[ExI] 2/3 game, round 1

[spike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org 
> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of 
> Mike Dougherty
> ...
> 
> I'm not really sure what it is about games like these that 
> seem to make us want to understand their mechanics only so we 
> may find increasingly clever ways to exploit them  (ok, i 
> mean "cheat")  Or was that were you were heading, spike?


It is puzzling that the notion of exploiting or cheating is applicable in
any way to the game as proposed.  There is no money at stake here, so we are
in it to learn.  Do exploit away, if it is educational.  {8-]  I find it
interesting how it led to a cascade of ideas.  

I first heard this proposed as the 1 sigma game: the winner is the one
closest to one sigma below the average.  But I made it into the 2/4 average
game, because not everyone knows how to estimate a standard deviation, but
everyone knows how to divide by three and multiply by two.  The phenom of
racing to the bottom led me to add the closest-without-going-under rule.
Then Emlyn's system grieving gave me the idea of setting an arbitrary play
money wager with each round, matching all the previous, then scoring it
based on ratio of wins to losses, which makes it scale independent.

Excellent!  This feels a little like the early days of Ideas Futures, when
we had a chat group dedicated to that topic.  The group eventually fizzled
when real money Ideas Futures arrived, and then everyone kept their
intellectual property to themselves.  So do let us not propose a real money
version of ESTA.  It would spoil the fun.  

I am making up a spreadsheet to do the scoring for you, so you can decide on
a strategy in future rounds without needing to do the mechanics.  More
later.

spike