Since I learned a bit of game theory recently, I thought I’d apply it to the problem of consumers copying digital content, rather than paying the producer for their own copy. The idea is that it’s similar to classic examples in game theory where all individuals acting in their own interest (or “rationally,” according to capitalism) result in the situation being worse for everybody.

We could set up a theoretical example like this: say we have a million players, and each player has to choose independently whether or not to pay $10 for music (think of it as a particular CD if that’s easier, and pretend that it’s music everybody likes). Because of free copying, they will receive the music regardless. The quality (i.e., monetary value) of the music, however, is directly determined by the number of people that pay. For simplification purposes, let’s say that the value of the music is equal to half of what’s payed for it (suspend your disbelief about this for a moment). So if all of the one million people pay, then $10,000,000 has been payed, and music worth $5,000,000 is distributed to everybody. Obviously this is a pretty decent situation: everybody has virtually become $4,999,990 richer because they now have access to some great music.

So let’s say you’re one of these people, and you have to decide whether or not to pay. You may not know what the other people are going to choose, but when you analyze your two choices, it really doesn’t matter. Your $10 will only increase the value of the music by $5, so you’ll be better off by not paying. This is intuitive from several different angles. The only Nash equilibrium in this game is when nobody pays. Nobody pays, and nobody gets any music, so nobody’s net worth has increased at all. Everybody is much worse off, even though they each individually made decisions that were cleary favorable for them.

Of course, anybody who needed to suspend disbelief back when I suggested to will probably also notice that the game was set up this way. If I had said that the value of the music was equal to the amount paid for it, then there would have been no tendency not to pay. In that case, every strategy would be in equilibrium, so behavior would be impossible to predict. On the other hand, if I had said that the value of the music was more than the amount paid, we would have the opposite equilibrium: everybody would want to pay. So now I’m going to see if I can determine the more influential factors that affect this game in real life, so we can predict the future of music as we know it.

To Pay vs. Not To Pay

There are a number of influencing factors in real life. To start with, if nobody pays for music, this does not mean there won’t be music. Plenty of people make music for free, for a variety of reasons. So it’s not entirely clear that we’re worse off if nobody pays (mostly because, if everybody pays, then we’ve collectively spent a lot of money on music).

Second, artists producing music may be able to increase the quality of their product if they’re paid more, but there’s certainly a logical limit to this. I doubt anyone would expect that a musician paid $10,000,000 for an album will necessarily produce an album that’s ten times better than the same musician paid $1,000,000 for the same album. There may even be no discernable difference at all.

Third, musicians usually aren’t paid until after the music has already been produced. So they can really only guess what they’ll be paid for it. This means a person deciding whether or not to pay for music knows for certain that their choice will have no effect whatsoever on the quality of the music in question. It certainly may have an effect on the quality of future music, but that requires a bit of foresight to act on.

Fourth, owning music without paying for it may be illegal. However, this may be very difficult to enforce. For example, I could take a song file and encode it in a series of pictures and post it on flickr for anybody to download and decode. Attempts to enforce this sort of law end up producing complicated actions and reactions that usually make everybody fed up with the content producing industry.

Fifth, many people grew up in an age where musicians were paid by anyone who wanted to own their music, and therefore consider it to be the natural way of things. However, generations in this category will eventually be replaced by generations without the same inclination.

Sixth, many people feel social pressure to pay, because to not do so would be seen as mooching off of those who do. This can influence a lot of non-compulsory behavior, such as tipping, and other examples I can’t think of. However, of all the things in this category, the act of downloading a file in the privacy of one’s own home is least likely to be influenced by social pressure. I suspect this is a major reason why guilting people into paying has such a minor effect.

Seventh, in a global market the effect of any given individual is difficult to detect, so people will be easily able to convince themselves that their actions are inconsequential. Only in very local markets does the opposite become true.

Conclusion

It’s complicated. You figure it out.

I was thinking about how free-content-duplication is killing the entertainment industry, and I remembered how back in the day these talented content-producers usually made their living by gaining the attention of the royalty and being permanently employed for their personal service.

So I thought I’d do my part to help out, and I’ve compiled a list of reigning kings which you artsy folks can use as a reference to inform your career choices:

• King Sheikh Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifah of Bahrain
• King Albert II of Belgium
• King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck of Bhutan
• King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia
• King Abdullah II of Jordan
• King Letsie III of Lesotho
• King Mohammed VI of Morocco
• King Harald V of Norway
• King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia
• King Juan Carlos I of Spain
• King Mswati III of Swaziland
• King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden
• King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand
• King George Tupou V of Tonga

Now I’ve done my good deed for the day.

I think this is fun:

def power_set(s)
	return [[]] if s==[]
	s=s.to_a
	res=[]
	((2**s.size)...(2**(s.size+1))).each do |i|
		t=[]
		check=i.to_s(2)[1..-1]
		check=check.split("").map{|a| a=="1"}
		(0...(check.length)).each{|j|t.push(s[j]) if check[j]}
		res.push(t)
	end
	res
end

irb(main):007:0> a=[]
=> []
irb(main):008:0> 4.times{a=power_set(a)};a
=> [[], [[[], [[]]]], [[[]]], [[[]], [[], [[]]]], [[[[]]]], 
 [[[[]]], [[], [[]]]], [[[[]]], [[]]], [[[[]]], [[]], [[], 
 [[]]]], [[]], [[], [[], [[]]]], [[], [[]]], [[], [[]], [[], 
 [[]]]], [[], [[[]]]], [[], [[[]]], [[], [[]]]], [[], [[[]]], 
 [[]]], [[], [[[]]], [[]], [[], [[]]]]]

That is one nice set. If you could have any of the elements in that set, which would you choose?

Sometimes the “New” vs. “New-Other-Sellers” vs. “Used” prices on Amazon don’t make very much sense.

God bless America. Free continental breakfast.

The next time somebody tries to sell you something, ask them:

If it’s true that what you’re selling is worth the price you’re asking for it, and that it will service a real need that I have, then why is it necessary for you to put so much effort into persuading me to buy it?

If they can give you a good answer to that question, then purchase the product immediately.

If you ever find that you don’t know how to follow instructions, I’ve prepared the following set of simple instructions (which you can easily commit to memory with the mnemonic “FRIED”):

That oughta work.

The other day my step-cousin and I tried to solve the chicken-and-egg question, from an evolutionary one-of-them-must-have-come-first perspective:

Assuming that there is some (probably arbitrary) dividing line in the evolutionary tree between pre-chicken and chicken, then there must have been a "first chicken" at some point - let's call her Lucy. Lucy's parents were, by definition, not chickens, but Lucy's mother laid an egg containing a chicken (by some lucky mutation or something). Lucy then must have laid her own egg, which not only (I think it's safe to assume) also contained a chicken, but additionally was laid by a chicken. So which egg are we talking about? This reveals an ambiguity in the original question. The question is

We must insist that the egg be specific to chickens, or else it's a silly question (the egg came first, whenever the first egg-laying species evolved, probably long before chickens). So we can state the question more clearly: But if we try to answer this question, we run into the ambiguity hinted at earlier, which is specifically: And once we choose one or the other, the answer is obvious - either the chicken came first (because the first egg was the egg laid by Lucy), or the egg came first (because the first egg was the egg Lucy hatched from), respectively.

The question's not so interesting anymore. So since we're thinking about evolutionary progression, how about this question:

A family friend recently told me the following joke:

Why do programmers get Christmas and Halloween confused? Because Dec(imal) 25 == Oct(al) 31.

HAAAHAHAAHAHHAHHAAH!!!1 LOL! ROFL!! BMW! AT&T!!

One of the things I’m least likely to be doing (at similar positions in the list to “watching American Idol” and “krunking”) is playing flash-style internet games on websites that specialize in banner ads. However, I recently ended up playing this game called Light-Bot, which is the first game I’ve seen (though I expect there are many others – like I said, I don’t do this much) to incorporate basic computer programming concepts.

There’s a robot placed on a grid, and the player has to write a program to tell the robot what to do in order to accomplish the goal. The programming language consists of seven commands (go forward, turn right, jump, etc.), which are represented with pictures instead of words, and the player drags the pictures onto a program grid (not the grid the robot is on), and they are executed in the order specified.

Two of the commands are subroutine calls – there are two extra program grids representing the subroutines. It’s even possible to get the robot into an infinite loop by having a subroutine call itself. Also, each portion of a program has a maximum length – twelve commands for the main body, and eight commands for each subroutine. Part of the challenge is utilizing the subroutines well enough to fit the program in the allotted space.

It occurred to me that the levels in the game would be interesting candidates for a genetic algorithm experiment. The lack of syntax (any random blending of two programs will always be syntactically valid) and the limited length of the programs would make it easy to write a simulator, and the problem space could be quite challenging (I gave up on level nine or so). A related problem would be determining if a particular level is solvable or not. I’ll put it on my list of programming projects.