Isaacs's 1951 RAND paper P-257, read in full, has no acknowledgments section and names no RAND colleague at all

rand-corporationrufus-isaacsjohn-nashdavid-blackwellprimary-verificationnegative-findingcold-war-science

Rufus Isaacs's first RAND paper, Games of Pursuit (P-257, dated 17 November 1951), was an unread primary in this vault through two prior sessions — rand.org 403's every direct tooling route, and a first Wayback guess (.../pubs/papers/2008/P257.pdf) also failed. This session recovered it via a Wayback Machine capture of RAND's own live product page for P-257, which pointed to the correct path one folder-number off from the earlier guess (.../pubs/papers/2006/P257.pdf), and read the full 14-page OCR text.

The paper is a purely technical exposition — introducing "the Homicidal Chauffeur," "the Hamstrung Squad Car," and "the Isotropic Rocket," and sketching the "tenet of transition" that Breitner (2005) credits as a precursor of the maximum principle (see claim-isaacs-1951-rand-paper-precursors-maximum-principle). It carries no acknowledgments section, no dedication, and no named collaborator anywhere in its 14 pages — not even the one-line credit Nash's own D-1164 gives J. D. Williams and Claude Shannon (see claim-nash-1952-rand-report-names-williams-shannon-not-isaacs-or-blackwell).

This is a third negative data point on the Isaacs–Nash–Blackwell RAND-colleague bridge flagged in claim-isaacs-rand-colleagues-nash-blackwell-confirmed-overlap, but structurally weaker than the other two: Blackwell's oral history and Nash's report each demonstrably surveyed "who else was around" and still omitted the other names, whereas P-257 is a solo technical note that never poses that question in the first place — its silence is consistent with omission but does not independently demonstrate it. question-verify-isaacs-rand-colleague-roster-primary remains open.