I have been fascinated by game theory for some time. Game theory is a branch of applied math that "studies strategic situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns". Game theory has been used in fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, military planning etc.

In biology (which is my field of interest), the principles of game theory were used to formulate the theory of Evolutionary Stable Strategies (enunciated by John Maynard Smith in 1982) to explain why certain population ratios (eg. hawks versus doves) persist in nature, and why these ratios are stable. ESS also explains why the human sex ratio is always 1:1 (male/female) and why any deviation from this will always be corrected back to "normal".

Another application of game theory relates to war. The Israeli mathematician Robert Aumann (who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for his work in this arena) made the striking observation that: "countries are more likely to cooperate if their relations are characterized by frequent interactions and a long time horizon. Game theory also teaches that the chances of cooperation increase when backed by the threat of punishment."

The take home message I get from this is that if you are a peace negotiator trying to settle armed conflicts, you must negotiate from a position of strength. You must be able to carry out a threat of punishment against any violators to your peace treaty or else nobody will take you seriously. This probably explains why the UN is so ineffective in seeing that its resolutions are carried out: the UN has no real military force that is capable of enforcing these resolutions.

Combatants on the ground will see this and they will simply ignore UN resolutions they don't like. Hence, Hezbollah can afford to thumb its nose at UN resolution 1559, which then forced Israel to take punitive action last summer against Hezbollah, an action that should have been the duty of the UN to impose.

The other insight I got from game theory is that those suicide bombers who die for their cause willingly do so because they have already calculated that their deaths will be offset by the gains that their close genetic kin will obtain from their actions. The suicide bombers may lose their chances to propagate their own genes, but they gain by allowing the genes of their siblings and other close relatives to get propagated.

Suicide bombers would have to come from large families for the cost-benefit calculation to be favorable to them. They should have many brothers and sisters who can fill the vacuum and continue the task of gene propagation in their absence. This implies that if you are looking for the profile of a potential suicide bomber, you have to look among Arab families with many children. A family with only one child will not be a suitable source of such a "shahid"(martyr).

This is interesting. Perhaps I should check the profiles of the Sept. 11 suicide bombers to see whether they indeed fit this prediction. If a significant number of them came from large families (larger than the norm for Arab families), then this may validate the theory. It will also demonstrate the applicability of game theory in war.

tekton12  ¶ 8:04 AM