Category: Games
How do Nigerian drivers enter the road and make U-turns?
In the United States, if I am trying to accelerate and enter the road from say a parking lot, I try to minimize the number of misleading movements my car might make. I don’t “edge out” just for the heck of it, for fear this may spook the other drivers and cause them to suddenly switch lanes in a dangerous (for them) fashion. Furthermore, I might misjudge and move the car out too far into the lane, leading to a collision.
In Lagos, it seems the practice is to announce your intentions with as many little forward “nudges” of your car as possible. They seem to mean “I am thinking of going sometime soon.”
After enough such nudges, the oncoming cars either go far away into the left lane, or perhaps they stop for you altogether and let you go. Or maybe they slow down a bit and you decide you can beat them and so you pull into the lane.
A higher discount rate (for entering the road) is one way to rationalize this behavior, but in a variety of other contexts I have noticed Nigerians who were not massively upset at being ever so slightly late. So might there be some other explanation?
Maybe there is greater variability in rational assumptions about the other drivers. You may not know how well their cars can brake, accelerate, and perhaps their lane-switching plans and propensities are harder to predict. So by nudging your car out in successive bits, you may be “taking the temperature” of the other drivers on the road. Keep in mind that they, too, may not have a good sense of how well your car can accelerate (furthermore some of the vehicles are tuks-tuks, not cars). A willingness to make more nudges may be telling the other drivers that your engine is pretty good and your will is strong.
So they read your nudging pattern, and you draw inferences from their lane-switching and stopping responses. Ex post (one hopes), everyone has a better sense of what the other cars and drivers are capable of doing.
Of course this is speculative. The key point here is that greater variability in potential performance creates a case for sending more and smaller bits of the signal in advance.
Is *this* what is going on?
In 1987, Trump made his goal of Russian collaboration on nuclear power explicit: The Soviet Union and the US should partner to form a nuclear superpower with the intention of intimidating other countries into dropping their own nuclear plans.
“Most of those [pre-nuclear] countries are in one form or another dominated by the US and the Soviet Union,” Trump told journalist Roy Rosenbaum. “Between those two nations you have the power to dominate any of those countries. So we should use our power of economic retaliation and they use their powers of retaliation, and between the two of us we will prevent the problem from happening. It would have been better having done something five years ago. But I believe even a country such as Pakistan would have to do something now. Five years from now they’ll laugh.”
Nuclear-related sanctions, from the two major powers, were to be applied to both Pakistan and France [sic]. Here is the full article, I cannot vouch for this account or any particular interpretation of it, but the hypothesis is new to me and so I present it to you as well.
Thomas Schelling has passed away
Here is my 2005 tribute post, Thomas Schelling, Nobel Laureate. Here are all the other MR posts about Schelling. A great loss of course and for me he was a true role model and important advisor throughout my career. Here is the University of Maryland notice.
What will future casinos do forthcoming betting markets in everything?
The gambling market is somewhat saturated, so how can new customers be found?
One idea: skills-based games.
In Atlantic City, the Borgata added a basketball free-throw shooting contest. Other casinos are adding skill-based games to electronic slot machines — shooting, puzzles, less slot machine ding ding ding and more Angry Birds-style competition.
Maryland does not allow such games yet, but the state’s gaming agency says it is working on the issue.
That is from Michael Rosenwald, with most of the article covering D.C.’s foray into the casino genre.
Carlsen > Karjakin
1. Karjakin played some of the best defensive chess ever, finding resources where there appeared to be none.
2. Carlsen had become a bit lazy, relying too much on his stamina advantage to beat opponents (yes I do understand that is an odd notion of lazy!). Yet he had no real stamina advantage over Karjakin, who is of the same age and came to the match in very good physical shape. So Carlsen simply could not grind him down, and it took Carlsen the entire match to realize that.
3. Karjakin made very few attempts to achieve demonstrable, sharp advantages. That limited his total number of victories to one.
4. In the rapid tie-breaker — four consecutive games in the final day — Carlsen couldn’t try to win on stamina and simply showed he was the better player across many dimensions of the game. Karjakin posed him no problems at all in these contests.
5. Karjakin played as Carlsen’s equal for the twelve regular time control games. Yet I don’t think he will be back as a challenger. His style is too “drab” (Kasparov’s description) to get through all of the risk-rewarding tournaments to reach the final championship match again.
6. Perhaps rapid chess is the future of chess as a spectator sport. Four games in a row, each twenty-five minutes per player, plus increments. It was thrilling, and I watched on the train.
7. Putin finally lost one this year, let’s hope this reverses the trend.
Here is the Chessbase account, here is the quite good NYT story.
The world championship chess match so far
Magnus Carlsen was heavily favored, but after six games with Karjakin — half the match — they are all draws. The first noteworthy feature of play is that Karjakin has matched what is usually a big stamina advantage for Carlsen. If Carlsen were playing against Anand again, and creating similar positions, he probably would be two points up, as he was pressing strong endgame advantages for hours in two of the games. Yet Karjakin held firm and found the necessary defensive resources in both cases and victories fell from Carlsen’s grasp. Overall we have seen few obvious mistakes in the play.
The second noteworthy feature of the first half of the match is that Carlsen has shown no inferiority of opening preparation, unlike what is usually the case; if anything Carlsen has had slightly better prep. (And note that Karjakin has Putin and thus an army of seconds on his side; Karjakin has a connection to Crimea and used to play for Ukraine but now plays for Russia and basically endorsed the territory transfer, get the picture?)
I believe one should root for Carlsen. Yet this is 2016, and I suppose anything could happen at this point…
What else is happening
Turkey continues a major crackdown against the Kurds.
This week at least 239 people drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean.
Huawei will begin marketing its smart phone in the United States this January.
Journalists will try to tell you that Carlsen vs. Karjakin will be close. Other journalists will try to tell you that someone other than Golden State or Cleveland will win the next NBA title. Other journalists will try to tell you…
“U.S. military hackers have penetrated Russia’s electric grid, telecommunications networks and the Kremlin’s command systems, making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the U.S. deem it necessary”…link here.
TaterGrams: New Alberta company lets you mail personalized potatoes.
Just keep Mexico, South Korea, and Estonia in mind, and I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.
Why the British parliamentary vote may matter
No, I don’t see them voting down Brexit, any more than Republican Senators ever were going to endorse Hillary Clinton, even though many of them are rooting for her. The more likely scenario out of Brexit is simply that Parliament stalls, demanding that Theresa May give them “the right Brexit.” Of course there is no such thing, wrong Brexit is wrong Brexit, if only because EU-27 cannot agree on very much. But with enough stalling, eventually another national election will be held and of course Brexit would be a major issue, probably the major issue. That in essence would serve as a second referendum, and if anti-Brexit candidates did well enough, parliamentarians would have cover to go against the previous expression of the public will.
I give that path out of Brexit p = 0.2, with another p = 0.1 for “somehow Brexit just doesn’t happen.”
Here is commentary from Joshua Tucker. And from Jolyom Maugham.
Addendum: The final word on Brexit rights may be held by…the European Court of Justice.
There is no grape stagnation
Setting the world record for using your mouth to catch a grape dropped from the greatest height: It was a dream years in the making, and all it took was a hot air balloon, walnut-sized fruits shipped specially from Georgia and a crew of Ph.D.-level engineers who gathered at a tiny Vermont airport before the sun rose on Monday morning.
The man with the plan was Brent Fraser, 35, who said he “just had a natural knack” for catching things in his mouth ever since his high school days in Barre, Vt., where buddies would chuck food toward him in the school parking lot.
The piece has some good sentences, such as:
Indeed, once things did get going, most of the few dozen attempts ended with a goggle-clad Fraser getting smacked in the face and chest by the large grapes — selected because they were easiest to see — that were traveling about 56 mph.
And:
“How much did they hurt?” one of the engineers, Tristan Ramey, asked at one point.
“So bad,” Fraser told her. “I felt like I was being punched in the face.”
He ended up catching one from 101 feet. And finally:
Fraser, most of his face stained in purple grape juice, had to get to work to interview a prospective employee by 9 a.m.
Here is the full article, with video, via the excellent Mark Thorson.
Why announce your secret, unprecedented cyberstrike against Russia?
My Twitter feed is mocking the policy behind this news report, but of course it makes perfect sense. Here goes:
1. The United States wishes to have it be common knowledge that it can embarrass Putin. But in fact maybe it can’t! (At least not with a policy we are willing to bear the consequences of.) So why not threaten that you can? A truly secret strike probably would hurt him less than an embarrassment. So start investing in the embarrassment now.
2. If the U.S. does do something cyber against Russia, it may wish to signal in advance that it won’t be truly severe, so as to limit retaliation and lower the probability of ongoing escalation. Some public discussion can achieve this end. Truly devastating blows are in fact usually delivered in secret.
3. There is a chance that the U.S. can’t/won’t do much if anything against Russia at all. In that case third parties (Iran, China) may not know this for sure, and the announcement may have a slight deterrent value in their direction.
4. It may not be possible to understand the entire American strategy without knowing the private messages that are being sent to Putin at the same time. For instance, the overall strategy may be “announce a coming mild retaliation and privately threaten a more severe action.” Is that really so out of place? Probably not.
In other words, “announced secrets” sometimes can make perfect sense.
Why do people play chess again?
According to Donner: “The whole point of the game [is] to prevent an artistic performance.” The former world champion Garry Kasparov makes the same point. “The highest art of the chess player,” he says, “lies in not allowing your opponent to show you what he can do.” Always the other player is there trying to wreck your masterpiece. Chess, Donner insists, is a struggle, a fight to the death. “When one of the two players has imposed his will on the other and can at last begin to be freely creative, the game is over. That is the moment when, among masters, the opponent resigns. That is why chess is not art. No, chess cannot be compared with anything. Many things can be compared with chess, but chess is only chess.”
That is Stephen Moss at The Guardian. Along related lines, I very much enjoyed Daniel Gormally’s Insanity, Passion, and Addiction: A Year Inside the Chess World. It’s one of my favorite books of the year so far, but it’s so miserable I can’t recommend it to anyone. It’s a book about chess, and it doesn’t even focus on the great players. It’s about the players who are good enough to make a living — ever so barely — but not do any better. It serves up sentences such as:
Surely the money in chess is so bad that this can’t be all you do for a living? But in fact in my experience, the majority of chess players rated over 2400 tend to just do chess. If not playing, then something related to it, like coaching or DVDs. That’s because we’re lazy, so making the monumental effort of a complete change in career is just too frightening a prospect. So we stick with chess, even though the pay tends to be lousy, because most of our friends and contacts are chess players. Our life is chess. As a rough estimate, I would say there are as many 2600 players making less than £20,000 a year.
And:
Stability. I had this conversation with German number one Arkadij Naidisch at a blitz tournament in Scotland about a year ago. (there I go, name-dropping again.) He suggested that a lot of people don’t achieve their goals because they just aren’t stable enough. They’ll have a fantastic result somewhere, but then that’ll be let down by a terrible tournament somewhere else.
…The problem is it’s hard to break out of the habits of a lifetime. Many times at home I’ve said to myself while sitting around depressed about my future and where my chess is going, “tomorrow will be different. I’ll get up and study six-eight hours studying chess.” But it never happens.
Overall biography and autobiography are far too specialized in the lives of the famous and successful.
Labor Force Participation and Video Games
Here is more from Erik Hurst discussing his new research:
On average, lower-skilled men in their 20s increased “leisure time” by about four hours per week between the early 2000s and 2015. All of us face the same time endowment, so if leisure time is increasing, something else is decreasing. The decline in time spent working facilitated the increase in leisure time for lower-skilled men. The way I measure leisure time is pretty broad; it includes participating in hobbies and hanging out with friends, exercising and watching TV, sleeping, playing games, reading, and so on.
Of that four-hours-per-week increase in leisure, three of those hours were spent playing video games! The average young, lower-skilled, nonemployed man in 2014 spent about two hours per day on video games. That is the average. Twenty-five percent reported playing at least three hours per day. About 10 percent reported playing for six hours per day. The life of these nonworking, lower-skilled young men looks like what my son wishes his life was like now: not in school, not at work, and lots of video games.
How do we know technology is causing the decline in employment for these young men? As of now, I don’t know for sure. But there are suggestive signs in the data that these young, low-skilled men are making some choice to stay home. If we go to surveys that track subjective well-being—surveys that ask people to assess their overall level of happiness—lower-skilled young men in 2014 reported being much happier on average than did lower-skilled men in the early 2000s. This increase in happiness is despite their employment rate falling by 10 percentage points and the increased propensity to be living in their parents’ basement.
It’s hard to distinguish “push” unemployment that is made more pleasant by video games from “pull” unemployment created by video games. I’m not even sure that distinction matters very much, at least if we aren’t talking about banning video games to increase employment. If elderly people started playing a lot of video games (as soon they will) would we worry that this was making retirement too much fun?
I’d be interested in knowing how much video games have displaced television. I watch more television than my kids, who play more video games. It’s not obvious that this is to their detriment.
Perhaps the issue is that video games like slot machines are so enticing that young people discount the future too heavily or don’t recognize the future cost of not being in the workforce. Maybe. Perhaps what we really need is a 3D, virtual reality, total sensory simulation, awesome video game that is so expensive that it encourages people to work.
Overall, the video game worry is a bit too reminiscent of the Dungeons and Dragons panic, or the earlier panics that books and radio were ruining children’s minds, for me to jump on board.
Nuclear sentences to ponder
…there were at least two instances in which top officials tried to slow, or undermine, the president’s nuclear authority.
The first came in October 1969, when the president ordered Melvin R. Laird, his secretary of defense, to put American nuclear forces on high alert to scare Moscow into thinking the United States might use nuclear arms against the North Vietnamese.
Scott D. Sagan, a nuclear expert at Stanford University and the author of “The Limits of Safety,” a study of nuclear accidents, said Mr. Laird tried to ignore the order by giving excuses about exercises and readiness, hoping that the president who sometimes embraced the “madman theory” — let the world think that you are willing to use a weapon — would forget about his order.
But Nixon persisted. Dr. Sagan reports that during the operation, code-named Giant Lance, one of the B-52 bombers carrying thermonuclear arms came dangerously close to having an accident.
Then, in 1974, in the last days of the Watergate scandal, Mr. Nixon was drinking heavily and his aides saw what they feared was a growing emotional instability. His new secretary of defense, James R. Schlesinger, himself a hawkish Cold Warrior, instructed the military to divert any emergency orders — especially one involving nuclear weapons — to him or the secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger.
It was a completely extralegal order, perhaps mutinous. But no one questioned it.
That is from William Broad and David Sanger at the NYT.
Addendum: Here is a 2008 Alex post on the same.
It seems Scotland and Northern Ireland must agree on invoking Article 50
Theresa May has indicated that Brexit could be delayed as she said she will not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until there is an agreed “UK approach” backed by Scotland.
The Prime Minister on Friday travelled to Scotland to meet Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, and discuss plans for Britain’s Brexit negotiation.
In a sign that the new Prime Minister is committed to keeping the Union intact, she said she will not trigger Article 50 – the formal process for withdrawing from the EU – until all the devolved nations in the country agree.
That is from The Daily Telegraph. Here is my previous post on whether Article 50 ever will be invoked.
What are young men doing?
Here is Erik Hurst, from an excellent piece profiling Erik Hurst:
Right now, I’m gathering facts about the possible mechanisms at play, beginning with a hard look at time-use by young men with less than a four-year degree. In the 2000s, employment rates for this group dropped sharply – more than in any other group. We have determined that, in general, they are not going back to school or switching careers, so what are they doing with their time? The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of 12, and sometimes upwards of 30 hours per week. This change marks a relatively major shift that makes me question its effect on their attachment to the labor market.
To answer that question, I researched what fraction of these unemployed gamers from 2000 were also idle the previous year. A staggering 22% – almost one quarter – of unemployed young men did not work the previous year either. These individuals are living with parents or relatives, and happiness surveys actually indicate that they quite content compared to their peers, making it hard to argue that some sort of constraint, like they are miserable because they can’t find a job, is causing them to play video games.
This problem, if that is the right word for it, will not be easily solved.