Dan Q – Page 302

Game Theory Applied

A friend of mine recently posted the the following conundrum to his blog:

I found the deck of cards from a board game called scrupples (it poses you a dilemma and your opponents guess how you would respond) and I thought up another one completely off the top of my head:

"You and two other people are temp workers in a large corporation hired for one month to do some simple, repetitive data entry. One of your co-workers over-hears the boss say that the temps are very good and that they are going through the work so quickly they’ll probably let one of them go. Your co-worker suggests to you that all three of you go slow from now on. What do you do?"

I found the application of game theory to this question more interesting than the ethical implications it posed, so I wrote a long comment in reply to it. Then, realising that the comment was so long that it probably deserved it’s own blog post, I wrote this.

I recommend that you come up with your own answer to Matt’s question before you read my post.

Ah yeah; I’ve played that game. It’s far more fun when you start making up your own.

Now, on to your question – it’s more complex that it immediately appears – at first it’s a simple question of ethics: go slower to keep your job or keep doing a good job for a one-in-three chance of losing it. Based on that, even, it’s not so simple a question, and my answer would depend on how much I wanted to keep the job, which depends on factors like how much I needed the money, etc.

But it’s not that simple; thanks to a little application of game theory, because it turns out that if you do make the decision to slow down, but your two co-workers, faced with the same decision, speed up, then it’s probably going to be you that they let go, on account of you being the least productive of the three. Assuming that all three temps are equally capable of thinking through this logic and do not communicate with each other any further, I would anticipate that all three would work even harder in an effort to impress. After all, if you’re the one who’s deliberately slow, you have a 1-in-3 chance of being fired, but if you’re deliberately fast, you have a 1-in-3 at worst (in the situation that everybody goes fast, assuming that all three are equally competent workers).

Of course, this is a somewhat sterile view of the world: in the end, there are other major factors that can’t be accounted for in simple probabilistic terms: it’s unlikely that all three temps are equally proficient, or that they all want the job badly enough to put in the same level of extra effort, or that they don’t trust each other enough to form a meaningful "slow conspiracy." There’s lots of factors that game theory doesn’t take into account here: but nonetheless, it seems to work: I’ll pick a related example.

There is a party game I’ve taken part in a few times in which a team of individuals is charged with the task of slowly lowering a long thin pole to the ground without any individual member losing contact with it. The players are stood in a staggered pair of lines, facing one another, with the stick held between them at about nipple-height. Each player supports the stick with exactly one finger. Then, as a team, they have to lower the stick to the ground, without anybody losing contact with the stick. This makes a conflict of rules:

each individual wants to be touching the stick (from underneath), but

the team wants the stick to go down.

What happens? The stick moves up. The effect is magical to watch, because if you’ve got over about six people none of them "feels" like they’re part of the "moving up" process, but it’s still happening. Everybody blames everybody else. In actual fact, each person is re-asserting their position against the stick (by moving their finger up in response to it moving away from them) so as to meet rule 1. And all it takes is a little involuntary vibration (easy done, when you’re supporting part of a long stick on one finger) to kick the process off. It’s a good team-building activity, and it’s great to spectate, too.

Transplanted to your hypothetical (?) situation, the height of the stick represents the speed of work of the fastest worked. Game theory predicts that you will all want the best for yourself, ultimately, and so the rules are as follows:

each individual wants to be touching the stick (i.e. wants to be the fastest worker), but

the team wants to the stick to go down (i.e. work speed in general becomes slower).

Therein lies the basis of my prediction. What do you think?

Black Sheep

We have to get this film for Troma Night: Black Sheep. It looks stupid enough to rival Isolation (angry mutant livestock!), which some of you saw last Halloween, but at least it doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. See the trailer:

In other news: good luck to everybody who’s doing exams this week.

Troma Night CLXI – Tonight

CHANGE OF PLANS: All of the tickets for Pan’s Labyrinth are sold out. For those that didn’t get a ticket in time and for those that weren’t coming to Pan’s Labyrinth anyway, Troma Night now starts as usual at The Cottage at 8pm. Tell anybody who might not know.

Tonight is the 161st Troma Night (based on liberal estimation and basic guesswork), and it’s a somewhat unusual one. The plan is as follows:

8:00 pm – start at the Arts Centre for the stunning-looking Pan’s Labyrinth. Yes, this means that we won’t be ordering pizza at 8pm: instead, I suggest that people either (A) eat beforehand or (B) have a snack beforehand to keep them going, and we’ll order pizza later. I suspect I’ll be doing option B.
10:20 pm – return to The Cottage, order pizza for anybody who’s hungry, and watch something else. I propose an MST3K, or perhaps one of the B-movies Jimmy provided some weeks back, because I anticipate that something silly, bad, and/or funny will be quite welcome after the psychological thriller than Pan’s Labyrinth is likely to be, but I’m open to suggestions and I’m happy to do things democratically.

If there’s anybody who doesn’t want to come along to Pan’s Labyrinth but does want to come for the rest, let me know and I can give you a bell when we leave the cinema, so you can meet us in a timely fashion. But really, you should come.

The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Well, that’s Twilight Princess for the Wii finished. And quite a spectacular game it was too. Highlights [warning: spoilers] include:

Predictably Zelda: many of the best elements of Zelda games gone by made it into Twilight Princess, so much so that the predictability of some of the plot elements will make accomplished players groan, such as the "you must collect 3 parts of this, scattered throughout the land," "you must restore power to the Master Sword," and the "if you’ve just got a new weapon, you’ll need it to escape the room you found it in and to beat the boss of the dungeon you’re in right now" cliches.
Replay value: having finished it, there are still several things I’d like to go back and do again, do better, or actually do. Disappointingly, by comparison to Wind Waker, there is no option to save progress having defeated the final boss and carry on playing: instead, I’ll have to use my just-pre-boss save game as a springboard to explore the things I didn’t get a chance to do earlier, which feels somehow incomplete, but nonetheless I’m looking forward to trying out a few extra things.
Music: yes, it’s a Zelda game. There’s not so much emphasis on musical puzzles as there was in, say, Ocarina, but there’s still some (mostly related to transforming into a wolf and howling at stones, which gets to be just about challenging enough to keep you amused, by the end of the game). As usual, the soundtrack is stunning.
Imaginatively-designed bosses: some of the monsters you’ll fight are particularly interesting. A whole selection of varied fight scenes litter the game: jousting against a monster on a boar’s back across a flaming bridge; tripping over a balrog-like beast by strategically grabbing the chains around it’s ankles so that you can reach it’s face; and swinging around – Spiderman-style – from towers in order to gain altitude on a dragon are three of my favourites, but there are plenty more great fight scenes.
Controls: the Wii release of the game makes great use of the unusual Wii controllers: typically, the nunchuck "stick", in the player’s left hand, is used to move around (or look around, in some modes), and the right-hand "Wiimote" is swung in order to move Link’s sword, or aimed at the screen either as a cursor (for choosing weapons and items from the inventory, options in the menu, etc.) or as a crosshair (for firing the bow and arrow, for instance). There’s a great variety of clever special moves to be learned, and while the swordfighting can be a little cumbersome at first, the learning curve is shallow enough. Later on, you’ll be flicking the Wiimote and the nunchuck in unison to perform advanced moves – rolling around your enemy to strike them from behind, knocking them off balance with your shield, and Link’s signature "spin attack," for example. The bait fishing puzzle is a little simplistic, but the lure fishing (which you’ll discover far later in the game), which makes use of both controllers – one as the rod, and one as the reel – is a satisfying example of the kinds of things that Wii developers will be giving us plenty of in the near future.

Stuff that wasn’t so great:

Fighting one particular boss involves swimming around in 3D space while avoiding the tentacles of a huge aquatic beast. Now that’s all fine and a great idea for a boss, but it feels somewhat clunky in implementation: it’s hard to see where the tentacles are and if you’re in range of them, as they seem to suddenly "jump" around without fluid animation.
Like all the recent Zelda games, Twilight Princess has an extended "tutorial" period, which gradually opens up into the full game, but Twilight’s feels longer than it needs to be, and it feels a little like it’s holding your hand for a bit too long. This could simply be because it’s been released on a new console which Nintendo are hoping will attract new players to videogaming, and they wanted to reduce the initial complexity of the game, of course, but nonetheless: by adding more small mini-quests in the early part of the game – things that experienced players could to in order to feel like they’re in control of their own destiny, and not just following instructions from the other characters – would have been nice. I remember playing a little Morrowind on the PC, and being pleased to find that on my way to the first destination of my quest, I was able to wander off course and help (or hurt) numerous other characters in the game world, getting back "on track" whenever it suited me. I know that’s not what Zelda’s aiming for, but even Wind Waker felt more like it was open-ended and free, even early on (although having a boat and an entire ocean of islands ahead of you will have been a major factor in that). Just a minor rant, of course.

Total playtime for me was about 43 hours, but I’ve left a few stones unturned. In any case, a highly satisfying game and very recommendable. If you own a Wii but don’t own Twilight Princess, get it. If you don’t own a Wii, consider getting one to play Twilight Princess.

Gorillamania 1 – Comedy Night – 28th January

Gorillamania 1 – the upcoming Gorilla Monsoon comedy night – has been announced! Three Cardiff comedians will be doing their stuff in the Coopers Arms, supported by two of Aber’s own – Ben Poole and… Scatman Dan! Show starts 8pm on Sunday 8th January. Read more about the event on the official website.

Now all I need to do is think up some jokes…

The Decline And Fall Of The British University

Here’s one for the academics amongst you: an article by a Mark Tarver entitled Why I Am Not A Professor OR The Decline And Fall Of The British University. Without having had the decades in academia that the author has had, it’s hard for me to easily agree with him. However; I suspect he’s right. As a student of Computer Science from 1999 to 2004, I’d always felt like the standards bar must be lower than it was perhaps ten years earlier: particularly toward the end of my degree, I found myself repeatedly frustrated by the ongoing changes in the way that the discipline was being taught: rather than students learning valuable and interesting technical knowledge, they’re increasingly taught what they need to know to pass exams. Moreover, since the return and now the expansion of tuition fees, students feel that they are paying for a service: if a student is given a bad mark, they can potentially argue that this is because of bad teaching, and demand their “money back.” While this of course has not happened (as far as I know), the balance of power has in this way shifted: the power no longer lies with the knowledge, but with the money. Underpaid junior lecturers struggle to write “quotas” of papers and artificially inflate numbers to “pass” as many students as possible in order to impress their capitalist employers and ensure the continuation of their career for another year.

At this point, I started ranting and theorising.

Sad as it is, it’s actually those institutions that make the most of their right to charge so-called “top up fees” – in the absence of the government making changes to fix the failing higher education system – that stand the best chance of surviving. While it’s unfortunate that we need the annual league tables – accountability is important, of course – I’d predict that universities will become more and more “two tiered”, with the “expensive” first-class universitites surpassing the “cheaper” second-class ones in terms of teaching quality and research done. The idea of a “budget” degree will become a real possibility within the next five years.

Where does this put us? Well; it’s problematic because it’s self-sustaining: the better universities will get the most money, which will help ensure that they stay the best. Similar problems have been seen in the NHS. Worse than that, the standard of education will be lowered in order to accomodate for the rich but stupid (in the premium institutions, which cannot attract students in bulk and are resigned to taking anybody who can afford to pay) and the poor masses (in the budget universities, where it is necessary to process large numbers of students of very variable intellectual quality in bulk – like a production line for gowns and scrolls) until it’s almost unworthwhile having the universities at all.

It’s not all doom and gloom: unlike the author of the article I linked to, I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Like all things, there’s a delicate balance, and it can be restored by managing either end of the scale (in the economic model I’ll go on to describe, this is similar to the Pareto optimal of neoclassical economic theory: however, you don’t need to think about economics to understand and disagree with it, as I’m sure many of you will). As I see it, there are two ways – and it’s inevitable that at least one will occur, eventually – for the British higher education system to get “fixed.” The first is, of course, for the government to see it’s mistake (and the mistakes of the governments before it) and reinstate the value of the degree. Free or cheap education based on ability is a simple and effective way to manage higher education: every school leaver with sufficient grades can get a university place, for free, with a traditional difficulty level of teaching imposed in the first year (assessed and league-tabled annually, to ensure accountability, of course), but if they fail (without significant reason, such as severe illness), they are required to pay for some or all of the education to stay on the course. It makes no difference to the university which of these is opted for, because they get the same money from the government, so the only reason a university would want to raise grades excessively would be to keep on more students, which would of course affect their overall rating as an institution, providing balance. I’m very much in favour of the idea that everybody should be entitled to as much education in a single field as they’re academically capable of, of the highest quality available, as cheaply (to them) as it can be provided.

Of course, that’s a somewhat contraversial opinion, and won’t win anybody enough votes in the current political climate. But there’s a second option which I haven’t yet seen touted by anybody else: when it becomes broken enough, it’ll fix itself. Like some academic model of the gaia hypothesis, the forces acting on the academic system will eventually come into balance, and then snap back to something more stable. How can this happen? Through the power of capitalism! What we’re seeing in the academic sector is very similar to what we saw in the national rail network some years ago (a bad example; this is still maturing) and in power and telephone companies – privitisation. The fundamental difference between today’s universities and those of our parents – apart from the lowering of the intellectual bar, especially regarding entry conditions; and the expansion of the sphere of arts subjects – is that today’s university departments are required to generate much of their own funding and to compete with each other and their counterparts in other universities for research money and students. The aging academics who run these departments, educated in the sixties and seventies, don’t (typically) have a great grasp on modern business practice, but they’ll learn it (or be replaced by those who do) as their departments become more like companies, something we’re seeing happening already. Then, at some indeterminate point in the future, a university will get smart enough to try to improve the customer experience. Like every other consumer product, education will be treated like a marketplace commodity, and different departments in different institutions will begin to compete on the factors of value: price, and quality. While it could be argued that these are relevant factors today when acting as a consumer to the university system, it will become even more so one in tomorrow’s higher education world.

What I’d like to see, in this situation, would be an increase in perceieved value of a higher quality degree, but with sufficient “stock” to provide for a large minority of students. If this is the case, as an economist would probably agree, the other institutions would have to compete on quality to stay in the race. It’ll be a long and very difficult process, particularly if the universities are still as large and slow-moving beasts as they are today, but it’ll happen eventually, just as it’s happened in other fields (when was the last time you saw somebody buy a mobile phone without a camera, or a portable music player that wasn’t digital?).

There’s always the risk that value will be added in other ways than improving the quality of education provided, like it has in some other fields. I certainly don’t look forward to the day when I see degrees offered with “extras” like free Sky or AOL subscriptions or cheaper phone calls than your regular provider… but I do, confusingly, look forward to the idea that one day my degree may be made less valuable by an increasing standard of education.

Plans For The Weekend

For those of you that were wondering, here are some of the plans for the weekend:

Saturday (Tonight) – Troma Night

Tonight, 8pm, at The Cottage. We’ll be watching Airplane, some dodgy Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Airplane II. Both Airplane movies in one night: surely, I can’t mean it? Yes, indeed I do. And don’t call me Shirley.

Sunday – Scholars Puz Quiz Night

We still need somebody to volunteer to be the Bringing Up The Rear team captain this week. Last time we played, we sucked remarkably little (I blame Heather), and didn’t make too many stupid mistakes. Come join our puz quiz team and help make fools of us all.

Monday – My Birthday / Mini-Geek Night

It’s my birthday on Monday. 26 isn’t a special age, so I thought I’d mark the occasion with drinks at The Cottage. Plus; as Claire‘s recently received a package which looks and sounds a lot like it might be a board game, I’m guessing that a Geek Night in the evening is a cool idea, too. If you’re free, come along for silly board game related fun. And I promise I won’t let Claire drink lots of vodka and then try to throw everybody out of a lifeboat this time.

That’s the Abnib update.

It Couldn’t Be You

Following up on my Lottery Winners Counter JavaScript toy, and on Andy‘s recent blog post about trying to rig the lottery using statistics, I decided to write a new software toy to help demonstrate exactly how impossible it is to do as he suggests and guarantee a profit through the strategic purchase of large numbers of lottery tickets. Even at it’s most statistically optimistic, using obscene rounding (i.e. 49.999% is "unlikely", 50.001% is "likely"), you stand to lose over £2M every time you play. Try out my calculator now.

If that’s not in itself enough to convince you, have a look through this stunning Times article on why "our national gamble stinks". It compares the National Lottery to casinos, which have a significantly higher payout rate, and argues that if you’re doing it for the charities, you should just give one a quid – they get to claim 28p gift aid that way too.

Just my £13.9M worth.

Top Ten Worst Domain Names

Do you think that the Italian power company, PowerGen, were actually thinking of how else their domain name could be read when they registered powergenitalia.com? And there’s at least nine more equally badly-chosen domain names.

Oh, and happy new year.

My Mum On Christmas Day

As Paul indicated, Claire and I are out of Aberystwyth this Christmas: first with my folks, then with hers. As I’d threatened it yesterday, I’m sharing with you and the world in general this video of my mum on Christmas Day. She’s had a few drinks already, and she’s decided that she’s suddenly able to ride a unicycle. And juggle at the same time.

Still haven’t fixed putting Flash right into my blog, but as this one’s a 3MB video, it’s probably best to link to it anyway: watch the video!

Otters

This morning, I saw a family of three otters swimming up the Rheidol. I’ve never seen or even heard of otters in Aberystwyth before, so I found this noteworthy and remarkable. In answer to questions in advance: Yes, I’m sure they were otters: I had quite a clear view from the riverbank. No, I don’t have a picture; I only had my phone with me which at best managed to achieve a picture of what is barely recognisable as water. And what were they doing? Well, just paddling slowly up the river, dipping and diving as they went, and attracting a lot of attention from a flock of confused-looking local seagulls.

A Very Merry Troma Night – Tonight At The Cottage

Tonight’s Troma Night will be held at The Cottage. It’s the final Troma Night of the year, and it’ll be our least Christmassy of the “Christmas” Troma Nights ever, we suspect! Here’s the plan:

8pm prompt start – order pizza and start watching ~~xXx~~ Top Gun (we can’t get hold of a copy of xXx – sorry!)… with a RiffTrax! This’ll be our third RiffTrax experiment; hopefully it’ll be as great as the last two.
Second; Bernard & The Genie; wonderful Christmassy comedy starring Lenny Henry, Alan Cumming, and Rowan Atkinson.
Third and finally; Snakes On A Plane, perhaps the most overhyped movie ever (or, if folks can’t survive another feature length film, I suggest MST3K ep 602 [Paul, would you be so kind as to bring this, please?]).

One more thing – as a small “thank you” to everybody who’s made Troma Night so fantastic this last year – and as a Christmas gift to our friends in general – Claire and I have decided to “buy a round”: we’ve racked up a sizable quantity of ales for tonight’s attendees to drink. So come along for some good films, bad films, pizza, and – just this once – you can get pissed on us. So to speak. Ahem.

See you later.

Geek Night Tonight

We haven’t had a Geek Night in, like, forever, and a few folks I was talking to last night suggested one. So let’s have one! The Cottage at 7pm; see you there.

Synopsis For Harry Potter Movie

From an e-mail. Original source unknown.

Gorilla Monsoon Mailing List

The Gorilla Monsoon Mailing List is finally becoming usable, after a lot of kicking of the Monsooners by yours truly. If you’re in Aber, and interested in stand-up comedy, and weren’t on the mailing list because it was impossible to persuade anybody to put you on it, the problem has now been fixed and you can sign up like a normal person. Now go do it.