David Sklansky, well-known poker theorist, is challenging Christian fundamentalists to a battle of standardized-test-taking skills! (Via Unscrewing the Incrutable and Cynical-C.)

This is an open challenge to any American citizen who passes a lie detector test that I will specify in a moment.

We will both take the math SAT or GRE (aptidude test). Your choice. We will both have only half the normally allotted time to lessen the chances of a perfect score. Lower score pays higher score $50,000.

To qualify you must take a reputable polygraph that proclaims you are truthful when you state that:

1. You are at least 95% sure that Jesus Christ came back from the dead.

AND

2. You are at least 95% sure that adults who die with the specific belief that Jesus probably wasn’t ressurected will not go to heaven.

If you pass the polygraph you can bet me on the SAT or GRE. Again this is open to ANY one of the 300 million Americans.

Also, for those who think I am being disengenuous because I would make the offer to anyone at all, you are wrong. I am now so rusty that at least one in 5000 Americans are favored over me and I would pass on a bet with them. That’s 60,000 people. If the number of people who would pass that polygraph is between 10 and 30 million, which I think it is, that means that at least 2000 of these types of Christians are smart enough to be favored over me. Given such Christian’s intelligence is distributed like other American’s are.

But I’m betting fifty grand they are not. Their beliefs make them relatively stupid (or uninterested in learning). Or only relatively stupid people can come to such beliefs. One or the other. That is my contention. And this challenge might help demonstrate that.

(I’d feel better about Sklansky’s chances if he knew how to spell “resurrected” — good thing he’s sticking to the math test.)

This sounds like an interesting way to get publicity, but the theory behind it is kind of … dumb. It relies on the idea that there is some unitary thing called “intelligence” that correlates in some simple way with both test-taking skills and religious beliefs. If only it were anywhere near that simple.

Assume for the moment that belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus really does indicate a certain amount of credulity, lack of critical thinking, etc. (Obviously not an unproblematic assumption, but let’s grant that it’s true for the sake of argument.) Why in the world would that be inconsistent with being a math prodigy? The human mind is a funny, complicated thing. There are extraordinarily basic mathematical calculations — taking the square root of a fifty-digit number comes to mind — at which a pocket calculator will always do much better than any human being. Yet if you asked the calculator to invent a theory of gravity based on special relativity and the Principle of Equivalence, it wouldn’t get very far.

Some people (and physicists are among the most guilty, for obvious reasons) seem to think that the ability to do math is the quintessential expression of “intelligence,” from which all other reasoning skills flow. If that were true, scientists and mathematicians would make the best poets, statesmen, artists, and conversationalists. And faculty meetings at top-ranked physics departments would be paradigms of reasonable discussion undistorted by petty jealousies and irrational commitments. Suffice it to say, the evidence is running strongly against. (It’s true that physicists are incredibly fashionable and make the best lovers, but that’s a different matter.)

There really are different ways to be smart. Which is not some misguided hyper-egalitarian claim that everyone is equally smart; some people are very smart in lots of ways, while others aren’t especially smart in any. But it’s very common for people to be intelligent in one way and not in others. David Sklansky, for example, is a great poker player and quite mathematically talented. But his understanding of human psychology falls a bit short.

(I should add that Sklansky may in fact know exactly what he is doing, judging that hubris will be enough to lead more people he can beat to accept the challenge than people he will lose to. But from the discussion, it seems as if he really doesn’t think that anyone fitting his criteria will be able to beat him.)

This is a quick reminder about the “Apocalypse” Categorically Not! event this Sunday (see here or here), featuring Marc Kamionkowski, Jonathan Kirsch, and Carolyn See.

I’d also like to let you know about the next Southern California Strings Seminar, next week Friday and Saturday at USC. A number of topics in string theory will be discussed, from applications to topics in Mathematics (the Langlands program), through black hole physics, and all the way to applications to the physics of experiments involving collisions of heavy nuclei. More about this regional meeting over on Asymptotia.

-cvj

The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 24th September. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them. Have a look at the last two descriptions here and here, and the description of the recent special one on Uncertainty that was held at the USC campus is here.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Apocalypse!’

The next Categorically Not! is Thursday 31st August. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events, started by K. C. Cole, and held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them. Have a look at the last two descriptions here and here.

It is important to note that this one is a USC event, and not a Santa Monica event! It is on a Thursday and not a Sunday! You might wonder - why these changes? Ah! I promised to reveal what was going on behind that photo shoot I told you about a long time ago (with K.C., Tara McPherson, and myself - recall the fun we had with that picture?), and now realize that I did not get around to it.

This is it. There is a series of wonderful events going on throughout the year on the USC campus - the embodiment of our new Provost’s “Arts and Humanities Initiative”. It is called “Visions and Voices”, and I’ll tell you more about it on Asymptotia. Our program within that larger program is not called Categorically Not! but “Science and Serendipity”. Anyway more on that elsewhere.

So will the old Categorically Not! series stop? No. The Santa Monica series will continue, but there will be some gaps to accommodate the USC events. We hope that the regular Santa Monica crowd will make the short trip across the city to USC on those nights. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website. More about the relation to the Categorically Not! events can be found in this post on Asymptotia.

Anyway, here is the blurb for the upcoming event on the 31st August:

Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Uncertainty (Revisited)’

We’ve finished with the World Cup and the big bike race across France. We’re in anticipation for the Fall season of baseball with the playoffs and world series. But, in between, is a lessor known sporting event - the World Series of Poker. The final game will be played Thursday 10 August, and one of the 9 finalists in that game is a genuine particle theorist! It’s Michael Binger who was a graduate student here at SLAC, studying under Stan Brodsky, and defended his thesis just a couple months ago. I was on his committe and can say that he did a fine job. And on Thursday he is playing at the final table at the World Series of Poker. He is coming into the final table ranked 8 out of 9 (apparently 9 people sit at the final table) with a pile of chips worth over $3 million.

This is the World Series of Poker, No-Limit Texas Hold-em Championship. Within poker circles, this is the big event. About 8700 people entered the contest, buying in with $10,000 of tournament chips, each. These 8700 card-playing studs battled it out several weeks until 9 super-players were left. Those 9 will battle it out for the championship on Thursday. And a particle theorist - from Stanford - has amassed over $3 million in chips and thus cracked the top poker playing circle. Eat your heart out Sean!

Michael Binger worked on physical renormalization schemes with applications to grand unification and split supersymmetry here at SLAC under the guidance of Stan Brodsky. Essentially, they have a unique method of describing the running of the strong coupling constant (i.e., how it changes with the energy scale it is being measured at) and found a number of qualitative differences and improvements in precision over conventional approaches when applied to calculations within grand unification theories. It’s interesting work and I’m glad somebody took a look at it.

It seems that Michael is somewhat of a novelty in the poker circles due to his physics PhD. He’s been interviewed and quoted as saying:

Michael Binger hopes to continue doing research in physics without having to run the rat-race of getting a job and impressing all the right people as he puts it. A win here at the World Series of Poker Main Event would definitely give him the freedom to do pretty much anything he wants.

I’ve never followed the world series of poker before, but now I’m rooting for a rising star and a genuinely nice person. GO, BINGER GO!!!

Update: Michael Binger finished in third place! His winnings totalled $4.123 million. He was eliminated in hand #229 at 3 AM PDT, after more than 12 hours of play. He had an Ace-10 suited pair in his hand and with a hand like that he understandably bet the store. For more details on the hand, please see Sean’s comment below (#20). All of us here at SLAC give him our heartiest congratulations!! Rumor has it he will be stopping by on Monday!

Sometimes the technological marvels that are the most useful are those you didn’t even know you needed. Here is a perfect example: from iFone, a version of Monopoly for your cell phone. That’s right, Parker Brothers’ classic board game, downloadable for a few bucks, so that you can match your wits against one or more computer players whenever you like. (One jarring feature of the iFone version: it’s a British company, so all the properties are named after places in London, rather than Atlantic City. Mayfair instead of Boardwalk, Trafalgar Square instead of Indiana Avenue, etc. Disconcerting.)

Monopoly, of course, is famous for being that game you used to play as a kid that never quite finished, since it took forever for someone to win. The cell-phone version is no different, but it’s trivial to stop and start again much later, and the patience of the little phone CPU brain is enormously better than that of your brothers and sisters. In fact the computer players are pretty good — they are capable of making trades and all that, and they’re smart enough to value a property very differently depending on whether it will complete a full set of one color or not. But there are a few things the computer doesn’t quite understand; for example, completing a monopoly is much more valuable for a player that has enough extra cash to start building properties than for one who is completely cash-poor. And building houses is the key to actually winning the game; the computer is also reluctant to mortgage a few properties in order to build on some other ones, a classic mistake.

So overall my cell phone provides a challenging opponent, but one I can usually beat. It does my sense of self-worth good to know that I am so much smarter than a piece of high-tech equipment. And the story of my stirring come-from-behind victory while waiting in the customs queue at Heathrow will be celebrated by epic poets for generations to come (or would be had there been better documentation of the event).

But the interesting things, not having played Monopoly for years, are the moral and political implications that follow from the game. We think of Monopoly as the quintessential embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism: a competition within the unfettered free market, starting from a level playing field and allowing nature to take its course. Which is all true. But what the game really illustrates are the shortcomings of capitalism, as effectively as one could imagine; if I didn’t know better, I would think that Karl Marx himself had designed the game. Consider:

• The game perfectly demonstrates the instability of the free market (which it should, if someone is going to “win”). That is, the rich get richer, as they can leverage their wealth to increase their earnings. Makes for a better board game than a society.
• Talent does not win in the end. Sure, there is some judgment involved in when to make certain trades with other players, but the biggest single factor in winning or losing is a literal roll of the dice! How bleakly fatalistic can you get?
• The playing field is initially level, but only in a completely artificial way. It’s perfectly clear that, if the game worked like the real world in which some people were born into wealth and others were not, the aforementioned benefits of being rich would absolutely dominate. Not much room for social mobility. A devastatingly effective argument for preserving the estate tax!
• Most telling of all: your income does not come from working, it comes from collecting rents. Later in the game, when a few players have started to build houses, you quickly discover that you lose money during your own moves, and only make money during the other players’ moves.
• It follows that, later in the game, the best square to land on is Go To Jail! From the comfort of Jail, you don’t have to worry about paying rents to anyone else, but you are free to accumulate wealth from your own properties. It’s really just a vacation resort for white-collar criminals.
• The only mildly redistributive action that occurs in the game is the rare-but-devastating “building repairs” card that comes up occasionally in Chance and Community Chest, and which does impact the rich disproportionately. But, significantly, the money doesn’t go to other players, but to the Bank (which is the real source of evil in the whole game).
• On the other hand, the game does make you hate the Income Tax. So there’s some mixed messages there.

So I’m thinking that there is quite a subtle subversive message in the dynamics of Monopoly, now being spread to a new generation through their handheld gadgets. Of course, one must already be of a suspcious cast of mind to read the above features as cautionary tales; if cutthroat competition is more your style, you might just think they are cool.

Nevertheless, as we have been known to fearlessly suggest improvements in the world’s classic games, I have a couple of ways to make Monopoly even better — more equitable without having the income distribution settle into some happy socialist equilibrium where incentives are balanced against economic guarantees. (Where would be the fun in that?)

• To increase the role of skill in the game, change the dice-rolling procedure. Instead of simply rolling two dice and dealing with the consequences, players should be able to pick the number on one die, and then roll the other to calculate the number of spaces they are to move. Chance is obviously still involved, but a bit of calculation would be introduced, in weighing the relative merits of avoiding that property vs. being able to reach this other one. I certainly hope that the real world works like this at least a little bit.
• To prevent criminals from benefiting from their crimes, allow other players to spring for the $50 fine (or 50 quid, in the British version) needed for someone to leave jail — and allow them to do so whenever its their turn, regardless of the criminal’s actual wishes. Again, a bit of skill is introduced, as the other players will have to judge whether it’s worth their money to spring someone from the pen, or whether they should hope that someone else will do so.

Sadly, I can’t implement these genius suggestions on my cell phone. And nobody actually wants to play the game in person any more. Still, it’s important to fight for a just and equitable society, even in rather imaginary contexts.

I know the tension has been building, so without further adieu, I present the answers to our poker quiz! And you should listen to what I say, as I am a recognized expert in the field.

Remember the set-up: you’re playing Texas Hold’Em, so you have two cards to yourself, and (eventually) five cards face-up in the middle, and your hand consists of the best five cards you can choose from your two and the five community cards. Which of the following has the best chance of winning against somebody else’s (unknown, obviously) cards at a showdown?

• Jack-10 suited
• Ace-7 unsuited
• Pair of 6’s.

Note that this is not really a poker-strategy question, it’s just a math question. There is a separate issue, which is “which is the best starting hand”, or for that matter “how should you play each hand?” — we’ll get to that later. But this is just a math problem — which is most likely to win if you choose to stay in the pot all the way to the showdown?

The answer, to nobody’s suprise, is: it depends! It does not depend on your position, or whether the betting is limit or no-limit — those might affect your strategy along the way, but at the end of the hand it’s just a matter of who has the best cards. What it does depend on is how many people you are playing against. The absolute probability that you will win obviously goes down if you are playing against more opponents with randomly-chosen cards, just because there are more ways they could beat you. But, much more interestingly, the ordering of which hand is best also changes.

Here are the answers, presented in convenient tabular form. We’re showing the percentage chance that your hand will win outright, both against one other random hand and against four other random hands. The percentages come from running 500,000 simulated hands each, using the Poker Academy software. (It’s a very nice program, incorporating artificial-intelligence routines developed by the University of Alberta Poker Research Group. [Yes, there is such a thing.]) “Jd” stands for jack of diamonds, “Td” for ten of diamonds, etc. For later convenience we’ve chosen the ace to be the same suit as the JT, with all other cards being different suits (it doesn’t matter for this table, but does for the next one).

So the miracle is that the relative strength of the three hands reverses when we go from one opponent to four. Against one other player, the sixes stand the best chance, followed by the A7, followed by the JTs (where “s” stands for “suited”). But against four, JTs is the most likely of the three to win, while the sixes are the least.

It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on. But before we do, let’s take a peek at something even more surprising. What happens if, instead of putting one of these three hands against some other random cards, we put them up against each other, two at a time? What is the relative ranking? Here is what happens:

The table shows the chance that the hand listed on top will beat the hand listed on the left side at a heads-up showdown (no other players). The entries don’t add up to 100% because there can be ties . So, another miracle: it’s not transitive! Sixes are likely to beat A7, and A7 is likely to beat JTs, but JTs is likely to beat a pair of sixes. It’s a kind of combinatorial rock-paper-scissors situation.

So what is going on? Note that if we consider just the two hole cards, without taking advantage of the community cards, the sixes are the best hand, followed by the A7, with JTs bringing up the rear. For one of the latter two to win, the community cards have to help it improve (by pairing one of the hole cards, or making a flush, or whatever). So the question becomes, how many ways are there to improve? The only likely way for the A7 to improve is for either an ace or a seven (or both, or several) to land on the board, although it’s also possible to find four board cards that help make a straight or flush. Adding up the probabilities, it’s almost a fifty percent chance, but not quite. Against the sixes, there are more ways for the JTs to improve. Both because the cards are “connectors,” allowing for cards that would give low straights (7-8-9) and high straights (Q-K-A) or various intermediate possibilities, and because the cards are suited, making it much easier to make a diamond flush. So JTs will usually beat a pair of sixes. But it won’t usually beat A7 if the ace is of the same suit. That’s because some of the ways that JTs will improve will also improve the A7 — in particular, if four diamonds come up, the JT will have a flush but the A7 will have a better one.

The same reasoning explains the first table. Against only one randomly-chosen pair of hole cards, there is a substantial chance that the sixes won’t need to improve, so they do the best; likewise the ace can often come out on top just by itself, so it’s second-best. But against four opponents, chances are excellent that someone will improve, and JTs has the best chance.

Which leads us to the other question: which is the best starting Hold’Em hand? It should be clear that there is no universally correct answer, and it will depend on game conditions — although, in ordinary circumstances, JTs is clearly the best, for a couple of reasons. One is that the thought experiment of playing your cards against another pair of randomly-chosen hole cards isn’t what really happens; in a real game you have a bunch of opponents, and the ones with weak hands simply fold, leaving only the stronger hands. So it’s almost as if you are playing against a larger number of opponents, even if a small number stay in for the showdown. The other reason (much more important) is that the criterion for success is not how many hands you win or lose, but how much money you win or lose. The A7 is not going to make you much money. If no ace comes up on the board, you’re likely beaten. If an ace does come up, either someone else has an ace with a better kicker (in which case you will lose a lot), or nobody has an ace and they will just fold (in which case you will win a little). Likewise for the sixes — if nobody can beat a pair of sixes, they’re not going to be putting much money into the pot. The only way to win big is if another six comes up, which is possible but unlikely, and you’d still have to worry that someone else made a straight or flush. This is why beginning players often over-value low pairs and aces with low kickers.

The moral of the story is that you don’t win in Hold’Em by knowing the percentage chance that your pocket cards can beat some other random two cards — you need to know what kind of hand your opponents are likely to have. Part of that is just probabilities, but much of it is gleaning clues from the way they have played the hand up to that point (did they raise, or call? how many bets? from what position?). In other words, you need a model of your opponents. Poker players have invented a simple two-dimensional parameter space of ways to play that serves as a simple model. One axis ranges from loose to tight — how often someone plays vs. folding. The other goes from passive to aggressive — how often someone simply checks or calls vs. raising. At the crudest level of analysis, you can locate an entire table of players at some point of the tight/loose and passive/aggressive plane; with a bit more data, you can describe individual players this way, and at a very sophisticated level you can get as specific as you like in an extremely high-dimensional parameter space (”they like to raise 80% of the time with pocket nines or better in fifth position with one bet and one caller before them when their stack is less than half of its starting value,” stuff like that).

That’s why it’s much harder to program a computer to be a championship-level Hold’Em player than a championship-level chess player. There is no perfect strategy in Hold’Em — no decision tree you could unambiguously follow to guarantee the best possible outcome. (Indeed, if you had an opponent that used such a decision tree, you could in principle always beat them.) Unlike in chess, the computer can’t win by brute force; it needs to be clever enough to learn from the previous moves of its opponents to figure out how they are playing. Teaching computers to play poker is an active area of research in artificial intelligence. And teaching humans is an active area of research in Vegas (although the “tuition” can get a little steep).

The baleful eye of the establishment media has once again turned our way, and judged us to be sordid muckrakers. Declan Butler at Nature has written about the largest science blogs, and we were happy to find CV in the top five, along with Pharyngula, The Panda’s Thumb, Real Climate, and The Scientific Activist. (Plenty of room to complain about methodologies, but whatever — suffice it to say that prize money was distributed quite equally.) The Technology Chronicles, however, has poked a stick at these would-be science blogs, and found that they succeed not by “politely debating the fine points of string theory” (ahem), but rather by “channel[ing] the static and political undercurrents in their fields.”

Nonsense! We have succeeded by writing about martinis and the World Cup. To cement our reputations as light-hearted bons vivants, today’s post is about poker.

In particular, a quiz. For those of you not addicted to Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown, the game that has swept the public’s consciousness is Texas Hold’Em. It’s just a particular variety of poker, in which each player gets two hole cards that only they see, and then five cards are dealt face-up in the middle of the table. The winner is the one who can construct the best five-card hand out of seven — their hole cards and the five on the board. Complications arise from the baroque betting structure (two players to the dealer’s left are forced to bet on the first round, which is after the two hole cards are dealt; further betting rounds after the first three board cards are dealt, another after the fourth, and a final one after the fifth), but basically it’s just that simple.

So, consider the following three possible pairs of hole cards:

• Jack-10 suited (e.g., a Jack of diamonds and a 10 of diamonds)
• Ace-7 unsuited (e.g., an Ace of spades and a 7 of clubs)
• Pair of sixes

The quiz is extremely simple, and should be easy for experts: assuming you don’t know what anyone else has, or yet what the board cards will be, which possibility is most likely to win at the end of the hand? And (a subtly different question) which is the best Hold’Em hand? Please show your work; answers will be revealed tomorrow. Winners will receive a free lifetime subscription to Cosmic Variance, one of the most popular science blogs on all the internets.

I know, it’s William Shatner. At a science fiction conference an awards show. From the Seventies. “Singing” an Elton John/Bernie Taupin hit.

But still. It can’t be for real, right? Like, irony? Please tell me it’s a joke. Seriously. (Via The Sports Guy, ultimately via Ed Brayton.)

Cate Blanchett to play Bob Dylan in biopic.

The resemblance is uncanny.

To be candid, Blanchett will not have to shoulder the burden all by herself; Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, and Richard Gere are among those who will portray different aspects of Dylan in the upcoming I’m Not There, due to be released next year.