No, no, let's do this properly now. Let's be serious.
The SHEEP game is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth version.
Originally Posted by
the sixth version
Welcome to the game of Sheep. It's simple. I'll list a number of categories. Anyone who wants to play just PMs me a list containing an element from each category. When I've gotten enough responses, I'll tally up the submissions. You get a point for every other person who gave your answer. The winner is whoever has the most points when we've tallied all the questions.
Naturally, your answers should be private. Don't go asking each other what answers you gave.
Example:
1. Name a fruit.
Leo: Apple.
Strife: Apple.
Five: Apple.
Bridge: Banana.
Kirby: Strawberry.
Leo and Strife and Five would each get 2 points, because two other people picked the same answer. Bridge and Kirby would get 0, since they were forever alone.
The first was quite naturally perfect; it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure.
Originally Posted by
Wikipedia
A Keynesian beauty contest is a concept developed by John Maynard Keynes and introduced in Chapter 12 of his work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), to explain price fluctuations in equity markets. It describes a beauty contest where judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular faces among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive.
Keynes described the action of rational agents in a market using an analogy based on a fictional newspaper contest, in which entrants are asked to choose the six most attractive faces from a hundred photographs. Those who picked the most popular faces are then eligible for a prize.
- A naive strategy would be to choose the face that, in the opinion of the entrant, is the most handsome.
- A more sophisticated contest entrant, wishing to maximize the chances of winning a prize, would think about what the majority perception of attractiveness is, and then make a selection based on some inference from their knowledge of public perceptions.
- This can be carried one step further to take into account the fact that other entrants would each have their own opinion of what public perceptions are.
- Thus the strategy can be extended to the next order and the next and so on, at each level attempting to predict the eventual outcome of the process based on the reasoning of other rational agents.
"It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees." (Keynes,
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936).
Keynes believed that similar behavior was at work within the stock market. This would have investors pricing shares not based on what they think an asset's fundamental value is, or even on what investors think other investors believe about the asset's value, but on what they think other investors believe is the average opinion about the value of the asset, or even higher-order assessments.
So true. But how do we design a competition that can somehow determine if you're just YOLOing the choice, or if you are indeed using the real galaxy brain techniques? How many levels of inference are you on?
SHEEP WHO ARE DEFINITELY NOT WOLVES™
This game is at once simpler and more complex than SHEEP as you know it. The questions, for one thing, are better. But how do you make questions better? By restricting the space of possible replies...maybe. That is only one way, a very easy way to do it. But there are others.
Consider a question like this.
Who is the best girl in Fate/Stay Night?
Brutal in its simplicity. Yet with an infinity of possible answers. But what if I now say to you - this question you must answer, not once, but twice.
Give two answers to this question. Answer
[1] what you actually think, and
[2] what you expect most people will answer for [1].
This game, unlike SHEEP, is not designed to test how much of a normie you are. It is designed to test how good you are at predicting the responses of normies. Which SHEEP also does, incidentally, but this does it better.
Your score is the number of people OTHER THAN YOU whose answer to [1] you predicted in your answer to [2] minus the number of people OTHER THAN YOU who predicted your answer to [1] in their answer to [2].
To give an example. Suppose that I answer:
[1] Himuro Kane.
[2] Archer [EMIYA].
Now let's suppose that the aggregate results from the board look like this:
| 22 total participants. |
Answered [1] Himuro Kane. (3 total) |
Answered [1] Archer [EMIYA]. (19 total) |
| Answered [2] Himuro Kane. (5 total) |
1 |
4 |
| Answered [2] Archer [EMIYA]. (17 total) |
2 |
15 |
I predicted with my [2] that the most popular answer to [1] would be Archer, and 19 people (none of whom is me) answered as I predicted. So I get 19 points. But five people other than me predicted that the most popular answer to [1] would be Himuro Kane, and that was my [1]. So I lose five points. I get 14 total. I am a godlike predictor with refined taste.
Now let's suppose I was one of the people who just put Archer [EMIYA] in both slots. Well, 18 people (not including myself) answered [1] as I predicted, so I get 18 points. But 16 people (not including myself either) predicted my answer to [1] so I lose 16 points and end up with 2. I am a shitter but relatively OK.
The point giveaway looks like this.
| 22 total participants. |
Answered [1] Himuro Kane. (3 total) |
Answered [1] Archer [EMIYA]. (19 total) |
| Answered [2] Himuro Kane. (5 total) |
1 person who predicted 2 others and was predicted by 4 others. Score = 2-4 = -2 points. |
4 people who each predicted 3 others and were each predicted by 17 others. Score = 3-17 = -14 points. |
| Answered [2] Archer [EMIYA]. (17 total) |
2 people who each predicted 19 others and were each predicted by 5 others. Score = 19-5 = 14 points. |
15 people who each predicted 18 others and were each predicted by 16 others. Score = 18-16 = 2 points. |
As you can see, the people in the lower left square are very good at predicting what others will do, but are themselves difficult to predict. Therefore they get a lot of points. The people in the upper right square are godawful at predicting what's popular, but are themselves normies, so they end up with negative points. Remember the equation:
Your Score = Nplayers (not including you) whose [1] == your [2] - Nplayers (not including you) whose [2] == your [1]
The winners of this contest are those who understand others, but do not allow themselves to be understood. They are like Akagi. You like Akagi, don't you? I still don't understand the rules of mahjong. I think it's pretty good.
With all that out of the way, these are the questions.
I. Which seiyuu's performance in any voiced Type-Moon work, or voiced adaptation thereof, do you rate the highest?
II. What is the greatest fight scene in any Type-Moon story?
III. Which long-promised TM product would you most like to see realised?
IV. Who is the best antagonist in any TM IP?
V. Have you actually read the VN? (Any of them?)
VI. For how many years have you been a Beast's Lair user?
VII. When will FGO finally end?
Give two answers to each question:
[1] what you actually think, and
[2] what you expect most people will give as their answer to [1].
In submission you can format these answers like III.1, III.2, and so on.
Send answers to me via PM. Answers will close on Tuesday April 4 at 0400 hours UTC. Any PMs received after that point will not be counted.
May the best wolf sheep win.
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