Word: chess
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...Ph.D. thesis that has been described as the rock on which the mathematics of game theory is based. Game theory tries to explain economic behavior by analyzing the strategies "players" in the marketplace use to maximize their winnings. Nash, drawing on the dynamics of such games as poker and chess, introduced the distinction between cooperative games, in which players form binding agreements, and noncooperative ones, in which they don't. His "Nash Equilibrium" has been used by generations of corporate and military strategists to help decide when to hold 'em and when to fold...
...Unlike chess ratings, which group players relative to each other, bridge rankings represent a measure of absolute accomplishment...
...Americans and a German were also rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Economics using game strategy -- employed in, say, chess and poker -- to predict the market. The winners: John C. Harsanyi, a retired professor from the University of California at Berkeley; John F. Nash, a mathematician at Princeton University; and Reinhard Selten of the University of Bonn...
Familiar from its various stage and cinematic incarnations, Liaisons, sung in English, is an extravagant chess match of check and mate -- and mate and mate. The Marquise (mezzo Frederica von Stade, in top form) is an archmanipulator who wields her sensual allure like a double-edged sword, encouraging her lover's worst instincts as she wreaks her revenge on society. Her foil, the unapologetic knave Valmont (the splendid baritone Thomas Hampson), is a cynical womanizer who makes the fatal mistake of falling in love with one of his victims, unwisely and too well. Who is worse? The amoral rake...
With its forays into Manhattan's Washington Square Park for lessons in chess from a sympathetic father figure (here it's the always authoritative Samuel L. Jackson), the movie might aim to be a Searching for Bobby Fischer in the Hood. But Fresh is so much more: a really good film, for a start, made with a subtle precision that suggests a Vermeer landscape of the ninth circle of hell. Fresh alchemizes the terrifying cliches of urban melodrama into annihilating poetry. A guarantee: the film's last shot -- just a boy's face, in ruins -- will break your heart...