“Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just”*…
Spliddit offers quick, free solutions to everyday fair-division problems, using methods that provide indisputable fairness guarantees and build on decades of research in economics, mathematics, and computer science. The project of a professor and his research assistant at Carnegie-Mellon University, Spliddit is an attempt to provide easy access to carefully designed fair-division methods, thereby making the world a bit fairer, and at the same time, to communicate to the public the beauty and value of theoretical research in computer science, mathematics, and economics– from an unusual perspective.
And, its creators assert, you can trust it:
When we say that we guarantee a fairness property, we are stating a mathematical fact. In other words, there are formal proofs showing that each of our algorithms provides rigorous fairness guarantees. The surprising possibility of formulating fairness in mathematical terms is the beauty of the scientific field of fair-division, and the force behind Spliddit.
* Victor Hugo
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As we get in touch with our inner Solomon, we might recall that it was on this date that “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was begun as a collaborative effort between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth while walking through the Valley of Stones near Lynmouth. Wordsworth brought up a book he’d been reading, A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea (1726) by Captain George Shelvocke, in which a melancholy sailor, Simon Hatley, shoots a black albatross. Coleridge expressed an interest in rhyming on the subject; Wordsworth gave advice {including “suppose you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the south sea, and the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime”); and by the end of the walk the poem– one of the cornerstones of English Romantic poetry– had largely taken shape.
The mariner up on the mast in a storm. One of Gustave Doré’s wood-engraved illustrations of the poem.