[W]e atheists are in a state of rebellion and sin, if all our claims are based on untestable assumptions, then we scientists must have done a great disservice to the world.

Allow me to apologize then, on behalf of all those who study and practice science, for . . . → Read More: An Atheist’s Apology]]> This is from an Eric Lee (who’s a completely awesome guy):

[W]e atheists are in a state of rebellion and sin, if all our claims are based on untestable assumptions, then we scientists must have done a great disservice to the world.

Allow me to apologize then, on behalf of all those who study and practice science, for the inventions that we have created. Instead of studying science, which is a waste of time, we should instead be reading, learning, and preaching the gospel.

We should be praying to God to provide for us, to cure us of diseases, to fill us with knowledge, to protect us from harm, and to help others in need.

We apologize for developing ways to grow more food to feed the hungry.
We apologize for developing ways to fight disease and cure the sick.
We apologize for developing ways to make information available to everyone.
We apologize for developing ways to protect us from our enemies.
We apologize for trying to help people who don’t agree with us, for trying to help people who consider us godless and condemned.

We apologize for making baseless assumptions and informed guesses.

Instead, we should realize that all our fossils came from animals which were created at the same time, and made at around the same time, during Noah’s flood. Even though it seems odd that dinosaurs, which must have died during the flood, since they aren’t mentioned throughout the Bible, were fossilized, and became fossils because of the flood, but not a single human fossil has been found in the same areas.

We should believe that DNA is a very efficient, marvelous code which was designed by the creator of the universe, despite the fact that the majority of it is information which we no longer use. Our DNA does have the information to code for a tail, but we no longer, er, I’m sorry, we never had the need for them.

We should believe that an explosion can never give rise to anything but disorder, even if we observe supernovas and find that they lead to the creation of stars/solar systems.

We apologize for observing the animals, finding that they have similar traits, similar DNA, and finding that some animals are more similar than others, and then using the law of natural selection and the fossil record, along with radiometric dating to explain this similarity and diversity. We should have, from the start, read the Bible, and realized that God had created everything.

We apologize for believing in our dating techniques. Whenever we date an object that is over 4000 or so years which is the entire life of the Earth, we should naturally discount it and trust that God had made the object outside of space and time for a while, or that God caused radiometric dating to speed up for the object, and not for the religious artifacts which are dated correctly at the times at which they were said to be from.

Finally, we apologize for looking at the world around us, for trying to use logic, observation, and repeated testing to try to explain the world.

We should all realize that it’s better for all of us if we just throw that all away and turn to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We apologize.

Yes, I’m betraying yet another nerdy secret of mine. And if you’ve watched The End of Time, change your Facebook profile photo to . . . → Read More: My New Facebook Profile Photo]]>

Yes, I’m betraying yet another nerdy secret of mine. And if you’ve watched The End of Time, change your Facebook profile photo to The Master’s!

What do you notice?

Sincerely,

Roy . . . → Read More: Nerding Out With My Laundry]]> So, I was hanging my clothes when doing my laundry and I noticed this:

What do you notice?

Sincerely,

Roy G. Biv

I did say this was. What happened? Men in Black happened. Orion’s belt was a cat’s collar. The cat being Orion took the charm out of stars for a while (though the thought of a universe being a bauble on the cat’s  collar tickles me . . . → Read More: Orion]]> This was my favourite star constellation when I was younger:

I did say this was. What happened? Men in Black happened. Orion’s belt was a cat’s collar. The cat being Orion took the charm out of stars for a while (though the thought of a universe being a bauble on the cat’s  collar tickles me still).

When I look up at these stars, I imagine, billions upon billions of flaming balls. Each of them possibly has planets surrounding it, the laws of gravity working perfectly, each of the planets and satellites sitting in their own gravitational well, sinking in with each round made. Every star out there, burning a high heat by means of fusion. Fusion that converts lighter, simpler elements out there like hydrogen into heavier elements like oxygen and carbon. Every twinkling star, a massive furnace that throws out heat and light. I stand in awe in nature’s awesomeness.

This is not an example of gravitational lensing, unfortunately. This is merely a lens flare. Shot with a 30 second exposure, look at all the stars. Some of these weren’t even picked up by the human eye. Most of these stars are too far away, the light we’re seeing from these stars are very old. We’re looking at the universe’s history, be it stars that are a year away from us, or a few centuries away from us. Sometimes you can’t help but to just wonder, how many of these stars we see are in actuality, dead and gone, leaving behind its legacy – new planets and new stars? How many have evolved life?

Everyday, out there somewhere in the universe, at least a star dies, and a star is born. From within the furnaces of supernovas, heavier elements are forged, and when the stars go supernova, these heavy elements are seeded, spread across the universe. The dust of a ‘nova forms new stars and planets through gravitational attraction. And within these planets, in an infinitesimally small chance, life exists. Some of these lifeforms may evolve intelligence, and some will not.

If you think about it, the atoms in our bodies are literally forged in the cores of the old stars. Stars that died to give us life. I couldn’t have put it more eloquently than Carl Sagan – “we are literally star stuff”

The world is a wondrous place. And it is wonderful to live. Think about it, to think by now, we could have been traveling the stars, traversing across the universe. Instead of squabbling about, humanity could have worked together (even if its Cold War racing situation).

Oh well, here’s a picture of my friends and I, as we mess about the 30 second exposure:

Also, here’s something relevant for you (it has Richard Feynman on bongos!!):

Wait, wait, wait!! Before you go “again, Chewxy blogging about his groceries pattern”, this is not about MY groceries. But yes, you’d guess right, I’m going to talk about some economics in this one.

The reason for this blog is because I read Dan Meyer’s blog article about optimizing queues in, well, a supermarket. . . . → Read More: Which Line To Choose At Supermarket Checkouts]]> A Pareto Optimal Choice

Wait, wait, wait!! Before you go “again, Chewxy blogging about his groceries pattern”, this is not about MY groceries. But yes, you’d guess right, I’m going to talk about some economics in this one.

The reason for this blog is because I read Dan Meyer’s blog article about optimizing queues in, well, a supermarket. Of course Dan’s blog is more interesting, because he went out and collected empirical data on queues.

Well, me being me, and having insomnia (and desperately needing to do something about my I’m-so-lazy funk), I hacked up a simulator to find out how to choose the best line.

I made 3 types of shoppers: the Random Walk shopper, the Smart shopper and the Even Smarter shopper. This is how they choose their lines:

• The Random Walk shopper randomly chooses a checkout line. He doesn’t care about how many people are there or how many items are there in the line
• The Smart shopper chooses the shortest line. He doesn’t care about how many items each person has in the line
• The Even Smarter shopper looks at each line. He randomly picks 3 or less shoppers in each line and gauges their number of items, then chooses the line with what he thinks has the least number of queuers with the least number of items. I think this heuristic is realistic (woo that rhymes), because humans cannot possibly have perfect knowledge.

I assume that all goods take the same time to scan, which takes 1 second. Which is what Dan himself assumed. Of course, he also assumed perfect information, which I didn’t. And because I don’t assume perfect knowledge, this exercise to find the best queue to be in is done by means of iterative simulation, as opposed to just finding the minima of each session.

So, I start off by generating randomly a population of 5 lanes, each with different numbers of people lining up, and each person lining up has different numbers of goods. I ran this 1000 times, and this was the results:

• Random Walk Shopper mean:158.05s; median: 120
• Smart Shopper mean: 165.327s; median: 125
• Even Smarter Shopper average: 158.93s; median: 125

These are the distribution graphs

Since the distributions of time spent is far from normal (which is surprising, because even the random walk one isn’t as normally distributed as I thought it’d be¹), chi-squared tests of significance is thrown out of the window². But needless to say, the means and medians of the three walkers are very close. If they were normally distributed, I’d say that the results between the Even Smarter shopper and the Random Walker shopper are not different from one another on a 90% significance level³.

Which brings me to the “Pareto” part of the title.  If you can do no better than to randomly walk into a queue, why bother choosing a queue? I think, it was Tim Harford in his book, the Undercover Economist, that also mentioned this. He likened a random walk down wall street (geddit, geddit?) as looking for the shortest queue. Sure, you can look, and you can have some degree of success, but choosing stocks in the stock market is the same as walking about looking for the shortest queue.

I ran the script a couple of times, and found that (assuming that it’s normally distributed), the Random Walk shopper is pareto optimal – i.e. this method of choosing lines will make you no worse off.  And I think you’ll find these results to be true in real life too, especially when it comes to ordering food at a fast food place. In fact I blogged about this yonks ago - about when I went to Hungry Jack’s in the middle of the night.

In a place like a fast food eatery, there are no signals for you, unlike in a supermarket. Of course, as the comments in Dan’s blog goes, there are other variables that come into play, like how chatty a person is (I usually keep my head down and mumble to myself when I find a cheery checkout girl, because I’m a mood dampener like that).

So what’s the best line to be at? The answer: be random. It won’t make a difference. And when in doubt, hedge your bets by diversifying.

Edit: some stuff about pareto optimality. I clearly wasn’t thinking when I wrote this

1. Nicholas Nassim Taleb would be eating his heart out on this one
2. you can only do chi-squared tests when the distribution looks kinda normally distributed
3. its simple actually, because we take every second to be significantly different, how significantly different then lies in the numbers after the decimal

Twinkle twinkle little star,

How I wonder what you are

Its a ball of fire formed

From the fusion of H2

Into helium it becomes

Light and heat too here they come

I sung this to my girlfriend, and she loved it. She is awesome . . . → Read More: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star]]> This is the song I shall sing to my kids when I have them:

Twinkle twinkle little star,

How I wonder what you are

Its a ball of fire formed

From the fusion of H2

Into helium it becomes

Light and heat too here they come

I sung this to my girlfriend, and she loved it. She is awesome like that

Now I have a new obsession (you know, alone and jobless – hint hint to prospective employers) – cubing! I’m not that good at it yet but in time I’m quite sure I can do speedcubing. This cube is quite smooth but can lock up quite often if you do . . . → Read More: Cubing]]> This one is cfgt’s fault:

Now I have a new obsession (you know, alone and jobless – hint hint to prospective employers) – cubing! I’m not that good at it yet but in time I’m quite sure I can do speedcubing. This cube is quite smooth but can lock up quite often if you do things too fast. Also, I’m awesome because of this:

Experienced cubers would know its quite hard to get a full face done and not have a T at all 4 sides. And yet I did it… Then again, I was experimenting with my own algorithms. Ah well.. back to cubing. If I don’t reply, that’s coz I’m cubing.

p/s: Background wallpaper is to Pressyo.

The end state of the game on Saturday.

Anyone who plays Monopoly long enough would know which stretches are the best . . . → Read More: Meditating on Monopoly]]> 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.

Anyone who plays Monopoly long enough would know which stretches are the best stretches to buy. Alternatively, if you simply cannot live without Markov chains (ahem, you know who you are *coughcfgtcough*), you can calculate the precise probability, but someone already did the work and calculated the probabilities of earning in each square.

But anyways, the game ended with a draw because quite early on in the game, I made a rather unwise deal (we would have ended earlier if not for the deal) with Cat. That deal was the stalemate maker (though in terms of liquidity, Cat was the winner, having twice the amount of cash I have).

By the end of the game, I had the Navys¹ with three houses each, and the Yellows² with four houses each, while Cat had the Light Blues³ with a hotel each.

She was exempt from paying rent on my yellow blocks, but not on my navy blocks. I had to pay rent on her light blue blocks. By the end, it was pretty much a 2 player game (whittled down from 5) – since the third player (consolidated from all the rest who were bankrupted earlier) had insignificant rents – they were blocked pretty much early in the game.

The odds of Cat landing on my properties is 12%, and the odds of me landing on her property is 6.5%. However, since she is exempted from paying rents on my yellow spots, the odds of her landing on my property of which she has to pay a lot suddenly drops to 4.5%. At this point, you surely think “so, she’ll win!”

If every property had rent of the same price, then, yes, she would have won the game about 3 rounds earlier than it would. But since the rents for the Navys (an average of $13,000) are significantly higher than the rents of the Light Blues (an average of $8,000), when you calculate a score based on probable rent collections, it turns out that the Navys would have a higher score than the Light Blues. But not by a lot. I didn’t have time to do a chi-square test to see if the difference were any bit significant, but I’m quite sure we can do what economists do all the time – chuck it into the error value and blame Lady Luck. LOL.

But even if the score is significant on a say, 90% interval, it would have taken ages for us to declare a clear winner. Which is not the point of a board game with many people playing. Hence we can quickly assume it is insignificant, and the game is a stalemate (the winner was eventually decided in terms of liquidity).

The Problem with Monopoly®.

Here, I must say, there is an inherent problem with Monopoly – after some time, small amounts of rent doesn’t matter anymore. Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s a real life phenomenon called inflation. Our game ended as Oligopoly (hey, I should trademark that – since most games with deals and trade involved usually end up as ologopolies), but it was an inflatious one. Prices for things you pay will repeatedly get dearer and dearer, and remember, the bank never runs out of money.

Free Trade and Capitalism

Oh wait, a side track: speaking of trade, the Monopoly game is supposed to demonstrate how a capitalist system works. But IMO, it fails badly. For one, trade is limited. It is limited to your dice roll – I don’t want to buy a place like Old Kent Road⁴, because its returns and the probability of people stepping on that square is supremely low. But I will still buy it anyways, on the off-chance that it might be actually useful. There is no ‘free choice’ so to speak.

You could argue that I do not have to buy that property. But I would be at a loss if I do not buy any available property when I land upon it. Even if you take into account  the opportunity costs of buying another property (i.e. if you pay $60 for Old Kent Road, you might not be able to afford Mayfair or Park Lane, but the odds of that happening is very very low).

Within the first 5 rounds of the game, every single player will be busy buying property, of which, the right to buy is ‘bestowed’ upon by the roll of a dice. If that sounds familiar, you must have grown up in one of the communist/socialist countries (China, Russia, India…) where the State assigns you a piece of property⁵. It almost feels as though you’re playing a rent seeker, and that’s all to the game.

So much for the concept of free trade in Monopoly. Heh.

Inflation in Monopoly

Ah, back to inflation. After a few rounds in Monopoly, you’d realize that things are slowly and creepingly becoming more expensive. Soon enough, undeveloped property on the board and the Go To Jail (11% chance!) squares are the most sought after refuge points. Players would rather pay rent in underdeveloped lands because they are still cheaper than any of the developed properties on the board.

By then, the whole game becomes pointless. The gap between the rich and the poor become more and more apparent (hey! this is what’s happening in capitalist societies… maybe my judgement of Monopoly has been too quick afterall). Then the first player quits, and things continue to become dearer.

The night we played, the inflation rate for rent was roughly at 9% every round – that is to say, if you average it out, rents got more expensive by 9% each time a player passes Go. It could be because somehow the players were all very lucky, and kept getting liberal amounts of money for free from the bank, but IMO, the inflation rate per round is crazily high.

And oh, the rich-poor gap? It causes unease. The poor players would almost certainly lose interest in the game (which is not the point of the game), and the rich players would then also follow suit, because it would get really boring after 30 rounds or so (and the bank doesn’t go bankrupt!!!).

Anti-inflation?

I ranted this out to cfgt, and he suggested I write some scripts to correct this error. I toyed with a few ideas. Amongst them was to limit the supply of cashflow. I thought of doing so by creating a script that would generate an infinite number of players (or at least approaching infinity) and the money supply is limited.

Then I thought, scratch that – I might sound like von Misses here – but WTF was the central bank doing there, hoarding money anyways? And so I thought up a few new rules (which didn’t need a computer when playing monopoly):

1. At the start of the game, divide the money up and distribute it to all the players equally. Whatever that is left and undivisible is put in the middle of the pot.
2. Players do not collect $200 (or in the Singaporean board – $2000) when passing Go.
3. Tax is collected every few rounds – 10% of cash.
4. The tax money will be used to facilitate whatever Chance and Community Chest cards that require the player to collect money from the bank.
5. Free parking is just free parking. No jackpot.

This way, the money is kept flowing within the system, except the outgoing taxes. A better way would be to let the Bank be a player as well, except that the Bank isn’t allowed to buy previously unowned property.

Trade Rules Changes

I also considered a few rule changes to remedy the free trade problem. But then I thought about it – part of the fun in Monopoly is playing the glorified rent-seeker. So, the dice rolling should stay. But trade can happen at any time of the game. Houses/hotels do not need to be knocked down when trade happens. Players can trade anything of value (except their tokens).

And I suppose the most important thing to change would be to allow players to charge whatever rent they wish, but cannot go higher than the market price (i.e. the rent printed on the card). True, this doesn’t help that the players still do not have a choice on what squares they land on… but it would at least give an impression that a free market exists (hah, but the players still cannot flock to cheaper rent areas). Consider this as a cosmetic change, since most players would be unwilling to move from the ceiling (which is the market price), and other players do not have a choice.

In The End Though…

In the end, this chat says a lot about what I was planning to do, and why I decided to blog this instead..

Chewxy says:
suddenly 20 dollars mean nothing
the monetary system in monopoly is poor
there is no production
everyone is seeking rent (literally
it is a FAIL game

cfgt says:
dude
the game is for kids
to be played for fun

Chewxy says:
uh, kids should be taught the harsh realities of life

cfgt says:
even for adults
we should be playing it for fun
not making it so complex that you start calculating nonsense
I can imagine at some point you’d even start adding bonds
hahaaha
why don’t you just go make a mockup in VS

Chewxy says:
actually, that is a bloody good idea

cfgt says:
I dunno
I think games should have simple rules
which can be broken by cards
having rules on cards simplifies gameplay significantly without sacrificing depth
although it increases game development complexity
but that being said
playing certain games with you economists is no fun…

LOL, hence, no python script to add extra rules.

p/s: When I was writing this, by sheer coincidence, Tyler Cowen had an article called “What are the best games“, a response to Caplan. My answer – Settlers of Catan (someone recommended me Puerto Rico, but I haven’t played that). I’d have gotten a set myself if it wasn’t crazily expensive in Australia.

1. Park Lane and Mayfair for the British version; Park Place and Boardwalk for the American version; and Parliament House and Asian Cultural Centre for the Singaporean version which we were playing
2. Leicester Square, Coventry and Picadilly Circus for the British version; Atlantic and Ventnor Avenues and Marvin Gardens for the American version; and Jurong Bird Park, Singapore Zoo and Underwater World for the Uniquely Singapore version I was playing
3. Pentonville Road, Euston Road and Angel Islington for the British one; Connecticut, Vermont and Oriental Avenues for the American edition; and I couldn’t remember the Singaporean version (ah, eidetic memory no more eh)
4. for US visitors, that’s Meditaraenean Avenue
5. I know, technically, the State owns the property and you don’t have a right to it, but I can’t think of any socialist countries who do that. And you practically given the right to the land anyways

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 . . . → Read More: An After-Dinner Conversation]]> 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.