1992. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Randorn House, Inc. Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. ‘The quotes from letters of John von Neumann on pp. 22, 85, 75, 140-41, and 180 are from materials in the John von Neumann archives, Library of Congress, and are used with permission of Marina von Neumann Whitman. The excerpts from “Ihe Mathematician” by John von Neumann on pp. 28-29 are used with permission of the University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 1950. ‘The quotations from letters of J. D. Williams on pp. 94-95 are used with permission of Evelyn Williams Snow. The comments on pp. 108-16 are used with permission of Merrill M. Flood. The quote from the letter on p. 117 is used with permission of Albert Tucker. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publeation Data Poundstone, William, Prisoner's dilemma / William Poundstone.—ist Anchor Books ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Von Neumann, John, 1903-1957. 2. Mathematicians—United States—Biography. I. Title. QA29.V66P68 1993 510',092—de20 {B} 92-29903 cP ISBN 0-385-41580-X Book design by Bonni Leon www.anchorbooks.com Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 .TO MIKOLAS CREWSACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many of the original group of game theorists at the RAND Corporation are still well and active, Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher contributed importantly to this book with their recollections of their work and of the RAND milieu. Much of the biographical mate- rial on John von Neumann, including the letters quoted, comes from the collection of von Neumann's papers at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. Some historical information on the Truman administration is based on materials at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri. Thanks for recollections, assistance, or advice must also go to Paul Armer, Robert Axelrod, Sally Beddow, Raoul Bott, George B. Dantzig, Paul Halmos, deane Holiday, Cuthbert Hurd, Martin Shubik, John Tchalenko, Ed- ward Teller, and Nicholas A. Vonneuman.CONTENTS 1 DILEMMAS The Nuclear Dilemma John von Neumann Prisoner's Dilemma 2 JOHN VON NEUMANN The Child Prodigy Kun’s Hungary Early Career The Institute Kiara Personality The Sturm und Drang Period The Best Brain in the World 3 GAME THEORY Kriegspiel Who Was First? Theory of Games and Economic Behavior Cake Division Rational Players. Games as Trees Games as Tables Zero-Sum Games Minimax and Cake Mixed Strategies Curve Balls and Deadly Genes The Minimax Theorem N-Person Games 4 THE BOMB Von Neumann at Los Alamos Game Theory in Wartime Bertrand Russell World Government Operation Crossroads The Computer Preventive Warx GONTENTS § THE RAND CORPORATION History Thinking About the Unthinkable Surfing, Semantics, Finnish Phonology Von Neumann at RAND John Nash The Monday-Morning Quarterback 6 PRISONER’S DILEMMA The Buick Sale Honor Among Thieves The Flood-Dresher Experiment Tucker's Anecdote Common Sense Prisoner's Dilemmas in Literature Free Rider Nuclear Rivalry 7 1950 The Soviet Bomb The Man from Mars Urey’s Speech The Fuchs Affair The Korean War The Nature of Technical Surprise Aggressors for Peace Francis Matthews Aftermath Public Reaction Was It a Trial Balloon? The MacArthur Speech Orvil Anderson Press Reaction How Many Bombs? Coda 8 GAME THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS Criticism of Game Theory Utility and Machiavelli Are People Rational? The Ohio State Studies 9 VON NEUMANN'S LAST YEARS The H-Bomb A Very Fine Tiger The CommissionerThe Moment of Hope liness Death 10 CHICKEN AND THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS Chicken Volunteer's Dilemma Volunteer’s Dilemma Experiments The Cuban Missile Crisis The Madman Theory 11 MORE ON SOCIAL DILEMMAS Deadiock Stag Hunt Asymmetric Games. Justifying Cooperation Howard's Meta-Game * Backward Induction Paradox 12 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST Stabie Strategies Is Defection in the Genes? Robert Axelrod TIT FOR TAT The Trouble with TIT FOR TAT Artificial Selection The Fish in the Mirror Cooperation and Civilization TIT FOR TAT in the Real World 13 THE DOLLAR AUCTION Escalation Shubik's Dollar Auction Dollar Auctions in Real Life Strategies Rational Bidding Where Game Theory Fails The Largest-Number Game Feather in a Vacuum Bibliography Index CONTENTS 186 189 194 195 197 201 203 204 212 216 218 218 224 222 226 228 231 2341 234 236 239 242 246 248 261 253 257 258 260 262 266 268 270 272 277 279 285 xi1 DILEMMAS A man was crossing a river with his wife and mother. A giraffe appeared on the opposite bank. The man drew his gun on the beast, and the giraffe said, “If you shoot, your mother will die. If you don’t shoot, your wife will die.” What should the man do? So asks a traditional “dilemma tale” told by the Popo of Dahomey. Odd and difficult decisions like this are widespread in African folklore. Many have been appropriated by Western writers and philosophers. In the Popo tale, you are supposed to imagine that the pronounce- ments of talking giraffes are always true. You can restate the dilemma in more Western and technological terms: you, your spouse, and your mother are kidnapped by mad scientists and placed in a room with a strange machine. All three of you are bound immobile to chairs. In front of you is a push butten within reach. A machine gun looms in front of your spouse and mother, and a menacing clock ticks away on the wall. One of the scientists announces that if you push the button the mechanism will aim the gun at your mother and shoot her dead. If you don? push it within sixty seconds it will aim and fire at your spouse. You have examined the machine and satisfied yourself that its remorseless clockwork will perform as stated. What do you do? Dilemmas like this are sometimes discussed in college ethics classes. There's no satisfactory answer, of course. It’s a cop-out to in- sist that you should do nothing (don’t push the button and allow the machine to kill the spouse) on the grounds that you cannot be “guilty” for doing nothing at all. You can only decide which of the two you like better and spare that one. Choices are even more difficult when someone else is making a choice, too, and the outcome depends on all the choices made. A simi- Jar but more thought-provoking dilemma appears in Gregory Stock's The Book of Questions (1987): “You and a person you love deeply are placed in separate rooms with a button next to each of you. You know that both of you will be killed unless one of you presses your button before sixty minutes pass; furthermore, the first person to press the button will save the other person, but will immediately be killed. What do you think you would do?”2 WILLIAM POUNDSTONE Now there are two people pondering their predicament and making independent choices. It’s vital that someone push the button. The tricky part is when you should make the sacrifice. The dilemma forces you to make a “lifeboat” decision about you and your loved one. Who really should be the one to live? There are many situations where one person might elect to save the other at the sacrifice of his own life. A parent might save a child on the grounds that the child is likely to have more years of life left. What- ever the criteria used—and there is no reason to believe both persons would use the same criteria—there are three possible outcomes of the lifeboat decision. The least disturbing case is when both come to the same conclusion about who should make the sacrifice and who should be saved. Then the former should push the button and save the latter. A second possibility is that both persons decide to save each other. A mother decides to save her daughter, whe has more years left, and the daughter decides to save the mother who gave her life. In that case there is a race to push the button first. The most disturbing case is when both persons decide he or she is the one who should be saved. Then neither pushes the butten and the clock ticks away .. . Think about this third scenario a bit. The clock reads fifty-nine min- utes after the hour. You haven't pushed the button, hoping that your loved one would—only he/she hasn't. (Let's assume that the survivor is notified immediately when the other person pushes the button.) You've had time to mull over the possibilities. Some people might take the whole hour to decide who to save, or to work up the courage to push the button. But it’s beginning to look as if your loved one has decided you should make the sacrifice. There's no point in vowing never push the button, not even in the very last split second. No matter how self-centered you may be, you have no power to save yourself. Someone has to die; that’s the way the dilemma works. if your loved one fails to make the sacrifice, you might as well save him or her. Remember, you really love the other person. Ideally, you would want to push the button in the last instant. It is possible that your loved one is thinking the very same thing. That gives you all the more reason to hold off until the very, very last in- stant. You want to give the other person a chance to push the button in the “last instant,” but if he/she doesn’t, then and only then do you