Banbury Cross

Prisoner's Dilemma is a classical example in Game Theory (originally proposed by by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950s) which demonstrates why people might sometimes choose not to cooperate although doing so appears to be in their best interest.

The game involves two prisoners, lets call them Joe and Jim, accused of some poorly evidenced crime. They are being interrogated separately and the police - in order to elicit admission of guilt - presents them with a simple choice: either deny all charges (cooperate with each other) or confess to the crime (effectively betraying your partner). The resulting 4 possibilities come with the following sentences:

Joe confesses, Jim denies: Joe walks free, Jim gets 1 year
Joe denies, Jim confesses: Joe gets 1 year, Jim walks free
they both deny: they both get 1 month
they both confess: they both get 5 months

Now ponder what you would do. Would you choose your own selfish interest for the off chance that your partner in crime has character and won't rat you out in which case you walk free and your buddy does some hard time, or would you cooperate with your fellow culprit, hoping he does the same and you both end up with a mild sentence? Note that although mutual cooperation is clearly the way to go (in terms of the overall sentence sum), many a low life would go for the riskier option even though it may not pan out.

Now let's switch focus to the whole planet.

Due to the explosive growth, humanity found itself in a similar position at the onset of this millennium. We have a dwindling supply of oil and it's up to us how we'll manage it. It is a known fact that wars waste more resources than peaceful activity. Military vehicles are not known for their great gas mileage. That puts us Earthlings in a long term dilemma similar to the one described above. Either we will cooperate with each other, put our disagreements on hold and try to make the best use of whichever oil we still have left. Or we will go into wars, wasting the crude reserves at much higher speed, hoping against hope that such wars will leave us with a slightly larger portion than would be our fair share. But - much like with prisoners above - if we ALL choose this destructive strategy, we will all end up with a much harsher sentence at the end. When the wars are done and over, we may realize that all that oil we fought over so hard is simply gone. Mindlessly wasted in the carburetors of our beloved tank divisions.

It will be interesting to see which way the humanity chooses. Judging by the intensity of sabre rattling in the Middle East, it will be a close call.

May wisdom prevail.

When I was in college, the Prague jazz scene was struggling in an intellectual twilight of the decaying communist regime. Hidebound apparatchiks had never much enthusiasm for free flowing art forms. But there was one band whose performance was shining through any tarpaulin that the overzealous censors tried to pull over it. It was called Naima and besides the standard trio of piano, bass and drums it featured rather unusual combination of electric violin and saxophone. The sound of this quintet was out of this world - riveting, engaging and sparkling as a pint of vintage Cabernet rolling playfully in a Riedel Vinum glass. Their adventures in the land of harmony filled you with that kind of inflammatory beauty that made you wanna get up and tear the benches off their bolts and hurl them into the Universe together with some choice primordial screams.

But alas, all that syncopation took place in the mid 80s - there was no YouTube and no recordable CDs then - and the communist recording industry wasn't exactly gaga over projects that made little effort to celebrate heroic achievements of Lenin and Stalin, not to mention the fact that the whole genre of jazz was still viewed as a poster child for the Western decadence. Hence no recordings of these amazing journeys have ever been made available to public. If any existed, they disappeared in the tumult of the modern world without a trace. Often when I search the racks in the CD store, I wonder how many hidden gems have been hiding undiscovered and unreleased in the vaults of private collections and archives.

And that's how it is with everything on this planet. Not every great idea makes it to the market and, conversely, commercial success is not a guarantee of quality. If you want to find something unique and refreshing, you may have to open your eyes and search in places well off the beaten path.

I went to Florida recently with a friend of mine and took tons of photos there. Tampa, Naples, Miami, the Everglades, the Keys - the whole enchilada. But my very favorite photograph of the whole trip did not showcase one of these magnets of tourism industry bathing in the splendor of Florida sunshine. It was taken at night and with nothing more attractive in it than the back a garden variety hotel in Miami Beach.

Yet - possibly because it does not have any recognizable dominant to distract you with - it exudes an unusual air of subdued tension, the natural anarchy of a tree portrayed against a stern backdrop of concrete functionalism. What a strange combination thought I - but at the end of the day it turned out surprisingly well - kind of like mixing the sound of saxophone and the electric violin on that poorly lit stage in totalitarian Czechoslovakia.

When I was looking at that photograph at home a couple of weeks later, it occurred to me that "Somneroy's Mesh" would be a great name for it. Mind you, I do not know any Somneroy, living or dead, Google does not know what somneroy is (which actually is a remarkable feat), yet - as I was looking at the picture - those words spontaneously popped in my mind without any indication what they might mean or where they came from. No memory was associated with them. But I bet they came from the same rogue lobe which is responsible for placing violins and saxophones on the stage next to each other. That lobe which doesn't care whether things make sense.

And you know what - sometimes it works out better that way.

Everyone who ever helped setting up a voting system for the class president selection knows that aggregating people's opinions - which is what election really is - is an ungrateful and deeply ambiguous undertaking. We all have our little internal preferences and opinions, but compounding them into a meaningful ranking that would reflect everyone's opinion is where the trouble lurks. Do we just take the person who is favored by most, or do we select the person who generates the least amount of opposition. Should it be winner-takes-all or should we give some points also to people on lower rungs of individual preferences? And how about people who exclaim: I like candidate A, except if he can't win I'd prefer C over B, unless A endorses B or B stops wearing those horrible purple shirts with yellow flowers. Aggregate that!

A little research on "voting systems" reveals a hopelessly muddled jungle swelling in the midst of human efforts to govern themselves - a timeless arena for mud slinging, palace intrigue and dirty politics of all kind. Yep, voting is a mess. A royal mess to be exact. There is in fact a precise mathematical proposition (google "Arrow's Theorem") which may give your foggy doubts about the whole system an elegant quantitative skeleton.

The other day, while poking my wikipedia stick at this sagging underbelly of democracy, I unearthed an archaic system that almost made me laugh. It pertained to a very peculiar and time consuming procedure that was devised for the election of the Doge of Venice in early Middle Ages (apparently the elders in this part of the Mediterranean did not have access to cable or an Xbox in those days). Without going into gory details of the mindbogglingly elaborate routine, one thing worth mentioning is that the multiphase operation contained a great element of randomness. It was essentially a sequence of filters which alternated selecting candidates and casting lots - all designed with the aim to level the playing field and prevent the largest families from having an undue influence.

Not that I would want to implement such monstrosity in our modern and highly efficient times - after all reducing the primary season in the US to merely ... well... some 18 months is an achievement well worth preserving - but it did make me think that maybe introducing a bit of randomness into the way we choose our representatives would not be such a bad idea.

Let's consider a hypothetical voting system in which the candidates are chosen randomly with a dice which is biased according to the election results - which means that those who command higher support of the electorate will be given better odds. As a simple example let me use an urn with colored balls as a random number generator. So let us suppose that the election results are in and they read as follows (in parenthesis I'll show the resulting bias):

1. candidate A - 60% (gets 6 red balls in the urn)
2. candidate B - 30% (gets 3 green balls in the urn)
3. candidate C - 10% (gets 1 yellow balls in the urn)

Now under normal circumstances the candidate A would get the position, period. But not with our brave new randomized system. We will just record the preferences and place the colored balls in the urn accordingly. The candidate A will still be the most favored to win the election - after all, six balls out of ten are his - but the other candidates now have a fighting chance as well. Ready? OK, now let an innocent child draw a ball from the urn and voila - your new senator is born.

We hear a number of complaints about too much money in politics these days. Many are quipping that elections have been effectively replaced by auctions. The underlying statistics of this new system would make it harder for corporations to buy candidates since they would be reluctant to waste money on people who might not make the random stage. It would also allow voters to make more honest decisions. Many people are afraid to vote for their true choice because they worry they would have wasted their vote on someone who does not have a chance against the perceived front runner. Introducing randomness would thus support non mainstream candidates who could still win in the random stage.

(one technical detail: we don't really want people who got say only 10 votes to have even a minuscule chance of taking the big prize - so to prevent obvious risks lets say that there would be a 5% minimum to qualify for the urn stage)

If you are still puzzled why we would let randomness enter the fragile world of our democracy, think about how many times we discovered things randomly - penicillin, chocolate chip cookies, teflon, brandy, microwave come to mind - even America herself was stumbled upon when Columbus searched for a different route to India. Or think about how many times you took a random turn in an unknown city and discovered a great photo op that wasn't mentioned in any of the glossy brochures. How many times did you slip into a great pool of fun just following a friend's hunch? The point is that our world has become so complex that it isn't easy even for experts to figure out what the correct form of governance should be. Do we loosen our immigration policy or do we tighten it? Should the central bank increase the interest rates or slash them? Who can really fathom all the implications of potential tax hikes? The labyrinth of causes and effects had long ago grown beyond the comprehension limits of a single mind. So maybe letting a little randomness in would make us realize something new. Something that would make our society happier in the long run.

Oh, and one more advantage. If a Doge of Venice ever discovers the time machine, he will feel right at home in our beautiful 21st century.

If Florida were a lizard, the Keys would be its master tongue probing the warm waters of the surrounding oceans for juicy morsels. Strung on the US Highway 1 like Caribbean pearls, the Keys are an elongated archipelago gently arcing in the southeasterly direction and reaching the farthest point some 100 miles away from its entrance. Despite the common origin, each individual island maintains a unique character so that the whole necklace offers a little bead of fun for everyone.

At the very beginning, you'll find a colorful coral reef accompanied by a series of fishermen's havens and heavens. And as you drive inwards you discover other hidden gems - secluded marina here, a thick coppice of mangrove trees there, a herd of dwarf deer, maybe a quaint backyard cluttered with tropical bric-a-brac or a family restaurant where you can have a fish a thousand ways and the obligatory Key Lime Pie to boot. You won't find many beaches here, but the ones you do find are so shallow that you can wade amazingly far from the shore and still be only knee deep in the water. And if you make it all the way to Key West, you can roam its narrow colonial streets with the ghost of Ernest Hemingway or just hang out at the Mallory Square and enjoy the streaming sunset.

But my favorite place in the Keys is the Old Bahia Honda bridge. A structure no longer used, but elevated high enough to give you a different perspective. As we were climbing an old wooded trail to the remainder of the bridge, I was puzzling why these islands were called keys in the first place. Only when we entered a small concrete platform, did the answer materialized in front of my eyes. These were the Keys to Paradise.

Every so often I run across a public pronouncement which makes me feel like Alice in Wonderland, fleetingly pondering if I am still on the right side of the Looking Glass. Today, Yahoo Finance served one such piece of wisdom straight from Obama's top economic adviser Larry Summers.

"The central irony of financial crisis is that while it is caused by too much confidence, too much borrowing and lending and too much spending, it can only be resolved with more confidence, more borrowing and lending, and more spending."

Hmmmm.

That is like saying - while your plumbing problems were caused by too much hair, too much trash and too much gunk in the piping, the solution is to dump more trash, more gunk and more hair into your sink.

Or it is like saying - while your camel is slowing because it has too much stuff on its back, the way to make him go faster is to tie more junk to its hump. I would actually love to see a dramatization of such scene starring a retired camel in the role of the ailing economy and the three stooges as Wall Street Maestros - three buffoons running in circles around the poor animal, frantically pushing their belongings on top of its cargo area, and punching each other in the process.

But the moral of this parable is really simple - people can't drink themselves sober. It does not work. The mindset which caused a problem is not usually conducive to solving it. Summers' argument sounds like a desperate plea for a continuation of the same old Ponzi scheme which nearly crashed the system to begin with. And even if we could find the new suckers, eventually it will run aground again, except this time with a much larger bang.

Sure, there is one group of people who would profit greatly from the never ending expansion of credit, from driving more and more people into deeper and deeper debt. That would be bankers. They surely would love to pile more debts on top of the old ones - as Larry Summers is undoubtedly well aware. But his point sounds about as sincere as McDonald's spokesman hypothetically claiming: "The central irony of our obesity problem is that it can only be resolved with more hamburgers, more French fries and much fatter mayonnaise".

Albert Einstein allegedly authored the famous quote about insanity - which is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". Too bad Larry Summers never heard of it.