ability of each particular
             participant to influence outcomes be negligible.
             So instead, game theory found all kinds of immediate applications in the 1950's to problems
             of the Cold War, everything from airplane dog-fights to doctrines of massive retaliation. "In book
             '"Prisoner's Dilemma," writer William Poundstone records the heady intellectual excitement around
             the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif., which was
             where much of the early work was done."3
             Nash hinted the first formal breakthrough meanwhile he was still a young instructor at the
             Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He succeeded in generalizing a set of problems known to
             economists since the 1840's, when Augustine Cournot began writing about what might happen when
             two big companies collide with one another in the marketplace.
             Nash also formulated a universal "solution concept" for many-person '"noncooperative"
             ...