Shamelessly getting unfinished business out of the way. Yup, that’s
me.
Excursion Day 1. We traveled down to Yilan on a bus. I played
guess-it with Paul.
I was quite surprised at myself for remembering this game, but I think
it’s simple and little-known enough to be worth mentioning. Guess-it is
a remarkably pure game of luck and bluffing from one of Martin Gardner’s
columns, played with a small odd number of cards, e.g. the 13 cards of
one poker suit. The cards are dealt evenly to players (who can look at
them) with one card left over, which is kept face down; players take
turns choosing one of two actions:
-
Name a card and ask the other player if he or she has it. These
questions must be answered honestly.
-
Guess the left-over card. The guesser wins if correct; the other player
wins if not.
Guess-it is not trivial because sometimes you should ask the other
player if he or she has a card that you already see in your hand;
otherwise whenever you answered “no” to a query you’d immediately guess
that the asked card is the hidden one. It is actually a solved game in
the sense that the probabilities of the Nash equilibrium strategy for
when to guess and when to bluff have been worked out already, but
they’re not simple probabilities by any means and humans are terrible
randomizers anyway. A few rounds of it sure beats rock-paper-scissors. I
was very amused to lose almost all our games with 11 cards but win
almost all of our games with 13.
Okay, no more gratuitous narrative excursions into game-theory. The
first stop, National Center for Traditional Arts, was a very laid-back
culture place with old-fashioned retro shops and streets.
We watched a 3D glove puppetry (布袋戲) video, in the same session as
a lot of the leaders.
We finally arrived at the hotel at 3:30, meeting another local from
Taiwan, Mr. Chen, who helped us carry some of our stuff off the bus.
Po-Chiang, our guide, was waiting inside. We took more pictures and
finally lugged the meager stuff we had off to our hotel rooms.
At least, we tried. I started to realize that there was much more to
this hotel than it seemed.
Firstly, of course, was the confusing placement of rooms with numbers
starting with 4 and 5 on the fourth floor (which would be the fifth
floor by our numbering system, where the lobby is floor 1; but here the
lobby was assigned 0. Off-by-one errors just waiting to happen here.)
Secondly were the completely indecipherable signs. I don’t remember the
details, but the first signs we saw read something like “560 ~ 540:
left; 520 ~ 540: right”. Occasionally there would be weird slashes or
half-slashes between the numbers instead (later I finally realized they
were slanted, Comic-Sans-style capital Ys, or “and” in Spanish). Are
these closed, open, or half-open intervals? And why the heck are their
upper and lower bounds in a different order!?
We wandered through the corridors, peeking down each one, trying to
figure out whether the numbers were increasing or decreasing and whether
a parity argument (for those of you not fluent in math lingo, that means
odds and evens) allowed for the existence of our room. Who knew the
simple act of finding one’s living quarters could be so mathematically
tasking? In the end, our rooms were in the last corridor, just about
diametrically opposite to the elevators on the half of our floor. Oh
well.
The room was pretty nice overall. The furniture and basic facilities
were quite complete, with a sparkly bathroom and a couple tables and
chairs of various shapes. The closet was big and had a safe, which was
rather important because just about everybody we had met had warned us
over and over again about all the incredibly skilled thieves, muggers,
and pickpockets in Argentina. It was probably much safer (no pun
intended) in the hotel, but with all of these warnings (later we would
even find a notice from the hotel warning us to lock our doors) I was
never entirely certain. There were lots of lights controlled by a set of
confusing switches on either side of our beds. There was at least one
white immovable divider cunningly disguised as a switch, one switch that
didn’t ever seem to do anything, and one that turned everything off. The
last one made a little sense after a while because it had pictures of
stars and a moon on it, but the whole setup was still pretty
non-user-friendly in my opinion.
