Higher Level College Courses

[WarriorCleric]

So, after four years of garbage, you get to take the classes that are supposed to be the core of what you want to study. Most classes I am taking now are off the 400/500 style, meaning they are both undergrad and graduate classes, the difference is not in difficulty, but in how the professor grades students of each level. I could work on a project with a graduate student and prospectively receive a B while he fails, should the professor see fit.

This is an assignment for one of my classes due next week.

II) Three straight male students planned a scheme to get free drinks one Saturday night by going to the local gay club and enticing other young men to purchase them free drinks.

Suppose Scott is straight and is planning to visit the club tonight with two friends. This is their strategy:

'If a young man asks you a questions' he tells his two friends 'The only answer is "Buy me a drink and find out"'

Scott believes that wearing a well-ironed shirt instead of an old colorless T-shirt would increase his chances of success, but ironing the shirt has a utility cost of 1. However getting a free drink has a utility cost of 2. So it may pay off to iron the shirt. If Scott doesn't get invited, he must buy his own drink at a cost of 1.

Assume Gabe frequents the local gay club with the hope of finding a date with another young man. Paying for a drink has a cost of 1, and not paying for a drink implies a zero payoff. If he invites Scott a drink, he has very little hope for a date. However if Scott is well dressed, Gave gets a utility value of 2 because other men in the club will observe this and Gabe's "value" in the dating market increases. If Scott is wearing an old t-shirt, he gets no utility from purchasing him a drink, so the payoff in this case is a pure cost of 1.

Thus the payoff matrix:

                 Invite Drink    Do Not Invite

Ironed Shirt    (1,1)             (-2, 0)

Old T Shirt     (2,-1)            (-1,0)

a) Find all Nash equilibria in pure strategies

Now assume that when Scott gets a free drink, he's so happy that he forgets about the cost of ironing the shirt. Then, the payoff of wearing a well ironed shirt when he gets a free drink is 2 instead of 1. Find all Nash equilibria of this game. There is also an equilibrium in mixed strategies. Call p the probability that Scott wears a well ironed shirt and q the probability that Gabe buys him a drink, and find the values for p and q in such an equilibrium.

c) Which equilibrium strategy in ( gives each player a higher (expected) payoff?

So in my fifth year of college I have friends of mine who are now doing breast cancer research, spendings thousands of dollars of grant money a month buying DNA, Killing rats, and creating new chemicals. I have a friend who is working high powered lasers in various atmospheric conditions for reasons unknown. I have friends in Med school and Dental School, digging through bodies, rebuilding teeth. And what am I doing? I am figuring out the likely hood of duping gay men into buying me a drink.

And how do I feel? I feel that this class is the reason people should goto college. Could we be applying the same processes to two corporations fighting or sharing the market, calculating the probabilities that failure that each bring for each case, Calculating how each changes when extra options are given, and determining the best play for each corporation in turn? Yes, yes we could. But instead we study the completely asinine.

I thought some of you might get as a kick out of this aswell.

WC

[Pali]

And here I'm just thinking "Nash equilibria... hey, that's the guy A Beautiful Mind was about!"

I love college. It feels totally bs, but when I really sit and think about it, I'm getting a lot out of it.

[Zrothum]

I can't suffer through the idiotic 100s. I almost puked when I got in there and saw some of the writings these morons were producing. I was supposed to sit there in the same class as them? They needed to be in middle school, not college. It was sickening. Screw college.