Prisoner's Dilemma

A friend of mine recommended this book to me a couple of years back. I finally got around to reading it after getting interested in Prisoner’s Dilemma sometime last year.

The book primarily covers three topics. It starts with John von Neumann’s childhood and his early life to the point when he published The Theory Of Games and Economic Behaviour. It then talks about Game Theory and–not so surprisingly in hindsight–the book goes into a full-blown discussion about the events surrounding the atomic war and the nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR. Once the three topics are introduced, they all appear throughout the rest of the book in seemingly random yet chronological order.

The book spends a considerable amount of time discussing Prisoner’s and similar dilemmas in the second half of the book. The different storylines helped make sense of the concepts being discussed and showed them in practice in real-life situations. At times, the information provided is overwhelming but it makes up for it with the change in pace and storylines.