A BRIEF HISTORY of DETERMINACY §1. Introduction
0001 0002 0003 A BRIEF HISTORY OF DETERMINACY 0004 0005 0006 PAUL B. LARSON 0007 0008 0009 0010 x1. Introduction. Determinacy axioms are statements to the effect that 0011 certain games are determined, in that each player in the game has an optimal 0012 strategy. The commonly accepted axioms for mathematics, the Zermelo{ 0013 Fraenkel axioms with the Axiom of Choice (ZFC; see [Jec03, Kun83]), imply 0014 the determinacy of many games that people actually play. This applies in 0015 particular to many games of perfect information, games in which the 0016 players alternate moves which are known to both players, and the outcome 0017 of the game depends only on this list of moves, and not on chance or other 0018 external factors. Games of perfect information which must end in finitely 0019 many moves are determined. This follows from the work of Ernst Zermelo 0020 [Zer13], D´enesK}onig[K}on27]and L´aszl´oK´almar[Kal1928{29], and also 0021 from the independent work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern 0022 (in their 1944 book, reprinted as [vNM04]). 0023 As pointed out by Stanis law Ulam [Ula60], determinacy for games of 0024 perfect information of a fixed finite length is essentially a theorem of logic. 0025 If we let x1,y1,x2,y2,::: ,xn,yn be variables standing for the moves made by 0026 players player I (who plays x1,::: ,xn) and player II (who plays y1,::: ,yn), 0027 and A (consisting of sequences of length 2n) is the set of runs of the game 0028 for which player I wins, the statement 0029 0030 (1) 9x18y1 ::: 9xn8ynhx1; y1; : : : ; xn; yni 2 A 0031 essentially asserts that the first player has a winning strategy in the game, 0032 and its negation, 0033 0034 (2) 8x19y1 ::: 8xn9ynhx1; y1; : : : ; xn; yni 62 A 0035 essentially asserts that the second player has a winning strategy.1 0036 0037 The author is supported in part by NSF grant DMS-0801009.
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