My friends and I had a game of Monopoly just 2 nights ago. It was a fast and fun game, but I wasn’t satisfied with the game at all. It didn’t give me any stimulation.

The end state of the game on Saturday.

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I know, I know, I haven’t been blogging for a few days already. Don’t sue me.. I’m extremely busy nowadays with school, and various projects…

Few people have asked me why I like Lucky Star. Well, for one, it very much mimicks my conversations in real life (yes, I talk about Chocolate Coronets, and I dare you to tell me you haven’t played a game that was meant for a more mature audience when you were still young. Ahem.. GTA?)

I guess, that’s what’s so interesting about randomness (and yes, I know Lucky Star was shown last year). Now, here’s a slice of the random conversations I get into (and ooh, it has annotations!):
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So Cat asked an interesting question last night early this morning: Would you rather be in a relationship where the other party loves you more, or one where you love the other party more.

For time being, let’s accept her premise that love can be quantified (and that the dynamic called love is not in equality across the relationship). My answer is, obviously I would like to be in a relationship where I love the other party more.

Cat had the same answer and her rationale was that a person will not take the other party for granted if he/she loved the other party more. There was a downside to this, though. Should anything happen to the relationship, one’d feel more hurt, as one’d have already invested effort into the relationship.

Personally though, I stand by my personal principles on love. If you love someone, approach it with reckless abandon. You’re just looking out for someone else’s happiness. If I love someone (and I do, actually - a few people even), I’d do it till the end of time. I would want them to be happy. So it doesn’t matter if I have to exert more effort than the other party. In essence, to me, the effort is actually effortless.

The question of the former almost never arises, unless sometimes when I am feeling particularly selfish (I seem to be lapsing into that state quite a bit these days), but on the whole, I generally feel that I would be very comfortable in a relationship where I love more than the other party.

Tou posed a question then: what if both parties were looking for a relationship where they want to love more than the other? Assuming that the situation isn’t mutually exclusive, and that both parties are allowed the same preferences, the result is obviously a kind-of Nash equilibrium (this is where you question my sanity: why would anyone sane want to model love as a game? Yes, I watched A Beautiful Mind.), where both parties would put in 100% of their effort into the relationship. In fact, these kinds of couple, in my opinion, are the ideal couple. Sure, they may have a lot of problems, but due to their willingness to put more effort into it, they would solve things better than others.

Of course, that is assuming a lot of unsaid things. Ah, but why bother. I would still love the people I love (you know who you are - parental units, sibling unit, PrettySwallow and Xingyi.. LOL). Even if they turn their backs on me, it’ll never change.

So, tell me, which kind of relationship do you prefer? One where you love the other party more, or one where the other party loves you more? I’m curious to know.

p/s: watch my blog for an interesting announcement soon.

So, I’ve watched The Dark Knight for the second time today. And this isn’t a review of Joker, the movie TDK. Instead, this movie will focus on the little insight of game theory to be found in the movie. If you haven’t watched The Dark Knight, consider this a spoiler.

In the movie, there was a scene, where the Joker got two ships to try to blow each other to oblivion. He had cut off communications and power to both ships, and the people in the ferries had to make up their minds whether they should blow the other ship or not. Add to the fact that one ship is ferrying civilians and the other is ferrying convicted prisoners. Nice GT situation, no? Continue Reading »

I’ve been bunking over at cfgt’s place for a couple of days (for a project of mine). And I noticed that I seem to go to the toilet more than usual. Soon, it felt like the toilet was drawing water out of me. I began to suspect that the toilet was evil, and whose sole purpose was to drain me of liquids.

So, tonight, me being suspicious over the toilet, decided to sneak up on the toilet and catch it in action.

Lo and behold - the Toilet of Doom!

The Toilet of Doom - complete with evil seals and pentagram!

Imagine my anguish this morning. I had set down the laptop on the floor last night to process some millions of lines of data. This morning, I got this message. And since it was a debug run, I didn’t save the code. Aha.

Nothing was blocking the airflow, and Melbourne’s temperature at night was about 8 Celcius.

Bah

This is an after dinner conversation:

KL looked at Shockrave’s untouched vegetables.

KL: What is that?

Shockrave: These are vegetables. They help with your digestion. Here, have the plate.

Shockrave passes the plate to KL. KL took a look.

KL: Nah. Thanks

Shockrave: Have it. It’s called Pareto Optimal. I gain no utility from having this plate. Since you want it, take it.

LOL. Best dinner conversation in years. When a bunch of econ/finance/actuarial students get together for dinner, you talk about dominant strategies and utilities. In fact I think you could use our conversation in an episode of Big Bang Theory and it wouldn’t feel out of place.

Awesome.