INVITATION TO CYBERSECURITY 134 Solomon’s Wise Ruling “Now two prostitutes came to King Solomon and stood before him. One of them said, ‘Pardon me, my lord. This woman and I live in the same house, and I had a baby while she was there with me. The third day after my child was born, this woman also had a baby. We were alone; there was no one in the house but the two of us. ‘During the night this woman’s son died because she lay on him. So she got up in the middle of the night and took my son from my side while I your servant was asleep. She put him by her breast and put her dead son by my breast. The next morning, I got up to nurse my son—and he was dead! But when I looked at him closely in the morning light, I saw that it wasn’t the son I had borne.’ The other woman said, ‘No! The living one is my son; the dead one is yours.’ But the first one insisted, ‘No! The dead one is yours; the living one is mine.’ And so they argued before the king. The king said, ‘This one says, “My son is alive and your son is dead,” while that one says, “No! Your son is dead and mine is alive.”’ Then the king said, ‘Bring me a sword.’ So they brought a sword for the king. He then gave an order: ‘Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.’” (1 Kings 3:16-25) Note the predicament for the wise judge and king, Solomon. He is dealing with a case of she-said, she-said, with no forensic evidence or eye witness accounts to help determine the truth. Game theory, which would not be invented until thousands of years later, can help us appreciate King Solomon’s intuitive understanding of human rationality. We can analyze this story from a game theoretical perspective to predict how it is going to end.3 To do this, like any game, we need to define the players, their choices, and their utility preferences. The players in this game are the real mom (Mom) and the imposter (Imposter). Once Solomon issues his verdict, each woman has a decision to make. They can accept the judge’s ruling or defy it. We can assume that both women would have been familiar with Deuteronomy 17:8-12 on Israelite judicial practices. It states that a judge’s verdict is final, it must be followed to the letter, and the penalty for failing to do so is death. Therefore, defying a judge’s order was not something to be done lightly! We will refer to this option as the Reject choice and to accepting the verdict as the Accept choice. Their choices are interdependent because the combinations of their choices result in different outcomes (e.g., who lives, who gets to keep the baby, etc.). Some outcomes are more preferable than others, and they can be ranked to determine utility values. 3 This illustration is adapted from the book: Brams, S.J. (2003). Biblical Games: Game Theory and the Hebrew Bible. MIT Press.
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