Weekend Gaming -- Behold the humble checker

Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen.

Edgar Allan Poe -- "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"

Poe's opinion on this matter is more common than you might expect. It's not unusual to hear masters of both chess and checkers (draughts) to admit that they prefer the latter. So why does chess get all the respect? Why do you never see a criminal mastermind or a Bond villain playing in a checkers tournament?

Part of the problem is that we learn the game as children so we tend to think of it as a children's game. We focus on how simple the rules are and miss how much complexity and subtlety you can get out of those rules.

Chess derives most of its complexity through differentiated pieces; with checkers the complexity comes from the interaction between pieces. The result is a series of elegant graph problems where the viable paths change with each move of your opponent. To draw an analogy with chess, imagine if moving your knight could allow your opponent's bishop to move like a rook. Add to that the potential for traps and manipulation that come with forced capture and you have one of the most remarkable games of all time.

There have been any number of checkers variants.* You could even argue that all checkers games are variants since, unlike chess, there is no single, internationally recognized version. Here are some of the best and best-known.



Spanish Checkers

Considered by many connoisseurs to be the best of the national variants. It is distinguished from the American version by a queen's (analogous to a king) ability to jump long. This makes a queen powerful but, since captures are mandatory, easier to capture.






Dama (Turkish Checkers)

Also known as Greek checkers. In this variant, pieces move vertically and horizontally instead of diagonally. Among other things this doubles the playing field.



Lasca

This variant was invented by the second World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker. It's worth noting that Lasker (who is considered one of the best chess players of all time) would look to checkers when designing his own game.

In Lasca, captured pieces are added to the bottom of columns controlled by whichever player has the top piece. Since jumping only captures the piece on top of the column, players have to take into account not only position but also height and position.

You can get a detailed write-up by following the link or you can see Lasker's original patent application here. He comes off as rather immodest, but he was the world's best chess player and a close friend of Einstein so I guess we can let him slide.


Misère checkers

This one you probably know as suicide or give-away checkers. The object is either to lose all your pieces or have them blocked so that you can't move.



Endless Checkers (or whatever the damned thing is called)

I'm certain I've read about this somewhere though I can't seem to find any record of it. Here, when a piece reaches the last it can move to an appropriate space on the first row (think of a board wrapped around a cylinder). There are no kings in endless checkers.


I have a feeling I'm missing something. Any suggestions?

* Including one I'm particularly fond of, but that's a topic for another post.

Maybe it's a system for redistributing wealth to statistical consultants

Hot on the heels of this, Nick Rowe has a post up at WCI discussing the ways that certain popular revenue gathering plans increase inequality and the reasons why people don't seem to mind.

If you hurry, you can read it before I do

I don't normally link to things I haven't gotten around to reading yet but between Michael Lewis's record of sharp insights and fine prose and Felix Salmon's glowing recommendation ("tour de force"), I feel confident that this take on Ireland's crisis will be well worth reading.

Free TV vs. Hotel Cable

I've written quite a bit about over-the-air (OTA) digital television. It's an impressive advance in a major consumer technology and I'm a satisfied customer, but the most interesting aspect of the OTA story might be the coverage that it doesn't get. It took the New York Times months to produce a single (factually challenged) story on the subject though bloggers like Rajiv Sethi had long been on the case.

The absence of coverage fell in line with a couple of suspicions I've long held about the current state of journalism. First, journalists tend to view the world almost exclusively through an upper-middle class perspective (which, given the pay many of these journalists make, is really strange). Second, journalists have grown more passive, more likely to wait for someone (usually someone with a vested interest) to tell them what to say.

Though they might not be talking about it, media companies have taken notice. Both the Tribune Company and MGM have quietly moved into the field with AntennaTV and ThisTV, while the cable companies have been issuing carefully worded statements about how they are not worried about the recent drop in subscribers.

I'm pretty sure they are worried, and and a recent encounter with hotel cable explains why.

For some reason, hotels seldom splurge when it comes to cable (other than the mandatory HBO). This could be because rigorous cost-benefit has shown that all those extra channels don't pay for themselves or it could be because it's an easy item to cut and corporate politics tends to reward short term savings. Either way, you're looking at the most basic of basic cable.

As I was settling in for the evening during a recent trip, I turned on the TV and surfed through the channels. The best thing I could find, honest to God, was Spy Hard on TBS. To add insult to injury, the signal had been severely compressed so the picture was strangely blotchy.

It struck me that I would have been much better off had the hotel simply put an antenna on top of the TV. Being in a major metropolitan area I would have gotten more channels including multiple choices from PBS (I get ten in LA) and at least one OTA superstation like ThisTV or AntennaTV. The programming on these two runs the gamut from from awful (Benny Hill) to good (Philadelphia, La Cage aux Folles) to great (Lean's Great Expectations). ThisTV in particular has been bringing its A-game (It's currently showing Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three. All about Eve is coming up tomorrow).

Cable is largely based on a commitment/upsale business model. You get customers to sign a contract for the economy package then bump them up into progressively more expensive options. This creates a hard (contractual) and soft commitment (you often find yourself hooked on one or more of the shows in the higher tier).

This model worked extremely well for over thirty years but now viewers in much (if not most) of the country have an alternative to basic cable that offers more channels with better programs in higher quality with no commitment for free. All that's required is an appropriate antenna. When we add other elements (Redbox, Netflix, online video, even the DVD section of your local library) the picture becomes more complex but not in a way that improves the situation for the cable companies.

How do you use an upsale approach when your cheap option isn't as good as the free one? I don't see brand-building as a viable solution; the relevant brands here are the shows and networks, not the providers. That leaves two choices: improve basic cable; or hope that the lobbyists for the cellular industry manage to shut down OTA television and grab the bandwidth before consumers realize what's happening.

I would probably have gone with the first choice, but the cable companies may know something the rest of us don't.

The lesson of Cassandra -- sometimes it's no fun being right

Mark Thoma has taken Paul Krugman's one-day hiatus from his column as an opportunity to pull from the archives an extraordinary piece by Krugman from back in the late Nineties. I limited myself to one paragraph but the whole thing merits a careful reading when you get the chance. You'll find that in 1998, Krugman was saying most of the same things he'd be saying in 2011:

I don't know what provoked [Robert] Samuelson's outburst. But if one of our most well informed economic journalists has come to disdain macroeconomics, this may be because he has been listening to economists themselves. Over the past 30 years, macroeconomics--and especially that part of macroeconomics that concerns itself with recessions and depressions, in which the economy as a whole is less than the sum of its parts--has fallen steadily into disfavor within the economics profession. As late as the mid-1970s, many textbooks still followed the lead of Paul (no relation to Robert) Samuelson's classic 1948 Economics, beginning with the macroeconomics of booms and slumps and turning to microeconomics only in their second half. Nowadays, however, every textbook (yes, even the one I'm writing) relegates macro to the second half. Even within the macroeconomics half, more and more books (like the much-hyped new text by Harvard's N. Gregory Mankiw) dwell on "safe" issues like growth and inflation as long as possible, introducing the question of recessions and what to do about them almost as a footnote.

People who ought not to be interesting but are

Most famous people aren't as interesting as you expect them to be -- I suppose that's inevitable -- but quite a few of the nearly famous are more interesting than they ought to be. Now, thanks to Nick Paumgarten (via Chait) we can add the actor who plays "The World's Most Interesting Man" to the list:

Goldsmith is not this man. Still, he has more in common with him than you do. A montage of highlights from the real life of Jonathan Goldsmith might include (had there been cameras present) footage of him rescuing a stranded climber on Mt. Whitney, saving a drowning girl in Malibu, sailing the high seas with his friend Fernando Lamas (the inspiration for his Interesting persona and, according to Goldsmith, “the greatest swordsman who ever lived in Hollywood”), and starting a successful network marketing business (“I was a hustler, a very good hustler”), which, for a while, anyway, enabled him to flee Hollywood for an estate in the Sierras. Among the outtakes might be glimpses of his stint as a waterless-car-wash entrepreneur. “I love the old philosophers,” he said. “I have a large library. I am not a die-hard sports fan. I love to cut wood.”

...

Goldsmith had on a black polo sweater, a black sports coat, bluejeans, and black tasselled loafers. He had a black-diamond earring that Barbara had given him. They drank Chianti, and Goldsmith told the story of his life and career. The Most Interesting Man in the World, it turns out, is a Jewish guy from the Bronx. His mother was a Conover model, his father a track coach at James Monroe High School. Postcollegiate dissolution (and a session with the famed psychoanalyst Fredric Wertham) led him into an acting class at the Living Theatre and, eventually, into competition with the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall. (Goldsmith recalls a contentious exchange with Hoffman: “I jumped up and said, ‘Dustin, the reason you don’t like me is because I’m gonna make it and you’re not.’ ”) Goldsmith eventually made it—out to Los Angeles, anyway—and embarked on a career as a “that guy,” very often the that guy who gets killed, on television shows such as “Bonanza,” “Mannix,” “Gunsmoke,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “The Rockford Files,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “CHiPs,” “Dynasty,” “T. J. Hooker,” “Knots Landing,” “Magnum, P.I.,” “MacGyver,” and “Dallas,” to name a few. He had an equally peripatetic career off the lot, the particulars of which he’s saving for a book. He divulged one old surefire tactic: knowing that Warren Beatty kept a penthouse suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Goldsmith used to wait in the lobby for the young women who’d been summoned there, and he’d intercept them, saying, “Warren sent me down. I’m terribly sorry, but he had to cancel the meeting.”

But even taking into account his ability to snag one-night-stands from Warren Beatty (that, my friends, shows an inventive mind), Goldsmith still isn't as unexpectedly interesting as James Lipton.

That's right, that James Lipton, the guy who does the fawning interviews of vapid celebrities. Probably the last person in the world you'd pick to be trapped in an elevator with, but Lipton is one of those rare people who gets more interesting when he talks about himself. His biography starts with playing the Lone Ranger's nephew (which would make him the Green Hornet's father, by the way), ends with him named dean emeritus of the Actor's Studio Drama School and includes a interlude as a French pimp (though Lipton disputes the use of the term since he worked for the prostitutes rather than the other way around). You can hear Lipton's charming account here.

But you should still skip Inside the Actor's Studio.

Outsourced blogging

I've been meaning to post something on the Collegiate Learning Assessment exam (which seems to be the main data source for the new book Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa). In the meantime, Dean Dad has a good post on the subject.

There has never been a greater time-wasting innovation than Wikipedia

Case in point: the details of the third voyage of Willem Barentsz are completely useless knowledge but the story is (if you'll pardon the adjective) undeniably cool.

And you thought statisticians were just good for counting cards

We're also handy if you have a handful of scratchers.

From Wired (via Felix Salmon):

The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.

The next day, on his way into work, he stopped at the gas station and bought a few more tickets. Sure enough, all of these tickets contained the telltale pattern. The day after that he picked up even more tickets from different stores. These were also breakable. After analyzing his results, Srivastava realized that the singleton trick worked about 90 percent of the time, allowing him to pick the winning tickets before they were scratched.

For example the ticket below has one winning row. If you're having trouble spotting it the article has a step-by-step solution.



To make things even more interesting, there's evidence that Srivastava may not be the only one to have spotted the pattern.

"What is the worst case scenario here?"

If you're in a hurry, skip to 6:30...





Does this mean I'll have to retract all of these posts?

"If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao..."

This is probably a question for Andrew Gelman but this post by Jonathan Chait (previously mentioned by Joseph) raises some interesting points:

A Frum Forum writer notes an interesting trend: People who find their parents are watching Fox News and losing their minds. To wit:

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping track of a trend among friends around my age (late thirties to mid-forties). Eight of us (so far) share something in common besides our conservatism: a deep frustration over how our parents have become impossible to take on the subject of politics. Without fail, it turns out that our folks have all been sitting at home watching Fox News Channel all day – especially Glenn Beck’s program.

Used to be I would call my mom and get updated on news from the neighborhood, her garden, the grandchildren, hometown gossip, and so forth. I’ve always been interested in politics, but never had the occasion to talk about them with her. She just doesn’t care.

Or didn’t. I don’t know when it happened, exactly, but she began peppering our conversation with red-hot remarks about President Obama. I would try to engage her, but unless I shared her particular judgment, and her outrage, she apparently thought that I was a dupe or a RINO. Finally I asked my father privately why Mom, who as far as I know never before had a political thought, was so worked up about Obama all the time.

“She’s been like that ever since she started watching Glenn Beck,” Dad said.

A few months later, she roped him into watching Beck, which had the same effect. Even though we’re all conservatives, I found myself having to steer our phone conversations away from politics and current events. It wasn’t that I disagreed with their opinions – though I often did – but rather that I found the vehemence with which they expressed those opinions to be so off-putting.

To add some heft to this anecdotal take, Fox News has the oldest audience of any news network -- the average Fox News viewer is 65 years old!

Assuming something even vaguely like a normal distribution, this means that a significant number of Fox viewers (and presumably Tea Partiers) were high school and college students in the Sixties and early Seventies. In other words, it appears that the generation that gave us the most annoying right-wing movement in recent memory also gave us the most annoying left-wing movement.

My question for Dr. Gelman is: how much overlap was there? What portion of the students who went around quoting the Little Red Book are now seniors quoting Glenn Beck?

Is geography destiny? -- walkability

[following up on this post and this one]

In comments, Joseph pointed out that, while I had argued that the stereotypes about LA (and by implication, other cities) were exaggerated, I hadn't addressed the larger question of location affecting lifestyle.

Does choice of city have a big impact on lifestyle? Certainly, but it may not be the impact you expect. Before I got to LA, I thought it would be something like Atlanta, a dense center of urban culture and activity surrounded by miles of faceless ring cities, but LA doesn't really have a center. What you normally think of as urban activity (screenings, plays, concerts, speakers, art shows, dining, night spots and places to hang out, etc.) is spread out over the four thousand plus square miles of LA county.

This leads to an odd paradox: LA is one of the most and least walkable cities you'll find. The city is filled with great neighborhoods where you can live or work without a car. You can walk or pedal anywhere you need to go. If, however, you want to experience more than a tiny portion of the social and cultural life of the city you have to have access to a car and accept the fact that a significant part of your life will be spent on the freeways.

Another Education Post

Dana Goldstein:

The fact is that where such programs exist, they are oversubscribed--parents don't seem to mind sending their kids out-of-district (sometimes just a 5 minute drive away) into a town where they do not enjoy political representation when the result is a better education.

I think this direction is non-controversial. However, this scenario assumes one of two things:

1) There are more students in the district which is accepting students. As the United States funds a lot of education out of local property taxes, this may create less resources per student in the destination district (and ways to try and balance this out are quite tricky)

2) Some students need to be sent the other way. If the perception is that going the other way leads to a lower quality education (even if untrue in fact) then that could be an issue.

In the second case, I suspect that the lack of representation will be a much bigger issue (as it makes it hard for parents to engage the new district to try and remedy issues that are seen as concerns).

LA, NYC and other imaginary places

from Penelope Trunk (via Joseph):

When I moved from LA to NYC, I was horrified at the lack of yoga studios in NY. Yoga was already huge in LA, but not yet in NY. I was also scared that New Yorkers were always a little bedraggled, and I had just spent ten years learning how to look perfect everywhere I went in LA. It’s fun. It’s fun to have no weather and no fat and no rushing in LA. It’s fun to get a day off from work to prepare for watching the Oscars. I grew up in Illinois, but I got used to living in LA.

I've been living in LA for a few years now and I have a pretty good read on the town. I can show you the trendiest parts of Silver Lake, the funkiest parts of Venice and the toughest parts of Watts. I can take you to the best taco stand in East LA and get you a milk tea with or without boba at four in the morning. I can introduce you to such diverse characters as rocket scientists, a mystic knight of Oingo Boingo, and Frenchy from the original run of Grease on Broadway.

Like I said, I've got a pretty good read on this town and I can tell you that the LA that you hear about doesn't exist. What does exist are little slivers where you can find passable facsimiles of the LA of an Aaron Spelling show, where you can see toned and tanned people who look like what you thought people in LA looked like.

What LA gives people like Trunk is a fantasy, a chance to convince themselves that life is like a TV show and they belong in the cast, but the only way to maintain that fantasy is to tune out or simply avoid almost all of Los Angeles, and that's a shame because it's a helluva town.

If you turn on the dome light, the whole thing explodes

There has been a lot of talk from the right recently (Megan McArdle is on the case) on the potential problems electric cars can have with cold weather. Most of the commenters seem to have rolled the Volt in with this group which seems strange for a plug-in hybrid. The comment that really caught my attention, however, was the following paragraph from the Washington Post's Charles Lane:

The exact loss of power these cars would suffer is a matter of debate, partly because no one has much real-world experience to draw on.* But there would be some loss. Running the heater to stay warm, or the car radio to stay informed, would drain the battery further.

Nerd that I am, the idea of significantly draining a hybrid's battery by running the radio reminded of the Simpsons' episode where a truck was so delicately balanced on the edge of a cliff that Homer was able to shift it back on the road by tuning the radio. I suppose it's possible but I wouldn't call it likely.



* Actually we do have real world experience thanks to the good people at Consumer Reports who tested the car under just these conditions and found the EV range dropped to the low end of what GM claims but the mileage running in standard hybrid mode remained remarkably good. This information is also available on Wikipedia.