Two Reviews: TV Spy Shows and "A Beautiful Mind"

[Tim May]

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