Conflict

Up to now, we have considered decision-making in cases where we are the ‘protagonist’, and where the ‘antagonist’ is relatively benign, or more precisely, indifferent to our desires. In this case, we characterize the antagonist as ‘nature’ in which we have we considered nature to consist of those aspects such as weather that do not react to our everyday behaviour. We can then regard the activity of engineering design as a ‘game against nature’. In the example of design of an offshore structure to resist wave loading, we might choose the design wave height and ‘nature’ chooses the actual wave heights which the structure has to resist.

But nature includes creatures other than ourselves! In activities in which other human beings – or indeed, animals – are involved, we cannot rely on any kind of indifference. If we set up a business, our competitors are out to do better than us, and this implies trying to take business from us. Strategies will be worked out to achieve this objective. We can no longer rely on probabilistic estimates of our opponent's strategies based on a study of ‘impartial’ nature, as we might do in studying a record of wave heights.