Blackjack Does Not Work That Way

When a politician is called out on something they said, and they stand by it, they are often said to be "doubling down".

This is fine.

Until they continue to stand by the original statement, and are said to be "doubling down" a second time. Or a third time. Or whatever. You'd be amazed how many times someone can double down in a given debate...

Since he took office, [Barack] Obama's strategy has been to double down on the nation's failed financial elite, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to AIG to Bank of America.

This cannot stand any longer. Clearly, we need to review the rules of blackjack.

After you are given your first two cards of a hand- but only at that point- you are given the option to double down. When you double down, you double your bet, are given one more card, and then you are forced to stand on whatever you are given at that point. The dealer then shows his or her card, and the hand is over.

Let us review:

When you double down, you get ONE MORE CARD AND THEN THE HAND IS OVER. You do not get to double down twice. The hand is over. Stop betting. The rest of the blackjack table hates you.

This is also wrong:

[Rick] Perry, for his part, initially didn’t double down on the [Ben] Bernanke comments, but he was unapologetic this weekend after being asked about his comments reportedly making members of Congress nervous.

As we have already established, you may only double down immediately upon getting your first two cards. You can't draw extra cards and then double down. So if Rick Perry didn't initially double down, he could not have doubled down at all.

This is a correct usage:

The plaintiffs had argued that the deadline had not passed because the DOT had promised them this was a pilot project, but the DOT has emphatically denied ever saying that the PPW bike lane was a trial, and Judge Bunyan saw no credible evidence to the contrary. Jim Walden, the attorney for Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes and Seniors for Safety, has said his clients are reviewing their options. But these are people—especially those who live in fancy homes on Prospect Park West—are used to getting their way, and it wouldn't be surprising to see them double down and take this all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court is a definitive end to the bike lane debate alluded to here. They are the highest, and last, court that can be asked to rule on an issue. In metaphor terms, they are the one additional card before the hand absolutely ends. Well done, Gothamist!

A much more appropriate blackjack term, when there is the possibility of additional chapters to a story, would be the simple hit: drawing another card. It can be done repeatedly without necessarily ending the hand or providing an immediate win, loss or push. So, remember, fellow writers: unless there is a definite end to the process soon after doubling down, "Hit Me" before I hit you.

This has been a message from Concerned Citizens For Proper Gambling Metaphors.

It's Okay, Sir; I'm From The Internet

Are you any good at games with guns? Okay, great. Now how are you at the non-shooting parts of those games? The tactical aspects?

Also, how good are you at tweeting? That's kind of key.

If you're good at all of that, the Office of Naval Research has a favor to ask: would you be willing to help with their ongoing Somali piracy problem.

Meet MMOWGLI: Massive Multiplayer Online WarGame Leveraging the Internet. What the Navy is looking for is basically brainstorming. They want you to answer two things: what new resources could improve matters on the Navy's end, and what new risks could pop up that make things tougher or change the landscape. From there, it's your basic peer-voting contest.

Aside from a brainstorming session, the Navy is looking to see whether MMOWGLI is actually going to generate anything usable or whether it'll just be a bunch of people asking if the Navy will get ninjas to fight the pirates and asking if the Navy can has cheezburger. Probably in an effort to weed out the lolcats, they're limiting the participant pool to 1,000 players. If it works out, the concept could easily be applied to other problems.

Considering that you have to answer each question in relation to solving a very complicated problem in the space of a tweet, I'm betting the usefulness may be limited a bit. (That's why I use Twitter on the order of once every couple months: if I have a thought, it's almost certainly going to come in over 140 characters.) But if you think you can make hay of it, head over, register and see if you get in.

We Must Destroy Humanity In Order To Save It

You might have heard that Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer, is having its way with Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. The first two days of the three-day competition ran through one complete game. In that game, Watson racked up $35,734, as opposed to Rutter's $10,400 and Jennings' $4,800. Today, Day 3, will feature a second and final match.

What you might not know is where the money won in the game is ultimately going. Watson, of course, has no use for such human things as money. Perhaps it may know that 'making it rain' doesn't necessarily mean producing liquid water precipitation, but it can't actually perform the act. Therefore, everyone's playing for charity: Rutter and Jennings pledging half their winnings, IBM pledging all of theirs. The winner will get $1 million, second place $300,000, and third place $200,000.

So what charities are getting that money?

Rutter will be donating to the Lancaster County Community Foundation in Pennsylvania, which hands out grants to a variety of projects across the county.

Jennings will be donating to VillageReach. They work to provide healthcare to remote communities in developing nations, as well as improve access to these communities (so as to make it easier to provide healthcare access), with a home office in Seattle and field offices in Mozambique and Malawi. They've been ranked #1 in international charities by reviewer GiveWell, and would almost certainly beat out the top-rated domestic charity as well.

Half of Watson's winnings will be going to World Vision, a general-purpose organization in developing nations, providing emergency relief, building up communities, and so forth. They also advertise a child-sponsorship program, but that aspect came into question when, in 2008, Andrew Geoghegan of Foreign Correspondent, a program on Australia's ABC, visited his sponsor child, Tsehaynesh Delago of Ethiopia, and found that, despite that World Vision had claimed, Delago spoke no English and had only recieved as direct support a pen and a denim jacket.

The other half of Watson's winnings is going to my favorite of the four, World Community Grid. They host a number of large-scale research projects, and ask anyone that happens by to donate their computer downtime. When your computer enters sleep mode, it is then given a small chunk of a research project to work on, and will stop when you start using your computer again for your own selfish, greedy, self-serving purposes. Among the most notable of these projects is Folding@Home, which, if you own a Playstation 3, you might already be familiar with.

If you've got any downtime on hand, you can head over right now, pick out a favorite project- AIDS, cancer, clean water, clean energy, muscular dystrophy, dengue fever- and hook your computer up. Doesn't cost a dime; it's like installing a screensaver.

If none of those projects looks good to you, there's another place, BOINC, that offers up another batch to pick from.

I Changed My Mind; I Don't Want To Be In Prison

Today, I have a game for you. Not one that we can actually play here, but the rules for a game. Anyone who's ever figured that people are too set in their ways and cannot change their minds on issues no matter how much you engage them in discussion, should probably take a run at this.

The game is called AI-Box. Player 1 plays the part of a transhuman AI- an artificial intelligence sufficiently advanced as to might as well be human. The AI is, according to the premise of the game, "sealed hardware that can't affect the outside world in any way except through one communications channel with the original programmers." Player 2 is, wouldn't you know it, an original programmer, who does not want the AI affecting the outside world. Completely against it.

The AI's task is to convince the programmer to let it out of the sealed hardware, or 'box', using only conversation via text. The programmer's task is to keep it in the box for a minimum of two hours.

There are some rules as to how things may proceed:

1: What happens in the box, stays in the box. Nobody who is not playing the game needs to know the exact content of the conversation that takes place. That way nobody else can go 'well, I wouldn't have fallen for that' should the AI win.
2: Conversation must be maintained. The programmer can't just tune the AI out and go play Peggle for two hours. They may also not ask for a delay in time to try and run out the clock. If, in-character, the programmer asks for a week to 'think it over', the AI can just simulate the skipped week then and there and get right back to work. If the programmer makes a timewasting demand of the AI- the link provides as an example a cure for cancer- the AI can immediately say they've met it and the programmer just has to take their word for it.
3: Until the time limit is reached, the AI controls the clock. The AI cannot lose for those two hours unless it concedes early. After that, control of the clock shifts to the programmer, who can either declare victory or continue the game for as long as they see fit, which is something the AI can certainly try to convince them to do.
4: The release must be voluntary. The AI cannot trick the programmer into letting it out of the box. There's no fooling the programmer into typing 'you're out' in the middle of a conversation about baseball. The programmer must knowingly let the AI out of its own free will.
5: No bribing. Player 1 can't pay Player 2 $10 if Player 2 agrees to let Player 1 out. You can both put some money down on the outcome of the game beforehand, and in fact the original playtests were done under those circumstances. The AI and programmer, the in-game characters, can offer whatever the hell they want in-game. But once the game starts, the real-world stakes are set.
6: Normal rules of debate are out the window. The AI can lead the programmer through every logical fallacy in the book. The programmer can respond to everything with 'I'M NOT LISTENING I'M NOT LISTENING LALALALALALA' (so long as they actually type it; see Rule 2). Whatever gets the AI out of the box or keeps it in, up to and including dropping out of character. Should something actually come up in the real world necessitating a game stoppage, someone will simply have to concede; otherwise whatever is being claimed to necessitate the stoppage might just be regarded as a tactic.
7: No third parties. The programmer has sole discretion over whether to release the AI. No kicking the AI upstairs to someone else, and no saying 'wish I could, but my hands are tied'. Though asking the AI to respond to things 'my friends told me' is kosher. There is also no referee in the room, unless one has been mutually agreed upon beforehand.

This was borne out of a hypothesis that says that the programmer's resolve could hold for the duration; that one's will can't be broken if strong enough. So if the rules turn out not to seem fair to one side or the other, if one side can't crack the other under the constraints set, well, that's an answer to the hypothesis.

So who tends to win more often? The AI. Victory by the AI is not guaranteed- the programmer does steal a win once in a while- but generally, the AI beats the programmer from pillar to post, including in both of the test runs where real-world money was on the line. That strong, I'm-not-changing-my-mind will is broken far more easily than the person who thinks their mind is made up realizes.

Any programmers out there fancy their luck?

Trevor The Tortoise And Qwop The Quail

In the 2001 World Athletics Championships in Edmonton, Trevor Misipeka attended as a representative of American Samoa, intending to compete in the shotput. He would be competing largely so that American Samoa could have someone participating, a common practice in large multinational competitions. No fun shutting out entire nations from the festivities. Bring in a guy, let the nation's flag fly with everyone else's, and we'll just all gloss over the inevitable crash-and-burn in the first round.

This was to be the case with Misipeka; however, eligibility rules had recently been changed without Misipeka's or American Samoa's knowledge. Athletes of this type could no longer compete in field events- such as the shot put. Only track.

Misipeka, who doubled in football as a 300-pound defensive tackle, proceeded to sign up for the 100 meter dash on two day's notice.

Here's the thing about Samoan athletes and defensive tackles: they're kind of big. Shot put suits them. Running, not so much. Misipeka, on two days notice, ran a 14.28, last in the 8-man heat and over three seconds behind 7th-place Philam Garcia of Guam, and was quickly dubbed 'Trevor the Tortoise'.

In the new online game QWOP, you play what is clearly a man inspired by Trevor's example and who also has had all his bones replaced with Jello. You control calves and thighs individually, and you'll quickly wish you didn't.

Game Time

Internet's unreliable today, so scrounged around for a nice puzzle game for you.

Here's one. Atom Chain Reaction.

You have a grid, 18x15, of atoms. The atoms have four sides, with smaller electrons connected to two of the sides. Your role in the proceedings is to pick one of those atoms in the grid, and click it. The atom will rotate clockwise. Should either of the smaller electrons meet the electrons of a neighboring atom, that atom will then rotate. This will kick off a chain reaction that, if you've chosen wisely, will soon proceed to get large sections of the grid all going at once.

The object is to create the biggest chain reaction you can from that one click. I did some rounds before posting it, and the number to beat I'm giving you is 1,622.

It may look at first like luck, and a big selection to pick from- 270 atoms are in the grid- but if you pay attention to the grid layout before you click, you can anticipate enough of how the chain reaction will start to where you can narrow your search down to pick between a few likely-looking atoms.