6. The Greek Example
Instead
of poker, I prefer politics. And after all, politics is a way of
people making choices which affect their lives. And it is a natural
laboratory for GTN. With real consequences. Let me take the current
turmoil in Greece as an example.
Do
not understand Greece? That is all right, you are with a great deal
of company, including people who really ought to know better. But
what if the papers today were a giant remark by a negotiator for the
Germans. Basically he said: "Why do not you just leave?"
And
that remark gave everyone who thought they had a clue, a real point
to start at the end and work backwards. It was just the smart people
who knew what was going on, it was the people who listened very
closely, which is a larger number than before. You just have to know
what the signs are, and use something called "Game Theory".
Game
theory was invented, to remind everyone, by Morgenstern and John von
Neumann, with von Neumann one of the finest mathematicians in the
20th century. The game that they started was littered with the best
of minds in the field, many of them great mathematicians themselves.
And three of the brightest are already mentioned: Gödel, Turing, and
Nash. What the three of them did was essentially invent the idea of
informational space, and, though separately, introduced the idea that
there was something like a current running through this. Later on,
engineers realized that it was not just theoretical, it was also
practical.
And
one of the greatest ideas came from Nash; that was, do not go
forward, go backwards. This way you will know what each participant
wants, and how best to conserve it. In this way you could show by
game theory what they would do, and what they would do by min maxing
their position, whatever their opponents did.
This
was not just theoretical, Nash showed it by using poker as an
example, but its main use is with real people and the choices that
they make. Once you look backwards, you will see that the logical
choices, if any, will be there. And sometimes they will not be there
as you would expect.
Take
for example: Greece. It might seem that there are only two players: a
Greek player, and a European player. From this viewpoint, the Greeks
want out, and the Europeans want in, that is of the euro. So the
Europeans punish the Greeks to bend them to their will. But there is
not two but three players in the game: the rich Greek people, the
poor Greek people, and the Europeans. The Europeans and the poor
Greek people both want for Greece to go on the drachma. But the rich
Greek people, who control all that is worth anything, want to stay,
so they can move out of the country whenever is worth moving. They
are the people who want to stay.
With
this in mind, it then becomes very simple to see why the condition of
the country is what it is. The rich Greek people are hiding money,
leaving exposed public goods to be taken; because after all they do
not care about public goods, only private ones. The poor Greek
people, who have some allotment of public goods, even if it is just
to get some to lose money, do not have this advantage. That is why
the rich Greekocrockes do not care about public goods, and are happy
to waste them in order to keep the private goods which they can
shuffle back and forward.
But
more than that, there are other rich elites wanting to stay on the
euro, whatever the cost is to their poor brethren. Such as Ireland.
All of these elites want to stay on the euro to have transportability
of their money, while the poor do not really care. At least not
enough to take the whipping from the bloodless Eurocrats.
So
next time you see the results of what is going on in Europe, realize
that the parliament is controlled by rich people, and the poor are
increasingly out on the street. And the rich Eurocrats do not have a
clue as to how to play the game. What they should do is go after the
rich of the country, not the poor. For example taxing money going out
of the country. Why? Because to them this is a sideshow, and what is
really important is not Greece, but Italy, Spain, and Germany.8
But
that would leave the Eurocrats in the position of caring for ordinary
people. Which they would not rather do. I will leave as an exercise
how many people in Britain actually elect the government.
And
that is surprising, because we started out with a mathematical
concept, which seemed to have nothing to do with physical laws. But
here it is doing physical things, such as play computer games, which
some of you think I do not notice. But you would do well to notice
that I am up here, and you are down there, and there is an
informational space disparity, which does not exactly favor you. Just
noting that.
So what have we discovered in this
little talk? We discovered that there is a numbering system, which is
called the Gödel Numbers, based on how primes are distributed. Then
we moved to the Turing Machine, and found that it could manipulate
these numbers, and decide which of them are useful in the present
case. Finally we discussed Nash Equilibrium, which was the resistance
to manipulating Turing machines. Finally we took this trio of
mechanisms – let us call it GTN – and found that there was a
connection to current space. Obviously this is only the beginning of
the story, and whether one works on it, uses it, or decides to run
screaming from and only then encounter it in an app, you are stuck
with it as a feature of our time. There will be other times, and some
of you will go on to make your mark: as these three young men did in
their early 20s to early 30s.
But remember, there is lot to
think about, and the digestion will take some time, and require more
reading from you. You may find that there is some mark that you can
make in this lecture, and some future lecturer may take a moment to
recognize this. Realize you are getting close to making your mark.
And if I am alive, I will be very interested in the direction you
will take, because it is the new which is exciting, and strange, and
will take some time to get your head around, as Someone by the name
of Guth9 did for me.
Footnotes
1 “Zermelo
and the Early History of Game Theory”
2 Actually:
“Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und
verwandter Systeme I.”
3 “Enhancing
Patent Quality: Screening Out Low-Quality Patents And Trolling
Litigation”, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper
Number 20322
4 From
the Antikythea mechanism, through Pascal's calculator, to Babbage's
computer.
5 That
is: MIT.
6 You
can read up on Brouwer proof and a number of different variations on
https://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Brouwer_ fixed-point_theorem
7 At
the same time my grandfather, Sterling Price Newberry, was actually
involved in mining the Higgs Boson, though it was not called that,
from electrons, were it exists, in to x-rays, where it does not
exist; at GE.
8 With
some fine work by Ian Welsh.
9Cosmology
at MIT.
