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Jane Street's Figgie card game

figgie.com

21–30 of 122 posts

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#21
The whole choosing games thing is strange.

Give me one button and throw me into a live game.

Or let me practice against bots before going live.

Also the notice that my username was taken wasn’t clear (was in white) so i thought the app didn’t work until i learned my username was already taken by scrolling up and seeing the notice that didn’t stand out

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#22
post #3

Love this. I’d really like to play with real cards, but the uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead of time. At 4 minutes a round you’d need maybe 10 decks for an hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you’d have 12? But that means you’d have more info about what’s likely in later rounds.. Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some in…

Person 1 enters the room, makes a bunch of decks and puts them in boxes. Leaves the room. Person 2 enters the room, shuffles the boxes, leaves the room. Person 1 re-enters the room and picks a box.

Person 1 made every deck exactly the same way though.

I guess Person 2 could run some simple validations of what Person 1 initially did.

Then again, Person 2 could have also replaced all of Person 1s decks with their own.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#23
I've enjoyed playing this.

The basic strategy that works for me:

1. If I have an obvious skew in the distribution of cards I've been dealt, I can assume the common suit and hence the goal suit and try to buy the cards of that suit.

2. If the distribution of cards I have is more or less even, then I just save that round and try to make back the base cost.

The hard part has been trying to understand how to update my beliefs based on the trades being made. If you assume everyone is making the rational choice, you might be able to come up with some strategy, but if its against humans who might be trying to bluff, I have no idea. Although, they say its a win-win game, so maybe theres a way there too.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#24
post #7

I downloaded the app to try it. It's interesting, appears that you can join a game with other players? I see two tabs: "4 starting" and "12 active" But clicking on these had no effect until suddenly the overflow broke rendering. I am fascinated by this app mostly because it has a recruiting message at the bottom from Jane Street. I've never seen that before. But, it's also interesting because it is one of the more po…

Given that Jane Street's prowess is in OCaml, I'm more inclined to give them grace when trying to release a React Native app. RN is one of those languages/frameworks that is both very easy to get into and also incredibly difficult to make a polished app.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#25
This reminds me of how I got my first job in trading.

They had all the candidates going around doing various gimmicks like mental arithmetic. But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.

I got dealt a ridiculously good hand, and all I had to do was wait for a couple of people to give me the missing two or three cards.

Once I started, poker was the game the bosses had us play. It seemed like a 10 quid subsidy from the head trader every day, I just had to wait around until he decided he'd played enough and went all in on what was always a crappy hand.

That essay about why poker probably isn't the best game for traders is pretty good btw. But there was a golden age of online poker going on at the time, and you could sit there with 5 tables open if you wanted.

I like the design of the game, having looked at it superficially. It's basically a market for cards, with what seems like a goal for collecting the right suit.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#26

This reminds me of how I got my first job in trading. They had all the candidates going around doing various gimmicks like mental arithmetic. But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for. I got dealt a ridiculously good hand, and all I had to…

[deleted]

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#27
post #19

Why not use your own characters or companies to trade? Would be way more fun having some mascots to trade instead of common cards

The game mechanics require 2 colors that each contain 2 suits. Playing cards fits this requirement, are widely available, and importantly everyone knows what the suits/colors are. The same isn't true if you used random companies or game characters.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#29
While this is a fun intellectually stimulating nerd toy for engineers, trading just doesn’t make sense to me.

Making massive sums of money from bad policies of governments, shorting companies or even entire countries and making money from wars by shorting and longing commodities is a repugnant way of making money and is immoral.

This is no better than crypto trading and gambling.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#30
post #2

Upvote to comments ratio: nobody knows how to play, hadn't even heard before, but it has "nerdy corpo" attached to it, so must be good.

> Upvote to comments ratio: nobody knows how to play, hadn't even heard before, but it has "nerdy corpo" attached to it, so must be good.

Correct, it’s the first trap us nerds make when corpos make “puzzles” to rope in future engineers to make lose their soul in immoral challenges like finance.

When the FAANG jobs boom fizzles over due to the shift to AI, we will see more engineers compromise to finance as a way to make FAANG level salaries.

We just don’t like to admit it, instead we like nerd games like this.

This is the finance recruitment marketing machine to entice future engineers to lose their soul to make obscene amounts of money doing the most morally bankrupt actions against humanity.

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