Word: esses
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Message to cheaters everywhere: do your homework. When the answer key to a difficult problem set was inadvertently picked up by one of the students in Biology 22, "Evolutionary Stable Strategy" (ESS), Head TF William Piel proceeded to give students a run for their money...
...Instead of simply passing out a new problem set, Piel decided to use game theory, one of the primary topics studied in ESS, in order to subtly frighten students who might have felt tempted to glance at the lifted answer key. In a biological context, game theory is used to predict the optimal behavior or adaptive strategies of animals in a competitive environment while also having to account for the probability of alternative strategies in the neighboring environment. Piel wrote a creative game theory word problem that would apply to the classroom situation and e-mailed the problem to every...
...According to Piel, the problem was set up in typical ESS fashion, "where the strategy of one depends of the strategy of others. And the payoffs for the others are intended to encourage an outcome undesirable to the perpetrator...
...problem read as follows: "Consider the following payoffs: If the student who took the answer key fails to return it and is eventually caught, he or she will get a zero for the ESS problem set (let's call this cost C). If the student is caught willfully sharing the answer key with other Bio 22 students, the student will be referred to the Administrative Board (suffers cost C as well as the Ad Board cost D). A Bio 22 recipient who refuses to read the answer key and reports the perpetrator who passed it out (given that the perpetrator...
...important as bagels have been in my life--I think back to meals at Manhattan's Ess-a-Bagel, late night jaunts to H & H Bagels and the thousands of bagels in between--I always find myself surprised by the vast gulf in bagel quality between the two cities I call home. I may have learned to suppress the observation and block it out. And who could blame me? When done right, the bagel can serve as the focal point for an entire diet. But in the hands of lesser baker...it's nothing more than a carbohydrate-rich sandwich...