The Prisoner's Dilemma
Two people can each do better by betraying the other — and end up worse off than if neither of them had.
195018 min read
Canadian-American mathematics
Albert W. Tucker
1905 – 1995
Princeton mathematician, known for the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions in optimisation and as the doctoral adviser of John Nash. In 1950, needing a way to explain the Flood-Dresher game to an audience of psychologists, he invented the story of two prisoners interrogated separately and gave the dilemma the name it has carried ever since.