Potential Applications of Manual Games

Thomas A. Brown

Expert InsightsPublished 1984

There is a lot of excitement in the air these days about very highly automated games and the use of artificial intelligence in gaming. In this paper the author points out some of the virtues of old fashioned manual games. He also suggests improvements in the way manual games are conducted which will overcome many of their problems without compromising their virtues. The author believes that manual games, in the sense of games in which human players make move-to-move decisions in an environment which makes the consequences of these decisions ultimately fairly clear to the players, have an important role to play in the analysis of dynamic decision processes. This is especially true if the decision process is one which is important, but which does not take place frequently enough for a body of reliable real world experience to be built up. War between the great powers is an example of such a decision process.

Document Details

  • Availability: Web Only
  • Year: 1984
  • Pages: 13
  • Document Number: P-6957

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Brown, Thomas A., Potential Applications of Manual Games. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1984. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6957.html.
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