power and negotiation and game theory

Tyeliah's taking a class called Power and Negotiation. Every week she has to negotiate. Sometime soon she has to write a three page paper about a negotiation she has recently done outside of class - she wanted to use negotiating for free movie tickets when the movie theater audio was playing at mute level, but i don't think she'll be able to write 3 pages on that - so she'll probably write about negotiating with me for who's doing the dishes

Anyways, one of her negotiations took place as a team negotiating with some other team where each team had the option to cooperate or screw the other team. Interestingly, the goal was for the two teams to maximize their combined points, not for one team to beat the other so it seems like the incentive would be to cooperate ... but apparently the incentive to beat the other team won out and most teams tried to screw each other.

In my various internet wanderings I read about game competitions where people write computer programs that pursue different gaming strategies.

In one-off games, almost everyone ends up screwing the other team, but in repeat games the incentive is to cooperate until the last game and then screw the other team on the last game ... but the other team knows this so they screw your team the game before the last game ... but the other team knows this so ... and so on ...

It turns out the best strategy is tit for tat ... do whatever your opponent did on their last turn.

4 months ago this blog post would have been fully sourced with links to interesting articles about game theory and deep, silly thoughts about what it means that the tit for tat strategy is the maximal strategy and so on and so forth ... now I have a job and all I want to do with my weekends is lounge on the couch and take walks outside on sunny days not look up interesting articles for your edification... such is life...

Spring Classes

Tyler and I have both decided to write a post in the hopes that we will push through the inertia and get back to blogging something approaching regularly.

Spring classes began yesterday. Essentially all my classes are electives this semester and it has not been easy choosing them. However, I have pretty much decided and unless something changes (somewhat likely) these are the classes I will be taking...

1.273/1.274 Supply Chain Planning/Design

1.261 Case studies in logistics and supply chain management

15.012 Applied macro and international economics

15.665 Power and Negotiation

ESD.930 (don't know the title - its a project based class on procurement)

Tiger teams - Project based class, I'll be doing a project with EnerNOC

ProSem - Each week executives speak about leadership and operations

Gender and Poverty - A women's studies class that is going to be a ton of work for no credit

and that's the list. 2 of the classes are only half a semester long so my load the second half will be a lot lighter.

Inertia perhaps being overcome, I will write more about the classes once we have done more than go over the syllabus.

On Laziness

So, sometime about 4 months ago I wrote a post about something or other and I was going to enliven the debate with some silly thoughts or other ...

and then nothing...

Rest assured, this is a common blogging trend. Peruse the various LGO/LFM blogs of the past and present and you will see a multitude of posts about how - "oh, I've been so bad about updating, I'll do better"

As my 7 foot chinese differential equations professor once said - "Never Better! Always Worse!"*

So I won't say that I'll do better. I promise that I will do better, worse or the same.

... and its not as though there weren't actual good reasons for the lack of blogging other than laziness (although that one predominates). First and foremost, I got a job. I now work as a transmission policy analyst for one of the largest electric companies in the world. Yay me.

I got the job about a week after the last post and proceeded to binge on video games until my job started. You see, I couldn't play too much video games** while I didn't have a job because then I'd be thinking - "Oh my goodness, I can't believe I'm one of those people who plays video games instead of looking for jobs ... what a loser I am ..."

But once I had the job, I could do anything ... including going to St. Louis and wearing a gorilla suit, which I did***.

So I started a job. Other things that happened in the intervening 4 months:

I got married****
Tyeliah got married****
We went to Paris and London
I got Superbowl tickets (from my father for christmas)
My favorite team (the Saints) won the NFC championship and is going to the Superbowl!
Tyeliah went crazy taking 8 classes and nearly lost her marbles (she did really well in the classes though)
Tyeliah semi-relaxed during the break and then took a 2 week trip to see factories around the country
Tyeliah forgot last semester's craziness and decided to take 10 classes - which she then dropped to 9 as a compromise (although its really only 8 she says cause she's auditing one and maybe its really only 7 because ...)

Alright, more to come later ... maybe.

*said in regards to 90% of the class failing the 2nd test (though not yours truly) - full quote, you have to imagine a chinese accent and a 7 foot rail thin chinese man who loves elvis to get the full effect - "People always say, give me second chance, I do better ... No! Never Better! Always Worse!"
**Tyeliah believes it should be "playing too many video games" but my reading is that "video games" is continuous object - as in, "I am playing video games a lot" not "I am playing a large number of video games" which would imply that I played many different video games whereas I want to imply that I played a few video games a large amount of time ... thus I defend using too much video games ... also, I wrote that first and I don't like to change things after I write
***the gorilla suit was worn at the appropriate gorilla suit wearing time - Halloween - and by the way, gorilla suits are really warm
****in case you were wondering, we married each other at a very small ceremony on the eastern shore in Maryland. It was wonderful.