kaiyun欧洲杯app(体育)官方网站
How games and game theory have changed the world
IN 1824 PRINCE WILHELM OF PRUSSIA asked for a demonstration of an elaborate game he had heard about from his military tutor. The Kriegsspiel, or war game, had been devised a few decades earlier as a more militarily realistic form of chess. Instead of regular squares, the board was a detailed map of a real battlefield. Wooden blocks represented different military formations; each turn of the game simulated two minutes of battlefield combat. Damage was worked out by rolling special dice and using odds-based scoring tables based on casualty statistics from historical battles. The game took two weeks to play, during which all cats had to be banished from the vicinity, so they did not climb on the board and mess up the pieces.
1824年，普鲁士的威廉王子要求展示他从军事导师那里听说过的一种精妙游戏。这种名为Kriegsspiel（战争游戏）的游戏在几年前被设计出来，作为更符合军事实际的国际象棋形式。棋盘不再是规则的方格，而是一张真实战场的详细地图。木块代表不同的军事编队，每回合模拟战场上的两分钟战斗。通过掷特制骰子和使用基于历史战斗伤亡统计的概率评分表来计算伤害。游戏需要两周时间才能完成，这期间所有猫必须远离，以免爬上棋盘弄乱棋子。
The prince was enchanted, and every Prussian officer was ordered to learn to play the game. It allowed new tactics to be tried out, even in peacetime. The rules were constantly updated with new weapons and statistics. When Wilhelm became king, Prussia’s unexpectedly swift victory in 1871 in the Franco-Prussian war was attributed to these gamed simulations.
王子对此着迷，并命令每个普鲁士军官都要学会玩这个游戏。这使得在和平时期也能尝试新的战术。规则不断更新，以加入新武器和统计数据。当威廉成为国王后，1871年普鲁士在普法战争中的意外迅速胜利被归功于这些模拟游戏。
By the time of the first world war, Kriegsspiel was being used to predict when German battalions were likely to run out of ammunition, allowing timely replenishment—what would now be called supply-chain forecasting. In the interwar period, German planners used it to develop Blitzkrieg tactics and simulate the invasion of Czechoslovakia. When Hitler invaded Russia, both sides relied on the game to predict how the campaign might unfold.
到第一次世界大战时，Kriegsspiel被用来预测德军营将何时耗尽弹药，从而实现及时补给——这就是现在所谓的供应链预测。在两次世界大战之间，德国规划者用它来发展闪电战战术并模拟入侵捷克斯洛伐克。当希特勒入侵俄罗斯时，双方都依赖这个游戏来预测战役的进展。
The story of Kriegsspiel is just one of the many examples marshalled by Kelly Clancy, a neuroscientist and physicist, in her wide-ranging survey of how games can shape reality. Her story starts in earnest in the Renaissance, when mathematicians first developed probability theory, in part so that they could understand games of chance involving dice and cards. Games thus helped reveal that even random events were governed by laws and were susceptible to analysis. The resulting techniques were applied to medicine, population studies and the analysis of scientific errors. The German polymath Gottfried Leibniz saw games as models of the world, and thought studying them could “help to perfect the art of thinking”. The creators of Kriegsspiel were inspired by his work.
Kriegsspiel的故事只是神经科学家和物理学家凯莉·克兰西在其广泛调查中所收集的众多例子之一，展示了游戏如何能够塑造现实。她的故事真正开始于文艺复兴时期，当时数学家首次发展了概率论，部分是为了理解涉及骰子和牌的机会游戏。因此，游戏帮助揭示了即使是随机事件也受法律约束并且可以进行分析。由此产生的技术被应用于医学、人口研究和科学错误分析。德国博学家戈特弗里德·莱布尼茨将游戏视为世界的模型，并认为研究它们可以“帮助完善思维艺术”。Kriegsspiel的创造者受到了他的工作的启发。
Such war games, in turn, prompted John von Neumann’s initial steps in the development of what is now known as game theory, a branch of mathematics that could, its proponents hoped, be the physics of human nature. By the 1950s the theory had been fleshed out, with now-familiar ideas such as the Nash equilibrium and the prisoner’s dilemma, which consider how adversaries adjust their strategies in response to each other’s actions. Game theory directly underpinned the idea of “mutually assured destruction” during the nuclear build-up and stand-off of the cold war. It has since been applied in fields ranging from trade to evolution.
这种战争游戏反过来促使约翰·冯·诺依曼在发展现在称为博弈论的初期步骤中迈出了重要一步，这是一门数学分支，其支持者希望它能够成为人类本性的物理学。到1950年代，该理论已经形成了诸如纳什均衡和囚徒困境等现在熟悉的概念，这些概念考虑了对手如何根据彼此的行动调整其策略。博弈论直接支持了冷战期间核武器扩散和对峙中的“互相确保毁灭”理念。此后，它被应用于从贸易到进化的各个领域。
In the 21st century, the influence of game-like mechanisms has assumed a new, digital form. Social-media platforms are akin to games in which users compete for clicks and attention; apps have gamified dating, fitness and language-learning; and woe betide anyone whose rating on eBay, Uber or Airbnb, based on scores from other users, falls too low. Games have also been central to the development of artificial intelligence. Modern systems rely on the computational horsepower of graphics chips originally designed to run video games; and games have driven progress in the field, from chess, to Go, to the ImageNet image-recognition contest.
在21世纪，类游戏机制的影响以新的数字形式出现。社交媒体平台类似于用户竞争点击量和注意力的游戏；应用程序将约会、健身和语言学习游戏化；任何在eBay、Uber或Airbnb上的评分太低的人都可能遭遇不幸。游戏也在人工智能的发展中发挥了核心作用。现代系统依赖于最初为运行视频游戏而设计的图形芯片的计算能力；从国际象棋到围棋再到ImageNet图像识别比赛，游戏推动了该领域的进步。
Gaming’s power to shape reality, then, is incontrovertible. But Ms Clancy argues that games are “a map that warps the territory”. Though they may be internally consistent, that does not mean they accurately reflect the world. Yet they are often treated as though they do. Worse, the neat models of reality that game theory provides not only misrepresent reality, she argues, but can deform it in malign ways by affecting how people act. Humans are not the reward-maximising automata that game theory and economists like to assume.
因此，游戏塑造现实的力量是不可辩驳的。但克兰西女士认为，游戏是“一张扭曲领土的地图”。虽然它们可能在内部一致，但并不意味着它们准确反映了世界。然而，人们经常把它们当作现实来看待。更糟糕的是，博弈论提供的现实模型不仅误导了现实kaiyun欧洲杯app(体育)官方网站，她认为，还可能通过影响人们的行为以恶性方式变形现实。人类不是博弈论和经济学家所假设的奖励最大化自动机。
Economists are well aware of this, of course. The field of behavioural economics aims to understand how psychology, not just cold logic, affects decision-making. Ms Clancy dismisses it as “one of the least reputable fields of science” because it is “richly funded by corporations”. She objects to the way that behavioural economists refer to “cognitive biases” as though they are defects in human thinking, when in fact “they are the way thinking works”. Economists, it seems, are wrong to apply game theory uncritically, but are also wrong to try to address its limitations.
经济学家当然很清楚这一点。行为经济学领域旨在理解心理学，而不仅仅是冷逻辑，如何影响决策。克兰西女士将其视为“科学中最不受信任的领域之一”，因为它“富有企业资金支持”。她反对行为经济学家将“认知偏差”称为人类思维中的缺陷，事实上“它们是思维运作的方式”。经济学家似乎错误地不加批判地应用博弈论，也错误地试图解决其局限性。
In Ms Clancy’s telling, the overzealous misapplication of game theory lies behind many of the world’s problems, including economic exploitation, manipulation of public opinion, racism and neoliberalism. Some readers may grow weary of Ms Clancy’s demonisation of heartless economists and cut-throat capitalism. Although games and game-like mechanisms are not inherently bad, she argues, they have been used to “launder dubious beliefs” by “data-hungry technologists” and “rapacious business interests”. The challenge, she concludes, is to find ways to use games for good, rather than ill; to change existing rules and devise entirely new game-like structures, such as fairer voting systems. By turns philosophical and polemical, this is a provocative and fascinating book.
在克兰西女士的叙述中，过度热衷地错误应用博弈论是世界许多问题的根源，包括经济剥削、公众舆论操纵、种族主义和新自由主义。一些读者可能会对克兰西女士对无情经济学家和冷酷资本主义的妖魔化感到厌倦。虽然她认为游戏和类似游戏的机制本身并非固有的坏，但它们已被“数据饥渴的技术人员”和“贪婪的商业利益”用来“洗白可疑信念”。她总结道，挑战在于找到将游戏用于善的方式，而不是恶；改变现有规则并设计全新的类似游戏结构，例如更公平的投票系统。这本书时而哲学性，时而论战性，是一本引人深思和充满魅力的书。
声明：本文全文摘选自《经济学人》，每日一篇精读材料PDF+word+MP3音频历年合集2021-2024全部资源下方扫码咨询获取。
客户服务：提供百种外刊英语学习资料，可下载，可打印，扫码免费领取最新资源。
扫码获取所有外部刊物资源
