This post is about a conversation I once held with a good friend of mine, Nadav Sherman. It is not a very serious topic, so take it lightly. We were wondering how to calculate the total amount of fun a person has during his life time. We reasoned as follows:

The absolute state score (a.s.s.) of a person is a number ranking the person’s current state and possessions (it is a function of time). For example, if you have 500,000$ and a girl-friend, then your a.s.s. is higher than that of someone identical to you without a girlfriend, but lower than that of someone identical to you with an additional 1,000,000$. Note that we do not specify exactly how to calculate the a.s.s., but we believe that it can be defined such that claim 1 below will be true. The actual value of the a.s.s. is not directly correlated to the fun a person has - a person with a million dollars and a beautiful girl-friend can be sadder than a poor lonely guy.

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