ABSTRACT
The theory of games is the product of a superb mathematical virtuosity. It illustrates a great mathematician’s originative genius. By an extraordinary paradox, it assumes away the whole of that aspect of business, science, art and contest, which allows originative genius to exist. It assumes that business, and life at large which embraces business, is a game with rules, and that the players not only know these rules but have so mastered their complete and assumedly bounded implications that all possibilities can be surveyed by them and that each of two contestants can so conduct himself as to be invincible, or else as nearly invincible as, for example, the entitlement to first move in chess makes possible. The player of a game, of a kind to whom the Theory of Games can be applied, is one who can take into his reckoning every possibility, and does so on the assumption that his opponent will do the same. Where, then, is the scope for that supreme trump in every contest of the world at large (as distinct from the world of game-artefacts), surprise ? Surprise is that dislocation and subversion of received thoughts, which springs from an actual experience outside of what has been judged fully possible, or else an experience of a character which has never been imagined and thus never assessed as either possible or impossible: a counter-expected or else an unexpected event.*
