EE 376A Information Theory TTh 11-12:15pm, McCullough 150

Handout #5 Thursday, January 6, 2011 Gowtham Kumar

Comment on the Questionnaire: Write down the smallest number (positive integer) that no one else in this class writes down:
The minimum unique positive integer game had some interesting ideas. Look at the data first and try to gain an understanding:
M in i m u m u n i q u e p o s i t ive i n t e g e r g a m e 7

F re q u e n c y

10

15 In t e g e r

20

25

30

In addition, there were 9 entries above 25: 26, 31, 37, 42, 50, 79, 91, 1001, 1017. Wei Lei has written 5 and is therefore the winner!! (See the graph above) Novel answers: Emmanuel Tsukerman wrote 1,2,3,...., that is he wrote all the integers. So he has also written the smallest integer that no one else has written!! Another interesting strategy is to write 1 before anyone else gets a chance to read the question and then announce to the class that you have written 1. Since one has to write the minimum unique integer, he cannot write 1, and thus you win, assuming people are rational. It turns out people are not really rational, so that technique won't work! It is very easy to determine all the pure-strategy Nash equilibria. It can also be shown that when there are more than 3 players, a symmetric mixed strategy Nash equilibrium does not exist. You can refer to http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/archive/notes/um713719000000001665.pdf for more details. If you are not familiar with game-theory and are interested in understanding the above paragraph: Read the mathematical definition of a strategy for a player from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_(game_theory) From this page, understand what is a pure-strategy and what is a mixed-strategy. Then understand the definition of Nash equilibrium from wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium Also you may want to go through prisoner's dilemma from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma Then you will know the definitions needed to be able to attempt to understand what is going on. You may also refer to the course MSE 246 if you are interested in learning basic game theory. If you are stuck and are interested in knowing more, feel free to talk to me during my office hours.

Choose a random number less than 10:

One person wrote: Write a random number? That's ridiculous! Many people tend to choose a number of low descriptive length, that is, a number of low Kolmogorov complexity. Kolmogorov complexity is the descriptive complexity of the number: the length of the shortest program required to print that number. For example, even though is seemingly random, a very small program print acos(-1); can print all the digits of . The same can be said of the base of the natural logarithm, e. People tend to pick those numbers that are short and easy to describe. There were numerous entries of , - , e and -e, in addition to integers. A number like 238.682538023343658438 was really rare. The key is we tend to pick those numbers whose description length is short. A histogram of integer choices is shown below:
C hoos e a Random num ber 6

4 F re q u e n c y

4 Num ber

The distribution is close to uniform amongst the numbers 2-9. People tend not to pick 0 or 1. They believe 0 or 1 is not random at all. 49 people chose integers.

The non-integer values are plotted below: (not all of them of course)
C hoos e a R andom num ber 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 -4

F re q u e n c y

-2

2 Num ber

You can see a lot of instances of e and . 21 students chose non-integers. Moral of the story: When your bank asks you to pick a password for your online account, please don't pick your password to be the first 10 digits of pi! The histogram shows how insecure that choice is! Choose a number with a high Kolmogorov complexity, that is, a number whose minimum descriptive length is large! Don't common choose words in the dictionary, they can be represented by the index of the word, with a length less than 20000 and are easy to find.