"When everyone is playing their best move to everyone ELSE's best move then no one is going to move."

Non-Cooperative Game Theory has to do with the best strategic action being NOT to cooperate with the majority opinion. This is not to say that a person OPPOSES the majority but rather simply does not act as one of the majority such that the majority of people do not look at you as a threat. If you take any position or opinion that appears to be against any other position or opinion then you pose a threat to that other entity and they will take steps to defeat you whether you are an actual threat or not. In the case of a corporation these steps are mostly unconscious and not the result of an actual human being using sentient capability to properly evaluate you or your thoughts and actions.

John Forbes Nash, a mathematician and professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, came up with what has become known as, "The Nash Equilibrium." Everything has a tendency to seek a state of equilibrium. All opposition will receive opposition in return so the optimal state-of-being is to understand all points of view such that you do not feel any need to oppose them. If you feel that a particular point-of-view is destructive or sub-optimal then it is advised that you present additional information that might help to improve that other point-of-view and make it more integral.

A Non-Cooperative Game Theory-oriented game of chess would most likely end in a king versus king draw where all of the pieces have been removed or taken and you are left with only the two kings on the board. In this scenario at least one player chooses not to win the game but also chooses not to lose the game either. Winning the game puts the other player in a "less-than" position with a potential need for revenge. Whereas, by tying or drawing the game with neither player having any point advantage leaves both players with a sense of equality and safety.

We can see an aspect of this concept being played out in present-day politics where two major political parties are BOTH manipulated by a behind-the-scenes "non-participating" entity to make it appear that they are both close to each other in popularity such that which ever party wins the other party has a sense of, "Well at least it was close." This scenario is very obvious as of this writing in October of 2008 where the actual popularity of Barack Obama is so overwhelming that the people behind the poles manipulate both the poles and the interpretation of the poles in the media so as to make it look closer than it actually is. A similar situation happened in both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections except that the actual vote itself was manipulated to appear to be close ENOUGH that the other party chose not to enforce legal measures to reveal the deception.

GAME THEORY from A Beautiful Mind (summary)

This video parallels the video editor's own personal life experience and will hopefully help to communicate the challenges that a person with Asperger's Syndrome coupled with Schizophrenia far outweigh the benefits that such people can provide for society as a whole if we can transcend the perceived dysfunction and have empathy for the weirdness that disguises the phenomenal genius that most human beings will never understand.

Game Theory, aka The Nash Equilibrium, and the potential benefits for achieving integral solutions to the world's most challenging problems.

Recall the lessons of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. In competition individual competition serves the common good. Every man for himself and those who strike out are stuck with their friends.

"Adam Smith needs revision, if we all go for the blonde then we block each other and not a single one of us is going to get her. So, then we go for her friends but they will all give us the cold shoulder because nobody likes to be second choice. But what if no one goes for the blonde? We don't get in each other's way and we don't insult the other girls and soon we'll win. That's the only way we all get laid. Adam Smith said, the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what is best for oneself. That is incomplete because the best result will come from everyone in the group doing what's best for themselves, AND, for the group." -- John Forbes Nash character explaining Game Theory/Governing Dynamics to his friends in a bar.

Game theorists use the Nash Equilibrium concept to analyze the outcome of the strategic interaction of several decision makers. In other words, it provides a way of predicting what will happen if several people or several institutions are making decisions at the same time, and if the outcome depends on the decisions of the others. The simple insight underlying John Forbes Nash Jr.'s idea is that one cannot predict the result of the choices of multiple decision makers if one analyzes those decisions in isolation. Instead, one must ask what each player would do, taking into account the decision-making of the others.

In game theory, the Nash Equilibrium is a solution concept of a non-cooperative game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only their own strategy unilaterally. If each player has chosen a strategy and no player can benefit by changing strategies while the other players keep theirs unchanged, then the current set of strategy choices and the corresponding payoffs constitute a Nash equilibrium.

Nash equilibrium has been used to analyze hostile situations like war and arms races (i.e. the prisoner's dilemma), and also how conflict may be mitigated by repeated interaction. It has also been used to study to what extent people with different preferences can cooperate and whether they will take risks to achieve a cooperative outcome. It has been used to study the adoption of technical standards, and also the occurrence of bank runs and currency crises (aka Coordination Game). Other applications include traffic flow (Wardrop's Principle), how to organize auctions (Auction Theory), the outcome of efforts exerted by multiple parties in the education process, regulatory legislation such as environmental regulations (Tragedy of the Commons), and even penalty kicks in soccer.

REFERENCES:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram

KEYWORDS: Game Theory, Nash Equilibrium, Non-cooperative, John Forbes Nash, A Beautiful Mind, Governing Dynamics, Algorithms, Calculus, Mathematics, Venn Diagrams, Prisoners Dilemma, Richard Sol, Saul Bender, Martin Hansen, Carnegie Scholarship for Mathematics, Autism Spectrum, Aspergers Syndrome, Schizophrenia, Schizophrenic, Princeton University