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John von Neumann: 3 ideas and puzzles worth knowing

3 ideas and puzzles from John von Neumann, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• A mathematician and an economist built an entire theory of rational decision-making

  In their 1944 book, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern formalized game theory, showing how rational actors should behave when the best choice depends on what everyone else choo…

  — John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior

• You're handed a coin that might be rigged. Can you still use it to make a fair choice?

  Suppose you have a coin that lands heads with some unknown probability, not necessarily 50/50. Using only that biased coin, how can you produce a perfectly fair 50/50 outcome, guar…

  — John von Neumann, Fair coin

• One design decision let computers treat their own instructions as data

  Early computers had to be physically rewired to run a different program. The stored-program concept, described in John von Neumann's 1945 report on the EDVAC, instead held both ins…

  — John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC

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