Anatol Rapoport: Theory

Anatol Rapoport was Russian-born American mathematical psychologist. Explore interesting quotes on theory.
Anatol Rapoport: 90   quotes 0   likes

“A thorough understanding of game theory, should dim these greedy hopes. Knowledge of game theory does not make one a better card player, businessman or military strategist.”

Anatol Rapoport

Source: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 108

Hope , Game , Understanding , Knowledge

“We must admit that it is extremely difficult to formulate a theory sufficiently general to encompass all possible sufficient causes of wars. With regard to necessary causes, however,… it is weapons. Without weapons wars could not be fought. We are told that, deprived of weapons, people would still fight with sticks and stones. This, however, need not concern us. We are concerned not just with fighting but with the sort of mass insanity that can destroy the entire civilization, the product of millenia of accumulated effort, in a matter of hours. And this can be done only with real, up-to-date weapons, not sticks and stones.”

Anatol Rapoport

1960s, "The Study of Conflict," 1968

War , People , Effort , Fight

“Our first objective in undertaking the experimental program described here has been to gain some understanding of what goes on in long sequences of plays of Prisoner's Dilemma. We have attempted to gain this understanding by postulating a system going through a sequence of states and by attempting to formulate some mathematical models from which the dynamics of the system could be deduced. Once such a model is found, its parameters, properly interpreted, become the key terms in the emerging psychological theory. This strategy can be deemed successful, if the parameters so discovered are independent of the process itself, if they suggest further investigation, and if the further investigations, in turn, lead to a more inclusive theory.”

Anatol Rapoport

Source: 1960s, Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965), p. 185

Mathematics , Understanding , Success

“(Game theory is) essentially a structural theory. It uncovers the logical structure of a great variety of conflict situations and describes this structure in mathematical terms. Sometimes the logical structure of a conflict situation admits rational decisions; sometimes it does not.”

Anatol Rapoport

Source: 1960s, Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965), p. 196

Game , Mathematics , Decision

“At present game theory has, in my opinion, two important uses, neither of them related to games nor to conflict directly. First, game theory stimulates us to think about conflict in a novel way. Second, game theory leads to some genuine impasses, that is, to situations where its axiomatic base is shown to be insufficient for dealing even theoretically with certain types of conflict situations… Thus, the impact is made on our thinking process themselves, rather than on the actual content of our knowledge.”

Anatol Rapoport

Source: 1960s, Fights, games, and debates, (1960), p. 242; As cited in: Han Dorussen. " Min beste fagbok: Anatol Rapoport: Fights, Games, and Debates http://www.sv.ntnu.no/iss/issavisa/98-1/bestebok.htm" at sv.ntnu.no, 1998

Way , Game , Knowledge , Thinking

“Although the drama of games of strategy is strongly linked with the psychological aspects of the conflict, game theory is not concerned with these aspects. Game theory, so to speak, plays the board. It is concerned only with the logical aspects of strategy.”

Anatol Rapoport

Source: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 110

Game

“The predictions of physical theories for the most part concern situations where initial conditions can be precisely specified. If such initial conditions are not found in nature, they can be arranged. Such arrangements are considerably easier to realize with inanimate than with animate matter, because the properties of animate matter are much more sensitive to being tampered with than inanimate matter. In particular, living tissue in vitro may behave quite differently than in situ. Controlled biological experiments are, of course, possible, but they are more difficult and their scope is more limited than that of physical experiments. For this reason, biology has had to depend to a greater extent than physics on theories of larger speculative scope, in which reasoning by imaginative analogy plays a more important role.”

Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport (1956) "The Search for Simplicity"
1950s

Imagination , Nature , Animals , Parting

“Game theory applies to a very different type of conflict, now technically called a game. The well-known games such as poker, chess, ticktacktoe and so forth are games in the strict technical Bark and counterbark sense. But what makes parlor games games is not their entertainment value or detachment from real life.”

Anatol Rapoport

Source: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 108

Life , Game , Sense

“It is the shortcomings of game theory (as originally formulated) which force the consideration of the role of ethics, of the dynamics of social structure, and of social structure and of individual psychology in situations of conflict.”

Anatol Rapoport

p, vii (1974)
1960s, Fights, games, and debates, (1960)

Game

“The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.”

Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport (1956), as quoted in: Richard C. Huseman (1977) Readings in interpersonal & organizational communication. p. 35
1950s

Communication , Sense

“The usefulness of the models in constructing a testable theory of the process is severely limited by the quickly increasing number of parameters which must be estimated in order to compare the predictions of the models with empirical results.”

Anatol Rapoport

Source: 1960s, Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965), p. 150

“Whether game theory leads to clear-cut solutions, to vague solutions, or to impasses, it does achieve one thing. In bringing techniques of logical and mathematical analysis gives men an opportunity to bring conflicts up from the level of fights, where the intellect is beclouded by passions, to the level of games, where the intellect has a chance to operate.”

Anatol Rapoport

Source: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 114

Men , Game , Mathematics , Passion

“The "flow of information" through human communication channels is enormous. So far no theory exists, to our knowledge, which attributes any sort of unambiguous measure to this "flow."”

Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport (1969) in: Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist. p. 139
1960s

Communication , Knowledge

“"What is good in Korzybski's work," they say, "is not new, and what is new is not good." On the other hand, many "Korzybski-ites" proclaim that Korzybski's work has "nothing to do" with semantics. They go so far as to say that the very term "general semantics" was an unfortunate choice; that had Korzybski known what confusion would arise between semantics and general semantics he would not have used it at all. Korzybski himself has maintained that while semantics belongs to the philosophy of language and perhaps to the theory of knowledge, general semantics belongs to empirical science: that it is the foundation of a science of man, the basis of the first "non-aristotelian system," which has had no predecessor and which no academic semanticist has ever achieved.”

Anatol Rapoport

(1951, p. 14)
1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950

Knowledge , Science