Category: Games

*The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Many writers (including W.H. Auden, Georges Perec, Julian Mitchell, Julian Barnes, Ronald Harwood and Jonathan Raban) have been addicted to crossword puzzles, but I have never taken to them either.  The hours of freedom from words are a relief to me, though of course I acknowledge that, paradoxically, I then seem to feel the need of words to try to analyse the nature of this freedom.

That's because writing is an illness. A chronic, incurable illness.  I caught it by default when I was twenty-one, and I often wish I hadn't.  It seemed to start off as therapy, but it became the illness that it set out to cure.

That is from the new Margaret Drabble book, which indeed is about her obsession with jigsaw puzzles.  While I do not myself have an interest in jigsaw puzzles, or crosswords, I am nonetheless finding the book very interesting.  It will baffle many of her traditional fans but that's probably for the better.

The economics of Legoland and the revelation principle

by  Tyler Cowen in

At Legoland, admission is discounted for two-year-olds. But a child must be at least three for most of the fun attractions.

At the ticket window the parents are asked how old the child is. But
at the ride entrance the attendants ask the children directly.

The parents lie. The children tell the truth.

That is again Jeff Ely, from cheeptalk.wordpress.com

Via you-know-who

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is strategy involved in giving and interpreting compliments. 
Let’s say you hear someone play a difficult –but not too difficult–
piece on the piano, and she plays it well.  Is it a compliment if you
tell her she played it beautifully?

That depends.  You would not be impressed by the not-so-difficult
piece if you knew that she was an outstanding pianist.  So if you tell
her you are impressed, then you are telling her that you don’t think
she is an outstanding pianist.  And if she is, or aspires to be, an
outstanding pianist, then your attempted compliment is in fact an
insult.

This means that, in most cases, the best way to compliment the
highly accomplished is not to offer any compliment at all.  This
conveys that all of her fine accomplishments are exactly what you
expected of her.  But, do wait for when she really outdoes herself and
then tell her so.  You don’t want her to think that you are someone who
just never gives compliments.  Once that is taken care of, she will
know how to properly interpret your usual silence.

In the world of blogs, when you comment on an article on another
blog, it is usually a nice compliment to provide a link to the original
post.  This is a compliment because it tells your readers that the
other blog is worth visiting and reading.  But you may have noticed
that discussions of the really well-known blogs don’t come with links. 
For example, when I comment on an article posted at a blog like
Marginal Revolution, I usually write merely “via MR, …” with no link.

That’s the best way to compliment a blog that is, or aspires to be,
really well-known. It proves that you know that your readers already
know the blog in question, know how to get there, and indeed have
probably already read and pondered the article being discussed.

Pretty excellent, no?

Addendum: An explanation, from the one you would expect.

The mass sterilization of half of humanity

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bill, a loyal MR reader, asks:

A freak solar event "sterilizes" the half of the planet (people, animals, etc) facing the sun. What happens?

Putting aside, the "which half" question, I would predict the collapse of many fiat currencies and the immediate insolvency of most financial institutions.  Who could meet all those margin calls?  Unemployment would exceed 20 percent and martial law would be declared, food rationing and guys with rifles on street corners.  The affected countries would take in larger numbers of immigrants, especially young immigrants from poorer countries, to keep their societies going and to use and maintain the still-standing capital stock.  Many of those immigrants might be better off in the longer run, especially if they could internalize the norms of the host country by the time the original inhabitants perished.  If you let me "cheat," I'll postulate that genetic engineering is used to perpetuate the genes of the original inhabitants.

If a poor country were hit by this blast the eventual result probably would be mass starvation.  There is a chance that social order would collapse across the entire globe, due mostly to contagion effects, multiple equilibria, and bad expectations.

To some of you these mental exercises may seem silly.  Indeed they are silly.  But what's wrong with silly?  Such questions get at the stability of social order, the sources of that stability, and the general importance of demography and intergenerational relations.  Those are all topics we don't think enough about.  Because we're not silly enough.

Markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Chessboxing
has a convivial party atmosphere and is far more female friendly than a normal
boxing crowd, with 40% of tickets purchased by ladies.

Here is more, with the subheader Swedish Chessboxing Sensation in London.  About a year ago, five or so people sent me links about chessboxing for "Markets in Everything."  I didn't think it was weird enough to merit inclusion in the series.  But now, with the addition of "Swedish" and "ladies" to the mix (or is it the "convivial party atmosphere"?), I think it is weird enough.  Here is Wikipedia on chessboxing.

When No Means Yes

by  Alex Tabarrok in

… Having voted against the administration's climate change bill on the record means that at least some of these House Democrats will be able to vote for what emerges from a House-Senate conference later in the year. Therefore, the chances of a climate bill being enacted this year is now much greater than it was 24 hours ago.

That's the ever-perceptive Stan Collender on the politics of the climate change bill.

My (short) life as a gamer

by  Tyler Cowen in

For years I've been promising Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson that I would play an afternoon game with them, if only once.  And for years I've held out.  Since I used to play chess, Scrabble, and other games I cannot claim an intrinsic dislike of gaming.  Yesterday I tried to play Kremlin with them but I had to give up after thirty minutes.  My head hurt and I was not motivated to impose interesting structure on the game as a life activity.  I'm still looking for a simple model of my failure.  One hypothesis is that anyone who deals with university administration, as I sometimes do, will have no marginal taste for playing Kremlin.

Why is there an IQ test for many contest winners?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bob Baxley, a soon-to-be-loyal MR reader, asks me the following question:

In considering entering in an online drawing for a bicycle, I read the complete rules. The contest is billed as a random drawing of those entered. But what struck me is that "Before being declared a winner, the selected entrant must first correctly answer, unaided, a time-limited, arithmetical, skill-testing question."(http://www.cervelo.com/contestrules.aspx)

Curious about the occurrence of this rule in other contests, I Googled this long phrase and it turns out it is very common in contest drawings: (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US305&q="correctly+answer,+unaided,+a+time-limited,+arithmetical,+skill-testing+question."&btnG=Search).  Shorter snippets of this phrase return even more Google hits.

Any thoughts on why this stipulation is listed in the rules?

Maybe his contest is offering up this question to me.  But I cannot answer it unaided.  Help!

Convexifying the choice set, an ongoing series

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is a new proposal for chess:

  • Slight Win: A player wins slightly if any of the following
    conditions hold:
    d. The opponent offers to concede a slight win and he or she agrees,
    e. He or she stalemates his or her opponent.
    f. Without making a move, a player calls the arbiter and proves that as
    a result of her opponent's last move, the same position has occurred thrice.

The player that wins slightly gets 4/6 points, and the player that loses slightly
get 2/6 points.

Why not go further and allow the players to bargain for a split sum of any magnitude?  "I offer you .5713 to stop playing now…"

Debating Economics

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Intelligence Squared has held a series of debates in which they poll ayes and nayes before and after.  How should we expect opinion to change with such debates?  Let’s assume that the debate teams are evenly matched on average (since any debate resolution can be written in either the affirmative or negative this seems a weak assumption).  If so, then we ought to expect a random walk; that is, sometimes the aye team will be stronger and support for their position will grow (aye after – aye before will increase) and sometimes the nay team will be stronger and support for their position will grow.  On average, however, we ought to expect that if it’s 30% aye and 70% nay going in then it ought to be 30% aye and 70% nay going out, again, on average. Another way of saying this is that new information, by definition, should not swing your view systematically one way or the other.

Alas, the data refute this position.  The graph shown below (click to enlarge) looks at the percentage of ayes and nayes among the decided Underdogbefore and after.  The hypothesis says the data should lie around the 45 degree line.  Yet, there is a clear tendency for the minority position to gain adherents  – that is, there is an underdog advantage so positions with less than 50% of the ayes before tend to increase in adherents and positions with greater than 50% ayes tend to lose adherents.  What could explain this?

I see two plausible possibilities.

1) If the side with the larger numbers has weaker adherents they could be more likely to change their mind.

2)  The undecided are key and the undecided are lying.

For case 1, imagine that 10% of each group changes their minds; since 10% of a larger number is more switchers this could generate the data.  The problem with 1 and with the data more generally is that we don’t seem to see a tendency towards 50:50 in the world.  We focus on disputes, of course, but more often we reach some consensus (the moon is not made of blue cheese, voodoo doesn’t work and so forth).

Thus 2 is my best guess.  Note first that the number of “undecided” swing massively in these debates and in every case the number of undecided goes down a lot, itself peculiar if people are rational Bayesians.  A big swing in undecided votes is quite odd for two additional reasons.  First, when Justice Roberts said he’d never really thought about the constitutionality of abortion people were incredulous.  Similarly, could 30% of the audience (in a debate in which Tyler recently participated (pdf)) be truly undecided about whether “it is wrong to pay for sex”?  Second, and even more doubtful, could it be that 30% of the people at the debate were undecided–thus had not heard arguments in let’s say the previous 10 years that converted them one way or the other–but on that very night a majority of the undecided were at last pushed into the decided camp?  I think not, thus I think lying best explains the data.

Some questions for readers.  Can you think of another hypothesis to explain the data?  Can you think of a way of testing competing hypotheses?  And does anyone know of a larger database of debate decisions with ayes, nayes and undecided before and after?

Hat tip to Robin for suggesting that there might be a tendency to 50:50, Bryan and Tyler for discussion and Robin for collecting the data.