A Study After Cardozo: De Cicco v. Schweizer, Noncooperative Games, and Neural Computing
Robert L. Birmingham · OpenCommons at University of Connecticut (University of Connecticut) · 1992
not use them.The language 'logarithms' is metaphorical, denoting any strange mathematics.This Essay studies one great case, De Cicco v. Schweizer, 5 using noncooperative game theory 6 and a neural network.7 The mathematics is sufficiently strange.The game and network serve different, complementary ends:Roth recently rashly claims: "Anyone who has ever taken a basic contracts class knows that no common law court in history has ever enforced a gratuitous promise." 9 Nor does the scholarly literature give a good reason to enforce, or indeed not to enforce, such a promise."° Yet a noncooperative game supplies the reason in a class of cases including De Cicco.A traveller said of a representative cabin in the Texas hill country, it is "one through whose walls a cat could be hurled 'at random.' ' ' A net provides the equivalent of a cat test for the substantiality of a legal argument, the cat surrogate being thrown through De Cicco without meeting perceptible resistance. II. KREPS' GAMEInformally, I first prove a little theorem that a threat cannot succeed, by which below, in Part V, I interpret De Cicco.Its conclusion 4. I won't use them either.For a representative use, for example to decide whether the coast of Britain has finite length, see HEINZ -Orro PEITGEN ET AL., FRACTALS FOR THE CLASSROOM: INTRODUCTION TO FRACTALS AND CHAOS 218-28 (1992). It doesn't.5. 117 N.E.807 (N.Y. 1917).About Cinderella and the Count: they do not live happily ever after.See infra text accompanying note 67. 6.The "defining characteristic of noncooperative game theory," which by incorporating rule-governed behavior makes unmistakable the legal relevance of this theory, is its study of "how cooperation (and many other forms of aggregate behavior) can emerge from selfinterested individual behavior within a given set of 'rules.'"DAVID M. KREPS, A COURSE IN MICROECONOMIC THEORY 355 (1990).7. Neural networks are "systems that are deliberately constructed to make use of some of the organizational principles that are felt to be used in the human brain."James A.