Category: Travel

Many thanks to Nora and Kelly for an excellent dinner at their new flat: across the Folly Bridge from St. Aldates’. Afterwards, along with Bryn, we played a number of hands of Spades – a game with which I was previously entirely unfamiliar. It strikes me as inevitably highly statistical. There is a set probability to every 13 card hand, moderated through the scoring system. On the basis of limited information from a partner, you must play many iterations of a supergame, based on a defined collection of possible outcomes for each game, with appropriate scoring attached. The objective is to acquire points at a higher rate than the other team, until a certain threshold is crossed.

Two major kinds of decisions exist in the game: bidding decisions, and the decision of which card to play. Both are fundamentally strategic, though the first is based on a combination of the probability of your hand, in certain important ways, and on the rules related to winning or losing any one iteration (13 tricks). The second is based on similar probabilities, plus knowledge about previous hands (card counting), plus rules about winning tricks. While I could understand the general dynamics involved, I had neither the concentration to count cards, nor the insight to begin comprehending the emergent properties of the rule set. There are some rules, like the special set associated with nil bids, that add considerable extra complexity to the game, at least as comprehended by a somewhat addled beginner’s mind. Even so, it was fun to play, and I appreciate my fellow players for introducing it.

With a certain perverse logic, I take pride in the fact that Spades is probably a game that can be played as well by a computer as by the best human. Since it’s a collection of computable problems, it seems as though a collection of RAM and transistors should set the bar which the best humans approach. Since we define the ‘real’ difficulty of problems according to the amount of challenge they present to all available resources, and since computers can be programmed by relatively inexperienced statisticians, Spades can be branded as a less-than-enormously-complex game, even by someone completely inept at it. Isn’t rationalization amazing? I suppose when we’re just one century’s worth of random collection of molecules (if we are quite lucky), we need some logical path to not get overwhelmed with our own limitations.

PS. From all I have heard, the Arctic Monkies are an unusually talented new band (I can see all those more clued-in on the music scene laughing at me for saying it. Why not say: “I think this Led Zeppelin group has some ability?”). Trying to keep up with a dozen dozen different areas of human involvement, I cannot be at the crest of every wave. All that said “When the Sun Goes Down” is surprisingly melodic, despite somewhat a somewhat abrasive chorus.

PPS. It looks like I may have three new tutorial students over the first three weeks of August. I am thinking of going to Dublin for the fourth week, then flying straight from there to Prague for the first week of September. It would save me all the cost and bother of coach travel from Oxford to London to random-airport-for-cheap-airlines.

The first tutorial for the St. Hugh’s summer program has passed. While it wouldn’t be appropriate to discuss here, I can say that leading it was a learning experience for me, as well. Being on the other side of any such asymmetry is always uncanny.

In an exciting development, it seems that I am going hiking and camping in Scotland from the 27th to the 31st of this month, with the Oxford Walking Club. We are going to the western Highlands, to Faichem Park near Invergarry. We will spend three days walking in the Loch Quoich and Blen Shiel area. Some of the mountains there are 1100m high, a bit more than Grouse Mountain and Mount Fromme, back in North Vancouver. I am meeting the trip leader to deliver payment and a participant form in less than an hour.

Ever since watching the documentary where former Pythons revisit the places where Holy Grail was filmed, I have really wanted to go to Scotland. I promise to do my utmost to bring back some interesting photos: both using my increasingly ailing digicam and using the Fuji Velvia that Tristan so generously sent me.

[Update] Moments after paying the £80 for the trip, a serious difficulty arose. The club absolutely requires proper hiking boots for this trip. That’s fair enough, but mine are in Vancouver. The options, therefore, are:

1. Have my boots shipped from Canada
2. Buy boots here
3. Cancel the trip

Boots here, like everything else, are markedly more expensive than in Canada, and the ones I have in Vancouver are quite good. I do need to have them by the 26th of this month, but that leaves three entire weeks. Having them sent would mean digging them out from wherever in my big array of boxes of stuff left behind they are, plus paying postage. That said, I could use them for subsequent trips, it would almost certainly be cheaper than buying them here, and they are already broken in. Worth investigating.

[Update II] It seems extremely unlikely that my boots weigh more than 2kg – as much as a 2L bottle of soda. Estimating that they would fit in a 12″ by 10″ by 8″ box, they would cost $43.05 to send by Small Packet International Air. That’s about 20% of their original value, and probably about 1/4 of what inferior boots would cost in Oxford. They would cost $68.42 to send by Xpresspost International (with guaranteed four day delivery). Of course, the question of extracting them from whichever 55 gallon plastic box that has become their temporary abode remains.

[Update III: 5 July 2006] My mother has very kindly put my hiking boots into the post. As such, nothing remains between me and the realization of this trip. They should also prove useful when the Summer 2007 Kilimanjaro plan starts really coming together.