A Beautiful Math

A Beautiful Math

Tom Siegfried
ISBN 978-4-16-370010-6 (Japanese Translation)

This book reminded me of what I thought when I wrote about "The Selfish Gene".

About 2 years ago, there was a discussion on a mailing list. There a
guy asked if people in open source communities can challenge Windows
dominance by cooperating each other or not. What was impressive for me
was that another guy insisted on strongly that altruism is against the
theory of evolution in response to a phrase "collective optimization
of the society" which the first guy said.

I felt something wrong at that time on the second guy's argument.
The point of my thought was about the choice between selfish strategy
or cooperative one.

Genes drive organisms selfishly, but human behavior in their various societies
is not simple. In other word, a society is not a simple prisoners' dilemma
game, but an iterated one at least. Also, participants there can
communicate/negotiate/intrigue... and be tied with each other.
Thus, the best optimum strategy is usually mixed strategy.

Reading Dawkins' book in those days, I thought "Meme" could be the key
to explain my feeling of wrongness. I mean what the first guy should
have have bean a meme not a gene.
But, after all, it's simply because the discussion was just too primitive.

Siegfried's book reviews progresses in game theory focusing on
interdisciplinary aspects of them including even quantum mechanics!
As an old physics student, it's a fun to see that what I studied those days
got various new aspects to work with other areas of science,
network theory, evolution theory, economics and even sociology etc.

BTW, more more reason why I like Siegfried's work is that he is familiar with
Sci-Fi. When I was a child, I pored over Isac Asimov's works, and it was
beyond my expectation seeing the name of Hari Seldon. :)

Bought on March 6, 2008.

Finished on April 20, 2008.