Edgar Allen Poe Flaws The Game Theory

The man, the poet, the soldier, and the scientist? In Poe's "The Purloined Letter," he manages to find a flaw in the omniscipent Game Theory. For those who slept during applied mathematic theory class, Game Theory essientially is my statistical chance of winning in strategic situations based on the choices made by my opponent. It's now applied to a broader spectrum of applications like social science, biology, and pimping. Yes, pimping, but that's not why this is being written.

Here's what Mr. Poe said:

“I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of ‘even and odd’ attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one.

“The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, ‘are they even or odd?’ Our schoolboy replies, ‘odd,’ and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, ‘the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;’ — he guesses odd, and wins.

“Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: ‘This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even;’ — he guesses even, and wins.

“Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed ‘lucky,’ — what, in its last analysis, is it?’

‘It is merely,’ I said, ‘an identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent.’”
[From “The Purloined Letter.” Paragraph breaks added]

Here's the rest of the article from ScienceNews. Enjoy.