YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Wooldridge

lines on the record: 35
first: 2026-06-07
most recent: 2026-06-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“far, far, far from perfect. So, this is an ongoing challenge, and I think it will be for the foreseeable future building machines which align with human values and human preferences. And that machine human bottleneck, we just take so much for granted because we've spent our entire lives growing up in a social”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Away all of Reddit, all of Facebook, all of Twitter, and so on. And along the way, those AI programs are going to learn every kind of toxicity that you and I can imagine, every kind of human bias is present on Reddit. Every kind of obnoxiousness is out there on Twitter. And the AI doesn't necessarily, it's just learning that using this as raw training data. Once you built that model, all that stuff is essentially latent within the model. And all it requires is the right prompt for that to be exposed. So you have to imagine that you have these sort of core models, which are then being wrapped in what are called guardrails by the big tech companies. And the point of a guardrail is to prevent any of that nastiness coming back to the surface. And the fundamental problem is that guardrails at the moment are rather flimsy.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been a very, very active area for decade or so of, and it's sometimes called the value alignment problem, ensuring that the AI that we build has values which align with human values. That raises other questions, by the way, exactly whose values do you want it to align with? Mine, yours, Elon Musk's, Donald Trump's values. And actually, it's not obvious that there is a consensus on what those values are. But nevertheless, this problem of value alignment is a very, very well recognized topic. One of the challenges that we've got at the moment is some of the most successful examples of AI that we have right now, large language models like ChatGPT and the like, were built by just by training them on essentially all of the digital text that's available in the world, the whole of the World Wide Web, which includes, by the way,”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“what's called reward hack it can learn to get a reward according to this reward mechanism but in game in ways that we didn't expect it to do and this is one of the fundamental ways in which ai can go wrong but any we have to communicate to these machines what we want them to do and that bottleneck for me that human machine bottleneck is really one of the big bottlenecks in ai generally”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It may be a choice to maximize its expected utility. And the big problem with that is if you've given it the wrong model of utility to describe the technical terms, if you haven't described what you want appropriately, then things can go very badly wrong. One of the ways in which they can go wrong is what's called when we set up, when we have a machine that learns what to do and we give it feedback called through what's called a reward mechanism. And the reward mechanism basically says that was good or that's bad. Thumbs up or thumbs down. You did a good thing. You did a bad thing. And this is in an area of AI called reinforcement learning. That's how AI programs learn. The problem is if we set up the wrong reward mechanism, it can learn to do things that we didn't actually want it to do. It can learn to”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is completely ubiquitous, not just in economics, but within AI. When you play a chess program or some other AI program, what it's doing is it's trying to figure out what would be the best outcome on average for you, the outcome which maximizes expected utility in von Neumann's terminology. So it's game theory is embedded completely throughout ideas and it's remarkable how many of those ideas go right back to John von Neumann in the 1920s.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what John did in that, what von Neumann did when he invented expected utility is he told you the best way to play when you are uncertain about what the outcomes are going to be and what he said is, roughly speaking, this is simplifying. You'll have to read the book to find a full story. But roughly speaking, what he said is the way to play optimally is to make the choice which would give you the best outcome on average if you played, made that choice a large number of times. And that's called the expected utility of a choice, the average amount that you could expect to earn from making that choice. But that idea here, expected utility, I'm looking in my bookshelves. I'm looking at a couple of hundred books on my bookshelves. I don't believe there was one of those books that doesn't have that idea expected utility at its core.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's absolutely pervasive throughout AI in a range of different ways. So one classic example was Deep Blue from the 1970s, the first chess playing. But actually, underneath the hood of that chess playing programs are techniques that were developed within game theory, which I talk about in the book. There's a technique called backward induction, which is used for analyzing games. And if ever you've played a game of chess or checkers or even a game of tic-tac-toe and a computer, you will have encountered that algorithm, that technique, which was invented by, was invented by game theorists. And it's a very simple technique for analyzing board games like that. Now, you need to do a bit more work when you want to play a game as difficult as chess, but it's absolutely central, absolutely central to how those programs, those AI programs will play a game of chess. And the other big idea, which John von Neumann invented almost quite casually, almost as a side product of what he wanted to do was an idea called expected utility.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Theory provides pretty clear advice for that. So which game are we in? I hope that in the book what I do is I convey to you the range of different scenarios and the kind of the game theoretic advice in each of those. And as we mentioned, each of the 21 lessons starts with the classic story from game theory to illustrate those, like the game of chicken or the prisoners dilemma or the voting, you know, the strategic voting problem and so on. But remember, game theory is just a bunch of mathematics. It's neutral. It doesn't say how you should cast your vote. It just says, you know, if you want to get the best outcome for yourself, then I'm afraid sometimes you're going to have to vote strategically. If you don't vote strategically, then sometimes you will be casting a vote and potentially end up worse off as a consequence. You'll cast a vote truthfully and potentially end up worse off as a consequence. So again, a lot of people think get”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is worth and bid not a penny more and not a penny less. And again, the striking thing about this is that's telling the truth about how much you think it's worth. You've got actually got a strong incentive to bid exactly what you think it's worth. In other words, to tell the truth about how much you think it's worth, which is a kind of a remarkable result. And there are some very good reasons why actually we very often want auctions with exactly those kinds of properties. And I talk about those in the book. So, you know, these lessons are, if you're in an auction like that, and they do occur. And actually, the auctions like that are used in to decide which adverts we see when we do Google searches, for example, so that they're really, they really do occur. And we're all regularly faced with the problem of voting. And how do we cast our vote and game?”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For yourself. And that means sometimes the big lesson there is there are always situations where it makes sense to vote not truthfully, not for your most preferred candidate, but for somebody else because that's the way you stand the best chance of getting this outcome. And then sometimes it always pays to tell the truth is it turns out that we use auctions nowadays all the time in our lives. eBay is now a big part of many of our lives. We routinely buy and sell things on eBay and other online auction platforms. But it turns out there are some auctions, some particular types of auctions where actually it turns out the best thing to do is to bid for something exactly the amount that you think it's worth. In other words, where you are strongly incentivized to think exactly how much do I think this is.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perfect system in the sense that you would never benefit by doing anything other than voting truthfully, voting for your most preferred candidate. Now, without spoiling the book for your listeners, there is a result which says, no, unfortunately, whatever voting system you come up with, there will always be circumstances in which tactical voting is the best thing for you to do. In other words, voting really is a game. Now we see the large parties tell us, no, no, you shouldn't vote tactically. You should always vote effectively, truthfully, because they know they benefit from that because most votes in that way are going to go for one of the big parties. But the lesson from game theory is voting really is a game. It makes sense to think strategically about how to cast your vote to get the best outcome.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, sometimes it pays to lie is really about the question of strategic voting, right? And we saw strategic voting in the UK in a very big way and the last general election. I mean, I think that was one of the big factors that we saw lots of websites advising people, you know, if you want to get rid of this particular party in this constituency, then this is who you should vote for. And that strategic voting is essentially voting but where you're not voting truthfully, where you're casting a vote for somebody who is not actually your most preferred candidate. Now there is a sense in which you're lying there. And this problem has been studied. The following problem has been studied. Are there voting systems like the one that we use in the UK, the one we use in the K plurality or single transferable vote, which is used in Ireland and some other countries? There are many different voting systems. Is there a”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“TV licenses in the UK, same story, best outcome for me. There's a kind of a prisoner's dilemma in AI right now that we've got some of the richest companies in the world that are racing to develop AI that apparently they don't believe is safe. Why are they doing that? Because if they believe if they didn't do it, somebody else would cheat. Somebody else would go ahead and do it. And it's been described as a prison dilemma. But the characteristic of the prisoner's dilemma is where there is that temptation to cheat. Everybody and everybody has that temptation. Everybody cheats and everybody ends up worse off as a consequence. The problem is if we are doing playing this game without binding agreements, without some mechanism to enforce cooperation, to enforce the agreement that we make, then game theory says you're not rationally going to get to cooperation. You need some other mechanism there to help you get to cooperation. But actually, that I think is an important lesson of game theory.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“reducing fishing in the North Atlantic without actually enforcing that with spot checks and the kind of other tests to make sure that people are actually adhering to the agreement that's been made. Because without that, it's just noise. If there are no teeth there, it's just noise. It doesn't cost me to anything to promise something to you. And if I know that if you cheerfully cooperate while I cheat, I'm going to be better off as a consequence. And in the prisoner's dilemma, that is the choice that the players could make. So the temptation to cheat is the characteristic, the really characteristic of a prisoner's dilemma. And the same thing happens, you know, in public transport, the best outcome for me in public transport is if you all buy your tickets and I cheat, then you have all bought your tickets. We have a well-funded public transport system. But if we all cheat, then we end up with a poorly funded public transport system.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so the classic characteristic of a prisoner's dilemma is that there is a temptation to cheat on an agreement where you and I can reach an agreement, but it's not a binding agreement. It's just me saying to you, okay, let's do this, but where I have a temptation to cheat, that is where I would strictly do better off by cheating no matter what you did. But in a prisoner's dilemma, you have exactly the same temptation. Now, the problem with the prisoners dilemma, if everybody is faced with that temptation to cheat, then actually everybody ends up cheating and everybody ends up worse off as a consequence. Now, one of the big lessons of game theory is that if you really are playing a prisoner's dilemma, then you're not going to get to an outcome where nobody cheats without a bit of help. That is, we would be foolish to sign agreements around, say,”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is this really a commitment or is this a signal and so on? And it turns out in a Cuban missile or crisis, it seems that both players actually back down, although it didn't quite look like it at the time, but actually both players made concessions where they stepped back away from the brink. And it was the biggest brink in human history that they were on the edge of. But there were many ways in which that game could have been misplayed. Game theory can flag up these dangers for you and tell you what the indications are that you're in a game of chicken or that you're in one of the other games that we talk about in the book and help you identify those and the dangers. And I think that's one of the chief values of it.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the mathematics of game theory doesn't have too much to say about that. I mean, but yeah, in reality, that's exactly what you're going to do. What is the serious, you know, what are their options seriously? What are the consequences? Are they really committing at this point, for example? That's a really important point. Is there a commitment here or is it just a signal? And a signal carries no weight other than what you're trying to do is send a message to the other. But there's no commitment there. There's nothing which irrevocably commits you. Commitments can be very powerful, but also very dangerous. And if you make those commitments which don't get seen by the other party, then the outcome can be very, very bad indeed. But of course, the Cuban missile crisis, probably the most famous game of chicken in human history, was exactly that. And what you describe exactly happen. JFK and his team busy working out.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“invading became an irrevocable commitment at that point. So one of the life lessons here is understanding the dangers when you see a game of chicken play out around you and the classic danger in a game of chicken is mutual escalation until you're both fully committed and you both go off the cliff”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First and make sure that the other player has seen and understood that commitment. And the danger is continual escalation is that both sides inadvertently end up committing. They both go over the cliff. So the game of chicken is a classic game theory game. And the point is it happens all around us. So what's happened in Ukraine since 2022, in particular the beginning of that, looked like a game of chicken between NATO and Russia, where Russia were sending out very strong signals, making thinly disguised threats about the use of nuclear weapons and so on. Classic signaling. And actually the invasion itself was a very, very strong commitment move. Up until then, it had been a game of signaling where it was, we believed there was going to be an invasion and both sides were sending signals to one another, but Russia.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The danger, the classic danger in a game of chicken is escalation. That is you send out these signals and these signals get stronger and stronger until both sides become irrevocably committed. So in this case where they both pass a threshold from just sending signals to making commitments like both sides in the game of in the EU Brexit game of chicken, both sides commit to play hardball then that ends up with a very bad outhorically they've both gone over the cliff if in Jim and Buzz's case you know if these how might they commit themselves they can throw out their steering wheel they can sell a tape a brick down on the accelerator and so on and these are then commitments which force them into a particular course of action commitments can be really powerful but if you're going to use a commitment you have to get in”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“your chicken i'm brave i'm gonna head straight no matter what you do you're gonna lose this game i'm the i'm the bravest here that's signaling that's classic signaling in a game of chicken and we saw exactly that in the brexit game you know the announcements that came out of 10 downing street about you know we will not back down you know we demand and so on and so forth and exactly the same from the eu they're sending signals about”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We see in a game of chicken when people actually play the game of chicken in the real world and we see lots of these, for example, I talk about how Brexit, you know, the gameplay between the UK and the EU is a game of chicken where basically both sides are saying we are going to be brave. That is we're going to push for a hard Brexit or from the EU point of view, no access to our markets without freedom of movement and so on. The worst outcome there is if nobody backs down that actually if both players play a hard Brexit game and cars to us and we don't get to sell our umbrellas and warm beer to them. So what you see in the game of chicken play out is signals that the players make to each other about where they are heading. So in when Jim and Buzz play this game the signals might be, you know.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“believe their chicken, then you should drive straight. You should hold on for that second longer. But you better believe, you better get that right. If you think that they're brave, if you think they're just going to carry on driving straight, you don't want to go over that cliff. You may as well jump clear. I mean, it's not the best outcome for you. The best outcome is where you look brave, you know, where you're the last to jump out, but it's better than going over the cliff. So the point is in the game of chicken, you want to judge what the other player is doing and then do the opposite. If you think they're going to be brave and drive straight, you should dump clear. If you think they're chicken, they're going to jump clear. You should drive straight a moment longer. But you need to think very, very carefully about your opponent. The problem is in the game of chicken that if you misjudge that, you can both go over the cliff and then both end up with the worst possible scenario. Now, the game of chicken is fascinating because of the behaviors that”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the game of chicken, the name comes from this game that was supposedly played by teenagers in 1950s America that was immortalized in the movie Rebel without a cause, where James Dean's character, Jim, is playing a game against his nemesis Buzz, and they're trying to prove who's brave and who's chicken. And the way they do this is they drive their cars both towards a cliff edge. And basically the idea is that the chicken is the first person to jump out of the car and the bravest is the last person to jump out. The problem is if they're both brave or they think the other person's chicken, they're looking over the shoulder, waiting for them to jump out, then they both go over the cliff. And that's the worst outcome for both of them. So in a game of chicken, it pays to think very, very carefully about whether your opponent is really brave or really chicken. If you really...”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and very often you get very disinterested students with pure mathematics courses. I've taught hands-on robotics where the students get excited at the beginning but then end up getting disappointed because robotics is really quite hard to get right. But actually the reaction with students on this course has been very, very different. They engage with it. They engage with it in a way that they don't engage with other courses. And this is what got me thinking perhaps there's a book here where I can explain the kind of ideas that I explain in my course, but obviously without mathematics and without computer programs and so on. So that's what the book's an attempt to do.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really is just as much about cooperation as it is about conflict. But secondly, I think an important lesson in the book is that trying to get to good outcomes, to get to cooperative outcomes, to outcomes that are satisfactory from the point of view of society, you can't do that naively. Game theory tells you what's required to get there rationally. And some people find the advice unpalatable, but the advice is very, very robust advice. And I think it's advice that we could all be advised to listen. But the fundamental reason I wrote the book is I teach this as part of a computer science and AI course here at the University of Oxford. And I've been teaching it for more than a decade now. And my experience of teaching it with students has been very different to anything else that I've taught. I mean, I've taught pure mathematics courses.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think there are a couple of things to take away from the book. And the first is that the first lesson in the book is it isn't all about greed and it isn't all about money. And there is this perception that game theory advocates some model of human behavior, which is selfish in the kind of the cruel sense of selfish, you know, that it's just me scrabbling to get the best outcome for myself and stomping on everybody else. Actually, game theory admits saints as well as sinners. It copes with saints just as well as sinners. It doesn't advocate some model where I am scrabbling to get ahead and trying to kick everybody else down and make them do as badly as possible. So that's the first part of what I wanted to say in the book. And I think that's an important lesson. It isn't just applicable to scenarios of pure greed and selfishness.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it was problematic. It had a problematic reputation. And part of that was that a lot of the early game theorists, extremely eminent game theorists, were looking at scenarios like nuclear war and saying how can we play a nuclear war well? Well, you can imagine an enormous number of people. We're like, a nuclear war is not a game. And these game theorists are reducing the ultimate nightmare of global thermonuclear conflict to a game, you know, and the stereotype was that these were kind of sociopathic robots that divorced from any human understanding. You know, how can you think about war as a game for so many people? That was just appalling. That's an oversimplification of what went.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of conflict. So part of the reason for writing the book is to continue the rehabilitation of game theory and to show people that it's as much about subjects like cooperation as it is about the kind of conflict scenarios that John von Neumann was the first to study.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And me too, don't worry about it. And I'm not going anywhere near poker, not ever again, not after the last time. But anyway, what von Neumann did is he showed what you need to do in a zero-sum encounter. But there was a problem with that because the theory that he first established is about essentially games of conflict where there can be one winner and everybody else must be a loser, zero-sum games. And for the next 30 years, 25 years, 30 years, that was more or less it in game theory. And so game theory got kind of identified as the science of conflict. Whereas in practice, game theory also deals with cooperation, when can cooperation happen, when can mutually sustained rational cooperation happen, you know, when can win, win outcomes occur. Also concerned with those things. But in the public perception, it was the science.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there is a big branch of mathematics called optimization, which is about trying to compute the optimal choice given a range of possibilities and your preferences over this. And it's a very big, very, very well established theory. And what game theory does is try to say, how do we do that in a game of poker? What's the choice that I could make, the move I could make in this game, which would result in the best outcome for me. Now what von Neumann did is, I mean, he had to greatly simplify things because poker's a complex game, but he came up with a simple model of what are called zero-sum games. And a zero-sum game is basically a win-lose game. And a game of poker is a zero-sum game in some sense because if I win, you lose, right?”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The players could be, it could be me and my wife negotiating about who's going to wash up the dishes and who gets to choose what we watch on TV tonight. They could be a parent negotiating with a child about how many screen tire, how much screen time they get before they go to bed. They could be you and your boss negotiating about your pay rise or two companies trying to reach a deal in the market. So although it has its origins in parlor games, the scope of game theory is very, very, very broad indeed.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, now von Neumann solved that problem mathematically, and in doing so, he kind of set off in train the whole of the field of game theory. He didn't actually tell us how to play poker well, but he established the main theory that was underpinning it. The problem is when people hear game theory as a consequence of that, they think it's only to do with parlor games, games like chess or poker or checkers and so on. But actually game theory studies every scenario where self-interested parties interact with one another. And that could be people playing a game of poker and in a game of poker. It's obvious what they're self-interested is. They want to win. You know, if I'm playing with you, I want to win the game. You also want to win the game. So our preferences there are not aligned with one another. And so the theory tells you how you might behave in such a game.”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So game theory is the mathematical theory that tries to understand every situation in which self-interested parties interact. And those parties could be me and you. They could be governments. They could be nations engaged in a bloody war that are trying to navigate their way through it. They could be anything which is perceived of as having choices that can take actions and also has self-interest in the sense that it has preferences about how the world is. So game theory is actually invented as far back as the 1920s. And one of the main inventors was the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann. And von Neumann was a mathematician who was interested in games and he asked himself a very, very, very natural question for a mathematician. He said, could game theory teach me how to play poker?”
2026-06-07 · Intelligence Squared · Why Does It Sometimes Pay to Be a Chicken? With Professor Michael Wooldridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT