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Jane Street's Figgie card game

figgie.com

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Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#51

Post by lordnacho »

kqr wrote: post #38
lordnacho wrote: post #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…

> 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. This is Pit , right? I remember it from an Aaron Brown book. Always wanted to try it! https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/140/pit

Yeah something like that. There wasn't time to explain anything complicated, just the basic "swap one card at a time with whoever, let me know when you have a set"

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#52

Post by yeeetz »

colesantiago wrote: post #30
ewuhic wrote: 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 m…

hows quantitative finance more morally bankrupt than being an engineer in oil/gas, defense industry, etc.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#53

Post by oidar »

sebg wrote: post #42
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His peculiar approach to eating??? Wow I need to hear about this. I’ll Google, but do you have any recommended articles?

https://chisness.substack.com/p/automate-the-food

Very sad. Max wrote about optimizing nutrition and cited a satire piece about over-optimization ruining someone's life. Then, ironically, he died from malaria while traveling—despite having donated to malaria prevention. Life defies our attempts to control it.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#54

Post by LPisGood »

thehappyfellow wrote: post #17
dmurray wrote: post #8

This game seems like it shouldn't work playing one-off games with no money on the line. How do you win in that context - by ending up with the most money at the end of the game? That would change the gameplay very significantly - a strategy that has you end with $1000 one time in three and 0 the rest should be favoured over one where you end up with $300 every time. Poker solves this with poker tournaments: everyone…

You should play a lot of hands, or organise a tournament, for Figgie to really make sense. It's fun but I prefer to play in person.

How do you play in person? Are the cards for sale somewhere?

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#55

Post by LPisGood »

ewuhic wrote: 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.

The blog post linked in the top comment itself is very well written though. I had assumed poker was a good game to teach traders to play and the counterpoints were insightful.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#56

Post by LPisGood »

yeeetz wrote: post #52
colesantiago wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

hows quantitative finance more morally bankrupt than being an engineer in oil/gas, defense industry, etc.

Or data harvesting, or making games with addictive micro transactions, or…most industries.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#57

Post by programjames »

nsarafa wrote: post #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

I think it's because there's usually only a couple players at any given time, so live matching would never fill.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#59

Post by EvgeniyZh »

AttakBanana wrote: post #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 be…

A better strategy would be to estimate card value based on your starting hand (i.e., probability that each suit is goal suit). It requires some non-trivial combinatorics but I guess if you take the game seriously you just memorize those once. Then you buy cards if the price are lower than your estimate and sell if it is higher. You also should pay a somewhat more for the card that gives you majority (4th/5th).

The updates are in this case, at least assuming others are doing something similar, is to increase expected price if you see sell for higher price and reduce if you see the sell for lower price. To figure out how much to update would be the hard part.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#60

Post by thehappyfellow »

LPisGood wrote: post #54
thehappyfellow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should play a lot of hands, or organise a tournament, for Figgie to really make sense. It's fun but I prefer to play in person.

How do you play in person? Are the cards for sale somewhere?

Just a normal deck is fine, you have to prepare it but it’s not a big deal.
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