Economically speaking, should one look up to the businesspeople who build skyscrapers, or look down at them? Calculation is involved in reaching the answer obtained in this study: “A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Skyscrapers,” Robert W. Helsley and William C. Strange, Journal of Urban Economics, vol. 64, no. 1, July 2008, pp. 49-64. The authors explain: […]
The delightfully iffy game called “Fifty-Fifty Trivia” was created by Martin Eiger, who invents many concepts and games, using words and ideas as the main building material. Eiger is, among other things, our Limerick Laureate—you can see his limericks, in any issue of the magazine (Annals of Improbable Research, with each limerick describing something that […]
Since its launch in 2016 Pokémon GO has attracted a wealth of academic studies – covering the social, psychological, medical, security and legal aspects of the game. [ For those not familiar with the subject, here is some background : Pokémon GO is an augmented reality (AR) mobile game for iOS and Android devices. It […]
“A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it.” When it comes to ‘Juiciness’ in Role Playing (Computer) Games, too much, or too little, it seems, can be non-ideal. Professor Dominic Kao and colleagues at the Virtual Futures Lab, Purdue University, US, have experimentally investigated such […]
This device has just received a US patent (April 24, 2018) – can you guess its function? It’s not only a (semi) conventional fold-up chair – it’s also the basis of a number of tailgating, beach, BBQ and Family Games. “The present disclosure relates to a chair with game features. The chair can function as […]
It almost goes without saying that Improbable endeavours to keep our readers up-to-date with current fMRI research projects. In respect of which, may we recommend : ‘This is your brain on Scrabble: Neural correlates of visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players as measured during task and resting-state’ published in the journal Cortex, Volume 75, […]
CEOs of high-profile (e.g. S&P 1500) corporations are sometimes tempted to shirk their duties. One quite well-tried method of shirking is to leave the office for the day and play golf instead. Thus, as an observer, if you take the position that shirking might in general hamper business performance, an extrapolated question can be asked […]
Of all the curious things one can get insurance cover for – the golfing fraternity’s ‘hole-in-one-insurance’ is surely one of the curiouser. Why would one want insurance against a hole-in-one? The answer lies in the substantial cash bonus prizes which (some) golf clubs offer to those players who manage to get one. From the club’s […]
E. coli figure prominently and violently in this study: “Whack-an-E. coli with the Morbidostat,” Ofer Fridman, Amir Goldberg and Nathalie Q Balaban, Genome Biology, 2012 Jan 27;13(1):140. The caption to figure 1 of the paper reads: “The morbidostat, as a whack-a-mole game, maintaining constant evolutionary pressure despite the evolution of protective mechanisms. An Escherichia coli culture is […]
The angle of incidence is strongly related to the angle of “reflection” in this new real-AND-SIMULTANEOUSLY-artificial game of the mathematical gods: “Microorganism Billiards,” Colin Wahl, Joseph Lukasik, Saverio E. Spagnolie, Jean-Luc Thiffeault, arXiv 1502.01478, February 5, 2015. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of Wisconsin, report: “Recent […]