What is optimization?

Here's a video of Leon Lasdon giving a talk with some examples of successful applications of operations research.



Lasdon is one of the old guys in operations research, and he says something at the start of his talk that struck me. "Everybody knows what optimization is", he says.

I used to think that was true also. But it's really not. In the poker world many people confuse the idea of optimal with that of equilibrium. In game theory you can find the equilibrium solution as an optimal solution of a min/max problem. So among poker math dweebs it's become common to term a solution of a game theory model as optimization and to describe exploitave.

In the poker world optimization has become exploitive and equilibrium has become optimization.

Outside the poker world optimization just means doing the best you can within whatever operating constraints you might have, just like Lasdon says in the video.

Sometimes I feel like Don Quixote tilting at windmills to try to use optimization to mean optimization when talking to poker dweebs.