Mark was 1910, Twain an game unquestionably was theory not was a game astute not theorist. even social an observer established At the time who field. used of his But his death savage Twain in 1910, game theory was not even an established field. But Twain was an unquestiona astute social observer who used his savage wit to engage the comic and tragic aspects of humanity, particularly in the Slavery-era south. Edgar Allen Poe's "The Purloined Letter" anticipated game theoretical approaches in showing that "the way to win is to extend chains of reasoning of the form 'He thinks that I think that he thinks that I think . . . ' one step further than your opponent." In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Final Problem , Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty play the equivalent of a Matching Pennies1 game (Binmore 4, 22). Similarly, Mark Twain deploys game theoretical strategies in his fiction. Using a decision, prospect, and game theory-based interpretation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn makes it possible to explicate the novel's underlying causality and the role that reciprocity plays in Huck and Jim's decisions. Using those causal and strategic modes of interpretation recasts Jim as an intelligent being who would have, on some level, realized the utility of not telling Huck that Pap is dead, which confirms the significance of the novel's concluding twelve chapters. The applicability of game theory to literature should come as no surprise given its seemingly universal appeal in both the humanities and the sciences. In 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , declared game theory "the most prominent unifying theory of social science" (Holt, Roth, Smith). Beyond the countless instances where economists, mathematicians, sociologists, psychologists and philosophers have cited literary examples (or created their own narratives) to provide context for their theorems, there are formal contributions to literary scholarship that use game theory and related fields to offer compelling new literary interpretations. In 1980, The MIT Press published Steven J. Brams's Biblical Games: A Strategic Analysis of Stones in the Old Testament; the book's use of game trees and outcome and payoff matrices gave biblical and literary scholars a new method of analyzing and interpreting the scriptures. Brams's innovative book set the

Playing Games and “Making” A Novel: Mark Twain and Game Theory in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Playing Games and “Making” A Novel: Mark Twain and Game Theory in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn