Author: Suxin Hong

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 article talks about the impact of weak ties to the job seekers and recruiters, however, the author only talks about the impact for the recruiters side. There states if a company wants to build a team with talented people, it is more likely for the company to hire people with talent because of the new employee is the bridge to other networks of great people. This is because of the strong readic closure we talked about in lecture. In this network, the relationship between networks is not only friendship, but also the employment relationship, the weak ties still exist between the company and the network of an employee and the weak tie has some effect such that the employee could offer a referral to his or her network so that the company would hire them in the end.

This is interesting because for students who are about to graduate, and after graduation, they have to find jobs. Sending as many as possible resumes to companies is a choice to find a job but this way is not efficient and there is a small chance to get the interview invitation from the company. To know someone who is working or has worked in a company and let him or her provide a reference seems to be a good choice. Although the article does not talk about the impact on the seeker side, but the weak ties do have impact on both ways as the job seeker could be recommended to the company because they can get referrals, and the company is more likely to hire them (weak tie effect) if they do have the skills to meet the requirement.

Reference:

Harper, Everett. “Weak Ties Matter.” TechCrunch. TechCrunch, April 26, 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/26/weak-ties-matter/.