Hmmm. "Vietnam -- US Relations: 1945-1968" seems to be missing from this list ;)
I love Space Technology textbooks from the 1960s. Largely because the physics and math of orbital mechanics can still be provided for good simulations.
Not sure if the same holds true for Game Theory apart from historical interest.
For a better introduction see Networks, Crowds and Markets:
It's an excellent book but not the most readable. Loved it as did most of my classmates in Game Theory / Economics tracks but some were finance majors just struggling. Re-reading it a few months ago, I could see why.
I’m disappointed only in how few titles are listed here. The impact RAND had on how we think about complex topics and the caliber of people they engaged was simply amazing. So much of their work from their heyday in the 1950’s seems either comically obvious or comically arrogant now, not because they were clueless but because they so completely shaped how we think today that we can’t imagine being the first to ask those questions that way.
[edit added] And yes, I do get there were a lot of projects RAND was involved in that people could reliably and reasonably dislike or find highly objectionable. For me, as important as that is, it doesn’t change the historical significance and importance (and interest) of the work RAND did, both good and bad.
The first game theory book I read was Compleat Strategyst [1]. Less interesting flipping through it now, but at least at the time it was a good sales pitch, leading me to read a bunch more on the topic.
Seeing analytic techniques applied across competitive games was a revelatory moment for high-school-me, in the mind-candy sense. In an odd way, learning to try to wrap math around human activities shaped how I approached programming for a long time. Not that I was trying to apply game theory to programming, rather the general approach of thinking about the world as a sort of meta-word-problem. Wish I had started trying to get rid of that habit earlier.
Is it really true that people in the sixties thought that interstellar travel is 'just around the corner' as claimed in the blurb to the book? I mean RAND sold this book as a product for serious people.
I don't know how many people did but in the seventies there were a lot of people who had seen the birth of the airplane to the landing on the moon. With people believing in exponential progress of technology amd things like Orion an NSWR I suspect a lot of people rid assume interstellar travel was right around the corner.
My great grandmother saw the Wright brothers fly as a teenager. The moon landing was a big deal to her.
You’re absolutely right. I was little when I talked with her, but my parents would surely say she would have completely accepted interstellar flights as the next thing.
Read the science/tech magazines from the 50s and 60s -- travel to the planets was imminent and ineluctable. [1]
While in principle and reason enormous achievements and progress are within reach of private enterprise, the 20th century was not dominated by reason and freedom, to say the least.
And they had all the objective reasons to think so. I remember reading a sci-fi book from 1930s (Olaf Stapledon), otherwise well-researched, that pegged the invention of nuclear weapons 300 years from then and spaceflight millions of years from then (the interstellar space flight was never achieved, not even billions of years into the future when the humankind v18 moved to Neptune and achieved a lifespan of 250,000 years).
If that was the prevailing opinion, it's easy to see how the interstellar flight could be seen as around the corner after the conservative predictions were all put to shame.
Kinda makes one want to draw parallels with the 'singularity' and AI.
Given the tone of so many of these reviews, I can't tell if the first reviewer ("Obi Wan") is being serious/delusional or if s/he's using the pagination of the text to subtly(?) mock the other reviewers. https://www.amazon.com/Million-Random-Digits-Normal-Deviates...
Also, Baran was not the only voice in the packet networking sea.. Pouzin should be recognized more. No disrespect either Baran, or RAND, but this has a feel like the washington mall history of invention.. if it didn't happen either in the US, or by a person who subsequently immigrated to the US, it almost didn't happen.
I share Shapiro/Anderson on email with anyone I can convince to read it. I remember it coming out well: I'd been slung off a UK JANET email list for abusive behaviour just around this time!
I love Space Technology textbooks from the 1960s. Largely because the physics and math of orbital mechanics can still be provided for good simulations.
Not sure if the same holds true for Game Theory apart from historical interest.
For a better introduction see Networks, Crowds and Markets:
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/