What happens when presidential advisors, in Machiavellian terms, think more of themselves than of the prince and seek their own profit more than the goals of the president or the "good of the realm"? In Games Advisors Play, Jean A. Garrison examines case studies of foreign policy in the Nixon and Carter administrations and addresses how and why advisors manipulate the group process, under what conditions advisors engage in power games, and in what situations they are most effective in influencing presidential policy choices. Given the high stakes, policy advocates employ various tactics to manipulate the advisory process and decision outcome. Three types of tactics are used: structural maneuvers, procedural maneuvers, and interpersonal maneuvers. Although these tools are important to the success of an advisor, the advisory process is a dynamic group process, and advisors must recognize that others have potential influence as well. The effectiveness of advisors therefore also depends on their power and authority, their manipulative skills, their interpersonal communication skills, and the relationships among members of the inner circle. Using the internal policy debate over arms control to trace the influence advisors have on specific decisions, Garrison compares the power games in Nixon's hierarchical system Number Three: Joseph V. Hughes, Jr., and Holly O. Hughes Series in the Presidency and Leadership Studies to Carter's more open advisory system. The disparate advisory systems provided advisors with different opportunities to influence the president and overall policy making. As a contribution to the decision-making literature in foreign policy, Games Advisers Play challenges static conceptions of the advisory process. Foreign-policy scholars, presidential scholars, and political psychologists will find this an exciting and thought-provoking study.

Humans and machines are very di?erent in their approaches to game pl- ing. Humans use intuition, perception mechanisms, selective search, creat- ity, abstraction, heuristic abilities and other cognitive skills to compensate their (comparably) slow information processing speed, relatively low m- ory capacity, and limited search abilities. Machines, on the other hand, are extremely fast and infallible in calculations, capable of e?ective brute-for- type search, use “unlimited” memory resources, but at the same time are poor at using reasoning-based approaches and abstraction-based methods. The above major discrepancies in the human and machine problem solving methods underlined the development of traditional machine game playing as being focused mainly on engineering advances rather than cognitive or psychological developments. In other words, as described by Winkler and F ̈ urnkranz [347, 348] with respect to chess, human and machine axes of game playing development are perpendicular, but the most interesting, most promising, and probably also most di?cult research area lies on the junction between human-compatible knowledge and machine compatible processing.I undoubtedly share this point of view and strongly believe that the future of machine game playing lies in implementation of human-type abilities (- straction,intuition,creativity,selectiveattention,andother)whilestilltaking advantage of intrinsic machine skills. Thebookisfocusedonthedevelopmentsandprospectivechallengingpr- lems in the area of mind gameplaying (i.e. playinggames that require mental skills) using Computational Intelligence (CI) methods, mainly neural n- works, genetic/evolutionary programming and reinforcement learning.

The mind-set that has dominated the history of computer game playing relies on straightforward exploitation of the available computing power. The fact that a machine can explore millions of variations sooner than the sluggish human can wink an eye has inspired hopes that the mystery of intelligence can be cracked, or at least side-stepped, by sheer force. Decades of the steadily growing strength of computer programs have attested to the soundness of this approach. It is clear that deeper understanding can cut the amount of necessary calculations by orders of magnitude. The papers collected in this volume describe how to instill learning skills in game playing machines. The reader is asked to keep in mind that this is not just about games -- the possibility that the discussed techniques will be used in control systems and in decision support always looms in the background.

Personal wealth isn’t the only purpose of hard work and investment; it’s also important to be able to pass wealth on to one’s children and grandchildren. Wealth transfer and distribution is a game, and if played poorly—or if it is not realized a game is being played—one’s fortune can be eaten away by a combination of poor investments and unfair taxation. Written by a financial advisor with decades of experience, Playing the Game prepares people for the game of Wealth Transfer and Distribution, enabling them to pass on their fortune intact so that future generations may enjoy it.

This volume features the complete text of all regular papers, posters, and summaries of symposia presented at the 17th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

The book describes the world's first successful experiment in fully automated board game design. Evolutionary methods were used to derive new rule sets within a custom game description language, and self-play trials used to estimate each derived game's potential to interest human players. The end result is a number of new and interesting games, one of which has proved popular and gone on to be commercially published.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer and Games, CG'98, held in Tsukuba, Japan in November 1998. The 21 revised full papers presented were carefully selected after two rounds of reviewing from a total of 35 submissions. The book addresses all aspects of computers and games, including game playing programs, mathematical games learning algorithms, social and cognitive aspects, and game theory. The papers are organized in topical sections on search and strategies, learning and pattern acquisition theory, and Go, Tsume-Shogi, and Heian-Shogi.