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Old 07-12-2018, 12:32 PM
gary
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Mt. Kuring-Gai
Posts: 5,915
Quote:
Originally Posted by multiweb View Post
AlphaZero... sounds like a military project. Do I smell applications behind game theory?
Hi Marc,

The company behind it, DeepMind, is a subsidiary of Google.

As you may be aware, in game theory, chess is not a game.
That's because, like noughts and crosses, there really exists out there
a well ordered set of moves that should always result in a win or draw.

The seminal 1944 book, "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior"
by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, is filled with heavy
mathematical equations but there is a chapter entitled "Poker and Bluffing".

In game theory, poker is defined as a "game" but chess is not.

Nevertheless, the genius of Von Neumann was to prove that even for
"true" games like poker there exists best strategies.

During the late Cold War in the 1940's and 50's, much of Von Neumann's
life was arguably frittered away consulting to US government think tanks
such as the RAND Corporation on the application of game theory to
strategic nuclear war planning.

These days, game theory is more famously applied to predicting the stock
market.

It will be interesting to watch how AlphaZero evolves to handle games of the game theory
type that have incomplete information and where opponents use tactics such as bluffing.

Google will probably want to use it to predict what you want to buy even before you have thought about it.
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