Killing The Game

Killing the Game: The Pangram’s Curse

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Last time I ran the New York Times Spelling Bee through the machinery of cooperative game theory, treating each day’s word list as a weighted voting game: words are voters, points are votes, Genius is the quota, and a word has power when it’s the one that carries you across the line. The punchline was … Read more

The Waggle Index

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The best way to kill a joke is to explain it. This is a series about explaining jokes. Each installment takes a game people enjoy and runs it through the machinery of cooperative game theory until the fun stops. The wager is that the autopsy is where the biology is — if you want to … Read more