Game theory is the mathematical analysis of strategic, non-cooperative interaction among multiple entities whose aims and objectives may be at odds with each other.

In this context, the famous notion of ‘outcome of a game’ is called the Nash Equilibrium, named in honour of John Nash, who proved in 1951 that for a large class of games such a solution always exists.

Over the past 20 years, attention has increasingly focused on computational aspects: when the theory predicts a particular outcome, how hard will it be for a computational process to actually find that outcome? Work on computational issues has also branched out into related fields such as voting, social choice theory and the design of auctions. This lecture will provide an overview of Professor Goldberg’s work in this field and other work which has shed light on the computational problem of arriving at the outcome of a game.