History
Alain Ledoux is the founding father of the guess 2/3 of the average-game. In 1981, Ledoux used this game as a tie breaker in his French magazine Jeux et Stratégie. He asked about 4,000 readers, who reached the same amount of points in previous puzzles, to state an integer between 1 and 1,000,000,000. The winner was the one who guessed closest to 2/3 of the average guess. Rosemarie Nagel (1995) revealed the potential of guessing games of that kind: They are able to disclose participants´ "depth of reasoning". Due to the analogy to Keynes´ comparison of newspaper beauty contests and stock market investments the guessing game is also known as the Keynesian beauty contest. Rosemarie Nagel´s experimental beauty contest became a famous game in Experimental economics. The forgotten inventor of this game was unearthed in 2009 during an online beauty contest experiment with chess players provided by the University of Kassel (Germany): Alain Ledoux, together with over 6,000 other chess players, participated in that experiment which looked familiar to him.
Read more about this topic: Guess 2/3 Of The Average
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)