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Ok so I'm in London right now for my junior year abroad, and I just had my first day of lectures today. The lectures were all huge and it seemed like there was little actual teaching going on.
But my main concern is the Game Theory class I'm taking. During the first part of lecture, the professor introduced us to Nim with normal and misere play. Cool. But then he goes on with all this crazy notation and random skribbles on the board about associativity, equivalence, and all sorts of strange proofs. Something to do with the equivalence of all losing games and weird notation that means "if and only if" and proofs going from one way or the other way (whatever that means).
Anyways, it doesn't seem like the class is too math heavy, so I'm not concerned with my qualifications to take the course. I noticed that most other people didn't take many notes if at all, and that confused the [censored] out of me. I didn't understand a single thing he wrote or said, so I was desperately trying to get it all down to figure out later. No luck, of course. It all seems pointless and trivial, or if not that, completely out of the range of my intellect.
Any input from game theory fans or majors? Should I call up Vanessa Rousso? Were any of you blown away at first sight (and I'm not talking about the Prisoner's Dilemma, like weird diagrams and three line equal signs)? I don't know if I want to stick with it or take a cool history course about the Cold War.
Here's a quick idea. He didn't explain any of the terms really, just sorta wrote and talked and wrote and talked.
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A bit of help...three equal signs means identical to--it's sort of 'always equal to' notation, or 'defined as'. The iff (if and only if) you were talking about (and I did mean to type iff) is the symbol you were probably looking at. The forward and backward proof have to do with this. For instance, to prove 'p is true iff q is true', you have to prove if p is true then q is true (forwards) and then if q is true, then p is true (backwards).
It does sound like it's fairly mathematical actually--not in a arithmetic/calculus sort of way, but in a proof and notation sort of way. Maybe it's the first day, maybe the prof is trying to set up examples, and what you're working towards for the rest of the quarter, or maybe that's what he's expecting you to know. My advice is to find out which case it is and figure out if you can handle it...
BTW, I do really like Game theory, especially since my Ph.D. will be very heavy in game theoretic ideas. Sometimes the theory can be fairly easy, but other times there can be lots of twists and lots of math.
Shane