The Blogg

I recently read a bit about hypermilers, people who go to great efforts to get the very best possible efficiency (in terms of distance traveled to fuel consumed) out of their vehicles. While I certainly do not go to such extremes as these people, I found that I use many of the same techniques myself. Particularly, I try to avoid braking whenever possible. My goal is generally to avoid touching the accelerator or brake pedal at all once I have reached 25 MPH, where the cruise control system becomes usable. If I see an obstacle ahead or a stoplight that is likely to be red if I continue at my present speed, I try to start coasting early enough that I will slow to the speed of the obstacle before reaching it or do not get to the light before it changes. When the way in front of me is clear and I am going slower than preferred, I adjust the cruise control to gradually accelerate to the desired speed. When stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I slowly idle forward continuously instead of accelerating to 5 MPH, breaking, accelerating, breaking, etc.

This style of driving seems obvious to me, but it is clear that few people practice it. It always amazes me how much these driving techniques seem to bother some of the other drivers around me. Very frequently, there is someone willing to speed up to pass me, then pull to a screeching halt right in front of me. A mile after the light, we have gone the same distance, but I suppose he gains some satisfaction from having passed the “idiot” who was slowing traffic down.

I cannot say that I base my driving habits on a concern for environmental welfare or foreign oil dependence, although I believe they are worthy causes. Nor are my actions primarily motivated by economic concerns, although I am certainly glad to be able to put off a trip to the gas station. One reason is, perhaps, that driving this way is a bit of a game; it gives my mind something slightly more complicated to think about during what can otherwise be a fairly boring task. Otherwise, I think I do this simply because it seems somehow fundamentally wrong to be doing something less efficiently than possible. This is the curse of the premature optimizer: if a machine (or computer program in my case) is less efficient than possible, then it can and should be redesigned to be more elegant.

In the case of driving, of course, there are three relevant variables: fuel consumed, distance traveled, and time used. Unlike the hypermilers, I am only willing to focus on fuel efficiency when I can do nothing significant about time efficiency. Thus, I am quite willing to exceed the speed limit when I believe I can do so safely and with minimal risk of legal consequences. I am starting to think about changing this practice, however. As speed increases, the benefits of increasing speed by a small margin become less and less significant. For example, I am about to leave on a trip to my parents’ house to celebrate Easter. This trip usually take 90 minutes, and around 44 miles of it are on highway-like conditions. According to the table below, going 70 MPH instead of 55 MPH through that highway time would only save me (1.09min/mile – 0.86min/mile) * 44miles = 10.12 minutes. Is that time significant? It can be, but I would have to know how much more fuel I am burning to do so.

Unfortunately, I have no particularly good way to determine that. I would love to see a graph of mileage / speed for my Ford Escort, but have not been able to find such a thing on the Internet. My limited knowledge of mechanical engineering leads me to believe that the engine will be most efficient at the lowest speed where it uses its highest gear, but I do not know what that speed is or how friction and wind resistance would affect this. I’ve thought about running an experiment where I drive 10 miles or so at a constant speed several times, varying the speed and filling my tank between each run. However, this would require an open track where I could realistically maintain a constant speed and would probably waste more fuel than I would save through the knowledge I would gain.

I consider myself a fairly competitive person when it comes to games. I love card games of all types, board games, computer games, role-playing games, and competitive sports (despite being terribly unathletic). In those games where there is a winner and a loser (that is, most games), I strive to the best of my ability to be the winner. That does not mean that I would “win at all costs” (cheat). Doing so would destroy everything that makes the game enjoyable. Nor does it mean (I hope) that I am a “bad loser” (sulking) or a “bad winner” (gloating). In the grand scheme of things, I could not care less whether I win or lose a game. Within the confines of the game, however, I care more than anything.

I do not think that this competitiveness extends to the rest of my life. I try to do my best (to the extent that I can do so while being lazy), but not at the expense of others. In a game, if I were to gain an advantage over the other players, I would ruthlessly exploit it to expand my lead as much as possible without a second thought. In life, I hope that I would do what I could to help those who lacked the same advantage. I suspect part of this difference is due to the fact that little in real life can be modeled as a zero-sum game, while part is because of compassion and the other nobler facets of the human spirit.

I have been fortunate to find many other people who share my competitiveness among my family and friends, and we have been able to enjoy a great many games together. On occasion we have had heated arguments when the rules of a game were ambiguous enough to support different reasonable interpretations among the members of the group, but our respect for each other always prevented these disagreements from extending beyond the realm of the game and affecting our friendships. In two semi-recent experiences, I have encountered people who seem to view games quite differently, much to my surprise and frustration.

The first instance was when my wife and I taught my parents-in-law, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law-in-law the card game Scum while we were home for the winter holidays. (Note: if you are interested, I am currently writing a book on folk card games such as this. If I ever actually finish it (unlikely), I would be happy to provide you with a copy.) One of the features of this game is that, at the beginning of each round, certain players must give the best cards in their hand certain other players. Because the contents of each player’s hand is known only to him, this depends on a trust that each player will behave honestly. When we began playing the game, nearly every hand would start with one of the players passing an absurdly low card, the receiver complaining, and then the passer replacing it with the one the rules required him to pass. The first time this happened I laughed with everyone else, and perhaps the second time as well. As the game went on, however, I began to find it increasingly annoying. I’ve been accused of having a poor sense of humor before, and it is possible my view of humor simply differed from that of the other players. As I thought about the experience, however, I realized that I would not have been so annoyed in almost any other circumstance. A game is meant to be a fun, social time, and is always more enjoyable with humor. There is something about ignoring the rules, however, that I cannot find funny. If one is going to participate in the game, he owes it to the other players to take the rules seriously.

The other experience was a few weeks ago when I was celebrating a friend’s birthday with some of my other college friends and a few people I had not previously met. During this party, several of us were playing Monopoly. One of the players was a young woman I did not know who had a very different perspective on the game. As anyone who has played a few games of Monopoly knows, the practice of making mutually beneficial trades is necessary. Whenever someone brought a trade proposal to this girl, she responded with “whatever you want” or “sure, I don’t want to WIN”. It was not that she did not understand the mechanics of the game, she simply did not care. The idea that someone might take deliberate actions toward winning the game seemed completely foreign to her. Just as she could not understand my motivation, I found hers quite inscrutable. If a person has no interest whatsoever in the outcome of a game, then I cannot understand why they would play a game. How could it possibly be fun?

There was another young woman in that Monopoly game who is a good friend of mine. She played the game much as I would for an hour or two, but when it became clear that she was a very longshot to win, she began making extremely lopsided trades to the benefit of her husband and the detriment of herself and all other players. Before these moves three of us had been in roughly equally strong positions, but this significant advantage allowed her husband to win rather easily. In this case I understood her motivation, but found her behavior quite irritating. The game is fun because, in spite of the large randomness, the game is fair when all players act in their own interest (that is, the only factor considered when making a move is whether it increases or decreases their chance of winning the game). If two or more players collude the game becomes unfair to the extent that any sense of competition is destroyed.

As they say about such things, “it is only a game”. Nevertheless, I find these different perspectives quite interesting. What does all of this say about me?