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Hydrostatic bipedal movement!
Ten years ago, I graduated college and moved into a cockroach-infested flophouse in the Kensington Market, which back then was one of Toronto’s most decrepit neighborhoods. I rented the house with three other people, but we had a problem: All the rooms were different sizes, and we were all incredibly broke. Who should get the bigger or smaller rooms, and what rent should they pay, respectively? In essence, we faced a classic problem of “fair division” — how to assign values to differently-sized and differently-valued slices of a pie.
The problem with fair-division solutions is that they rarely satisfy everyone; there’s always someone who winds up feeling the acid sting of envy, certain that they were screwed by the others in the negotiation. But as it turns out, there are in fact reasonably solid game-theory ways to solve a fair-division problem to produce that cherished grail of economic hocus-pocus: The “envy-free” result. Back in 1999, mathematician Francis Edward Su wrote a paper for Scientific American explaining his solution and applying it, coincidentally enough, to the problem of apartment-rent division (PDF link).
Then he did something even cooler: He created the Fair Division Calculator, a java app that you can fire up the next time you’re fighting over how to divide a cake. You set the application running, and it enacts his fair-division algorithm. As he describes on his site:
- Players are named A, B, C, …
- The applet will suggest divisions and successively ask players which portion she would prefer.
- After polling several players though various scenarios, the “Suggest Division” button will light up. When it does, press it to see an approximate solution, good up to the displayed precision.
- Press “Continue Iteration” to run the algorithm longer and obtain solutions with better precision.
I am so going to try this out.
(Thanks to Jim Jazwiecki for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
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» visit the Collision Detection archives
September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
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