Once upon a time, in a dark, cruel world – maybe a world darker and crueller than it is – there lived a woman who wanted a piece of the action. Her name was Capsella Medik, but we remember her as Donna Capsella. This is an anecdote from her youth, told by a man who lived to tell it.

...you've got to understand, Donna started small. Real small. No money, no allies, no kin, and her wiles were – as feminine as they are. Still, she was ambitious, even then, and she had to look the part.

Girl had a way with people. Here's how it went.

One night, she rents a room – one table, five chairs – and two armed bodies, and sets up a date with four men at once – Mr. Burr, Mr. Sapp, Mr. Ast and Mr. Oriss, who've never seen her before. All are single, thirty-ish white collars. One look at the guns, and they're no trouble at all.

On the table, there's a heap: a coloured picture, a box of beads, another box (empty), four stacks of paper, four pens, a calculator and a sealed envelope.

'So,' says Donna. 'I need a manager. A clever man who'd keep my bank happy while I am...abroad. I offer you to play a game – just one game – and the winner is going to sign these papers. You leave hired, or not at all.'

The game was based on Mendel's Laws – can you imagine? The police never stood a chance against her... She had it printed out – a kind of cheat-sheet. It's like, if you have some biological feature, it's either what your genes say, or you helped Nature along the way; and the exact – wording – can be different, so you have blue eyes or brown eyes. The wording is what they call allele. Some alleles, dominant, shout louder than others, recessive, so you'll have at most two copies of each gene (hopefully), but only one will ever be heard on the outside.

(It's not quite that simple, but we didn't protest. Guns, you know.)

So there was a picture of a plant whose leaves came in four shapes (made by two genes with two alleles each):

From left to right: simplex, rhomboidea, heteris and tenuis. Simplex had only recessive alleles, aabb. Rhomboidea and tenuis each had only one pair of recessive alleles – aaB? and A?bb. But heteris, that one was a puzzler: A?B?.

'Okay,' Donna waves her hand over the heap on the table. 'Here are the rules. You will see two parent plants, and then you will see their offspring – one at a time.' She shows us the box with the beads. 'Forty-eight kids total.' She begins putting some of the beads into the empty box, but we don't see which ones. 'The colours are like in the picture. You have to guess as much about the parents and the kids as you can as I go along. All betting stops when the last kid pops out. Guess wrong, even partially wrong, you lose a point, guess right, earn one. Screw around, you're out of the game. The one with the most points wins.'

'Uh,' mumbles Oriss. 'Can we, maybe, say we're not totally sure – ?..'

She smiles, and oh, those teeth. 'Yeah. Use your Bayes.'

And just like that, Oriss reaches to his stack of paper, ready to slog through all the calculations. (Oriss likes to go ahead and gamble based on some math, even if it's not rock solid yet.)

'Er,' tries Sapp. 'Do we have to share our guesses?'

'No, the others will only know that you earned or lost a point.'

And Sapp picks up his pen, but with a little frown. (He doesn't share much, does Sapp.)

'Um,' Ast breaks in. 'In a single round, do we guess simultaneously, or in some order?'

'Simultaneously. You write it down and give it to me.'

And Ast slumps down in his seat, sweating, and eyes the calculator. (Ast prefers to go where others lead, though he can change his mind lightning-fast.)

'Well,' Burr shrugs. 'I'll just follow rough heuristics, and we'll see how it goes.'

'Such as?' asks Donna, cocking her head to the side.

'As soon as there's a simplex kid, it all comes down to pure arithmetic, since we'll know both parents have at least one recessive allele for each of the genes. If both parents are heteris – and they will be, I see it in your eyes! – then the probability of at least one of them having at least one recessive allele is higher than the probability of neither having any. I can delay making guesses for a time and just learn what score the others get for theirs, since they're pretty easy to reverse-engineer – '

'What!' say Ast, Sapp and Oriss together.

'You won't get points fast enough,' Donna points out. 'You will lose.'

'I might lose. And you will hire me anyway. You need a clever man to keep your bank happy.'

Donna purses her lips.

'You haven't told anything of value, anything the others didn't know.'

'But of course,' Burr says humbly, and even the armed bodies scowl.

'You're only clever when you have someone to mooch off. I won't hire you alone.'

'Deal.'

'Mind, I won't pick you if you lose too badly.'

Burr leers at her, and she swears under her breath.

'Enough,' says Donna and puts down two red beads – the parents – on the table.

We take our pens. She reaches out into the box of offspring.

The first bead is red.

And the second one is red.

And the third one is red.

...I tell you, it was the longest evening in my life.

 

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So, what are your Fermi estimates for the numbers of points Mr. Burr, Mr. Sapp, Mr. Ast and Mr. Oriss each earned? And who was selected as a manager, or co-managers? And how many people left the room?

(I apologise - the follow-up won't be for a while.)