THEORY OF GAMES, 1944

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 4/10/01 6:42:24 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
markklan at PLANETC.COM writes:

<< "Professor X presented his radical new theory of games yesterday
 afternoon.  Did you attend the workshop?"

 "Yes.  I found his new theory of games intriguing, but I don't think he did
 a good job of showing how it reconciles with received game theory."
 *******

 In the second quote,  you could not use the terms "theory of games"
 and "game theory" interchangeably, because "game theory" always
 refers to a body of literature (in my experience), but "theory of games" is
 a more flexible term when appropriately modified. >>

It is possible to create an example in the other direction, such as:

"When Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (sp?) (then Lew Alcindor) was in high school, the
coach of an opposing team decided to use his own game theory: there is no
such thing as a one-man basketball team.  So he instructed his players to
ignore Alcindor and guard the other four opposing players.  This game theory
worked, with Alcindor's team losing 63-60, Alcindor himself scoring 57
points."

Here "theory of games" cannot be substituted, because the coach's theory was
about a specific game (singular).  However, one could substitute "theory of
how to play a game" or "theory of basketball".

In both your and my examples we have a need for a nonce expression to
designate some individual's hypothesis, and in each case we made an ad hoc
use of an established expression to describe an idea that is not part of the
corpus made famous by von Neumann and Morgenstern and known sometimes as
"game theory" and sometimes as "theory of games."

Let me contrive another one.  I have a list of words that I wish to check
against the OED.  Every time I find a match between one of the words and the
OED, I scribble a note on an index card and, to keep the cards from getting
scattered, toss the index card into a cardboard box by my side.  Hence I have
by my side a box of matches.

The point is that I find your example to be not incorrect but not really
relevant.

              - Jim Landau

PS: with regards to the thread on "soda" versus "pop", the basketball story
above was told to me by a man named "Seltzer"

PPS: come to think of it, let's try
"Yes.  I found his new game theory intriguing, but I don't think he did
 a good job of showing how it reconciles with the received theory of games."
since the word "received" prevents ambiguity.