I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at the time I wrote this simulation. I was living in Daniels Hall, a graduate student dorm whose layout consisted of pairs of extremely small single rooms that shared a one-seat bathroom between them. To say these rooms were small was no understatement; there was no place in my room where I could stand without being able to touch at least three walls. I had a little couch that rolled out to be a bed, after which I could not stand regardless of how many walls I was willing to touch. The one saving grace in the tiny room was that my morning newspaperwas delivered undermy door, and I could pick it up and read it without ever leaving my bed.
But it is the shared bathroom that is the relevant part of this story. With two doors leading to a one-seat john, soonerorlateryou get to meet the otherparty. That year, my bathroom-mate was a guy named Jay French, a graduate student in the business school.
Jay went on to work for McDonnell Douglas Aerospace Corporation in St. Louis, and I’ve lost track of him over the years (give me a call, Jay, if you’re out there), but he is the one who gave me the nerve to publish my jai alai results. As a future M.B.A., he had a professional interest in get-rich-quick schemes, and thus he was intrigued when I told him about my simulation.
“You know, I have just the place foryou to publish a paperon that stuff.
The Institute of Management Sciences publishes a semipopularjournal, Interfaces. I’m a member, so they send it to me every other month. They have lots of articles analyzing optimal strategies related to sports.”
2 An effective way to ruin any linear congruential generator is to instantiate it with the wrong constants. Setting a= 0, c = 0 and R0= 0 simulates flipping a one-sided coin because every “random” numberproduced will be 0. See Knuth’s book fora thor-ough discussion of the subtle problem of selecting the right constants to make things work.
He showed me a few back issues he had in his room. Daniels Hall rooms were so small you could only store a few back issues of anything.
But indeed, there were articles whose depth and topics were comparable to what I had done.
“Is this a respected journal?,” I asked suspiciously.
“Respected? No. But it is much less boring than the other journals they publish.”
I took the bait and wrote up a paper with the results of my simulation.
To give it a veneerof academic respectability, I claimed the paperwas a study of the “fairness” of the Spectacular Seven scoring system. The Spec-tacularSeven scoring system is unfairbecause equally skilled players have an unequal chance of winning. I tried varying the position where dou-ble points first start (afterthe seventh point played in SpectacularSeven) so as to discoverthe point that leads to the greatest equality. Aftersim-ulating 50,000 games foreach possible doubling point, it became clear that doubling nearthe beginning of a cycle is the worst time if you want to ensure fairness because the already favored first or second players are likely to be the first to emerge or reemerge from the queue. Yet this is ex-actly what happens with the SpectacularSeven. It would be much better to double when the middle playeris expected to leave the queue to play a point.
You might be curious about how academic journals work. Publication decisions are made on the basis of “peer review.” When the editor of Inter-faces received my submitted article in the mail, he or she skimmed through it and then came up with a list of two or three experts in the area to review it carefully. Identifying an appropriate set of referees for my article was probably somewhat difficult because there are few other academics with a clearly identifiable interest in jai alai. Instead, the editor probably sent it to experts in simulation or mathematical issues in sport.
Refereeing is one of the chores of being an active researcher. Whenever you submit a paperto a journal, you get yourname stuck in that editor’s database of possible future referees. It takes time to read a technical paper carefully and write a report stating its merits and identifying its flaws.
Thus, many people try to dodge the work. But peer review is the best way to ensure that journals publish only research articles that are correct and of high quality.
These referee reports go back to the editor, who uses them to decide the question of acceptance or rejection. Copies of the reports are sent to the
author of the paper, but with the names of the referee removed. Anonymity ensures that referees are free to speak their mind without worrying that vengeance will be taken at a laterdate. Referee reports contain ideas for improving the article, and thus even those papers recommended for ac-ceptance are usually revised before publication.
My article, “A Fairer Scoring System for Jai-alai,” appeared in Interfaces in November1988. Formy efforts, I received a modest amount of glory but no money. The authors of research papers receive no payment for their articles. To the contrary, researchers are often asked to contribute
“page charges” to help keep the journal going. A specialized academic journal might have a circulation of only 1000 or so, which is not enough to realize any significant revenue from advertising. To cover the cost of production, libraries get charged a fortune for subscriptions to academic journals, which can run from hundreds to thousands of dollars a year.
Nevertheless, most academic journals claim to lose money. I’m not sure I completely understand the economics of journals, but the point is that money is tight.
This tight money issue lead to an amusing incident with this particular paper. My Interfaces article contained several graphs of statistical data related to fairness, which I had drawn and printed using typical late 1980s computerequipment. The editordecided that the production quality of my graphs was too low for publication and that I had to hire a draftsman, at my expense, to redraw these graphs before the article would be accepted.
My original graphs looked plenty good enough to me, and besides I wasn’t happy about paying the draftsman. So I played the starving student routine.
In my final letterresponding to the journal I wrote as follows:
Acting upon yoursuggestion, I found out that the university does in-deed employ a graphics artist. Since I had no grant to charge it to, they billed me at a special student rate. The total cost, $26.25, meant that I only had to skip lunch fora week to pay forthem. Thank you foryour help and I look forward to seeing my paper in Interfaces.
A few weeks laterI received an envelope in the mail from the manag-ing editorof Interfaces. A stack of neatly cut out coupons to McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts, and seemingly every other fast food chain in existence was included. The note said
Maybe the enclosed will help you with yourlunch problem. We don’t want you to go hungry.