Games Make the Man

There are a lot of things in the world. Trillions of cells in your body, for example. But the number of ways to arrange these things swamps the actual number by an unfathomable margin. Suppose there are an even trillion cells in your body. If you scrambled the locations of these at random by swapping each cell with some other chosen in a cosmic lottery, what are the odds that after two such iterations, you'd end up back with all cells in their original position? So you scramble, scramble again, and hope for the best. You can think of it as the first operation randomizing everything, and the second giving a (very small) chance of putting it right. So what are the odds?

One in a trillion factorial. That's two times three times four...up to a trillion. The number of subatomic particles in the known universe doesn't come close to that number.

My point for this post is that connections and relationships are important. This sometimes has unexpected effects. I have two examples, both of which involve game theory. Both come from the 20 January 2007 issue of New Scientist.

1. The editorial (sub. required) describes some medical experiments showing that a chemical called dichloroacetate might be a potent anti-cancer drug. It's currently being used to treat other diseases, and basically enhances mitochondrial function. Most cancer cells don't use mitochondria to provide their energy (it requires a blood supply, which may or may not exist), so they rely on glycolysis. The drug switches the cancer cells' mitochondria back on. They apparently wake up, take a look around, and self-destruct the cell.

The twist is that because this drug has been around for a long time, it's unpatentable. Therefore no drug company is going to spend millions on a drug trial. They might well spend years and millions developing a similar drug. But not this one.

2. Blue-eyed men prefer to mate with blue-eyed women.

[M]en with blue eyes are drawn towards blue-eyed women, and prefer to choose them as their partner because this can provide reassurance that the woman's babies are theirs too.

In other words, because the blue-eye gene is recessive, a blue-eyed guy will know something's up if the baby has brown eyes. This is not true for brown-eyed mates.

There's actually another article in the same issue that fits the theme here. It's on people who lie in Internet dating sites, and is a fairly obvious instance of cheating. In this case, people lie, but not too much. They make themselves a little taller (men) or thinner or younger (women). But not so much that the face-to-face meeting will explode the myth.