Category: Games
Why do humans play chess in such a risk-averse manner?
Today I ask why computers playing among themselves have produced livelier games than recent matches of humans equipped with computer preparation.
That is from Kenneth Regan, much more at the link. And here is part of his answer:
The reason may literally be that the computers have greater contempt for each other. The contempt factor is a term in a program’s evaluation function that makes it pretend to be a couple tenths of a pawn better off than it is, in situations where a drawing or drawish continuation is available.
The computers also have no awareness of high stakes that puts “staying in the game” ahead of maximizing one’s chance of winning.
The context of course, is the recent Anand-Gelfand world chess championship match, which featured unprecedented levels of computer preparation, and, arguably, a lot of very boring games of “theoretical interest” only.
So will iPhones make us all more boring?
One scenario for the eurozone
Not a prediction, but I have been thinking through one possible path. Germany supports a phased-in backstop of eurozone bank deposits, but with intermediate goals and targets along the way. They’re not simply going to write a blank check. Some of the goals and targets are fiscal, while others involve turning over bank supervision to the EU. Obviously, none of this can be done quickly, thus there is no immediate done deal, but it might calm the markets. Germany also requires that Spain commit “the Irish mistake,” namely guaranteeing the returns to bondholders and funding that guarantee through “austerity.” Since Germany would also be backstopping Italy, France, and others, it doesn’t want a bondholder run, even if Spain, taken alone, might be better off forcing the bondholders to take losses.
Spain will claim it accepts the agreement, but in fact it won’t. It won’t over time, and it won’t pledge up front to fully protect the bondholders. Spain wants to see the money first. Capital flight continues and eventually intensifies. The deal does not get made in time and arguably there was no deal there in the first place, since Spain never had the willingness, or perhaps not even the ability, to meet the intermediate targets along the way.
One current option for Spain is to announce preemptively that it will accept significant EU supervision for their banks, with or without a broader deal. Arguably this would help ease their way into an agreement with Germany. In fact they are doing the opposite, by playing to the domestic audience and stonewalling on transparency about the nature and extent of their banking problems.
#tylertweets
Tyler’s twitter account was hacked yesterday for the most pedestrian of motives:
An amazing new weight loss product! It worked for me and I didnt even change my diet! [link redacted]
— tylercowen (@tylercowen) May 31, 2012
Justin Wolfers tweeted that this was rather unimaginative and following a challenge from Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour a new meme was born, #tylertweets. First the honorable mentions:
Although gas station tacos are generally excellent you should never get carnitas at a gas station that has clean squeegee water #tylertweets
— Gabriel Rossman @GabrielRossman#tylertweets New in my pile: “50 Shades of Grey”. Self-recommending.
— Robert Guico @lpangelrob
@ModeledBehavior truly rose to the challenge:
Its hard to imagine spoons will exist in their current form in 30 years. What does this tell us about the social discount rate? #tylertweets
— Modeled Behavior (@ModeledBehavior)
Given what we know about the money illusion, should the moon be destroyed or doubled? The answer is not clear to me. #tylertweets
— Modeled Behavior (@ModeledBehavior)
#tylertweets cannibalism is wrong, but not for the reasons it’s critics say. We ignore the wisdom of cannibals at our peril.
— Modeled Behavior (@ModeledBehavior)
#tylertweets careful viewers will note Big Momma’s House 3 is biting satire of modern central banking. Most underappreciated drama of 2011?
— Modeled Behavior (@ModeledBehavior)
The blue bond/red bond proposal
The model by Mr. Delpla and Mr. von Weizsäcker , for instance, would let countries put some of their debt — equal to no more than 60 percent of gross domestic product — into so-called blue bonds issued by all members. These would presumably carry a very low interest rate.
The rest — the red bonds — would remain the responsibility of individual countries and would probably carry much higher interest rates.
Countries would need approval from a central committee to issue blue bonds, and could do it only if they followed responsible economic and budgetary policies. Germany would effectively have veto power.
“If you behave well, you have access to blue debt,” Mr. Delpla said. “If you start to behave like Berlusconi, you will not have access to blue debt, and the price of red debt will go up.” He was referring to the former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, whose policies were blamed for much of Italy’s current economic and debt woes.
Thus Spain and Italy would still feel acute pressure to improve the way their economies function and to get better control of public spending. One big advantage of the proposal, Mr. Delpla said, is that it could be put into action quickly without a major restructuring of the European Union.
That is from Paul Geitner, here is more. What are the problems with this?:
1. GDP figures will be manipulated, to allow for the issuance of more guaranteed debt.
2. The key is guaranteeing the banks and their deposits, at reasonable cross-border cost. This doesn’t accomplish that.
3. Presumably a country has to pay back its joint bonds first, otherwise it is too easy to pass the buck on those and just pay back the national bonds. That makes the purely national bonds subordinated debt and may raise rather than lower their risk. Real private sector lending is already becoming subordinate to an unworkable degree, given all the “first in line” public lenders involved.
4. Germany still ends up with its finger on the “send you (and me) to doom” trigger, which already isn’t working out in the Greek situation. If Spain or Italy is approaching insolvency, can the Germans really withdraw credit? Didn’t the ECB just lend over a trillion euros, starting December 2012? How well is that going? Is Germany finding it easy to say “nichts mehr!”, or is the pressure for ever-greater bailouts integration? Why should the Germans let themselves be led further down that gangplank? Why not just call the plan “Germany commits to no more bailouts, not ever, ever again” and cross your fingers behind your back?
What else?
How emigrants try to run their fiscal policies
In survey data collected as part of the study, Washington, D.C.–based migrants from El Salvador report that they would like recipient households to save 21.2 percent of remittance receipts, while recipient households prefer to save only 2.6 percent of receipts.
This is one reason why emigrant workers do not send more back home all at once, namely that the sender does some ex ante forced saving on behalf of the recipient, who otherwise is not trusted to do it. Remitters also send relatively small sums — typical is $300 — but they send many times a year (16.9 times on average, in one study, despite some fixed costs of sending). That is to stop the recipient from spending all of the aid at once.
Perhaps you have noticed that cross-national and multilateral aid is also often doled out in multiple parts, rather than all at once.
Is this socially optimal? Maybe not. Is this nearly universal? Possibly so.
The quotation is from Dean Yang, here is more (pdf, see p.12).
The new casinos and how they induce you to spend money
Using the Panoscope method, Finlay compared the mental effects of classic casinos, with low ceilings and a mazelike layout, to those of casinos designed by Thomas. Subjects surrounded by footage of Thomas’s interiors exhibited far higher levels of what Finlay terms mental “restoration”—that is, they were much more likely to say that the space felt like a “refuge” and reduced their stress level. They also manifested a much stronger desire to gamble. In every Panoscopic matchup, gamblers in Thomas’s rooms were more likely to spend money than those in Friedmanesque designs. Although subjects weren’t forced to focus on the slot machines, the pleasant atmosphere encouraged them to give the machines a try.
Finlay refers to Thomas’s environments as “adult playgrounds,” since they provide an atmosphere in which people are primed to seek pleasure. “These casinos have lots of light and excellent way-finding,” she told me. “They make you feel comfortable, of course, but they also constantly remind you to have fun.”
…Thomas’s designs have a particularly marked effect on those guests who normally don’t gamble. The seduction of his décor, perhaps, is that it doesn’t feel like a gambling environment. The beauty is a kind of anesthesia, distracting people from the pain of their inevitable losses.
I just noticed exactly this from my trip yesterday to the newer complexes. While I felt no temptation to gamble, I found them far more pleasant than the traditional casinos, and if I were going to gamble, I would do it there. My refuge I found in Jose Andres’s restaurant China Poblano (in the Cosmopolitan), which I recommend if you are also here for the APEE meetings.
The Grand Gameshow
Chris Brunk, an all-too-loyal MR reader, writes to me:
I developed a thought experiment that I wanted to share with you. I call it “The Grand Gameshow”.
In this thought experiment you are a contestant on a gameshow. The host of the gameshow (let’s call him Alex) has a notecard that says whether or not god exists and to what extent he is involved in the affairs of mankind. You start with $1,000,000 that you must allocate across five possible categories:
- Category 1 – Scriptural literalism. Bet into this category if you believe that one of the religious texts is precisely accurate.
- Category 2 – God is omnipresent. Bet into this category if you believe that god is everywhere and intimately involved in our lives.
- Category 3 – God as a guide. Bet into this category if you believe that god is only there for the major turning points in life and/or when we reach out in prayer.
- Category 4 – God as a watchmaker. Bet into this category if you believe that god set the universe in motion but is no longer around.
- Category 5 – Atheism. Bet into this category if you believe that god does not exist.
You can distribute the money however you like (e.g. all $1,000,000 in one category or $200,000 in each). After you’ve allocated your $1,000,000 Alex flips over the notecard and reveals which of the five categories is correct. You keep any money that you’ve allocated into the correct category.
Some footnotes. For the purposes of playing this gameshow assume that your financial situation is that of a farmhand in Mexico. You earn about $4,000 per year and have no substantial savings or degrees. I classify simulism as being category 4.
I would be very interested to hear how you’d allocate your funds versus say, Russ Roberts or Robin Hanson.
How about this?: the true “solution” to the universe would be to our minds incredibly complex, although within the theoretical framework of a (non-existent) omniscient being it would be simple. If we had more knowledge about the true theory, however, though without reaching omniscience, many of us would not agree as to whether it involved a God or not. The knowledge-enhanced me would think it did not. The books don’t enter into it, nor do the book trucks, sadly.
For Russ or Robin I would not pretend to speak. Robin has papers and blog posts on simulism, so at the very least he is interested in that topic but I will leave it to him to describe his stance.
Claude Shannon and juggling
As he turned away from academic pursuits, Shannon also focused on inviting aspects: It was a game, a problem, a puzzle. It produced motions he considered beautiful. And it was something he simply could not master, making it all the more tantalizing. Shannon would often lament that he had small hands, and thus had great difficulty making the jump from four balls to five — a demarcation, some might argue, between a good juggler and a great juggler. Old friends — fellow jugglers from the Bell Labs days — wrote encouraging letters suggesting he was closer to five balls than he realized. It’s likely Shannon never quite achieved that. Nevertheless, in the late 1970s he found himself consumed by the question of whether he could formulate a scientific theory of juggling to explain its unifying principles. Just as he had done years before — for his papers on cryptography, information, and computer chess — he delved into the history of juggling and took stock of its greatest practitioners.
That is from Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Here is my previous post on the book, which I recommend highly.
Christian card counters
Until last year, he and his high school friend from Bible camp, Ben Crawford, ran a group of more than 30 religious card counters. Based in Seattle, the rotating cast of players says it won $3.2 million over five years — all while regularly attending church, leading youth groups and studying theology.
But first Jones and his group had to wrestle with the apparent moral paradox: Should Christians be counting cards?
“My father-in-law flipped out about it,” Jones said. “I remember Ben and I discussing everything. Are we being dishonest to the casinos? Is money an evil thing?”
Group members believed what they were doing was consistent with their faith because they felt they were taking money away from an evil enterprise. Further, they did not believe that counting cards was inherently a bad thing; rather, it was merely using math skills in a game of chance. They treated their winnings as income from a job and used it for all manner of expenses.
The article is here, hat tip goes to Mo Costandi.
I don’t see the core to this game
Mr Weidmann proposed last week that Germany’s Target 2 claims should be securitised. Just think about this for a second. He demands contingent access to Greek and Spanish property and other assets to a value of €500bn in case the eurozone should collapse. He might as well have suggested sending in the Luftwaffe to solve the eurozone crisis. The proposal is unbelievably extreme.
It also tells us something else: by seeking insurance against a collapse of the euro, the Bundesbank tells us it no longer regards the demise of the euro as a zero-probability event. If the Bundesbank seeks insurance, so should everybody else.
Here is more, from Wolfgang Münchau. Here is another account, Weidmann by the way runs the Bundesbank. As a general rule of thumb, any time you see an article about “Target 2,” it is important.
The calculus of consent?
A few years ago, two researchers, both then at Carnegie Mellon, decided to calculate how much time it would take to actually read every privacy policy you should.
First, Lorrie Faith Cranor and Aleecia McDonald needed a solid estimate for the average length of a privacy policy. The median length of a privacy policy from the top 75 websites turned out to be 2,514 words. A standard reading rate in the academic literature is about 250 words a minute, so each and every privacy policy costs each person 10 minutes to read.
Next, they had to figure out how many websites, each of which has a different privacy policy, the average American visits. Surprisingly, there was no really good estimate, but working from several sources including their own monthly tallies and other survey research, they came up with a range of between 1,354 and 1,518 with their best estimate sitting at 1,462.
So, each and every Internet user, were they to read every privacy policy on every website they visit would spend 25 days out of the year just reading privacy policies! If it was your job to read privacy policies for 8 hours per day, it would take you 76 work days to complete the task. Nationalized, that’s 53.8 BILLION HOURS of time required to read privacy policies.
That is Alexis Madrigal, the article is here, for the pointer I thank Jeffrey Deutsch.
Markets in everything the culture that is Sweden (England)
The odds were always going to favor the Swedes; after all, the sport originated in the small southern town of Varalov in the 1970s, and Swedes have been breeding show-jumping rabbits since the 1980s. Today, close to 1,000 active bunny jumpers can find at least one competition somewhere in the country most weekends, and there are two national championships a year. The U.K., on the other hand, hosts just a handful of competitions a year and is home to only about 10 rabbit jumpers.
In Sweden, where the fluffy competitors train for up to two hours a day, there is an established network of breeders who are always looking for talent. “Our bunnies are so used to competing, so they know what to do,” Ms. Hedlund says.
Choosing the right breed of rabbit is also important. Sweden’s 200 or so breeders are experimenting widely, and charge more—up to 1,500 kronor ($225)—for a rabbit with prizewinning parentage.
“You want mini lop for the cool and positive attitude and hare for the bigger size and long back legs,” Ms. Hedlund says. “But you don’t want too much temperament; you’d want a mix of a cool and a competitive attitude.”
Here is more, and it goes without saying, interesting throughout! And the sport is supposed to be good for the animals. For the pointer I thank Richard Herron.
p.s. Not all is well in Kaninland:
Despite their dominance of the sport, Swedish bunnies are bested by their Danish neighbors when it comes to world records. In 1999, a Danish rabbit called Yaboo set the world long-jump record when he flew over a three-meter, or nearly 10-feet, hurdle, while his compatriot Tösen bounced 99.5 centimeter, or about 40 inches, to nab the high-jump record in 1997.
Addendum: Photos and video here.
Toward a theory of praise
Rogoff’s real hero, however, was Bobby Fischer, the American chess champion of the 1970s. He remembers following the games from the famous Fischer-Spassky world chess championship in 1972, and being awed by Fischer’s play – “It was like seeing the hand of God at work; the originality, the simplicity.” He shakes his head in delight and amazement. Fischer even paid the teenaged Rogoff the compliment of analysing and praising one of his games in an article. But Rogoff did not let that go to his head. “I took that to mean that he knew I could never beat him. Because I knew he was hyper-competitive. I completely understood the message,” he chuckles.
Not sure if you can get through the FT link to the rest. It is interesting throughout.
The economics of role-playing games
Here is an excellent and varied article on that topic, by Ryan Dancey. Excerpt:
The more segmented those brains became, the weaker the overall social network was. Every new game system, and every new variant to those systems, subdivided that network further, making it weaker. Between 1993 and 1999, the social network of the TRPG players had become seriously frayed. Even if you just looked at the network of Dungeons & Dragons players you could see this effect: People self-segmented into groups playing Basic D&D, 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, and within 2nd Edition into various Campaign Settings that had become their own game variants. The effect on the market was that it became increasingly hard to make and sell something that had enough players in common that it would earn back its costs of development and production.
We looked around the industry and saw the same problem at virtually every company that had become successful: White Wolf had 5 World of Darkness games which were all slightly different, surrounded by a more diffuse constellation of games somewhat related to the Storyteller system but designed to be mutually incompatible. FASA had 4 games, none of which shared anything in common. Palladium & Steve Jackson Games both had “house systems” that they tried to use across their entire product lines, but they had ended up with the “Campaign Setting” issue that was bedeviling TSR; the variant rules at the edges of their games were creating independent game networks despite the shared DNA of the core. And we knew that inside every one of those companies they were seeing the same financial information we were seeing: Each new release was selling fewer and fewer copies, and in response, the companies were increasing the pace of releases trying to sustain planned revenues by volume of titles, not by volume of units. And it was killing everyone.
…My opinion is that the hobby gaming industry is going to transform into a very small niche business. It will cater primarily to an aging group of players who have made TRPGs their lifetime hobbies. As those players age, they’ll need less and less support in the form of commercially produced products. They will instead seek out community support tools to help them remain in touch with their hobby even as the social network they’re directly connected to becomes ever more frayed.
The piece is interesting throughout, and for the pointer I thank Will Koenig.
What would a sovereign debt crisis look like in the United States?
There is a new Econ Journal Watch symposium on this topic, with contributions from Arnold Kling, Garett Jones, Peter Wallison, Joseph Minarik, and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, recommended. I am myself closest to the views of Garett Jones. Here is a related video.