El Juego de la Cerveza – Systems Dynamics

One of the activities conducted during the System Dynamics class in Colombia was the Beer Game – El Juego de la Cerveza

It allows students to experience first-hand how structure of business organizations impact their behavior, to some extent irrespectively of how skilled their managers may be. In the game, a 3 tier distribution system delivers beer from a factory to consumers. Only the retailer knows the consumer demand. As information and goods propagates through the chain with delays, oscillation occurs.

Students play competitively, as a pool of money collected from them at the start of the game will be awarded to the winners. A very entertaining and active dynamic develops during the 4 hour exercise.

The Systems Dynamics Society offers kits for playing the beer game, that I recommend. They include everything you need to run the game, as well as videos of Professor Sterman running a session.

I have attended many of his sessions, both as student and observer – my employer sponsors the Beer Game during incoming MBA orientation at MIT. Professor Craig Kirkwood at Arizona State University also has very good materials and hints.

I decided to run with a low-budget version that uses beans, pieces of paper and boards printed on common plotter paper. Everything is in Spanish language. I believe publishing the materials here may be useful to colleagues in Latin America and other Spanish-speaking countries.

Here is the board for the game, and here are the slides

For editable versions of these files, please contact me directly.

Hanoi Towers nostalgia

This is a game invented in 1883 by Edouard Lucas d’Amiens, a french mathematician. He loved anagrams, and he used the pseudonim Professor N. Claus (de Siam), which is an anagram of his name, to publish about the game.

The rules are very simple:

Only one disc can be moved at a time

A larger disc can’t be moved on top of a smaller disc

The goal is to move all the discs from one pin to the other one.

I wrote a Z80 basic program to solve it back in 1984, but I don’t have the code anymore. Recently, Salvat Editores launched here in Brazil a bi-weekly publication where they sell a nicely crafted wooden puzzle every week.
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