During my senior year in high school I became interested in game theory. At that time I also learned my first programming language, FORTRAN, in a summer course at the University of Stuttgart. The first game I analyzed with computer help was simultaneous QUATRO-UNO described in Project 8. Since then I have believed that analyzing games formally may give new insights only if the game is sufficiently complex, and that for analyzing complex games technology is required. As evidence, this book is exhibit A.

Let's move from my private belief to the history of science and technology. Von Neumann and Morgenstern's book on game theory was published in 1944. A few years later, game theory attracted a lot of attention at Princeton University and at the RAND corporation. On the other hand, the first working computers appeared a few years earlier. A coincidence? Maybe, but if computers were not invented, von Neumann's ideas might have gone unnoticed for years or decades.

Game theory, as we have seen for two-player simultaneous games and others, works with large bimatrices (tables). So far the operations required to analyze a game—maximin moves, domination, best responses and pure Nash equilibria— are simple, but tedious, so computer help could be useful. To analyze these games, why not use spreadsheet programs, designed to work with tables?