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There once was a boy called Jimbo who created a wonderful game. Jimbo was the school inventor and because of this he generally hung around with a lot of the geekier kids. When Jimbo showed them his wonderful game they all loved it and wanted to play with it. Right after they started playing Jimbo started walking over to where the bigger kids were.

“No”, his geeky friends said, “you can’t play with them, some of them are bullies”.

“Don’t worry,” Jimbo said, “we can all play this game together and the cool thing about this game is that when people start being mean, and not playing properly the game helps us all find the mean people and fix what they break.”

“But,” said the geeky kids, “what if they say mean things about us or hit us?”

“Don’t worry,” said Jimbo, “the game will help you. Whenever something nasty happens it’s deliberately amplified so people can fix it. And anyway, just ignore the bullies”.

“But surely,” said the kids, “we need a complicated set of rules that says what you can and can’t do.”

“No,” said Jimbo, “because if we have a complicated set of rules then we might stop something new and exciting from coming out of the game. The playground as a whole will police itself as a whole and everyone will decide what they can and can’t tolerate. Don’t fight the playground,” he said.

Well many years passed and Jimbo became one of the most important boys in the school. But just when he thought things couldn’t get any better a group of particularly naughty boys were particularly mean to one of his best friends who was a girl. And strangely his usual reassurance that she should just ignore the bullies didn’t come. Strangely he didn’t say, don’t fight the playground. Strangely this time he said, here is a completely new set of rules.

He had forgotten his usual mantra. And just as his mantra predicted, everyone ignored him. Jimbo Wales you should know better.

Jimbo Wales in case you aren’t aware is the man responsible for Wikipedia. And one of his friends, Kathy Sierra, had a lot of nasty things said about her on her own blog. And so he and chief geek Tim O’Reilly have decided to create a set of rules about blogging. Jimbo famously once said, “don’t fight the internet”, to explain why Wikipedia works in some ways because of the trolls rather than as expected being destroyed by them. Troll attacks on Wikipedia actually help alert editors to areas on controversy which shouldn’t appear in a neutral point of view article.

All in all, as Doug says, Don’t feed the trolls. It’s the same as ignoring the bullies. They are only after a reaction, it’s much better to not give them one. This massive reaction is exactly, exactly what they wanted. These rules will be ignored by the everyone except the trolls. Why would the trolls pay attention? They will remember every part of the rules line by line and follow Jimbo, Tim and Kathy round the internet pulling them up every time they make a minor transgression. They will do this because that is what bullies do, they know the individuals will have to react.

If you’d like to read the rules then they are here.

You totally shouldn’t. Boys have such double standards. You just can’t. I mean one of my friends was talking to one of them and she’s already in a relationship so she just didn’t see her as a threat. And he was saying that basically girls split into girlfriend wives as like one group and sort of good time girls as the other. And they decide so quick you know. She was saying that if they, sleep with them on the first night then they’re like a good time girl and so totally not a girlfriend wife. So what are you going to tell him. Good because I think you’re making the right choice because that will make you seem more girlfriend wife. You want him to be reassured like that. I mean you don’t want his mind going like totally there immediately, you know, like you won’t be any fun or something. But you want to have him reassured by it, you know. Where are you meeting him? Oooh it can be hard to say no at his place. And it also means no kiss. No, yeah, no kiss. Because if you kiss you kiss on the couch at his place it’ll all go off and that might be fun but no girlfriend wife. So change the venue make it somewhere you can kiss at the end. Keeps it fun but not too fun. But yeah, I mean I think you should go out with him. I mean you know I don’t like him, but do you need the practice.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he suddenly revealed slightly too much information about himself. When he was a boy, and even to this day, he’s never liked smarties. He’s always found them to be horrible because of the strange mix between chocolate and shell. So far so perfectly reasonable except for the fact that he does like Minstrels which are basically the same thing.

Anyway he then went on to ask if we remembered the fuss about the blue smarties. The blue smarties were all the rage at one point and every cool kid had to have them. My friend was faced with a dilemma; he wanted to look cool and he wanted to not have to eat smarties. So he decided to eat smarties anyway but just swallow them whole like they were pills. Genius or crazy? There’s a very thin line.

Anyway this discussion led us to that old inevitable debate about whether orange smarties actually taste of orange or not. I believe that they do. But others did not. Some even went for an interesting compromise suggesting that it was in people’s minds and that a blind taste test would prove that people can’t taste the difference.

Well according to Nestle themselves they do put an orange taste into the orange smarties. And I believe them. I mean Nestle have never lied to us before.

[A note just for Nick. If Johnny Rocketpants turns up after this then it will be very funny.]

Here is a nice little logic puzzle for you all to play, it’s called the Pirate Loot problem and it goes something like this:

Imagine you are the oldest in a band of five pirates, where no two pirates in the group are of the same age. It is your responsibility as the oldest pirate to decide how to divide the group’s booty, which comprises one-hundred pieces of gold. Once you announce how you will allocate the gold, all the pirates in the group (including you) vote either “yes” or “no” on your decision. If at least half of the votes are “yes”, the pirates divide the loot as you directed, after which everyone carries on about his business. But, if more than half of the votes are “no”, you are then killed, and the task of deciding the allocation of gold lies with the next oldest pirate in the group.

Knowing that all the other pirates are just as smart, and just as logical as you, and furthermore, knowing that they all want the largest amount of gold they can get for themselves, how do you divide the gold so that you get the maximum amount of gold pieces possible, and guarantee that you will receive enough “yes” votes to stay alive?

For those of you who would like to work it out for yourselves please look away now – here be spoilers (and indeed Pirates).

The best way to solve the problem is to chunk it. Deal with smaller bits of it and build it up. So if you think of the 2 pirates situation then in that situation the older pirate can keep 100 gold pieces. And since there would be two pirates before there was one pirate (if they kept killing the oldest) the youngest pirate will always vote for you if you give him one gold piece, all it takes is giving him slightly more than he would otherwise get, to get the vote.

In the situation that there were three pirates that’s exactly what the oldest pirate would do, he is bound to vote for himself. So he can just give the youngest pirate 1 gold piece and get his vote and keep 99.

If there are four pirates then you can’t bribe the next youngest guy (in fact you’d never be able to bribe him however many younger people there are). And so you could choose to either bribe the youngest or the second youngest to get your vote.

So then in the five pirates problem (which after all was the one that I set) you can bribe the youngest, which gives you one vote at the cost of one gold coin. But who else can you bribe cheaply? Well you can bribe the second youngest with one coin because we know that in the three pirates problem he won’t get anything.*

So the answer is that if you’re the oldest pirate then you get to keep 98 of the coins and only have to dole out 2 coins to get the votes you need.

The thing I really like about this puzzle is that it is so close to real life. If we look at the economy around us then we see that the powerful can easily bribe the weak to agree with them. In fact the powerful can often bribe the weakest and ignore their middle strength rivals and still retain power and wealth. Just look at the situation in Iraq for example a variety of small countries are in the “coalition of the willing” circumventing the power of much larger rivals like France and Germany.

Basically this game really shows the mechanics of how the rich stay rich in the real world. Remember 2% of the world’s population hold 50% of the worlds wealth, it seems like that would be impossible, but this game shows exactly how this comes about.

*Some accounts of this problem will say that as part of the solution you have to bribe the middle pirate with one coin rather than the second youngest. The reasoning for this flows from imagining the problem the other way around. In their minds you give the gold to the second youngest to bribe them not the youngest. And then they go on to say that in the five pirate problem you would be unable to bribe the second youngest with one gold coin because he will demand two coins for his vote rather than just one. It doesn’t matter which of the two you bribe in the four pirate problem which means that in the five pirate problem there isn’t a guarantee for the middle pirate that he’ll get a coin if the oldest pirate is killed. This way he guarantees his coin so he would vote yes for one piece of gold.