Some comments on two related topics, the crop of t.v. shows with espionage/CIA themes and Opie's movie "A Beautiful Mind." Spoilers follow, so skip if desired. First, this seaons's crop of spy shows. I'm watching "Alias" as I type. Not exactly believable, but fun in a "Lola Rennt" ("Run, Lola, Run") way. Jennifer Garner is a chameleon, and is gorgeous to watch. "The Agency" is a lot more believable, sometimes to the point of being a bit boring. A lot of well-known actors, including David Clennon (from old "thirtysomething" episodes, and from "From the Earth to the Moon"...I've always liked him as an actor), Will Patton (a horrible Kevin Costner movie, "Postman," and a good Kevin Costner movie, a spy movie from the late 80s), Ronnie Cox ("Robocop"), Paige Turco (a B-movie I liked), and so on. A recent episode used "anonymous remailers" as a plot device, with spies using them to communicate. This show has been remarkably prescient (though not to folks like us) about public events. Episodes already in the can before 911 dealt with the Al Quaida terrorists, anthrax, and suitcase nukes. Some were deemed so close to real world events that they were delayed, sometimes more than once. "24," the Fox-TV Kiefer Sutherland vehicle. Frankly, I have no idea whatsoever what is happening. I've seen about 4-5 f these episodes and, for all I know, they have been in random order. I have no idea who is who, what is happening, or why I should care. The only exciting scenes were of a woman killing someone on a jet and then rigging explosives to detonate the escape door (she had a chute). Less related to spy themes, "UC: Undercover." A good series about an FBI undercover infiltration team. Now, on to "A Beautiful Mind." I'll try to forget Bob Hettinga's gratuitous, but oh-so-typical, negative comparison of me to the John Nash character. There are several themes in this movie of interest to (some) Cypherpunks list subscribers: 1. Nash's role in game theory. Especially the theory of Nash equilibria, which relates closely to Schelling points, which relates closely to notions of where "rights" come from. 2. Codes and code-breaking. This is somewhat fanciful, for reasons which become clear a bit later in the movie. 3. Paranoia and schizophrenia. Nash would have done well on the Cypherpunks list, had it existed back in the 1950s. There's also a love story recurring theme, with Jennifer Connelly (local Stanford grad) as his wife Alicia. I'd read the Silvia Nasar book on which the movie was based, and I of course knew about Nash equilibria. The movie does an acceptable job of portraying Nash as a young grad student struggling with his demons and trying to make a mark. However, anybody who doesn't know the basics of game theory--payoff matrices, games of chicken, prisoner's dilemma, etc.--is not likely to understand the "who gets the blonde" very brief scene. Too bad, as the game theory part is what was most interesting to me. The movie is divided into roughly four reels: * Reel 1: John Nash arrives at Princeton in 1948, seeking desperately to prove himself with his "one great idea." He comes up with the notion of Nash equilibria (*) and gets the recognition he craves. * Reel 2: He is apparently recruited to help the Defense Department's code-breaking operations in the mid-50s and is chased by Russian agents. His paranoia afffects his life, his wife, and his child. * Reel 3: His mental breakdown. Electroshock therapy, thorazine, and meaningless scribbles in notebooks. And his novel way he decorates the walls of his office. * Reel 4: His gradual re-integration into a shadow of academic life (e.g., wandering around Princeton, hanging out in the library). His eventual Nobel Ersatz Price in Economics. (* Nash Equilibria. Imagine India and Pakistan both competing for the ultimate prize, Kashmir. Nash showed that the "best is the enemy of the good" by showing that a good-enough equilibrium exists when, say, both nations accept less than their first choice. The movie portrays this as a bunch of guys competing for a gorgeous blonde, but winning by accepting the lesser women around the blonde. As with many things in game theory, it works better in theory in practice. In practice, _someone_ competes for the blonde and gets her, something the abstract model skips. But the notion of Nash equilibria is important because it leads directly to Schelling points, an extension of the idea. The borders between India and Pakistan are largely a series of Nash equilibrium points. Borders are "arrived at without explicit negotiation" for information-theoretic reasons.) The film is worth seeing for several reasons. Russell Crowe does a fine acting job. The theme is interesting. Members of this list will likely find several points of resonance, though nothing explicity about politics in the film. I'm concerned, though, about elevating John Nash to superhero cult status. His "great idea" was interesting (more than anything I have done, of course), but was done when he was very young and can almost be seen as a pretty obvious extension of minimax and Von Neumann/Morgenstern payoff matrices.. We all know that people don't compete mindlessly for the "best," that they routinely accept second-best. This is part of the cost-benefit calculus of life. Nash did more than just hand-wave about this, of course...his sets of curves have mathematical rigor. So he deserves a role in the pantheon of game theorists, but we shouldn't let his nuttiness give him more credit than he would be due if he had just evolved into a Rand Corp. talking head as so many of them did. A fellow nutcase in Princeton (*) during the same period was Kurt Godel (umlaut over the single "o"). His achievement was the greater one, and he remained a member of the IAS until his death. His story would be just as interesting, though maybe not as sympathetic as Nash's. (Godel was at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is NOT Princeton University. I caught a scene in the film where Nash is entering Fine Hall, which, if I recall correctly, is at IAS, not at Princeton.) All in all, recommended. I thought the film started briskly but then slowed to a crawl in the third reel. It picked up again in the final reel. --Tim May "The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else." --Frederic Bastiat