The Art of War was written by a Chinese ancient military strategist called Sun Tzu in late Spring and Autumn Period, it presents a lot of strategies of winning a war or battle and some of the aspects have a great influence on military planning even till now. The main idea about The Art of War is decision making and try to predict the opponent’s actions and then make the choice to dominant the war, which is the same as the game theory. However, the game theory is more about a mathematical approach of decision making, while The Art of War is more complicated than the game theory as it also considers human psychology facts and the situation under The Art of War is arguing is very fast changing (because anything could happen during a war) and there are too many unknown facts to do a mathematical calculation.
“If you know both yourself and your enemy, you can win numerous (literally, “a hundred”) battles without jeopardy” by The Art of War. It sates if someone knows the opponents quite well, then they can predict what are the possible actions that opponents will take so that they can come up with a solution to win the battle.
This idea is similar to the game theory as they all want to figure out a dominant way to win the game. The game theory is built on all of the people will make the rational decisions and find all the possible solutions and calculate the how many chances they could win and the choose the best one. However, the “enemy” talked by Sun Tzu is way more complicated, because Sun also considers the psychology of the opponents, for example, the fear. During the war, if you let your enemy fear about you, then there will a lager chance you can win it (during the cold weapon era, bluffing is a common strategy as it will make the enemies think you are strong, it is more like a deception, but in The Art of War, Sun states all the warfare is based on deception).
The reason I would like to talk about The Art of War is it is very impressive that Sun Tzu camp up the ideas about handling the conflicts and wining a war is really close to the game theory and written into book over 2500 years ago, even though Sun Tzu did not know game theory at that time, but he really contributes a great work to the world. The strategies Sun talks about not only can be applied to military strategies studies but also for the business (as the business is the modern warfare now).
In general, the game theory and The Art of War can be applied to military strategy and some other fields such as economy. The game theory is more like a mathematical way to calculate the possibility of winning based on a stable and simple situation. While The Art of War cannot calculated the possibility as the situation is way more complex and not stable.
Reference:
“Sun Tzu’s Art of War Strategy -.” Game Theory | Sun Tzu’s Art of War Strategy -. Accessed November 7, 2019. https://scienceofstrategy.org/main/content/game-theory.
“Networks.” A Game-Theoretic Interpretation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War : Networks Course blog for INFO 2040/CS 2850/Econ 2040/SOC 2090. Accessed November 7, 2019. https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2017/09/14/a-game-theoretic-interpretation-of-sun-tzus-the-art-of-war/.
Hagy, Jessica. “The Art of War, Visualized.” Medium. Medium, February 2, 2015. https://medium.com/@jessicahagy/the-art-of-war-visualized-b47da4c88c08.
This posting is quite interesting. From my point of view, Sun Tzu’s Art of War Strategy not only analyzes the war strategy as game theory. It also demonstrates how to think in their opponents’ logic.