Although debatable, the likeliest contender for the best picture of 2001 should have been the compilation of the networks' "live" media coverage shown on the morning of September 11th to the audience of hundreds of millions of dazed viewers across the globe
, however and alas, the motion picture that took home the Academy Award for the year was a drama named "A Beautiful Mind", directed and co-produced by the Academy Award winning director of that same year, Ron Howard. Loosely based on the biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Sylvia Nasar, "A Beautiful Mind" opened to the United States cinemas on December 21, 2001 (winter solstice of that year and day with least amount of daylight, FWIW) and primarily focuses on Nash's mathematical genius along with his purported mental sickness. In fact, the subplot that folks who have seen the movie will likely recall most vividly includes events whereby Nash obsessively searches for hidden patterns in magazines and newspapers while on assignment to crack encrypted enemy telecommunication and which are revealed later to simply be 'delusional' episodes caused from his onset and development of paranoid schizophrenia (how convenient for us Cluesforum sleuths.
) What viewers may less likely remember from the movie as it was only lightly touched upon was Nash's 'real-life' achievement as a Nobel Prize winner for the year 1994 in Economic Sciences, sharing it with fellow
game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. John Forbes Nash, Jr. was (is?) also an esteemed member of the RAND Corp.
Oh yeah... Anyone can see the resemblance to Russell Crowe.
Game theory is a major method used in mathematical economics and business for modeling competing behaviors of interacting agents. Applications include a wide array of economic phenomena and approaches, such as auctions, bargaining, mergers & acquisitions pricing, fair division, duopolies, oligopolies, social network formation, agent-based computational economics, general equilibrium, mechanism design, and voting systems, and across such broad areas as experimental economics, behavioral economics, information economics, industrial organization, and political economy.
...This research usually focuses on particular sets of strategies known as equilibria in games. These "solution concepts" are usually based on what is required by norms of rationality. In non-cooperative games, the most famous of these is the Nash equilibrium.
...The Nash equilibrium was named after John Forbes Nash.
...Nash equilibrium has been used to analyze hostile situations like war and arms races (see prisoner's dilemma), and also how conflict may be mitigated by repeated interaction (see tit-for-tat). It has also been used to study to what extent people with different preferences can cooperate (see battle of the sexes), and whether they will take risks to achieve a cooperative outcome (see stag hunt). It has been used to study the adoption of technical standards, and also the occurrence of bank runs and currency crises (see coordination game). Other applications include traffic flow (see Wardrop's principle), how to organize auctions (see auction theory), the outcome of efforts exerted by multiple parties in the education process, regulatory legislation such as environmental regulations (see tragedy of the Commons), and even penalty kicks in soccer (see matching pennies).
Hungarian born John von Neumann looks to have been a a key figure in the development of game theory and is featured in both the RAND Wiki and in the Game Theory wiki below. In his own wiki, we find that he was not only a frequent consultant for the the RAND Corporation, but also consulted for the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Army, Standard Oil, General Electric, and IBM among others.
From the wiki of Columbia University Professor of Business Journalism, Sylvia Nasar, she appears to have completed work on another book.
Nasar's second book, Grand Pursuit, was published in 2011. It is a historical narrative which sets forth Nasar's view that economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material circumstances in its own hands rather than in Fate.
Yep... It seemingly all makes perfect sense. The ability to influence through either true talent or via artificial means is the highest rewarded as has always been in the game of life where money is king, so long as the subject matter shall not include the telling of the complete truth to the un-or-mis-informed due to lack of payoff as is easily observed in the Nash equilibrium, but I suppose most of us here knew that already. And as more become aware to the presence of the game along with its distorted rules and fabricated economic underbelly, I wonder what then is the strategy... and where go the final remnants of morality?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Beautifu ... %28film%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Nasar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Aw ... st_Picture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann