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[ by Charles Cameron — From Elkus to Furnish, Tolkien to Feynman, — too tired to write, not tired enough to sleep — ripe for the twitter feed ]
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The occasion of mirth:

I’m going to introduce an authorization to use Military Force against ISIL that is not limited by Time, Geography or Means.

— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) November 18, 2015

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Adam Elkus identifies the zone:

Shit's getting metaphysical https://t.co/5aVdUtbk0j

— Adam Elkus (@Aelkus) November 19, 2015

The mirth:

@GrahamBlog This seems to be in open defiance of the laws of physics, for starters.

— Stuffing McGee (@lumpyprole) November 18, 2015

and:

ISIS on Infinite Earths https://t.co/FY0C1ocZXN

— Zeddonymous (@ZeddRebel) November 19, 2015

and:

.@GrahamBlog "We will fight ISIS in all multiverses. Also in Narnia, Middle Earth, Second Life and Legoland." pic.twitter.com/VWIFSeSbmI

— Peter Donnelly (@peter_donnelly) November 18, 2015

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Meanwhile, Tim Furnish was there ahead of time, defending Tolkien & attacking IS:

Of all #ISIS atrocities, this is one of the worst…. #Tolkien #LordOfTheRings #hobbit #Rohirrim #socialmedia pic.twitter.com/wHf0fWc2Au

— Timothy Furnish, PhD (@Occidentaljihad) November 18, 2015

And now let’s get back to those laws of physics:

"If you don't like it, go somewhere else. To another universe, where the rules are simpler". – Richard Feynman on quantum mechanics

— Joby Otero (@JobyOtero) November 19, 2015

[ by Charles Cameron — Adam Elkus, Umberto Eco, Chris Crawford and John Robb ]
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Rock Paper Scissors, diagram by Enzoklop via Wikimedia

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Adam Elkus talks about strategy and games, in the inaugural Center for International Maritime Security “Real Time Strategy” podcast. What delighted me was his commentary on rock paper scissors between the 9.55 and 11 minute marks:

I would say that if I was to pick a single game for people to play in a structured way to understand a lot about strategy. Here’s, actually I’ll probably surprise a lot of you people here, and say they can probably just do well with rock paper scissors, in a sense that a lot of games have representational issues of how realistic or generalizable they are, and at the core a lot of strategy amounts to making choices about what to do without knowing what your opponent will do, and the game that’s one of the most atomic and basic in the way it represents that is rock paper scissors. But not just a one off game, a finite game, if you play repeated games of rock paper scissors, the way people win is by detecting sequential dependencies in the various choices that their opponent makes – so learning about the opponent over time, particularly their choices of what they’re going to field, is a very useful heuristic, is a very useful educational gesture..

Adam has more to say about rock paper scissors at his Zenpundit post, Master and (Drone) Commander?

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A couple of additional quotes, from an earlier post of mine in a private venue:

Here’s Umberto Eco in his Search for the Perfect Language:

Recent studies have established that unlike western thought, based on a two-valued logic (either true or false), Aymara thought is based on a three-valued logic, and is, therefore, capable of expressing modal subtleties which other languages can only capture through complex circumlocutions…

And here is Chris Crawford, from his justly famous Art of Computer Game Design:

The advantage of asymmetric games lies in the ability to build nontransitive or triangular relationships into the game. Transitivity is a well-defined mathematical property. In the context of games it is best illustrated with the rock-scissors-paper game. Two players play this game; each secretly selects one of the three pieces; they simultaneously announce and compare their choices. If both made the same choice the result is a draw and the game is repeated. If they make different choices, then rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper enfolds rock. This relationship, in which each component can defeat one other and can be defeated by one other, is a nontransitive relationship; the fact that rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper does not mean that rock beats paper. Notice that this particular nontransitive relationship only produces clean results with three components. This is because each component only relates to two other components; it beats one and loses to the other. A rock-scissors-paper game with binary outcomes (win or lose) cannot be made with more than three components. One could be made with multiple components if several levels of victory (using a point system, perhaps) were admitted.

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John Robb on The Future of Drone Warfare is worth conasidering here, too, and play nicely with more of Adam’s thoughts in the podcast.

See also my post, Of games III: Rock, Paper, Tank.

And I think I’d best stop here, and make a second post on rock-scissors-paper and threeness games in general.

[ by Charles Cameron — once again learning the language i already speak ]
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Okay, now the humor:

Pursuant to my interest in learning the language which is now my mother tongue — including such terms as sperg out and edgelord —– Adam Elkus today updated me on the concept of the Dank Meme —

Dank meme? It’s another of those serpent eats tail things:

— scrambling my mind in time for breakfast by introducing me to Thomas the Dank Engine:

I must admit I’m more used to his Tank Engine cousin:

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I’m a big fan of Gordon, the fictional anthropomorphic tender locomotive, by the way — it’s a clan thing.

[ by Charles Cameron — a comparative mapping of time and eternity? ]
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From my POV, this image is superb:

It demonstrates both the experience of the human chess player, who cannot in general play by a “brute force” method since the tree of choices exceeds his neuronal capacity, and the rational experience of the brute force method, illuminated in the case of a problem small enough in scale for artful representation.

And part of what’s interesting — wonderful — here is the fact that the chess board is graphically far less beautiful, I dare to say, than the representation of the corresponding tree of choices.

And it reminds me of nothing so much as Mark Lombardi‘s fine art “conspiracy” graphs, like this one:

— taken from Lombardi’s book, Global Networks, in which the artist draws the networks of influence surrounding eg oil and war in the Middle East — and which I’m sure can be found with a little effort for less than the $234.63 atvwhich Amazon currently offers a used paperback copy.

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With thanks to Adam Elkus for pointing me to this concise icon of the Garden of Forking Paths.

[ by Charles Cameron — counterintuitive insights are like eddies in group mind ]
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Adam Elkus said a while back that he wondered “if @pmarca and @hipbonegamer could team up for a double quote post.”

Well, I’m @hipbonegamer, and @pmarca is Marc Andreessen — and while we haven’t teamed up as such, the DoubleQuote above consists of a tweet from Marc two or three days ago, and a paragraph I ran across yesterday which seemed to echo Marc’s tweet from one of Alan Turing‘s posthumously published essays, and which is juxtaposed with Marc’s tweet as my response. Effectively, Marc made the first move on this two panel board, and I responded with the second — and that’s how this most basic form of my HipBone Games is played.

The degree of kinship between Marc’s tweet and Turing’s para is even stronger if you look up the link Marc offered in his tweet, which goes to a pre-pub paper by Jerker Denrell and Christina Fang titled Predicting the Next Big Thing: Success as a Signal of Poor Judgment, in which they suggest:

The explanation is that because extreme outcomes are very rare, managers who take into account all the available information are less likely to make such extreme predictions, whereas those who rely on heuristics and intuition are more likely to make extreme predictions. As such, if the outcome was in fact extreme, an individual who predicts accurately an extreme event is likely to be someone who relies on intuition, rather than someone who takes into account all available information. She is likely to be someone who raves about any new idea or product. However, such heuristics are unlikely to produce consistent success over a wide range of forecasts. Therefore, accurate predictions of an extreme event are likely to be an indication of poor overall forecasting ability, when judgment or forecasting ability is defined as the average level of forecast accuracy over a wide range of forecasts.

— and then goes on to demonstrate it:

Consistent with our model, both the experimental and field results demonstrate that in a dataset containing all predictions, an accurate prediction is an indication of good forecasting ability (i.e., high accuracy on all predictions). However, if we only consider extreme predictions, then an accurate prediction is in fact associated with poor forecasting ability.

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The counterintuitive nature of this prediction is delighful in its own right — there’s a sense in which “going against the tide” of what appears obvious is part of a wider pattern that includes knots in a plank and eddies in a stream, close cousins to von Kármán’s vortex streets. And I suspect it’s that built-in paradox that we perceive as “counterintuitive” that caught the eye and attention of Turing, Denrell and Fang, Marc Andreessen and myself. Once again, form, ie pattern, is the indicator of interest.

So this DQ is for Marc and Adam, raising a toast to Alan Turing, in playful spirit and with season’s greetings.