Older blog entries for Bram (starting at number 58)

13 Feb 2003 (updated 14 Feb 2003 at 06:59 UTC) »
CodeCon

Pre-registration for CodeCon is closing on the 15th. After that you'll have to register at the door, which costs more.

We've got a really great program this year, including a presentation on Advogato. Also notable is a panel on version control, including representatives from BitKeeper, Subversion, and OpenCM.

CodeCon is also one of the the best places to meet all the local bay area open source hackers. I hope to see everyone there.

I've created a Codeville tutorial which demonstrates its cool features quite succinctly.

Secret Project Unveiled

My secret project is now ready to be seen. It's Codeville, a version control system.

One thing no longer nagging at my brain, a million left to go.

A public service announcement

Space travel is dangerous. Please take careful consideration before boarding any space vehicles.

Abstract Games Magazine is having a game design competition with the theme of simultaneous play. I came up with the following a little while ago, but it turns out I missed the submission deadline, so I'm posting it here.

The game is called Straights and Queers (this potentially uncomfortable metaphor is by far the easiest way of understanding the rules, so please bear with me). It's played on the following board -

       __
    __/  \__
 __/  \__/  \__
/  \__/  \__/  \
\__/  \__/  \__/
/  \__/  \__/  \
\__/  \__/  \__/
/  \__/  \__/  \
\__/  \__/  \__/
   \__/  \__/
      \__/

There are two players, the straights and the queers. Each player has two pieces, one male and one female.

On each turn, both players move any pieces they have on the board and place any pieces which aren't on the board, which happens at the beginning of the game or when a piece is captured. Both players write down what their moves are without seeing the opponent's moves, then reveal what the moves are.

Pieces move to any adjacent hexagon. They cannot move to a hexagon which another piece is currently on, even if that piece belongs to the same side. Pieces can be placed on any empty hexagon, but may not be placed onto a hexagon currently containing a piece, even one belonging to the same side. A player may not move both of their pieces onto the same hexagon. When pieces move, they must move to a different spot, they cannot remain in the same place.

If two pieces wind up on the same spot, then a capture happens. If the two pieces are of the same gender, then the queer captures, otherwise the straight captures. Additionally, in the rare case where a piece winds up in a corner with all three adjacent spots occupied and hence no legal turn on the next move, then it is captured. Captured pieces are returned to the side they belong to be placed on the next move.

The first player to perform ten captures wins.

That's all the rules. I think this game is made interesting by the simultaneous play despite the extraordinarily small board. Perhaps I went too far on board smallness, rendering the game brute forceable. However, there are classic games involving some chance and secret information which have extremely simple positions, such as yachtzee and texas hold'em poker. Texas hold'em turns out to be completely out of brute force range, but yachtzee is emminently brute forceable in the solo case optimizing average score, and on paper looks just barely solveable for the two-player case trying to optimize chances of winning.

I'm curious to see if the entrants into the sumultaneous play competition generally have very limited board positions. I'd also like to know if anyone has actually set about brute forcing yachtzee. If anyone knows of such efforts please tell me.

The CodeCon 2003 program is now announced, and registration is open.

CodeCon 2003 will be February 22-24, noon-6pm at Club NV in San Francisco, California.

All presentations will given by one of the active developers, and accompanied by a functional demo.

CodeCon presentations will include:

  • Advogato - Good metadata, even when under attack, based on a trust metric

  • Alluvium - p2p media streaming for low-bandwidth broadcasters

  • Bayonne - Telephony application services for freely licensed operating systems

  • Cryptopy - pure Python crypto

  • DeepGreen - Agent Oriented investment analysis designed to be self-funding

  • GNU radio - Hacking the RF Spectrum with Free Software and Hardware

  • HOTorNOT - People submit their picture for others to rate from 1 to 10

  • Hydan - Steganographically conceal a message into an executable application

  • Khashmir - A distributed hash table library upon which applications can be built

  • Mixminion - A next-generation anonymous remailer

  • Neurogrid - Decentralized Fuzzy Meta-Data Search

  • OpenRatings - An open source professor ratings engine

  • Paketto Keiretsu - Interesting and Useful Techniques for TCP/IP Networking

  • YouServ - A communal web-hosting system for the masses

  • A panel on version control

Lance Fortnow links to some interesting commentary on P vs. NP.

I found out today the standard terminology for my favorite conjecture -

Conjecture: The circuit complexity of the k-sum problem is at least n ** k.

This directly implies that the 4SUM problem is quadratic. I believe that the 3SUM problem is also quadratic (as does everybody), but that the reasons for that are much deeper and more complex.

It also implies P != NP, so we can rest assured that noone has proven it yet.

Given the obviousness of this conjecture I'm sure circuit complexity people have already spent considerable time on it and just haven't gotten anywhere, although curiously googling for '3sum' and 'circuit complexity' doesn't turn up anyone else musing on the subject.

Here is a good list of open problems to spend time on.

I haven't posted much lately because I've been spending my blogging time on my new secret project, which will be unveiled when I get a proof of concept working.

XML people don't seem to realize that when I say I'm on the de facto standards committee I'm not kidding.

ladypine: Neither of the examples you cite show a failure of pareto efficiency, in fact quite the opposite. I'll explain.

In the case of an auction, any price below the second price wouldn't be pareto efficient, because the seller could sell the item to someone else at a higher price and both the seller and the new buyer would be happier. Pareto efficiency isn't unique in this case, because the high bidder purchasing with any price between the first and second bids is pareto efficient.

(Yes it's possible to make more money selling on ebay by setting your minimum bid increment to a humongous value. At some point I'll get around to writing about ebay at length.)

The reason to go with the second price instead of some amount more (which is how ebay does things, irritatingly enough) is to make it less gameable, however some gameability remains. Specifically, the seller could inflate the minimum price to anywhere between the first and second price and be better off. This is impractical under many circumenstances, but is very important with only two (or one!) bidder. Note that gameability is only a problem in the situations in selecting between different pareto efficient solutions, so there's no weakness to it as a technique here.

In the case of stable marriage, there is a straightforward algorithm for finding all stable solutions based on pareto efficiency. For each person A, if A's first place choice is B, then for every C which appears below A on B's list of preferences, scratch B off C's list and C off B's list (this is justified because if B were paired with C then we could change the pairings to have B paired with A, and both A and B would be happier). Repeat until you can't simplify any more. At this point, participants will be in cycles, in which B is first on A's list, C is first on B's list, D is first on C's list, etc, until we get to A being first no somebody's list. Because of the gender difference, these cycles will always be of even length, so for each cycle we have to decide whether the males get their first choice or the females get their first choice. Note that this is a choice between different pareto efficient configurations, the appropriateness of pareto efficiency as a criterion is uncontroversial.

In practice, even on random data, this technique does such a good job of pairing up people that there's hardly any arbitrariness in final pairings. In the medical example a study was done and found that only a miniscule number of students would be assigned elsewhere in students's choice, so the algorithm was switched to that for good PR.

A bit off-topic, I'd like to point out that It's utterly stupid that 'the match' was so controversial for so long. I at one point solved stable marriage on my own because it's an interesting problem, coming up with the above algorithm, and after a little bit of testing realized how little difference male versus female choice makes. That was only a few days's worth of work. Let this be a lesson to everyone that if there's a big controversy which a simple study can shed a lot of light on, do the damn study.

The stable roommates problem doesn't always have a pareto efficient solution, for example there might be a loser who's put last on everyone else's list of priorities, but the above technique can be used to make an algorithm which works very well. Note that stable marriage is just a special case of stable roommates where all the males rank all females above all males and all females rank all males above all females.

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