Comment by pessimizer
2 years ago
This reminds me of professional Bridge. They split the teams with a wall and pass their cards through a window at the same time to prevent communication through timing.
2 years ago
This reminds me of professional Bridge. They split the teams with a wall and pass their cards through a window at the same time to prevent communication through timing.
And yet they cheat through the screens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Team_(bridge)#Cheating_an...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantoni_and_Nunes_cheating_sca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_and_Schwartz_cheating_s...
And those are the ones we know about. :)
As far as actually using bridge in a job interview once. I did. In bridge there's a rule where if your partner gives you a hint not via the bidding, you must take the opposite approach if logically possible. It is called "Active Ethics". I had an interviewer try to lead me by the nose to the answer way too hard, in a debugging interview. So I'd stop and check EVERYTHING I could think of first before doing what he said. I told him I was doing it after the interview, and to look up active ethics if he needed a further explanation.
Got the job.
While I admire your ethics, I feel like a lot of technical job interviews are structured such that you're supposed to actively collaborate with the interviewer. The interviewer is allowed to give you hints or suggestions, and they're very interested in how well the candidate takes hints.
And sometimes the hint can be a trick! I recently did an interview where the interviewer asked if I should use a shortcut to compare two strings, one that assumed there's only one way to normalize a string. I almost fell for it, but then I hesitated and mentioned that I was concerned about some languages where that assumption wouldn't hold. They agreed and were happy that I chose the safer approach.
There's a difference between collaborate and get clubbed over the head with the answer.
This guy was doing the latter, and it was meant to be an interview to test raw debugging/diagnostic skills. If I just followed the breadcrumbs, I'd show no real skill.
In a coding interview, I'd follow the hints.
Also many interviews are structured so there simply won't be time to finish the exercise if you're going slow.
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It probably wasn't the situation in your case, but I often give straightforward hints if the candidate is struggling with something that I don't want them to spend time on so we can get to the significant material.
E.g. in an algorithms interview they get stuck on an unrelated python issue (many people interview in python but don't use it day to day), or in a system design interview they get stuck on designing extra-credit subsystem C when they haven't finished subsystems A and B.
If they aren't getting it after a couple hints, I'll just tell them the answer or tell them to come back to it later.
Anyway, I would be very careful if you aren't going where the interviewer is pointing you. If you think it's a trick or you want to practice Active Ethics, then I would call that out in the moment since you might be messing up the flow of the interview at best and come off as hard to work with at worst.
I was very polite, but I just mentioned each other path.
In all situations, judgment is required.
Oh, I know. Attackers will continue to attack. In my opinion, professional bridge is a doomed game. Decades of added steps to prevent cheating complicate too much an already very difficult game, and determined, smart people are still very successful at bypassing them anyway.
I still want to learn to play at a reasonable level though, I'd rather waste my time on bridge than chess. But it needs to be home games, and there's no way I'm going to find the partners when spades and bid whist are out there and easy to learn.
As someone who has played in the Grand National Teams - Flight C. :)
It has problems. Cheating is a huge issue, as is sportsmanship. If you know bridge. I used to play precision with an 11-13 1NT. When people saw our convention card, they'd often ask to swap tables with other teammates. (Clearly not legal.)
When I was playing on a team where all 4 of us played the same convention card those people made me laugh so hard.
Cheaters will cheat. I played clean, I had fun. I haven't had time to play for a while. But man, bridge is a funny little world.
Surely then you're just in a game of bluff with a Sicilian ... ie then you just feel your partner to do the opposite and make sure it's caught, resulting in them taking the action you intended?
IANABridgePlayer, clearly.
Remember, partner has an ETHICAL issue. Partner must work AGAINST you. If they can infer that you might mean something other than what you are signalling, they must take that into account.
I've been in the situation in game a few times. Thankfully, my decisions were pretty cut and dry.
You don't have to do non-obvious things. If you are going to accept any invitation to game... You are going to accept even if partner looks happy, what I wouldn't do is throw out a slam exploring bid if I was on the fence about it.
If I was absolute top of range... I'd go ahead and make the bid. Because there is nothing that would change based on partner's actions.
Then they see what you're doing and have to act accordingly. Eventually... something about a land war in Asia.
If people are just expected to be human state machines and are penalized for not doing the prescribed automata, then you might as well flip a coin for the trophy and skip the game.
This is like saying a catcher can't signal to a pitcher.
Information-passing is a human skill that adds a dimension to the game. Let the best win.
Yeah, I lost all interest in Bridge when I found out the people who play it hate 100% of the interesting parts and had outlawed them, and that every time someone comes up with another cool approach, they outlaw that, too.
Initially learning the game it was like “oh wow, that feature of the game has some really cool implications! This is amazing!” but then reading about how real bridge tournaments run, yeah, they crafted the rules to remove every single one of those cool implications.
[EDIT] to be fair, the basic rules would also result in a terrible game as soon as people got too good at exploiting them. I just think they’ve managed to find another way to ruin the game while keeping it technically playable.
The extent to which this just seems to be openly true is startling. Some games, in response to new strategies that are particularly effective, by embracing them and setting aside older approaches. Some games respond by rebalancing and changing rules to keep the game working well. Bridge just bans the strategies themselves (eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_pass and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_unusual_method ).
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> Information-passing is a human skill that adds a dimension to the game.
Nah. You choose the game that you prefer. You can play the game where you cheat all the time, but don't play it with people who like bridge without asking them first.
Bridge has a built in channel for communication that has very limited bandwidth. The bidding conventions are about maximizing how much you communicate with limited symbols and almost no attempt at secrecy. Effectively it'd turn the game into one where players play with their hands face up, because that's the most effective way to communicate. That doesn't sound very interesting to me.
If you want to invent a version of bridge where surreptitious information-passing is part of the game, more power to you, but it’s not the same game.
Quite untrue.
There is this thing called "Bridge Judgement" that you are allowed to use.
Just because your hand has 10 HCP... but has 13 spades... doesn't mean you will pass. You'll bid your 7 Spades and call it a day.
Bridge has many shades of grey. It is learning how to dance them correctly that is hard.
Wow, looking at this with a red-team cap on, there is so much human "messiness" to exploit here. It shouldn't be too hard too be able to pass a bit or two of information.
It might be interesting for a security person to try to come up with ways to hypothetically assure a trustworthy bridge game, assuming no limits on costs or inconvenience (i.e. if a trustworthy bridge game takes three months to play, or requires launching a satellite into orbit, so be it.)
Bridge is a really weird game. It's all about secret communication with your partner, but it's not allowed to be secret. You can communicate, but no communication! Very odd.
Bridge tournament rules are crafted as if everyone involved wishes they were playing a different game, but are for some reason stuck with the basic rules of Bridge. There’s a pile of rules about how you aren’t allowed to do all kinds of things that the basic rules would enable.
It’s like if baseball couldn’t change field size or mound height or whatever and just had to add lots of rules about how you aren’t allowed to throw too fast or hit too far et c., but kept the physical reality of the game the same.
Communication through bidding is fascinating. Any type of collusion during any kind of auction is fascinating.
It seems there is still a possibility for passing information. For example, you can shove the little table across the barrier, or slowly slide it to indicate something. That's how the guy in the upper right passed it the first and second time.
There are endless ways to pass information. Notice the sibling comment about "active ethics." It's the game sort of saying "there's really no fool-proof way to keep you from cheating, so please just be a good person. Even to the point that if you're put into a situation where you could accidentally cheat, you should intentionally play non-optimally."