the random oracle

I took the overnight train from Beijing to Suzhou because the net travel time of a flight from Beijing to Shanghai to Suzhou didn’t warrant the price premium, not to mention the hassle of transferring several times. The overnight trains only have sleeper cars, where each cabin has 6 bunks three to each side. I reserved my ticket the required 10 days in advance and still was only able to get a middle bunk; as my neighbors loudly complained about later, it’s nearly impossible to get a lower bunk, you have to basically wait at the train ticket booth for the clock to tick to exactly 10 days = 240 hours ahead of departure in order to get one of those.

Anyway as I tried to make myself comfortable in my middle bunk, I heard a loud group of what I presumed to be college students yapping away two cabins over. I was initially just annoyed by their noise, but after eavesdropping for a few minutes I thought what I heard sounded awful familiar.

“The police asks the judge which person they think is a murderer and the judge tells the policeman whether or not he guessed right. The doctor gets to pick one person to save in the night, and if he picks the person that the murderers tried to kill then that person’s saved. The next day, everyone has to guess who one of the murderers is and execute him.”

They were playing mafia! Who knew that the game had spread so far! (Without presuming that it’s an American game, still the fact that college students in China and in America both play it speaks to its universal awesomeness.) Their rules were a little different from the ones I’m used to; for example the game ends as soon as all the cops are dead, and each round isn’t a free-for-all orgy of accusations, instead each person one-by-one accuses someone and then at the end everyone votes on who to execute. But there was no mistake: Chinese mafia had infiltrated my train.