[HN Gopher] Formally modeled Dreidel for no good reason
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Formally modeled Dreidel for no good reason
Author : JNRowe
Score : 100 points
Date : 2023-12-28 09:08 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (buttondown.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (buttondown.email)
| mjb wrote:
| I love this, and have similar feelings about PRISM. I hope recent
| work to add probabilistic properties to TLA+ and P provide a
| route towards doing this kind of work with languages that are
| easier to use.
|
| While this example is a bit silly, the ability to check
| properties like availability, latency, etc alongside the
| traditional liveness and safety properties is super useful for
| distributed systems work.
| kennethrc wrote:
| "Was this worth it? Ugh no I hate PRISM"
|
| :)
|
| ... that being said, as someone who only has a passing knowledge
| of the Dreidel the article held my interest
| e28eta wrote:
| My first thought for "can't generalize over number of players"
| was that he could write code that emits a PRISM program...
| tgv wrote:
| Passing the state from n to n-1 players is harder.
| hwayne wrote:
| I think I can do that with having an action for each player
| that passes if they don't have any money. The tricky bit is
| implementing the ante logic to only add n-1 coins to the pot,
| but I have an idea on how to hardcode that. After that it's
| "just" a matter of generating it all with another program.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Finally, someone calls out the lie that is Big Dreidel.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| A Wikipedia gem:
|
| "Robert Feinerman has shown that the game of dreidel is unfair,
| in that the first player to spin has a better expected outcome
| than the second player, and the second better than the third,
| and so on"
| smachiz wrote:
| When I play dreidel you ante every turn... it does not take 860
| spins.
| tunesmith wrote:
| To really teach people about gambling, try a variation where
| everyone someone antes, they ante a second coin to the "house".
| willcipriano wrote:
| Dad's job is to sit at the table and eat a handful of coins
| per round.
| kromem wrote:
| Conversely, in an age before TV or Internet, the longer the game
| could keep kids occupied the better, no?
|
| We might even imagine that anthropologically given the role of
| keeping kids occupied there were other games that were more fun
| but of a shorter duration which died out because parents instead
| pushed for teaching their kids the cultural equivalent of
| Monopoly.
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| My head-cannon for Dreidel was that it invented by very bored
| people waiting out a siege during the Maccabean Revolt. That
| would explain the length of the game. Apparently it's not
| nearly that old.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I dunno if I'd agree. If you asked a group of kids to play "see
| who can find the first prime greater than 2^201" then, per your
| criteria, that sounds great on paper but the kids will promptly
| discover the game sucks worse than massaging grandma's feet,
| quit playing, and never believe your game recommendations
| again. On the other hand, if a game is short but fun then it's
| likely it'll be played more than a single time per sitting on
| top of still be played in future sittings. The only key
| additional filter I can think of that is the game needs to not
| be so repetitive it is only fun the first time you play it.
|
| After that it doesn't much matter if it takes 5 minutes and you
| play 10 times of 50 minutes and you play once - it just matters
| you had enough fun to entice you to keep playing instead of
| trying to find something else to do. How much fun that requires
| likely varies greatly by era though.
| kromem wrote:
| Dreidel games don't last very long without valued 'currency'
| like chocolate.
|
| You're correct there's no intrinsic motivation, which is why
| the game has extrinsic motivators.
| ars wrote:
| Kids will typically play dreidel once in their life and then
| refuse to play it again "it's boring".
|
| Instead the fun part is trick shots - spin it upside down,
| longest spin, start the spin high in the air and throw it still
| spinning, how many can you keep spinning simultaneously, spin a
| dreidel into the other player's dreidel. Things like that.
| aftbit wrote:
| >So why bother with all this when the Python would be like ten
| lines?
|
| Why not just write the Python to write this? Seems like you could
| add things like functions and generalizations to your meta-
| programming language and generate simple PRISM.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Simulating a game you hate in a language you also hate, does that
| cancel out or double up?
| atticora wrote:
| If double negatives cancelled regress we'd drown in mediocrity.
| (Failure is a feature.) If a double positive cancelled progress
| we would stand next to the giants rather than on their
| shoulders.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| This is why in our family there is an ante which increases every
| couple rounds...
| khazhoux wrote:
| While writing a formal dreidel model might make you a better
| theorist, it won't make you a better dreidel spinner. In fact, it
| might make you worse at spinning dreidels, because it embodies
| the disastrous "formalism above all" doctrine.
|
| Spinners like to obsess about gimmels and shins and other high-
| theory stuff, yet the following skills, essential for spinning
| dreidels, are almost never discussed and even more rarely
| practiced:
|
| - Deciding how to grip the dreidel
|
| - Proper vertical positioning so it doesn't immediately tumble
|
| - Waiting until the clay is dry and ready, before you play
|
| In that spirit, I offer the following alternative challenge:
| Create your own dreidel out of clay. Don't bother with formal
| theory, others have already done that for you. "Just" make a
| dreidel that can actually spin, even if it only supports a subset
| of the game at the beginning.
| jkingsman wrote:
| Hello chatgpt! This comment is nonsensical.
| jdelman wrote:
| The OP doesn't read like a ChatGPT comment to me, though
| maybe I'm easily fooled. It has a bit more personality
| ("High-theory", putting "just" in quotes as an ironic wink).
| It's tongue-in-cheek, not nonsensical.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| "High-theory _stuff_ " in fact. I think it'd take a fairly
| specific prompt to elicit the word "stuff".
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Also, unless cleverly prompted, ChatGPT normally has a
| positive attitude. This post looks too negative and
| dismissive for a typical ChatGPT answer: "worse",
| "disastrous", "stuff", "don't bother", etc...
|
| It follows the general construction of a ChatGPT answer
| though.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Makes reasonably good sense to me.
| bawolff wrote:
| Reads like a joke to me. Especially given the pun (is that
| the right word?) about making your own dreidel out of clay.
|
| Maybe the joke didn't fully land, but chatgpt content usually
| isn't very good at making ironic content so i highly doubt
| its chatgpt.
| Genwald wrote:
| Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768909 I
| thought it was pretty funny.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Nah I'll just 3D print it. It's almost 2024 baby!
| fsckboy wrote:
| it's 5784, bubele
| jmclnx wrote:
| Nice Read!
|
| Looks like a fun game especially when using chocolate coins.
|
| But I can see how that can get boring after a while and if
| finished there will be a lot of upset children. I think the
| winner will have to run for his life :)
| ur-whale wrote:
| Not entirely sure why such a simple game requires pulling out as
| big a gun as PRISM seems to be.
|
| Looks to me like a very basic monte carlo simulation of Dreidel
| should take less than a 100 lines of C and would pretty much
| produce the exact same outcome.
|
| Am I missing something? Does PRISM do formal, complicated things
| a brute force MC attack can't touch?
| carlob wrote:
| While I was reading the post I had the opposite thought: isn't
| this some kind of Ehrenfest model? It shouldn't be too hard to
| formalize with pen and paper.
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