Bloodthirsty Pirates

Arr!! After discovering a buried treasure chest and hauling it on board, the five pirates of the Crying Skull open it to reveal 1000 gold coins. After the initial shock of gleaming metal wears off, the pirates quickly enter a fierce debate over how to divide up the money. The problem is that Captain Avery outranks first-mate Blackbeard, who outranks Cook, who outranks Drake, who outranks Edward.

They ultimately decide on a viciously democratic method of deciding how many coins each pirate gets:

1) The highest ranking pirate alive proposes a treasure distribution method.
2) Then all the pirates on board the ship (including the highest ranking pirate) vote Aye or Fuck No!
3) If a majority votes Aye, then the gold is divided according to the suggested system.
4) Otherwise, the highest ranking pirate is unceremoniously cast overboard (where he is immediately eaten by sharks), and the remaining pirates go back to step one.

Each pirate's proposal must be a simple non-random partitioning of the money among all remaining pirates. No breaking coins in half or melting them! For the purposes of argument, each pirate will not resist (successfully) being thrown overboard, and each pirate knows this. There are no tricks involved in the solution here.

Each pirate has the following priority of values:

1) Self-presevation.
2) Greed.
3) Bloodthirsty.

In other words, when each pirate is deciding which way to vote, they first try to vote in such a way that will maximize their chances of staying alive. If they will stay alive no matter which way they vote, they will vote to try to get the most number of coins possible. If their vote will not change this outcome either, they will vote for killing as many crewmates as possible. The pirates use the same set of priorites when coming up with thier proposals.

If a pirate needs to make a choice that the above value system is not clear on, they will flip a coin to help them decide.

Each pirate is infinitely logical and each one understands the motives of his fellow pirates and that each of his shipmates is also infinitely logical.

Which pirates die? How are coins divvyed up? Which pirate would you want to be? Try to figure this one out, the answer is cool.



HINT: Need a hint? If it gets down to two pirates, what happens? Work backwards.



LAST HINT: If there are two pirates left, it doesn't matter what Drake proposes, Edward will always vote No! which will result in the death of Drake and Edward's appropriation of the entire contents of the chest. Even if Drake proposes to give all the coins to Edward, he will vote No! since the pirates are bloodthirsty. Remember, since there is not a majority, the proposal is dismissed in the case of a tie. It is not defined above how Drake will vote, and indeed it doesn't matter.

Drake        Aye   Dead
Edward       No!   $1000

What if there are three pirates left? Remeber that each pirate knows what will hapeen if it gets down to two pirates. Try to work back up to five pirates before looking at the solution below.



Ok here's the solution. Let's say there are three pirates left. In order to stay alive, Cook must get a majority vote. He already has his own vote, so he only needs one more. In order to get another vote he must give Drake or Edward a better offer than what they get after Cook dies. Cook can't offer Edward a better deal, who will always vote No! so that he can watch Cook and then Drake die and eventually take all the money. Fortuantely, since Drake doesn't want to die, he will always vote Aye no matter what Cook's proposal is. So Cook's proposal is guaranteed to win. So how many coins should Cook give to Drake and Edward? Should he be nice? Since he is guaranteed to live, Cook falls back on his greed and takes all the money for himself. Since nothing is better than death, Drake will still vote for the proposal.

Cook         Aye   $1000
Drake        Aye   $0
Edward       No!   $0

If there are four pirates, Blackbeard must convince two of the three other pirates so he can get a 3-1 majority vote and stay alive. He cannot offer Cook a better deal who will always vote No!, so he msut offer Drake and Edward a better deal than the three-pirate scenario. To do this, he need only give them one coin each.

Blackbeard   Aye   $998
Cook         No!   $0
Drake        Aye   $1
Edward       Aye   $1

So at the very start of the whole process, for reasons that should be clear by now, Captain Avery will offer Cook $1, and either Drake or Edward (he flips a coin - let's say it comes out Drake) $2.

Avery        Aye   $997
Blackbeard   No!   $0
Cook         Aye   $1
Drake        Aye   $2
Edward       No!   $0

So Avery makes out like a scallywag! Unfortunately, no one dies. Here are some variants you can try that I came up with, feel free to post your solutions in the comments section, I'll post the solutions in a few weeks.

1) What if there are 1000 coins and six pirates? Seven pirates? Eight? Nine? If you are the lowest ranking pirate on the ship, how many total pirates would you want there to be on board (besides one or two)?

2) What happens if there's five pirates and only two $1 coins in the treasure chest?

3) Let's say that there are six pirates and only three coins, and two of the coins are worth $2 each. What's the highest denomination that the third coin could be if the first proposal is accepted?

4) Let's say that, in each pirate's proposal, he may decide to give each pirate a certain number of coins (as before) or propose that certain other pirates get thrown overboard as part of the proposal. What's the maximum number of pirates you can have on board if there is only one coin in the chest, and you want the first proposal to be approved?

Good luck!

Whether There's Weather

Chaos Theory is an idea that most people are at least somewhat familiar with. This is the theory where, if a butterfly flaps it's wings somewhere in China, it could effect the weather in Los Angeles. This idea seems intriguing, most people follow it, the butterfly's wings create a small whiff of air that interferes with a larger current of air, which affects a larger breeze, which keeps propagating up until it effects whether or not it rains in Los Angeles on a certain day.

I've been reading a book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an old book from the late eighties, and although now it is dated, it does offer a more complete picture of chaos theory than what I had assumed. The most interesting revelation I had was the discovery that if a butterfly flaps its wings somewhere in China, it WILL affect the weather in Los Angeles.



The theory goes like this. Let's say we make an exact copy of planet Earth with every air particle in the exact same place. Now let's say that a butterfly flaps its wings on Earth #1, but not on Earth #2. So now on Earth #1 a group of air particles has been displaced, and let's say that this is the only initial difference between these two Earths.

The key concept here is that from this moment onward, if we compare the positions of each air particle on the two Earth's, they will never be exactly the same. The result of the displaced particles never gets "drowned out". Instead, their area of effect only widens as they interfere with neighboring air particles. Even the slightest, smallest change in particle position will eventually manifest itself on a greater scale by influencing the complex behavior of local turbulences. This will create a difference in local air flow that will compound with time. These differences will in turn effect larger air currents which will translate to even greater differences in the air particle positions of the two Earths.

Inevitably, the differences will affect weather patterns on larger and larger scales until, given enough time, the overall global picture of low and high pressures, jet stream locations and developing hurricanes, tornadoes, etc will look completely different for the two Earths. This isn't a maybe, if a butterfly flaps its wings on one Earth and not on the other, the two Earths will eventually have irreconcilable global weather.



Here's another way to look at it. Meteorologists use temperature, pressure, humidity and air speed data from across the country to predict weather for the next few days using weather modeling computer programs. They are able to predict the weather more reliably for a greater number of days if they have temperature and pressure data points every square mile than if they have data points for every ten square miles.

But lets say they have data points at every square foot across the planet. They might be able to predict the weather a few weeks or a month out. However, over time tiny eddies within each square foot that don't appear in the data set manifest themselves in greater and greater ways until finally the overall weather pattern is unpredictable a certatin number of days later. This analogy works for square inches, and on downwards.

Moral Flexibility

Morality is one of those vague concepts that's defined loosely enough to provide hours of meaningless debate. Allow me to clarify the issue here, and hopefully you can shut down anyone who poses vague hypothetical morality questions.

I recently tried to take this morality quiz: http://www.philosophersmag.com/bw/games/taboo.htm Here's the first question:

A small boy is playing happily on a swing in a local playground when an older girl pushes him off and hurts him for no other reason than that she wants to play on the swing. Are her actions morally wrong?

The options are Yes or No. This question is frustrating, because it is not clear what is being asked, is it asking:

1) From the girl's perception of humanity's viewpoint, are the girl's actions moral?
2) From my perception of humanity's viewpoint, are the girl's actions moral?
3) From the abstract viewpoint of the girls' relevant community, are the girl's actions moral?
4) From the girl's perception of the viewpoint of the girl's relevant community, are the girl's actions moral?
5) From the girl's personal viewpoint, are the girl's actions moral?
6) From my perception of the viewpoint of my local community, are the girl's actions moral?
7) From my personal viewpoint, are the girl's actions moral?

Morals are a set of guidelines that define what behavior is right or wrong. The problem is that each person has a different set of guidelines that they are using. These guidelines must be justified: with a set of beliefs, religious or otherwise; by adopting what they perceive to be the generally accepted collective morality of the populace at the local, national, and/or global levels; or with a combination of the two. Got it?

So obviously whether or not the girl's actions are moral depends entirely on what specifc question 1-7 we're asking. Let's discuss the differences between these viewpoints.

Whenever someone asks: "Is it moral if..." what they're really asking is if the behavior exhibited by the scenario is right or wrong when set against some moral guidelines. It is not always obvious which moral guidelines they are referring to, so it is important to narrow it down:

Are we talking about personal, local community, national, global, or humanity based moral guidelines?
Are we talking about how my or the involved person's morals would evaluate the situation?
Are we talking about actual or perceived morals (for the cases of collective morals)?

It is important to distinguish actual from perceived morals when talking about the behavior of other people. A person's actions may be moral according to what they perceive to be the moral guidelines of a community, but may not hold up against the actual moral guidelines of the collective community. It is important to note that the actual collective morality of a collection of people is a worthy topic of debate.

Most people justify their morals at least partially upon what they believe are the morals of their local communites. Because of this correlation, it is clear why some people are confused and don't see the difference between personal and community morality. This problem is exacerbated by what I believe is the common perception that, based on the moral guidelines of humanity, it is not moral to not base your morals at least partly on the morals of humanity.

Since it is not clear what is being asked in the quiz, I refused to ignore the absense of a "You're not making sense" selection and optioned to vote with my feet. The web site seems to know that the quiz is ambiguous but I don't think they realize that this makes the quiz useless.

Stupid People Shouldn't Breed

Long post with Ranting... Enjoy!

Eugenics is defined as the study of methods of improving genetic qualities by selective breeding (especially as applied to human mating).

Let that sink in.

This science was explored and generally accepted in the first half of the 20th century in America, England and Germany. Law makers used scientific guidance to pass laws calling for the sterilization of criminals, the institutionalized, and anyone determined to exhibit "bad" genes. The Supreme Court upheld at least one sterilization law. This actually happened. Thousands were victims in America. Other eugenic tactics to deter mating of the lower classes and to stifle immigration were employed. Apparently this caught on too well in Nazi Germany, which could be said was the extreme culmination of this science. After WWII eugenics declined in popularity but continued on, and the ideas are still around today.

The idea behind eugenics seems to be based on the following logical progresison (from this popular article):

1. Human intelligence is largely hereditary.

2. Civilization depends totally upon innate intelligence. Without innate intelligence, civilization would never have been created. When intelligence declines, so does civilization.

3. The higher the level of civilization, the better off the population. Civilization is not an either-or proposition. Rather, it's a matter of degree, and each degree, up or down, affects the well-being of every citizen.

4. At the present time, we are evolving to become less intelligent with each new generation. Why is this happening? Simple: the least-intelligent people are having the most children.

5. Unless we halt or reverse this trend, our civilization will invariably decline. Any decline in civilization produces a commensurate increase in the collective "misery quotient."

Please reread that and formulate your own opinion. On the surface, it seems to make a strange sort of sense. In reality it's swiss cheese. Let me address each item:



1. Human intelligence is largely hereditary.

To say that human intelligence is largely hereditary assumes that intelligence is testable. First of all, you cannot test human intelligence. Intelligence must always be tested using some context. It's impossible to distinguish in testing, knowledge from intelligence.

Also, I believe there is no limit to any individual's potential intelligence. Intelligence can be improved over time. The brain is adaptive. To have a world view that teaches that people have limits would be untrue and tragically suppressive for those who believed it.

2. Civilization depends totally upon innate intelligence. Without innate intelligence, civilization would never have been created. When intelligence declines, so does civilization.

I don't think so. All that a civilization seems to require is cooperation and communication. However I will concede that intelligence is important, let's move on.

3. The higher the level of civilization, the better off the population. Civilization is not an either-or proposition. Rather, it's a matter of degree, and each degree, up or down, affects the well-being of every citizen.

First of all, it seems as though "civilization" is used as though it is a comparative utopia to the alternative. This may be conceptually true in most people's minds, but what is meant by civilization here? Note that the implication here is that civilization has no negative effects. What is the ultimate logical end of civilization? Consider if one end of the spectrum is the chaotic wilderness of anarchy. So the other end is bliss? Hardly. It is unemotional and Matrix-like. Think about that one.

But this is all besides the point. The real point is... fuck civilization. It is not the #1 priority of the human race. What is...? Survival. And guess what, civilization has only been a recent phenomenon in our genetic journey. It's working really well right now to ensure our survival. And guess what else? If it's working so well to ensure our survival, and a drop in the global IQ of the planet would drop our level of civilization. ...it will be corrected and the global IQ will go up again. That's because.... Evolution is still with us. It never left. It's a fact of life, and we are lifeforms. Period. And life only cares about one thing: survival, not civilization.

So my main point here is that to think in terms of protecting a civilization is nearsighted, and not honest with what is really the best for the human race in the long term. So what is beneficial to us in the long term? No one knows. So as long as we don't know, we may as well try to make things better in the near term, right? Ok, fine. However, do we really need more civilization? Is there a point at which more civilization is bad? Doesn't civilization just faciliate organized destruction (ie war)? Is the population better off? Maybe in the short term, but evolution will tell.

4. At the present time, we are evolving to become less intelligent with each new generation. Why is this happening? Simple: the least-intelligent people are having the most children.

Again intelligence is testable here. And does this last statement make sense? Hmm.

Let's say that people with low intelligence are predisposed somehow to breed. Let's say they have always been. Ok, so under this scheme, it is advantageous for the breeders to occasionally spit out intelectuals who are effectively sterile. This is obviously extreme, but the point is made, which is that intelligent people do not need to breed for low intelligence people to produce more intelligent offspring, as long as DNA can allow for it, and I submit it can and does.

Ok, but let's say that people with lower intelligence aren't less likely to mate, but they ARE less likely to not use contraceptives. Ok, so this means that intelligent people are not having as many kids. Hmm... so the solution seems to be in the intelectuals lap, so to speak. The supposedly intelligent people aren't procreating? Are they really that intelligent?

Ok, so maybe intelectuals don't want to increase the number of people on our already overpopulated planet. So this really boils down to a population control issue. That is a more worthy cause to address. Simple contraceptive education can prevent many of these accidental pregnancies, and level the playing field for everyone to get some play.

Intelligence all of a sudden has nothing to do with it, it's really a knowledge problem. And yes, having higher intelligence will leave you more likely to obtain contraceptive knowledge, but since equal education could solve the supposed slide of intelligence, it should be employed over other methods by eugeneticists.

5. Unless we halt or reverse this trend, our civilization will invariably decline. Any decline in civilization produces a commensurate increase in the collective "misery quotient."

What the hell are they talking about? What's a "misery quotient"? Pseudo-science in action? What would Buddha say about the misery quotient?

Ok, so the standard of living, civilization, will decline if we don't do something. I get it. It does sound dreadful. Stupid people fucking with our gene pool. But guess what? It's not just our gene pool, it's theirs too. These believers need to get it through their thick skulls. Despite the delusions of enriched life and greater good this evil may offer, there is this whole problem of basic human rights. The right to fuck uncontrollably, be stupid, and use the power of the masses to add suffering to all. And if this endangers our survival, evolution will correct it.

If we gloss over the rest of the rhetorical carnage, the fact remains, people have the right to do what they please, and it is the result of civilization that people have the unholy means to initiate policies for the supposed good of all that strip basic rights away from members of their own species. This civilization sounds more like a dystopia to me, a misery quotient of 12.

http://www.eugenics.net/index.shtml

http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/

E = m * (c + cesium factor)^2

Back in 2000 researchers at Princeton performed an experiment in which they claim they were able to transmit a pulse of light faster than c (186,000 miles per second), which is the maximum speed of light as proposed by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

I find special relativity massively interesting since it radically redefines our picture of how the universe works. The most important implication is that there is no notion of absolute rest in the universe. The velocity of an object is not an intrinsic quality of that object. In order to measure velocity, you must measure the relative velocity of two objects with respect to each other.

Einstein also said that nothing (not even light) could travel faster than the speed c. This is a requirement in Einstein's equations. If information could be transmitted faster than c then the laws of causality would break down. If in one reference frame, information propagates faster than c, than in another reference frame traveling at some sufficiently near c relative velocity, the reception of the information would occur before the actual transmission! This causes all sorts of problems since now mechanisms in the second reference frame could theoretically receive the information and send it back to the transmitting location before it transmits.



In the Cesium experiment, the beginning of the pulse of light (which can be thought of as a wave) touches the front of a transparent chamber filled with excited cesium gas. Sometime after this happens (the amount of time is unclear in the reports of the experiment I have seen) the wave leaves the cesium chamber.

Now the light waves consist of troughs and peaks, like an ocean wave, and the interesting thing is that the peak of the wave is propagated first out of the end of the chamber, whereas a trough of the wave enters the chamber first. So there seems to be a phase shift going on here. Now it is said that it is the transmission of the peak of the wave that occurs faster than c through the Cesium chamber.

But is this really information? I would say no. If the front of the light pulse (ignoring whether it is a trough or peak) does not travel faster than c, than there is no problem here. This is because the frequency of the light pulse is detectable in any part of the waveform. You don't need to see the peak to determine the pulse's frequency. As a result, the effect of the phase shift does not boost the information rate faster than c since the frequency is detectable the instant the wave is received, regardless of its phase.

It is not clear from what I have read if the cesium actually accelerates the front of the wave faster than c within the chamber. If it does then I would be highly skeptical since it truly would be a revolutionary experiment. It seems there is still lots of debate regarding this experiment, on the Internet at least. Many have complained that the details of the experiment have not been stated explicitly. The reality may be that the researchers are still trying to explain the phenomena they observed.

The Search for More Money

So Stars Episode III will be released soon and I plan on not seeing it.



I thought Episode I was mediocre. It was supposed to be a story about a boy. So why does Anakin come off as hollow? I feel like the acting was a little weak, I wasn't expecting much since he was just a kid, but at the same time how much can you do with lines like "Wizard!" We are not introduced to any of the kid's motives, and as a result, he is a one-dimensional ace pod racer.

However, his future is revealed by the supporting cast. All the Jedis, especially Obi-Wan are played very well. Queen Amidala and Anakin's mother also lend insight to the boy's future. Unfortunately, the film is also packed with inappropriate Jar-Gun.



The pod race was gloriously unspectacular. Remember the asteroid scene in Empire? The action was less than a minute, but it was way more awesome than the pod race. It and the Gungun battle is just time filler. Do we care what the result is? No, because we don't care about the boy. The best part of the movie was Anakin leaving home, and also the light saber battle against Darth Maul.

In short, the first prequel was not up to the standard of the originals, but I forgave it since it was trying to establish the characters and I figured the next movie would make up for it.



Sadly, Episode II was not a departure from the formula. This time the plot is even thinner, and the older Anakin is fundamentally unlikeable. How can anyone trust this crybaby? In my opinion, Episode III won't be a tragedy, it will be simple resolution, with all the main characters finally seeing the plainly obvious, that Anaking is a weak little maggot, and getting their rewards for being foolish.

Notice I said nothing about the CGI in these movies? I was restraining myself. The CGI sucks.

Unless the reviews are through the roof and Lucas picks up the mess he's made, all the mediclorians in the world won't get me to the theatre this summer.

Green Mushroom Award: Quake

The recipient of the first Green Mushroom Award is Quake. Quake is at once beautiful, frightening, and an absolute gore fest. Released in 1996 under the veil of much hype, it seriously delivered. It swept like a storm across college campuses and the rest of the gaming world at a time when the Internet was really starting to take off. As a result, it had a huge impact on the future of multiplayer killing.



Quake is the first truly 3-D first-person shooter. It's predecessors, games like Wolfenstein 3d and Doom were damn good games, and Quake plays very similarly. The player runs around shooting monsters, finding keys, opening doors, and trying to locate the exit. However the Quake 3-D environment allows for subtle improvements in the game interface and mechanics that really add up. Leaping between moving platforms, negotiating moving walls and floors, swimming underwater, dodging spikes shooting out of the walls, bouncing grenades off surfaces, being able to look up and down (and with the mouse), and being able to jump are all improvements over the previous ID games that make the game more immersive and more, well, 3-D.

Update: It should be noted that some pseudo-3d games like Marathon and Duke Nukem 3d had some of these game features as well.



The graphics and sound in Quake are awesome. I have not seen a game able to duplicate its gothic/medieval/futuristic atmosphere. At the time, the graphics were state-of-the-art with more detailed texture maps and 3-D models for the weapons and monsters. Most striking is the gothic-dungeon 3-D architecture with arches, spires and grates all casting dark shadows. The great Trent Reznor provided music and sound effects as well as ambient dripping and wind howling. In addition, due to the robust programming effort, all of this could run at lightning speed, offering great framerates on slower computers.



However, what really makes this game incredible is the infinite replay value provided by the multiplayer mode. Games like Marathon provided a featured multiplayer mode, but this was limited to 8 players on a LAN. For the first time, raging orgies of carnage between 16+ players across corners of the Internet were possible with sprays of blood and fragmented body parts flying from the victims of well timed rocket launcher attacks. And since the Quake code is open source, interesting server settings (less gravity) and game modes (capture the flag, team fortress) have been pioneered. In addition, since third party level editors are readily available, anyone can create their own levels.



It is not an exaggeration to say that Quake laid the foundations for every 3-D first person shooter to come. Games like Halflife, Unreal, Tribes, and Halo all build upon the multiplayer gibfests that emerged in Quake's heyday. And for me, Quake still delivers. Despite the fresh graphics that recent takes on the genre provide, the simple gameplay and ominous atmosphere make Quake the best choice when the goal is pure chaotic killing.