Bill Roper's Journal

So here's your baseball word problem for the day:

The Cardinals had a magic number of three entering tonight's game with the Brewers -- that is to say, any combination of Cardinals wins and Brewers losses totaling three would clinch the division for the Cards. One game was played today, which the Cardinals won, and the Cardinals clinched the division championship. How did this happen since there was one Cardinals win and one Brewers loss and one plus one continues to be two in this particular space-time continuum? (And two is less than three, just for completeness.)

And the answer is:

MLB changed the rules this year with the addition of more wild card teams so that there are no head-to-head playoff games in case of ties, even if one of the tied teams fails to make the playoffs as a result. With a win tonight, the Cardinals clinched a tie for best record in the Central with the Brewers, but they *also* clinched the season series against the Brewers, which gave the Cardinals the tie-breaker over the Brewers, which meant that a tie goes to the Cardinals.

Hooray for New Math!

And hooray for the Cardinals, 2022 NL Central Division champs. :)

So I was having dinner with Katie and agreed to split a dessert with her.

While we were waiting for the dessert to arrive, Katie started making fake gobbling motions with her hand and mouth, indicating to me that she intended to eat it as fast as possible so that she would get a larger share and I would not.

"This is a problem in game theory," I told her. "Have you ever heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma?"

No, no, she had not.

And I proceeded to explain how the problem of sharing the dessert was, in fact, the same as the classic case of the Prisoner's Dilemma. If each of us ate slowly and savored our dessert, then we would both arrive at a good outcome. If one of us defected and started gobbling down the dessert, then they would be slightly better off, because they would get much more of the dessert, but the other one would be much worse off, because they would not get their fair share of the dessert. This would mean that he (that would be me) would have to defect as well and start gobbling down the dessert, and now each of us would enjoy it less, while still ending up with the same amount of dessert.

The dessert was consumed slowly, evenly, and properly savored. :)

It is good when game theory has real life applications...

We went to the local Chinese buffet for dinner, because I have been dreaming of pot stickers since late Sunday night at OVFF. As it happened to sort out, I acquired my dessert before Katie and Julie did and was working my way through it while the girls were anxiously waiting for me to accompany them to the soft-serve ice cream machine to produce "swirl" from the center spigot. daisy_knotwise had promised them that I would go as soon as I finished my dessert, which by this point consisted of a brownie that I'd eaten half of.

I carefully cut the brownie in half with my fork and ate one half. I then cut the remaining half in half again and ate that half.

Gretchen, with whom I'd discussed Zeno's Paradox on the way home from OVFF, was not amused.

"Cut that out! Finish the brownie and go get dessert for Katie and Julie."

Julie, standing next to the table and watching me intently, said, "Cut it in half again, Daddy."

So I did. And ate it.

And then I finally ate the last bite.

But I am very impressed that my younger daughter recognized that I was cutting the brownie in half and eating half with each bite, as we had nowhere in our conversation mentioned that.