Category: Games

How do you build immunity from choking? (a meditation on Carlsen and Kramnik)

Yesterday Magnus Carlsen and Vladimir Kramnik each played decisive chess games in the Candidates’ tournament, for the right to challenge Vishy Anand for the world championship title.  Carlsen held the tiebreaker, so he had only to match Kramnik’s result — draw or win — to proceed to the match with Anand.

Both lost.  Uncharacteristically, both fell into time trouble.  Both made bad mistakes even after time trouble was over.  The chess world was shocked.

Arguably both choked.

Yet Kramnik has won several world championship matches, including against Kasparov, and Carlsen rose to world #1 at a very young age of course.

How does one become immune to choking?

If you have mastered stages 1 through n, presumably you still can choke at stage n + 1.  Carlsen had never played in a world championship or candidates’ match before.  In 1997 Kasparov choked when he had to play an improved Deep Blue, a machine.

Is there mean-reversion in choking and immunity to choking?  If you play at a supremely confident level at the very top, nine times in a row, do you forget how to handle pressure and eventually revert to choking?  Immunity against choking can wear off, or holding a title and having to defend it can raise the fear of choking through a kind of endowment effect (Bobby Fischer).

Does a string of confident winning raise the stakes more rapidly than you can master a rising choke, thus bringing you to n + 27 too quickly?  (The Miami Heat just lost a 27-game winning streak.)  Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak has proven so hard to break, as there is always a new and tougher choking margin.

Or can one ascend to n + 3 with sufficiently strong margins of error that perhaps the fear of choking is never overcome and remains in the background for when tougher situations come along?  Or one can ascend to n + 3 if everyone chokes along the way; someone must be choking least but still you are always a choker.

Under one theory, you become immune to choking at stage n + 2 only by at least once choking at stage n + 2 and then, on another occasion, overcoming your choke.  I call this the LeBron James theory.  Can it be that such loss/win experiences are required periodically and not just once up front?

The lessons are that it can be difficult to overcome choking, and that a complex mix of losing and winning may help you more with choking than simply lots of winning.

Why a coach should be ambiguous

From Jeff:

Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight?  Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to advance. A big problem for coaches is that the most precocious students also (naturally) think they know what they need to learn.

If Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he needed endless repetition of certain specific hand movements to learn karate, Daniel would have rebelled and demanded to learn more and advance more quickly. Mr. Miyagi used ambiguity to evade conflict.

An artist with natural gift for expression needs to learn convention. But she may disagree with the teacher about how much time should be spent learning convention. If the teacher simply gives her exercises to do without explanation her decision to comply will be on the basis of an overall judgment of whether this teacher, on average, knows best. To instead say “You must learn conventions, here are some exercises for that” runs the risk that the student moderates the exercises in line with her own judgment about the importance of convention.

The “austerity” of 2011-2012 in the United States

It turns out that much more of it was phony than many people had realized.  From David Farenthold, this is from today’s Washington Post:

To sketch the bill’s biggest impacts, The Washington Post focused on the 16 largest individual cuts. Each, in theory, sliced at least $500 million from the federal budget. Together, they accounted for $26.1 billion, two-thirds of the total.

In four of those cases, the real-world impact was difficult to measure. The Department of Homeland Security officially declined to comment about a $557 million reduction. The Department of State, the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — whose cuts totaled $1.9 billion — simply did not answer The Post’s questions despite repeated requests over the past month.

Among the other 12 cases, there were at least seven where the cuts caused only minimal real-world disruptions or none at all.

Often, this was made possible by a little act of Washington magic. Agencies got credit for killing what was, in reality, already dead.

Here is the article, and I did chuckle at the last paragraph.

The economics of Lego (investment markets in everything)

Here is one excerpt from a lengthy and data-intensive post, which likely offers more than you ever would wish to know:

The internet can be blamed for the size and scope of the secondary LEGO market. On the website, BrickLink, you can find almost any set that LEGO has ever produced. In addition, the site keeps records of trends in the market and value of individual pieces. This site is invaluable to a LEGO collector and has given many the ability to grow their collections. Before the advent of this site and sites like eBay, collecting LEGO required going to garage sales. There are now whole sites dedicated to buying LEGO as an investment, but that is a topic for another article.

This creation and expansion of the secondary market in conjunction with LEGO now marketing some of their products to an older audience has made the prices of some old sets increase exponentially.  On the extreme range, there is the UCS Millennium Falcon that is selling new for upwards of $2,000 (and close to $1,500 USED!). It sold for $500 new in 2007. Even non-licensed sets can run a premium, such as the Cafe Corner that was one of the original modular buildings. It was $150 new and now it can sell for over $1,000.

For pointers I thank Michael Rosenwald and Kevin Won.

The best at what they do

From Jeff:

When you look at a competition where one of the inputs of the production function is an exogenously distributed characteristic, players with a high endowment on that dimension have a head start. This has two effects on the distribution of the (partially) acquired characteristics that enter the production function. First, there is the pure statistical effect I alluded to above. If success requires some minimum height then the pool of competitors excludes a large component of the population.

There is a second effect on endogenous acquisition of skills. Competition is less intense and they have less incentive to acquire skills in order to be competitive. So even current NBA players are less talented than they would be if competition was less exclusive. So what are the sports whose athletes are the best at what they do?

My ranking

1. Table Tennis
2. Soccer
3. Tennis
4. Golf
5. Chess

How would such a ranking look for the social sciences?  Among a broader list of activities, where would blogging fall on the scale?

Questions which are rarely asked

All Scrabble players know that Q and Z are the highest scoring tiles. You can get 10 points for each, in the English language version of the game.

But according to one American researcher, Z really only deserves six points.

And it’s not just Z that’s under fire. After 75 years of Scrabble, some argue that the current tile values are out of date as certain letters have become more common than they used to be.

“The dictionary of legal words in Scrabble has changed,” says Joshua Lewis, researcher and creator of a software programme which allocates new, up-to-date values to Scrabble tiles.

“Among the notable additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X, so even though Q and Z are the highest value letters in Scrabble, they are now much easier to play.”

Here are some details on the reforms:

According to Lewis’s system, X (worth eight points in the current game) is worth only five points and Z (worth 10 points now) is worth six points.

Other letter values change too, but less radically. For example, U (one point currently) is worth two in the new version, G (two points) becomes three and M (three points) becomes two.

Here is more, via @timharford, and here is further information.

In which countries is crude libertarianism most and least true?

For least true, I nominate South Korea.  Other than comparing it to North Korea, how much do you hear libertarians claiming South Korean policies as their own?  It seems the government there did a lot and mostly it paid off.  The best the libertarian can manage is something like “their economy would have grown rapidly in any case,” and that may not even be true.

For “most true” you might say North Korea, but that is too easy a pick.  How about India?  Government there has done lots but most of it has worked out quite badly, whereas their deregulations generally have gone well (see our India unit on MRUniversity.com).  Further deregulation of the economy would likely be a good idea.

Singapore can be claimed for either category.

In which country is Marxism most true (“least untrue?”)?  Least true?  How about other ideologies?

Measuring the distribution of spitefulness

There is a new paper by Erik Kimbrough and J. Philipp Reiss, of importance for my world view:

Spiteful, antisocial behavior may undermine the moral and institutional fabric of society, producing disorder, fear, and mistrust. Previous research demonstrates the willingness of individuals to harm others, but little is understood about how far people are willing to go in being spiteful (relative to how far they could have gone) or their consistency in spitefulness across repeated trials. Our experiment is the first to provide individuals with repeated opportunities to spitefully harm anonymous others when the decision entails zero cost to the spiter and cannot be observed as such by the object of spite. This method reveals that the majority of individuals exhibit consistent (non-)spitefulness over time and that the distribution of spitefulness is bipolar: when choosing whether to be spiteful, most individuals either avoid spite altogether or impose the maximum possible harm on their unwitting victims.

I put Bryan Caplan on the “least spiteful” side of the distribution.

For the pointer I thank (the non-spiteful) Michelle Dawson.

How to Win at Poker

On April 15, 2011, a day that has been dubbed “Black Friday” in the poker community, the DOJ shut down the American operations of three major sites: PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Ultimate Bet.

Michael Kaplan has an update on the story:

In January of this year, Full Tilt and the DOJ worked out an arrangement in which the DOJ took ownership of Full Tilt with the intention of selling it to raise funds to pay back American players. Seven months later, on July 31, PokerStars purchased Full Tilt from the DOJ. Businessweek estimated that the transaction would make $547 million for the U.S. government. At the time, the DOJ vowed to reimburse Full Tilt’s U.S. players; Stars said that it would take responsibility for returning $184 million to non-American customers.

PokerStars followed through on its end of the deal and recently relaunched the Full Tilt site outside of the U.S.

So has the DOJ paid the U.S. players? Of course not.

According to Steven L. Kessler, an attorney based in New York City who specializes in forfeiture law…“In one of its publications [the ‘National Asset Forfeiture Strategic Plan 2008–2012’], the government talks about bringing in $2 billion in forfeitures and returning only $700 million.” Recouping Full Tilt funds will be “a long, drawn-out process to the point that you will need to be out five or six or seven figures for it to be worth pursuing. The system is set up so that you are discouraged from going after your money….Plus, look at what you’re exposing to get back what belongs to you. You have to wonder if it will turn into a tax case.”

In other words, as in other asset forfeiture cases, the government is grabbing up property and keeping as much as it can for its own coffers. Even if some of these sites were fraudulent, one wonders if the players would not have better off without government “protection.”

The full article also includes a good markets in everything item.

Hat tip: Ben Mathis-Lilley.

A simple model of lifetime happiness

From Jeff:

Suppose that what makes a person happy is when their fortunes exceed expectations by a discrete amount (and that falling short of expectations is what makes you unhappy.)  Then simply because of convergence of expectations:

  1. People will have few really happy phases in their lives.
  2. Indeed even if you lived forever you would have only finitely many spells of happiness.
  3. Most of the happy moments will come when you are young.
  4. Happiness will be short-lived.
  5. The biggest cross-sectional variance in happiness will be among the young.
  6. When expectations adjust to the rate at which your fortunes improve, chasing further happiness requires improving your fortunes at an accelerating rate.
  7. If life expectancy is increasing and we simply extrapolate expectations into later stages of life we are likely to be increasingly depressed when we are old.
  8. There could easily be an inverse relationship between intelligence and happiness.

Political sorting in social dating relationships

Gregory Huber and Neil Malhotra have a new research paper Political Sorting in Social Relationships: Evidence from an Online Dating Community (pdf).  Here is one useful bit:

Relative to the average standard deviation by respondent for each outcome…shared ideology increases interest in responding by 12% of that amount, interest in long-term dating by 16%, and assessments of shared values by 20%.  By the same comparison, shared lack of political interest increases assessments of likelihood of responding by a statistically significant 18%, but has more modest…effects on interest in long-term dating and assessments of shared values, respectively.

There is much more data in this paper, including a discussion of which issues matter to people the most.  Here is one upshot:

…online dating pairings where communication takes place display greater political homogeneity than the population as a whole.

A Macro Homework Question: Answer in the Style of…

I just returned from a trip to South Korea. Today, to prepare for the next trip, I took my jacket to the dry cleaners. Turning the pockets out, I discovered a substantial number of South Korean won. The transaction costs of exchanging the won for dollars are now very high. I will keep the won as souvenirs.

Question: What are the consequences of my decision for the South Korean economy? Answer in the style of a well-known economist. What would Scott Sumner say? (almost too easy!) What about Keynes? Krugman? Cowen? Prescott?

South Korea - Currency

Nonsense paper accepted by mathematics journal

Last month That’s Mathematics! reported another landmark event in the history of academic publishing. A paper by Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople had been provisionally accepted for publication in Advances in Pure Mathematics. ‘Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE’…

Each of these sentences [of the paper] contains mathematical nouns linked by the verbs mathematicians use, but the sentences scarcely connect with each other. The paper was created using Mathgen, an online random maths paper generator. Mathgen has a set of rules that define how papers are arranged in sections and what kinds of sentence make up a section and how those sentences are made up from different categories of technical and non-technical words. It creates beautifully formatted papers with the conventional structure, complete with equations and citations but, alas, totally devoid of meaning. Nate Eldredge – the blogger behind That’s Mathematics! – wrote Mathgen by adapting SCIgen, which does something similar for computer science. Papers generated by SCIgen have been accepted for publication at academic conferences and journals that claim to carry out peer review.

The article is here and it also excerpts from the referee reports, for instance:

We can’t catch the main thought from this abstract. So I suggest that the author can reorganise the descriptions and give the keywords of this paper.

For the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.

Crowdsourcing the lowest fare

Travelers with complex travel plans may have noticed, however, that the search results aren’t necessarily consistent. This has created a business opportunity for Flightfox, a start-up company based in Mountain View, Calif., which uses a contest format to come up with the best fare that the crowd — all Flightfox-approved users — can find.

A traveler goes to Flightfox.com and sets up a competition, supplying information about the desired itinerary and clarifying a few preferences, like a willingness to “fly on any airline to save money” or a tolerance of “long layovers to save money.” Once Flightfox posts the contest, the crowd is invited to go to work and submit fares.

The contest runs three days, and the winner, the person who finds the lowest fare, gets 75 percent of the finder’s fee that the traveler pays Flightfox when setting up the competition. Flightfox says fees depend on the complexity of the itinerary; many current contests have fees in the $34-to-$59 range.

Here is more, and for the pointer I thank @ArikSharon.