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The second player looks away while the first player mixes the five boxes into the main pool. Some, one or none of the five boxes may contain tokens. Once the pool is mixed, the second player gets to pick thirty boxes from the pool, if any tokens are found then player two keeps those tokens. Any tokens that are not found get kept by player one.
Multiple rounds are played and player one is able to observe player two's picking strategy. Player two notes the colour of the boxes that are found to contain tokens.
After a fixed number of rounds (say ten), the game is over and the player with the most tokens wins. If no tokens are collected by either side, player two wins.
On the other hand, player one can see that player two is always picking blue boxes so it would make sense for player one to use the single red box to maximise the chance of a token sneaking through. Thus, player two will weaken their own position unless they also pick red boxes.
Of course, at the end of the day, this is essentially the same as the "scissors / rock / paper" game in that if either side shows a preference, the other side can exploit that preference. The only reliable strategy is to play randomly (although some people have long and complex strategies for this game -- there is a whole mythology surrounding it).
Excellent question... it seems that airports have introduced a screening system that scans for nitrate ions by brushing people's hands and their bags then feeding the residue into a spectrograph which comes up with an answer. Since the procedure is sort of tedious and annoying (more tedious and annoying than the existing X-ray tests), they don't screen everybody.
I first met with this when I was pulled up and told that I had been randomly selected for an explosives test. I'd never seen such a thing but I had heard of the idea previously. From looking at the number of other people going past not getting screened, I would guess that they test about one in three or maybe one in four depending on how busy things get. However, after randomly getting selected for such a test three out of three times in other airports on later flights I soon realised that their sampling process is not even remotely random. Once curious, I sat and watched and noted that they almost always scan men (about twice as often as they scan women) and they prefer to scan muscular or tall men. They also scan older women and avoid children.
I also noticed that the officer who made these sampling decisions was in all cases a middle-aged female.
If I can observe this, then we can safely conclude that anyone else who is interested in security can also observe the same. Put in simple terms, if a hostile person wanted to bring explosives through the airport security, they would easily be able to avoid this machine because of the non-random sampling strategy. Since baggage can be exchanged between people in the "sterile" gate lounge area, the person who carries explosives through does not have to be the person who carries out the final act of sabotage.
This all leads me to conclude that the degree of protection offered by this screening is very low, but could be made considerably higher if the operators would actually sample randomly (like they pretend to do). What I don't understand is the reason they are not random. There are a number of possible explanations here:
I've tried a few strategies to see what information comes out of the people themselves -- from being politely chatty to stone faced and silent (sometimes people feel the need to fill in the silence with explanation, but it didn't work that time). The best results came from a direct and blunt comment that their sampling strategy is not random. I didn't even demand an explanation, just said it in complete confidence as an offhand remark. The officer tried several times to distract me by changing the subject so I nodded along for a while and repeated the statement. Eventually she came up with a declaration that all samples are picked completely randomly but it was clear that she didn't really believe it.
There are so many cases where official instructions are to be dishonest to the public that most people are quite used to being lied to. It's good practice to walk into a bank (even if you don't have an account there) and say that the ATM outside took your card and would not give it back. Tell them you are sure you got got your PIN correct. Ask them if they are OK with just taking the card out of the ATM and giving it back with you.
Naturally, the "official lie" is that the ATM destroys the card. Most everyone knows that the ATM merely stores the card until service time when a human collects the cards and destroys them. You might wonder why it is instructive to ask a question when you know you will get a dishonest answer -- the reason is because you get in the habit of watching people lie to you.
My personal suspicion is that there is some official policy to target certain people at airports and then give an "official lie" that this is a purely random event. If you think about the increasing use of random sampling (e.g. random breath testing) as part of law enforcement, it makes you wonder how far the "official lie" can be stretched to cover prejudicial bias in these processes. The only way to test a random process to see if it really is random is with a large sample size. Since no records are kept and even if they were kept, no normal citizen would have access to such records, testing for randomness can be quite difficult. Obviously, the airport case shows that the lie can be stretched a long way indeed given that their sampling is biased such a long way and still people are expected to swallow the official lie.
John Howard recently started talking about teaching the kids to salute the flag, sing the anthem and show respect for authority. At the end of the day, how can anyone respect an authority that is systematically dishonest? The only thing it teaches the kids is how to be dishonest themselves and show false respect to something that means nothing to them.
Is this where we want to be steering the country?
Once people start to accept the official lies they are handed, they see for themselves that dishonesty is morally acceptable and downright useful at times. They are willing to accept a prime minister who misleads parliament on repeated occasions and pretty soon we might as well have a country being run by Baghdad Bob.
It seems that the name "Security Theatre" has been adopted
for these kind of antics that demonstrate the powers that be are
doing something when in fact no one is any safer.
Since the actual danger of aircraft hijacking is very small to begin
with, the whole inflation of the issue and exaggeration of the risk
is itself a form of theatre. It makes sense to follow this up with
more dishonest posturing.
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