This is one of the 75 books on the list of The Smartest Books We Know by Fortune Magazine(or you can find the Chinese version of the list here), written by Robert Wright.

I started reading it when I went to Yun Nan. Perhaps the country, the village, and the nature scene had just inspire me to think about the idea in this book all along the trip. The Non-Zero-Sum game and the Zero-Sum game are two basic types of situation in the modern game theory, but it reflects in many ways of people’s interactions between each other. From the most ancient barbarian age to the modern technology age, the Non-Zero-Sum force have always been the power behind all human history.

Behind all these stories, no matter how disastrous or exciting they’re, there is only one purpose – to expand the playing group of this non-zero game. Each invasion from tribe to tribe, from country to country, from continent to continent, is also the creation of a connection between them. Fighting is always considered to be a Zero-Sum game because winner takes all, but without this kind of zerosumness, nonzero logic can never be the force that push the history of civilization forward. The brilliant part of this book is that Robert did not make any moral judges on the dark side of history. He presented all these facts and showed us how they’re just two sides of one coin. And when you really think about this nonzero logic of human destiny, the lesson we should learn is, if we play along the positive way in this game, we should have cooperate with people all over the world to become a Global Brain, so that we can solve the global problems we’re facing together as human race.