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Zero-Sum Two Person Games

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Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

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Introduction

Conflicts are an inevitable part of human existence. This is a consequence of the competitive stances of greed and the scarcity of resources, which are rarely balanced without open conflict. Epic poems of the Greek, Roman, and Indian civilizations which document wars between nation-states or clans reinforce the historical legitimacy of this statement. It can be deduced that domination is the recurring theme in human conflicts. In a primitive sense this is historically observed in the domination of men over women across cultures while on a more refined level it can be observed in the imperialistic ambitions of nation-state actors. In modern times, a new source of conflict has emerged on an international scale in the form of economic competition between multinational corporations.

While conflicts will continue to be a perennial part of human existence, the real question at hand is how to formalize mathematically such conflicts in order to have a grip on potential solutions....

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Acknowledgment

The author wishes to acknowledge the unknown referee’s detailed comments in the revision of the first draft. More importantly he drew the author’s attention to the topic of search games and other combinatorial games. The author would like to thank Ms. Patricia Collins for her assistance in her detailed editing of the first draft of this manuscript. The author owes special thanks to Mr. Ramanujan Raghavan and Dr. A.V. Lakshmi Narayanan for their help in incorporating the graphics drawings into the latex file.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA

    T.E.S. Raghavan

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  1. T.E.S. Raghavan
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Correspondence to T.E.S. Raghavan .

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  1. Ramtech Ltd., Larkspur, California, USA

    Robert A. Meyers

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Raghavan, T. (2017). Zero-Sum Two Person Games. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_592-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_592-2

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