PLAYER (von NEUMANN's): a critical view
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 2569 ▶ |
| Object type | Methodology or model |
G. BATESON writes: “The 'player' of a von Neumannian game is a mathematical fiction, comparable to the Euclidian straight line in geometry or the Newtonian particle in physics. By definition, the player is capable of all computations necessary to solve whatever problems the events of the game may present; he is incapable of not performing these computations whenever they are appropriate; he always obeys the findings of his computations. Such a player receives information from the events of the game and acts appropriately upon that information…
- “… in von NEUMANN's formal definition of a 'game' all problems which the game may present are conceived as computable, i.e., while the game may contain problems and information of many different logical types, the hierarchy of these types is strictly finite” (1973, p.255).
Most important of all “The player in incapable of 'error'… , he is by definition incapable of 'learning by trial and error'” (p.256), which shows him (it!) as a perfectly programed automata and thus a poor model of very complex real systems (including artificial ones like neural computers, of which it has been said that they are “very difficult to program”).