The Telephone Game

Chinese whispers (or telephone game in the United States[1]) is a game played around the world,[2] in which one person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly, and often amusingly, from the one uttered by the first. Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, the difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering, and that some players may deliberately alter what is being said to guarantee a changed message by the end of the line.
The game is often played by children as a party game or on the playground. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies as rumours or gossip spread,[1] or, more generally, for the unreliability of human recollection or even oral traditions.
~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

You might have played the telephone game when you were younger. Players sit in a circle, and the first player chooses a phrase or a word and whispers it to the player next to them, never repeating it. That next player does the same thing to the next player beside them, and the game continues until the last player hears the phrase. At the end of the round the passphrase is said aloud by the last player, and the fun comes when everyone gets to hear how the initial message was misinterpreted along its route. The general idea is to teach us how rumours are created and spread by miscommunication.

Our Negative View on Games

Over the last few years I have worked on a small inquiry/treatise on games, and come to understand that in broken or less than optimal societies we often mistreat or misunderstand the importance of games. I theorize that a strong society will put a special importance on games whereas weak or failing societies and economies will often disfavour the use of games, sometimes even outright banning them. The telephone game is looked at as a negative interpretation of a communication game. I think that if we view it in a different light, we might learn how to evolve such a game and use it to better ourselves and our participation in society. This writing seeks to extend the simple circuit of the telephone game so we might better understand how to utilize the lesson it provides for us.

The Bargaining Problem

The Bargaining Problem was a solution proposed by John Nash which he came up with in his early 20’s. The basic problem involves two parties that wish to make a trade involving a number of items (the youth of Nash is conveyed in his paper by the items he chose which include a ‘pocket-knife’ and a ‘baseball bat’ among others). Nash shows the value of trade between the two parties, first WITHOUT money, and then WITH money. It is easy to see that money facilitates trade for this problem and brings value to the mini-economy observed.

We can understand this insight further with a simpler problem, for example, with a trade between two parties that might involve trading a car for a truck, or other items that are not comparable with natural numbers (ie 2 whole cars might be worth more than 1 whole truck). A more ‘granular’ solution is needed, since cutting a fraction off of a truck or a car would render each valueless to the receiver. The parties COULD introduce other smaller items into the trade, yet regardless we can see the power of money, as highly divisible medium, in reaching an accurate value in exchanged.

It is understood that in such a trade, if no comparable value can be exchanged for, the trade won’t take place, and the mini-economy cannot optimize its value.

Here we can understand the implicate relationship between money and trade. In Nash’s paper it is the introduction of a currency that optimizes the problem solving capability of the parties, whether they are said to work non-cooperatively or cooperatively (It has also been stated by Nash that one such solution to, or method of solving, COOPERATIVE games can be found by rendering a game from its cooperative form to a non-cooperative counterpart). Here it could be shown that there is a relationship between the division of players much like, for example, how we might consider different parts of a single brain that seems to work against itself (addiction as an example), even though the entire brain is itself a single entity.

Moreover, in regard to currencies as a solution to complex problems, it might be that introducing a currency allows for this optimization, but it could also be shown just as well that when we optimize our trade, we should expect a currency to arise.

(1): Games with transferable utility.
(and)
(2): Games without transferable utility
(or “NTU” games).
In the world of practical realities it is money which typically causes the existence of a game of type (1) rather than of type (2); money is the “lubrication” which enables the efficient “transfer of utility”. And generally if games can be transformed from type (2) to type (1) there is a gain, on average, to all the players in terms of whatever might be expected to be the outcome.

Nash makes a sidestop in one of his essays/lecture on Ideal Money that explains that we can in fact render zero sum games into NON zero sum games in which both/all parties can make mutually favorable gain, and it is the introduction of a currency that allows this to happen.

The Implicate Relationship Between Malicious and Benevolent “Players”

There are two points I wish to make here. Firstly a benevolent player might be comparable to a communication node that passes on clean or accurately copied information. We can contrast this with a malicious player which is comparable to a node that passes on dirty information. If a sender holds optimized information, compressed to its most valuable form, we expect a benevolent player to perfectly copy and pass that information thus conveying the message in its most valuable form. On the other hand, a malicious node would render the information, and we can expect any rendering to be less than optimized in regard to its value and purpose. A node that passes on dirty information (but with no morally related mal-intent) would have a comparable characteristic that causes it to convey a message with a similar result. In this way a malicious player, or a broken communication node, are comparable (we also might view a “dirty node” as outputting the original information with a certain probability of error which would pose the same problem or difficulty).

The 3rd Party: Adding Complexity

We can extend Nash’s bargaining problem with the introduction of a 3rd party or a communication node that interacts between the two players. We can think of this party, from zero sum perspective, as benefiting any time the optimized messages between the two parties are obfuscated or rendered in any form.

This 3rd party might also pick up on, or have, information that the sending or receiving party might not be privy to, and for this writing (and simplicity) we should consider this comparable to obfuscation of the original message. This is easy enough from the perspective of this writing since the original intent, and therefore optimized value of the message, will have been obscured (in an unpredicated fashion from at least the sender’s view).

Following the implicate relationship between players, we can understand that any such third party might be a group of individual players that a message must or might pass through, and so it is really for simplicity sakes that we are dealing only with ONE 3rd party.

We can understand this in relation to communication nodes, that there may be only one such node to pass through or many nodes, but that we are really thinking about an input (sender), processor (3rd party whether one nodes or many nodes, or a simple or complex circuit), and an output (receiver).

We have now rendered the extended version of the bargaining problem to be transmutable to the Byzantine Generals Problem.

The Byzantine General Problem

In computing, the Two Generals Problem is a thought experiment meant to illustrate the pitfalls and design challenges of attempting to coordinate an action by communicating over an unreliable link. It is related to the more general Byzantine Generals Problem (though published long before that later generalization) and appears often in introductory classes about computer networking (particularly with regard to the Transmission Control Protocol where it shows that TCP can't guarantee state consistency between endpoints and why), though it applies to any type of two party communication where failures of communication are possible. A key concept in epistemic logic, this problem highlights the importance of common knowledge. Some authors also refer to this as the Two Generals Paradox, the Two Armies Problem, or the Coordinated Attack Problem.[1][2] The Two Generals Problem was the first computer communication problem to be proved to be unsolvable. An important consequence of this proof is that generalizations like the Byzantine Generals problem are also unsolvable in the face of arbitrary communication failures, thus providing a base of realistic expectations for any distributed consistency protocols.~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals'_Problem

Byzantine refers to the Byzantine Generals' Problem, an agreement problem (described by Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak and Marshall Pease in their 1982 paper, "The Byzantine Generals Problem")[1] in which a group of generals, each commanding a portion of the Byzantine army, encircle a city. These generals wish to formulate a plan for attacking the city. In its simplest form, the generals must only decide whether to attack or retreat. Some generals may prefer to attack, while others prefer to retreat. The important thing is that every general agrees on a common decision, for a halfhearted attack by a few generals would become a rout and be worse than a coordinated attack or a coordinated retreat.
The problem is complicated by the presence of traitorous generals who may not only cast a vote for a suboptimal strategy, they may do so selectively. For instance, if nine generals are voting, four of whom support attacking while four others are in favor of retreat, the ninth general may send a vote of retreat to those generals in favor of retreat, and a vote of attack to the rest. Those who received a retreat vote from the ninth general will retreat, while the rest will attack (which may not go well for the attackers). The problem is complicated further by the generals being physically separated and must send their votes via messengers who may fail to deliver votes or may forge false votes. ~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance

The Byzantine Generals’ Problem, or the Two Generals’ Problem, is usually expressed as a computer science problem in which a sender must pass a “ready to attack” message to a receiver (each of which are ‘allies’), but this message must pass through a ‘valley’ in which the enemies village/fortress sites and in which the allies have besieged and wish to make a simultaneous invasion of.

The basic premise of the problem is that the generals can never really be sure that their messenger has not been intercepted, or that the message they received has not be compromised or altered.

This problem remained unsolved until Satoshi Nakamoto posted the bitcoin.pdf whitepaper. The relevant point to make here was that it signaled the levation and evolution of another type of currency, bitcoin. Satoshi solved an unsolvable problem by implementing a higher order solution.

Private Channels for Bargaining and Negotiation

Here we can make a small point about how we can see private channels solve the problem of malicious 3rd parties or broken nodes, again allowing for the optimization of bargaining. With the introduction of a private channel it is easy to see how we can render a broken node to be ineffective in altering the messages being sent. In another way we are simply introducing a more direct path for communication, and in regard to the telephone game we are simply creating a parallel circuit of communication which would be also comparable to a broadcast system in which all nodes might receive all messages.

Optimizing Communication

In my writing Optimizal Taboo, I suggest that we might modulate our communication in small and smaller pieces/points, so that each piece might be rendered to become more palatable for the receiver. The idea here is to change the information being passed such that the value of the communication is still passed but the ‘language’ being used it more readable or acceptable to the receiver.

I make this point in tandem with another method of communication that is comparable to the introduction of an interpreter.

A basic example would be a difficult message we wish to convey to a friend, in which we first send to a mutual friend or a family member of the receiver. Such a friend or family member might be able to use their OWN language in order to pass the message on in such a way that is more appreciated by the receiver, but still conveys the same valuable information. Interestingly, this method of communication, although at least sometimes optimal, is usually not very socially acceptable and is often deemed manipulative (I use it all the time, often openly).

In this way we introduce an interpreter, or a benevolent player, or an intelligent node, that further optimizes the communication in such a way that the original sender was not able to do.

This would also be comparable to Nick Szabo’s market translator, which alleviates the friction caused from the mental accounting barriers created by both the obfuscation of current pricing systems as well as a lack of a highly granular currency system.

Transpacific Trade Negotiation

Wikileaks and other groups, and often social media tirades, are full of complaints of the private, behind doors discussion, that goes on between the elite leaders of the major nations of the world. Wikileaks is determined to dissolve the opaque private channels of communication created to allegedly foster optimal trade deals between countries. I would like to suggest that such private negotiations, that have arise through evolution of our global society over time, are necessary for our global economy to function optimally. Without private negotiations, optimal solutions to our global bargaining problem might not be able to come about. I don’t propose a proof for this, rather I suggest that in order to suggest that private communication is detrimental to solving the complex negotiations, that the protestors themselves must provide the proof. That is to say, private negotiations exist, and science must be used to show that such private channels are detrimental.

For this reason, specifically the complexity of coming up with such a proof, I believe such private channels should, and always will exist.

Optimizing the Telephone Game-A different perspective

The telephone game can be viewed as non-cooperative, if we are trying to produce the funny scenario of a misinterpretation of the initial message at the end of the round, whereas we might view it as cooperative if we are trying to get the initial message to carry through. This shows the implicate relationship between non-cooperative games versus cooperative game in regard to the telephone game. The optimization of the telephone game, such that the initial message is nearly never misinterpreted, would obviously be to set up a parallel line of communication. I think we might take this further by introducing an open broadcast system and incentivizing honest participation with a transferable utility (money). As the complexity of the game grows it would probably be beneficial to introduce private channels. It is this kind of inquiry into game that allows us to benefit from their evolution and understanding of them, and I hope to inspire a society that covets their games and the talents players that work tirelessly to optimize our solutions to them.