A presentation of systematic methods for winning differential games of pursuit and evasion, this volume explores the procedures' scope and applications. Numerous examples illustrate basic and advanced concepts, including capture, strategy, and algebraic theory. Detailed proofs appear throughout the text, along with 200 exercises that further clarify each subject. 1975 edition.
What might Heidegger say about Halo, the popular video game franchise, if he were alive today? What would Augustine think about Assassin’s Creed? What could Maimonides teach us about Nintendo’s eponymous hero, Mario? While some critics might dismiss such inquiries outright, protesting that these great thinkers would never concern themselves with a medium so crude and mindless as video games, it is important to recognize that games like these are becoming the defining medium of our time. We spend more time and money on video games than on books, television, or film, and any serious thinker of our age should be concerned with these games, what they are saying about us, and what we are learning from them. Yet video games remain relatively unexplored by both scholars and pundits alike. Few have advanced beyond outmoded and futile attempts to tie gameplay to violent behavior. With this rumor now thoroughly and repeatedly disproven, it is time to delve deeper. Just as the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan recently acquired fourteen games as part of its permanent collection, so too must we seek to add a serious consideration of virtual worlds to the pantheon of philosophical inquiry. In God in the Machine, author Liel Leibovitz leads a fascinating tour of the emerging virtual landscape and its many dazzling vistas from which we are offered new vantage points on age-old theological and philosophical questions. Free will vs. determinism, the importance of ritual, transcendence through mastery, notions of the self, justice and sin, life, death, and resurrection all come into play in the video games that some critics so quickly write off as mind-numbing wastes of time. When one looks closely at how these games are designed, their inherent logic, and their cognitive effects on players, it becomes clear that playing these games creates a state of awareness vastly different from when we watch television or read a book. Indeed, the gameplay is a far more dynamic process that draws on various faculties of mind and body to evoke sensations that might more commonly be associated with religious experience. Getting swept away in an engaging game can be a profoundly spiritual activity. It is not to think, but rather to be, a logic that sustained our ancestors for millennia as they looked heavenward for answers. As more and more of us look “screenward,” it is crucial to investigate these games for their vast potential as fine instruments of moral training. Anyone seeking a concise and well-reasoned introduction to the subject would do well to start with God in the Machine. By illuminating both where video game storytelling is now and where it currently butts up against certain inherent limitations, Liebovitz intriguingly implies how the field and, in turn, our experiences might continue to evolve and advance in the coming years.
The classical optimal control theory deals with the determination of an optimal control that optimizes the criterion subjects to the dynamic constraint expressing the evolution of the system state under the influence of control variables. If this is extended to the case of multiple controllers (also called players) with different and sometimes conflicting optimization criteria (payoff function) it is possible to begin to explore differential games. Zero-sum differential games, also called differential games of pursuit, constitute the most developed part of differential games and are rigorously investigated. In this book, the full theory of differential games of pursuit with complete and partial information is developed. Numerous concrete pursuit-evasion games are solved (?life-line? games, simple pursuit games, etc.), and new time-consistent optimality principles in the n-person differential game theory are introduced and investigated.
This book features contributions from the GTM 2020 International Meeting on Game Theory held virtually from St. Petersburg, Russia, including presentations by plenary speakers. The topics cover a wide range of game-theoretic models and include both theory and applications, including applications to management.
Dynamic games arise between players (individuals, firms, countries, animals, etc.) when the strategic interactions among them recur over time and decisions made during one period affect both current and future payoffs. Dynamic games provide conceptually rich paradigms and tools to deal with these situations.This volume provides a uniform approach to game theory and illustrates it with present-day applications to economics and management, including environmental, with the emphasis on dynamic games.At the end of each chapter a case study called game engineering (GE) is provided, to help readers understand how problems of high social priority, such as environmental negotiations, exploitation of common resources, can be modeled as games and how solutions can be engineered.
One of the largest collections of Trivial Pursuit questions ever compiled, this ultimate compendium covers art, entertainment, history, geography, science, sports, and more.
This volume examines fifty of the most important video games that have contributed significantly to the history, development, or culture of the medium, providing an overview of video games from their beginning to the present day. This volume covers a variety of historical periods and platforms, genres, commercial impact, artistic choices, contexts of play, typical and atypical representations, uses of games for specific purposes, uses of materials or techniques, specific subcultures, repurposing, transgressive aesthetics, interfaces, moral or ethical impact, and more. Key video games featured include Animal Crossing, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, The Legend of Zelda, Minecraft, PONG, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and World of Warcraft. Each game is closely analyzed in order to properly contextualize it, to emphasize its prominent features, to show how it creates a unique experience of gameplay, and to outline the ways it might speak about society and culture. The book also acts as a highly accessible showcase to a range of disciplinary perspectives that are found and practiced in the field of game studies. With each entry supplemented by references and suggestions for further reading, Fifty Key Video Games is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in video games.
Graphs measure interactions between objects such as friendship links on Twitter, transactions between Bitcoin users, and the flow of energy in a food chain. While graphs statically represent interacting systems, they may also be used to model dynamic interactions. For example, imagine an invisible evader loose on a graph, leaving only behind breadcrumb clues to their whereabouts. You set out with pursuers of your own, seeking out the evader's location. Would you be able to detect their location? If so, then how many resources are needed for detection, and how fast can that happen? These basic-seeming questions point towards the broad conceptual framework of pursuit-evasion games played on graphs. Central to pursuit-evasion games on graphs is the idea of optimizing certain parameters, whether they are the cop number, burning number, or localization number, for example. This book would be excellent for a second course in graph theory at the undergraduate or graduate level. It surveys different areas in graph searching and highlights many fascinating topics intersecting classical graph theory, geometry, and combinatorial designs. Each chapter ends with approximately twenty exercises and five larger scale projects.
The ~irst international con~erence on differential games was held at Amherst, Massachusetts, in September 1969. A second meeting, partially supported by N.A.T.O., was held in Varenna, Italy, in June 1970. At these conferences many new theoretical results and applications, especially in economic problems, were presented. The present volume consists o~ the lectures presented at a N.A.T.O. Advanced Study Institute on the "Theory and Applications of Differential Games" held at the University of Warwick, Coventry, England, from 27th August to 6th September, 1974. The main contributions during the first week consisted of a survey of two person zero sum differential games by L. D. Berkovitz and four integrated lectures by R. J. Elliott and N. J. Kalton, who have made important contributions to the concept of "value" of a differential game. Applications were featured during the second week and included tactical air games, pursuit and evasion problems, as well as computational aspects. A closing lecture with historical perspectives was given by Rufus Issacs, the recognised pioneer of differential games theory.
