NuclearPhynance Archive

.

In the film WarGames, the supercomputer WOPR simulates all possible games of tic-tac-toe as a metaphor for all possible scenarios of a nuclear war, each of them ending in a nuclear holocaust (mutual assured destruction). The computer then exclaims, "A strange game; the only winning move is not to play."

.

Two great books in my library: The Evolution of Cooperation and the Strategy of Conflict.



Been a long time since I read them but, in one of them can't remember which), there's a story about generals analyzing progress at the Maginot Line noticed that ammo usage was increasing but kills were decreasing. The going theory was that, without words, people were able to evolve towards the golden rule. They all wanted to go home and see their families, so they started missing.

When you have 20 screaming murderers running at you, you simply can't chose who to slot - information overload. At close quarters (<100m) bayonet charges work as the enemy (provided they are finite) are paralyzed by numbers.



There was a lot of studies about this in WW2, Korea and Vietnam with varying conclusions.

The point of gambler's ruin is that there is a point from which you can not recover - when you run out of money, you are out of the game.



A random game path hits any single point eventually, so in the long run you are ruined no matter what your strategy is. The only way to avoid ruin is to not play.



That was sort-of the point in War Games. In the world of mutually assured destruction, launching nuclear missiles is the point of no return. In every scenario, that point was reached at some stage. That is why "the only winning move is not to play".



So my point was that once you have that point of no return, in the long run you will reach it - i.e. War Games is just another aspect of gambler's ruin.



In the real world, things are usually more complicated. The point of no return could be moving, and it may be fuzzier than a simple point (e.g. maybe you can bluff your way out of ruin, or your opponents may disappear after a while, or they may behave in some way that negates the point of no return, or whatever). So no political messages out of simple maths, sadly...