Singular Value Decomposition

There's an App for That?

2012-02-11T21:16:00.000-08:00

Recently, Apple has come under criticism for contracting with Chinese electronics manufacturer Foxconn to produce iPhones, because Foxconn allegedly provides its workers with poor working conditions. This claim is disputed: for instance, critics point to several incidents of Foxconn employees committing suicide, but the overall suicide rate among Foxconn workers is less than the national average. Many consumers are demanding that Apple stop using Foxconn as a supplier until Foxconn improves its employees' working conditions.

However, the thing I want to talk about here is slightly different - imagine if the roles were reversed. For instance, let's say that it was a large European company with an American supplier, and the European company's customers thought it was horrific that not all Americans have health insurance, so they demanded that they cut ties with all American suppliers that don't offer their employees full health insurance. What do you think our reaction would be? Probably something along the lines of "What right do those people overseas have to dictate to us what our health policy should be?" (I mean, that's a significant part of the response to the U.S. government's attempts to mandate health insurance; just imagine if it were foreigners trying to pressure us in this way.) It seems like a similar argument could be applied to the actual situation: "We in the United States have no right to dictate to the Chinese what their employment policies should look like. If the Chinese don't like their current employment laws, they can change them. True, it might be the case that their political system doesn't give employees enough power to organize and change the laws, but it's not our place to make that judgement." (Again, imagine the reaction in the U.S. if foreigners said that U.S. companies should be boycotted because the U.S. political system has problems.)

Another Mini News Quiz

2012-01-19T21:10:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is developing a new smartphone application that, although it has not been released yet, is already stirring up controversy. What will the app enable users to do?

1. Determine the nutritional content of restaurant meals
2. Avoid high-crime neighborhoods
3. Get better deals on health insurance
4. Boycott products made by companies affiliated with Apple

The new year

2012-01-15T21:50:00.000-08:00

Here are some things I haven been doing during the new year:

1. I went back on Weight Watchers. There is a Weight Watchers place right in the Orchards Shopping Center which is where I switch buses whie going to and from work. On my first week back on Weight Watchers I lost three pounds. One time I was at the game store playing games and I had my Eaight Watchers booklet (I also had a big bag of oranges so I could have them instead of the high calorie snacks they sell at the game store) One of the people there said he didn't understand why I was on Weight Watchers because "you're already really thin; you don't have any weight to watch" (I am now about 5'8" and 180 lbs)

2. I found a laser tag place in Loveland. It is better than the place in Gaithersburg because the place in Gaithersburg had two main problems: (1) after you get hit, your phaser reactivates a split second before your pack reactivates, giving you a "free shot" after you get hit. Thus the best strategy after being hit is just to run up to the nearest opponent and get a guaranteed hit in. This often led to players standing next to each other trading shots, which was uninteresting game play, and (2) there were lots of technical problems, like packs that stopped working in the middle of the battle. The place in Loveland does not have thee problems Also you can get an all day play pass for only $25. On Thursdays they agave a "members only night" where they do a game called "Space Marine 5" which is supposed to be tougher (and there will be tougher competition) butI have not gone to that yet, because...

3. This Thursday I went to the live MythBusters show in Loveland. There was someone else at work who wanted to go so we went out to dinner and then to the show. At dinner I asked what he thought of MythBusters and he said that the old episodes (first few seasons) were better and some of the new episodes test "stupid myths". Also I showed him my iPad and he didn't understand why anyone would want it because it's more expensive than an e-reader like the Kindle, and almost as big but not as versatile as a netbook. He was pretty impressed by the WolframAlpha app though. The show was pretty cool ,and they had time for questions with Adam and Jamie, they had demonstrations with volunteers from the audience, and they told some funny stories. For instance ,they said one do the first time they realized what an asset they were to the Discovery Channel was when the insurance company told them that Adam and Jamie couldn't do a particular stunt, "but Tory could".

4. I found a web site called "Meetup" that allows you to connect with groups of people in your area. The way is works is that there are all these "Meetup Groups" that are each organized around a different activity, and you can post up when meetings will be taking place. Essentially, it is a social networking site like Facebook, except it is centered around finding people who share your interests, so it is likely to be a very good resource from me. I looked on Meetup and I found several Meetup groups in and around Fort Collins that I might be interested in; such as a philosophy discussion group, a group that does programming puzzles, and a group that is designing a new role-playing game..

5. I heard about a personal training studio in Fort Collins called "Nerd Fit", which is, as you might expect, is geared toward geeks. The web site doesn't have a whole lot of information, but is has things like there is a point system you use to ttrack your progress that is based off of the systems in role-playing games.

6. There is a gaming convention in Colorado called "Genghis Con" that will be taking place in February. I will make sure to save up some vacation days for that..

Gaming Math: Problem 18 Answer and Problem 19

2011-10-31T19:30:00.000-07:00

The answer to Problem 18, "Rating Trading", has been posted.

Problem 19: Rating Trading, Part 2

Consider the following generalization of the Math Trade Problem, which I came up with while thinking about how to use a similar "math trade" process to trade Magic cards. The difficulty with trading Magic cards using math trades is that Magic cards vary extremely widely in value, so the restriction of one-for-one trades is likely to be prohibitive. Therefore, suppose that we have the following Generalized Math Trade Problem:

Consider a group of N players, each of which has one or more cards to trade. Each player has a separate "subjective value" of each object - i.e. one player might value a given card at $12, while another might value it at only $8. The goal is to redistribute the cards among the players so as to maximize the sum of the amount each player values the cards he ends up with, subject to the constraint that each player ends up with cards that he values at least as much as the cards he started out with.

The "decision problem variation" of the Generalized Math Trade Problem is as follows: given an instance of the Generalized Math Trade Problem and a target value, determine if there is a solution such that the sum of the amount each player values the cards he ends up with is at least the target value (subject to all the other constraints of course).

Problem 19: Show that the decision problem variation of the Generalized Math Trade Problem is NP-complete.

Hints (ROT13 to read; you can read them one at a time)

1. Gur erqhpgvba vf gb gur fhofrg-fhz ceboyrz.
2. Gur fbyhgvba vaibyirf bayl gjb cnegvpvcnagf.
3. Bar bs gur cnegvpvcnagf unf bayl bar vgrz.

And the solution.

Mini News Quiz #2

2011-10-30T23:54:00.000-07:00

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a controversial new breed of iPhone apps claim to be able to do what?

1. Trick automated phone systems into connecting you with a human being faster.
2. Detect electromagnetic fields believed to indicate the presence of ghosts.
3. Display rapidly-changing images that hypnotize viewers into breaking bad habits.
4. Transmit voices across long distances using invisible waves of energy.

Hints for Gaming Math Problem 18

2011-10-29T21:21:00.001-07:00

ROT13 to read:

18A. Qba'g sbetrg gung pbfgf pna or artngvir.

18B. Fcyvg rnpu abqr vagb gjb.

18C. Guvf zvtug vaibyir nqqvat fbzr nqqvgvbany abqrf.

Gaming Math - Problem 18

2011-10-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

Problem 18: Rating Trading

Consider the following problem, which we will refer to as the Math Trade Problem:

Consider a set of N players, each of which has one game that they want to trade. Assume that each player has a different game. Each person also has a list of games that he wants (You may assume that nobody lists a game they already have as a game they "want".) The goal is to determine how to distribute the games between players such that the number of trades (i.e. the number of people that end up with a game they want) is maximized subject to the constraint that everyone ends up with exactly one game, and each person ends up with either a game he wants or he keeps the game he already has.

The minimum-cost network flow problem with node capacities is as follows:

Consider a graph G with a set of vertices V (also known as "nodes") and (directed) edges E between these vertices. Each edge has a maximum capacity, which states how many units of flow can be sent along that edge, and a "cost", which gives the cost of sending each unit of flow along that edge. The goal is to find a way of sending flow such that the amount of flow going into each node is the same as the amount of flow going out, and the total cost of all the flow sent is minimized. Additionally, nodes may have "node capacities" which give the maximum amount of flow that can flow through that node. (In some versions of the network flow problem, there can be "source" nodes or "sink" nodes for which the amount of flow going in need not be the same as the amount going out, but these will not be necessary for our purposes.)

---

Problem 18A. Given an instance of the Math Trade Problem, show how to transform it into an instance of the Minimum-Cost Network Flow Problem with Node Capacities, such that a solution to the network flow problem will give a solution to the given Math Trade Problem.

Problem 18B. Given an instance of the Minimum-Cost Network Flow Problem with Node Capacities, show how to transform it into an instance of the Minimum-Cost Network Flow problem without node capacities. (There are several well-known algorithms that can be used to solve this problem.)

Problem 18C. Consider the following generalization of the problem. Suppose that each player owns multiple games, and we want to maximize the number of trades (i.e. total number of games that people want that they get) subject to the constraint that each player ends up with the same number of games he or she started out with, and each of those games is either one he already had or one that he wants. However, we also add the complication that several players may want to trade the same game, and nobody wants to end up with two or more copies of the same game.

I will put some hints up later tonight and I will put the solution up tomorrow.

Shipping Jobs Overseas?

2011-10-23T19:54:00.000-07:00

One of the members of our local Belegarth group, John Degraffenreid, is running for Congress as an independent candidate. One of the planks of his platform (direct link won't work; click on "Platform" then "Trade") is that it is "time to hold corporations accountable for moving jobs overseas" and that American corporations should be required to pay overseas workers a "fair wage" to protect other countries from being "taken advantage of" and to eliminate the advantage of "moving jobs overseas."

Of course, most economists would say that most "moving jobs overseas" is actually a net benefit because each country can specialize in what it produces best, thus improving overall output - i.e., if a company saves money by "moving jobs overseas" and importing products rather than producing them in the U.S., that just creates jobs for the people in the U.S. that produce exports to exchange for the imports, and this analysis is not affected by whether the reduced costs are caused by the overseas workers being "taken advantage of". Of course, this argument has been discussed to death, and I don't really have anything new or interesting to say about it.

What I find more interesting is the implied moral claim that there is something blameworthy about a corporation "moving jobs overseas", such that the corporation needs to be held "accountable" for it. (Of course, I'm not picking on Degraffenreid here; lots of the public and politicians seem to have similar view, which is part of why I find this interesting.) Consider the following two cases:

A. Acme Corporation currently employs 100 American workers. It has an opportunity to expand into a new market and hire 50 more American workers, but instead decides to stay its current size.

B. Acme Corporation currently employs 100 American workers. It has an opportunity to expand into a new market and hire 50 more American workers, but instead it builds a factory in Pakistan and hires 200 Pakistani workers instead because it is cheaper.

I doubt very many people would say that in case (A) Acme Corporation did anything blameworthy, but in case (B) they would say that Acme Corporation was "shipping jobs overseas." But in either case, the change in number of American workers was exactly the same - zero. What principle could justify the difference? You can't just say that corporations have a responsibility to hire as many American workers as possible, because that would make (A) as blameworthy as (B). One possibility is to say that corporations have a responsibility NOT to hire foreign workers, but that seems hard to justify. Why is giving an American worker a job good but giving a Pakistani worker a job bad? I can understand why Americans value other Americans more than they do Pakistanis, but I don't understand why people would put a negative value on Pakistani jobs.

One possibility is that people think that Pakistani workers aren't actually being helped by the new jobs. But that doesn't make sense, because if the new jobs were really inferior to whatever they would be doing in the absence of the new jobs, then why would anyone take the new jobs? Another possibility is that people think that corporations have a responsibility to hire foreign workers AND pay them well, so that their lot would be improved by even more than before. But that doesn't explain attitudes like Degraffenreid's, since he says (probably correctly) that making American firms pay foreign workers more will induce them to hire fewer foreign workers. (Unless the idea is that it is better to help a few foreign workers a lot than to help a lot of foreign workers a little each.)

Possibly a better explanation might be to go back to the principle that "American companies have an obligation to hire as many American workers as possible", and explain the reluctance of people to assign blame in case (A) a different way. One possible explanation would be that my premise (that people don't assign blame in cases like A) is false. After all, people do sometimes consider companies blameworthy when they lay off workers, and Barack Obama did exhort companies to start investing and spending more if they had the money to do it. Another explanation might be that people think that (A) is theoretically blameworthy, it's just that "not expanding as much as you can" is much less visible than "opening up factories in foreign countries".

Here is another question: let's say that reforms designed to "bring jobs home" were implemented, and because of that, corporations pulled their investments out of Pakistan and brought them "back home" to the United States. In that situation, would Pakistanis be right to complain that the corporations are "sending jobs overseas" back to the United States? If so, then why does a corporation that operates in both the U.S. and Pakistan have greater obligations to American workers than to Pakistani workers? If not, then what is the relevant distinction?

Finally, consider the following third case:

(C) Acme Corporation currently employs 100 American workers. It sees room to expand and hire 50 more American workers. Instead, it buys more machinery to make each worker more productive, so that it doesn't need to hire any new workers.

I think most people would think there's nothing wrong with (C); or at least much less wrong with (C) than with (B). Sometimes people do lament the fact that technology puts people out of work, but certainly I have never heard any politician saying that we have to slow down progress on labor-saving technology in order to preserve jobs. But in both cases (B) and (C) you are choosing an option that allows you to hire fewer American workers in order to reduce costs. So a general principle that "it's wrong to hire fewer workers just so you can reduce costs" is not the driving force here.

A possibility is that there is some sort of (implicit) cost-benefit analysis going on. That is, people think that reducing costs is a legitimate benefit, but that it has to be balanced against the (perceived) costs of putting people out of work. With labor-saving technology, it's really obvious that the benefits are enormous: if we had never developed any labor-saving technology whatsoever, we would still be hunter-gatherers living in caves. But with international trade, the benefits are a lot less obvious, so it is easier for people to think that the costs exceed the benefits.

Of course, a lot of this is just speculation, and I don't know what the right answer is. I found an interesting web site called "Experimental Philosophy" that discusses research where they do surveys to ask people these types of questions in order to understand how people actually form judgements about these questions (like what makes someone morally responsible for something, or when it makes sense to say that someone "intended" for something to happen.) Reading that web site is part of what gave me the idea to think about this issue in this way, although I don't see any posts on that web site that discuss political/economic questions like this one. Also see here for a related discussion about "moving overseas" and moral responsibility (although I think that discusses a slightly different issue).

Saving Green By Going Green, Followup

2011-09-21T20:24:00.000-07:00

Today, I sent the following letter to my congressman Cory Gardner:

I am writing to urge you to vote against the TRAIN Act, which will delay implementation of key environmental protections that could save thousands of lives. While proponents of the TRAIN Act claim that they are interested in ensuring that the benefits of regulation exceed the economic costs, their actual actions clearly show that this is not what they are concerned about. First of all, the EPA already does cost-benefit analyses of its regulations. If TRAIN Act proponents believe these analyses are flawed, why wouldn't they just fix them, rather than wasting time starting all over? Second, the latest version of the TRAIN Act explicitly blocks the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and Mercury and Air Toxics standards. If proponents were really interested in making an honest inquiry as to the costs and benefits, why would they write into the bill what conclusions they want before even doing the analysis? Finally, the pro-pollution lobby's own words prove their dishonesty. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a key pro-polluter lobbying group, on the front page of its website (www.americaspower.org) states that proposed EPA regulations would "eliminate more than a million American jobs". However, if you click through to their own analysis you will find that is not true - they actually claim it will eliminate 1.4 million "job-years", totaled over an 8-year period, which is not the same thing. If the pro-polluter lobby can't even get basic facts straight, why should we believe anything they say?

I'm not too hopeful as to what Gardner will think about this issue, given that he is a staunch conservative and as far as I can tell from his votes, has hasn't voted on the pro-environment side on any recent bills. I don't see anything on his web site where he supports "protecting the environment." However, one of the proposals he supports, the Business Cycle Balanced Budget Amendment, says it will "force government to budget itself in a countercyclical manner", which actually makes economic sense. However, the actual proposal says that the budget limit for each year is an (inflation-adjusted) average of revenues for the past three years, and I don't think that's what "countercyclical" means.

Saving Green by Going Green ... Or Is It?

2011-09-20T18:42:00.000-07:00

Today, I received an email from the Environmental Defense Fund urging me to protect clean air by calling my congressman and urging him to vote against the TRAIN Act, a law that will create an independent committee do do cost-benefit analyses of new EPA regulations before implementation. Opponents of the bill argue that it is unnecessary because the EPA already does cost-benefit analyses of its regulations and the new law would just duplicate that effort and delay implementation of the regulations. On the other hand, proponents say that the EPA analyses may be biased (after all, they're not exactly a disinterested party) and that an independent analysis is necessary to make it unbiased. (Actually, the latest version of the act does a lot more than just call for cost-benefit analyses; it also explicitly blocks certain regulations, see here.)

What I was interested in is just what, in particular, proponents believed the flaws of the EPA studies were. The American Association for Clean Coal Electricity, (ACCCE), a power-company lobbying group, has a web page that discusses the issue from their point of view. They identify two perceived flaws: first, that the EPA considers only one proposed rule at a time and does not lump multiple proposed rules together in its analysis; and second, that the EPA does not consider other negative economic effects such as lost jobs. (Note that on the association's front page, they claim that the regulations the TRAIN Act will block will cost 1.4 million jobs. However, on the actual page that discusses the TRAIN Act, they say it will cost 1.4 million job-years, totalled over an 8-year period. These are very different.)

Anyway, the first criticism does not, at first, seem to make any sense. If regulation A has costs which exceed benefits, and regulation B has costs which exceed benefits, then added together, regulations A and B will collectively have costs which exceed benefits. The only way this will not be true is if either:

(a) The benefits of implementing both regulations A and B are less than the benefits of implementing A alone plus the benefits of implementing B alone.

(b) The costs of implementing both regulations A and B are greater than the costs of implementing A alone plus the costs of implementing B alone.

This, of course, raises the question of in what circumstances these can be true. For case (a), I can think of a simple example: suppose that both regulations will reduce exposure to the same pollutant, and the pollutant has a hormetic dose-response relationship. But for some reason I don't think that's the case that the ACCCE is thinking about. For case (b), I can think of a different case, that seems to be the case that the ACCCE is discussing. Suppose that both regulations reduce the production of electricity, and electricity (like most goods) has diminishing marginal value. Then just looking at each regulation individually, and estimating the cost by multiplying the current price by the amount of reduction (let's say), will understate the total costs. In the diagram below, the true cost is C+D but the "looking at each regulation individually) approach will give you something closer to C.
We can now estimate about how big this difference is. For the sake of argument, I will use the assumptions that are most favorable to the ACCCE's position. They mention that there will be a total reduction in coal power production of 30 to 100 gigawatts (GW) due to "these and other rules". 100 GW is equivalent to 876,000,000 MWh over the course of a year, or about 25 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption 3,741,485,000 MWh per year. Of course this is not a good estimate of total electricity consumption lost because some of the capacity lost in coal gets replaced by other energy sources. If I am interpreting the chart labeled "2016 CATR+MACT impacts" of their own report correctly (it's on page 6 of the PDF, or page 5 going by the page numbers on the page), it looks like about 60 percent of capacity lost in coal gets made up in increased natural gas. So you end up with a total of about 10 percent reduced consumption. According to the review here, the short-run price elasticity of demand for electricity is about 0.2. So 10 percent reduced consumption corresponds to about a 50 percent increase in price. That means that the triangular area D is about 25 percent of the area C.

However, my understanding (at least based on what it says here) is that for most of these regulations the benefits exceed the costs by at least several times. So just a 25 percent error won't make a significant difference.

----

The comment about jobs, however, is more interesting conceptually, and I think they have it backwards. Here's how I am thinking about it. Let's say that electricity and labor are perfect complements, so a business can produce a "widget" by using one worker and one unit of electricity. Suppose that currently the business is producing X widgets, and so it is using X units of electricity, and the new regulation will increase the price by Y. Suppose you ignore the issue of jobs. Presumably that means you assume that the business will just produce the same number of widgets as before. Then the total cost is X times Y. But suppose you take jobs into account, and you take into account the fact that now the business will produce fewer widgets because the cost of producing them went up. But if they made this change, then that means the change was beneficial (compared to just absorbing the extra cost). In other words, the "reduction in jobs" is partially a benefit because it means that you are now using less of the more expensive electricity.

-------------------------------

Of course, conservatives aren't the only ones who often use faulty economic reasoning when talking about environmental issues. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama claimed that oil companies had 68 million acres of land they were "not using" and that we needed to make them "use it or lose it." Most importantly, this claim was false: most of the 67 million acres of "non-producing land" was actively being explored and prepared, it's just that no oil was coming out of it yet. But even if it was true that oil companies were deliberately ignoring large portions of their land, why is that necessarily a problem? There are only two reasons I can think of as to why they would do that. One reason is because they think that oil will become more expensive in the future and they would rather wait and sell the oil when it's more expensive rather than extract and sell the oil now. But if that's the case, then the oil companies' actions would raise the price now (when it's cheaper) and lower the price when they get around to extracting it (when it's more expensive), thus reducing the volatility of oil prices over time. Isn't that a good thing; to save it for when it's scarcer? Another possible reason is if they are colluding to reduce supply in order to raise the price now. But that theory doesn't seem to hold water because oil is traded on a world market, and the vast majority of world oil and gas reserves are controlled by companies outside the United States, so it doesn't seem like U.S. oil companies could reduce the world supply that much just by drilling a bit less. And in any case, if the problem is that we are using too much oil, isn't it good if the oil price goes up because that means that people will have an incentive to switch to renewable sources?

Mini News Quiz

2011-09-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

President Obama's proposed new "American Jobs Act" prohibits employers from discriminating against job applicants who are...

(a) politically active
(b) environmentally conscious
(c) recently divorced
(d) currently unemployed

My new home

2011-08-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

So, I have finished up with everything for scvhool, I have deposited my thesis, and I am ready to start work on Monday. Here is what I have found so far:

Transportation

Transportatoin will be slightly more difficult here than in Champaign. I live in Fort Collins, then about 10 miles south of Fort Collins is downtown Loveland, and about 4 miles east of downtown Loveland is where I work. There is a bus system (Transfort) in Fort Collins, which I don't need ot use much because I can just bike everywhere in Fort Collins that I want to go usually. In order to get to work, I need to take the "Flex Bus" down to Loveland, then get on a COLT (City of Loveland Transit) bus to get to where I work. The last Flex Bus northbound from Loveland leaves at 7:12 PM, so I have some time to do stuff thereafter work. One problem with the bus system is that none of the buses run on Sundays (see below to find out why that is a problem). I did try riding my bike down all the way from Fort Collins to Loveland once, but I don't think it's something I will want to do very often. There is also a taxicab company (Denver Yellow Cab) here. According to here, it gets horrible reviews for customer service, but I have used it three times and so far have no problems, except that sometimes I get put on hold for a few minutes while calling for the cab. It is about $30 to go all the way from Loveland to Fort Collins.

Shopping

There is a major street (College Avenue) with all the usual chain stores like Target, Best Buy, Barnes + Noble, and so on. Another thing I have noticed here is that there seems to be a lot of outdoor stuff, camping, and hunting going around here, because I've seen several outdoor equipment stores including a dedicated archery store. Also I have seen lots of signs for gun shows - I wonder if those are geared toward hunters. Also, when I was in Loveland I saw the store Phoenix Nest, which sells Renaissance-style garb and they also do custom made leather products. I will probably be back there a few times to get stuff for live-action role playing (see below). Another store that is cool is in downtown Fort Collins, and it is called Science Toy Magic. It is a very small store but it is packed full of cool toys that demonstrate principles of science, and the guy who runs it does really fun demonstrations. A couple weeks ago I saw a sign indicating that they would get new toys in, so I went back to see the demonstration of the new toy, which was called the "Invisible High Bouncing Ball". The demonstration was okay, but it was a little hard to see what was going on. You can also watch this YouTube video here. Here's another thing which obviously won't affect me directly, because I am not going to use any illegal drugs, but might be interesting: I saw in the newspaper that Fort Collins is considering banning medical marijuana, and if you have been here you will understand why lots of Fort Collins residents complained that the ban would screw up their economy.

Gaming

There are two main game stores in Fort Collins: the Haunted Game Cafe and Gryphon Games and Comics. They all have things going on almost every night, including role-playing games, miniatures games, and board games. The Haunted Game Cafe has a shelf full of games you can borrow to play in the store., and they sell drinks and snacks there. Each of these stores is a little bit bigger than the ones in Champaign. I haven't played any role-playing games yet here so I don't know what the scene there is like. As far as miniatures go, it seems like I may be in luck. I like miniatures games because of the strategy and tactics, but I don't really like haveing to paint and maintain all the miniatures. At the Haunted Game Cafe, I saw a game called Malifaux, which is a miniatures game where each side only has a few miniatures (a starter army has about 5 miniatures, compared with several dozen for a game like Warhammer). One of the factions in the game has the ability to summon new units during a battle, which adds clever new strategies and tricks you can do. Back in Champaign, I looked into Malifaux and they advised against that faction because you have to have the additional miniatures for the extra units in order to be able to summon the extra units. I asked about that here, and they said they don't play that way here. When we came here before on our house finding trip we saw a game store called Duelist Kingdom in Loveland, but that store is closed now. Fortunately, it turned out that the reason it was closed was because it was bought out by a bigger game store called Grand Slam Games and Comics, but I have only been there once so far.

Live Action Role Playing

There is an Amtgard group in Fort Collins, which meets on Sundays, and one in Denver, which meets on Saturdays. I went to the one in Denver just to check it out. It was sizable - about 20 people showed up - but it was not nearly spectiacular enough to be worth the trip all the way up there on a regular basis (I had to take an airport shuttle from Fort Collins to the Denver airport, then another airport shuttle from the airport to the park). During the battlegame there I aplayed an archer, and about halfway through the game the person running the game pulled me aide and said "we have to talk about your arrows." For a second I thought I was doing something wrong, but the real problem was that I was so effective with the arrows he thought it was unfair for the other team. (Part of the reason was that the scenario had the opposing team transporting a torch between two locations, and they are required to stay near the torch. This made it so they were all in one place and easy to hit, and they were unable to chase me down.) I went to the group in Fort Collins, and I was originally planning to take the bus there but I forgot that the buses don't run on Sundays, so I had to take a cab. When I got there the people there said I must be really dedicated to the game in order to be willing to take a cab. There weren't a lot of people here that day so we didn't do a whole lot exciting (apparently the previous week was a big tournament, so everyone was tired from that, plus it's the first week of school). Additionally, I learned that there is a Belegarth group in Loveland that also meets on Sundays. That group has a "small" practice with 20-25 people each Sunday, and then ion the first Sunday of each month they have a "big battle" with 50-75 people.

Finally!

2011-08-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

After lots of hard work, I finally submitted the approval form for my thesis this morning.

Actually, I'm not technically done yet. First of all, the form is submitted but there's still an electronic thesis deposit process I have to go through. Also, my advisor still thought that some of the citations weren't adequate, so I agreed not to do the electronic thesis deposit until after I had fixed those issues. Also, I have to make sure that all the documentation for the software is updated. But I can easily do all that from Colorado, and I have plenty of time between now and when my job starts.

Anyway, I'm off to GenCon now, and then on to Colorado! I'll make sure to keep you updated.

Origins 2011: Part 4 - "Rules of the Game"

2011-07-19T20:45:00.000-07:00

First of all, today I learned that John, the owner of one of the local game stores, read my previous posts. He didn't agree with my contention that necromancers are environmentally friendly, because "rather than letting the corpses return to the earth, they're just going to send out [the undead] to do more harm" and "no necromancer is going to raise skeletons to clean your house or something."

Second of all, another thing I did at Origins is the following. Last time, I mentioned that I didn't get a chance to tell the author of the Hero System books about what I thought about the quality of his writing, but this time, I did. Of course, he said that he "disagreed completely" that the writing was too wordy, and said that the reason for the wordy writing was that his customers demand detailed rules. I am under the opinion that the same information could have been provided in a more concise way.

Rather then talk more about the details of the Hero System, the rest of this post will be about a more general topic - how the differences of opinion between me and some of the other people I play with about the rules of various games reflect fundamentally different ways of looking at game rules.

Consider the following conversation that I had with another Amtgard player. (This was a long time ago, so some of the details like the names of the spells are probably incorrect, but the general idea was the same.)

Him: "There's a gray area in the rules with the 'Dimensional Portal' spell. If two people are both under its effects, can they cast spells at each other?"

Me: "Why? What's unclear about it? The spell says that it takes a player out of game. Under the definition of out of game, it says you can't be affected by anything. So it seems obvious that they can't affect each other."

Him: "Yes, but it's the same out-of-game area."

Me: "What do you mean, out-of-game area? The rules don't say anything about out-of-game areas. You're either out-of-game, or you're not."

Him: "But in Dungeons & Dragons, the 'Dimensional Portal' spell does work that way."

Me: "This game is not Dungeons & Dragons. The rules of Dungeons & Dragons have no force in Amtgard."

The cause of our disagreement was that I was looking at the rules as a self-contained set of information, while he was thinking of the rules as codifying some pre-existing conception of how he thought the game should operate (if you're both transported to the same other dimension, you should both be able to affect each other).

A similar thing happened when the new 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons came out a few years ago. I was reading some articles online discussing the new system and comparing it to the previous editions, and one of the most common complaints was that the new system "didn't make sense." For example, in the previous edition, fighters generally had only one or a few attacks that they had to keep using, while wizards had lots of spells that they could each use only a couple times per day and after those were done their powers were very weak. 4th edition balanced out the two classes by giving all classes some powers that they could use all the time, and some powers that were restricted to once per encounter or once per day. Lots of people didn't think this made sense because why would a fighter not be able to use a specific move once he had used it once earlier in the day? At first, I was really confused about why this would be a problem. I mean, true, maybe it isn't realistic. But I can't think of any criterion of realism that "I can magically throw a fireball, but only once per day" would pass, but "I can stab the dragon with a sword a certain way, but only once per day" would fail. And there are all sorts of physical phenomena that do happen in real life that are counterintuitive (have you ever watched MythBusters?) so I don't see why the fact that it doesn't fit with your intuitions about how fighting should work should be a problem. Again, this was a case where I understood what was going on because I just looked at the rules as a self-contained system, while others got bogged down because they tried to fit how the rules worked with their pre-existing conceptions of whoe combat should work.

Of course, sometimes things work out the other way around and my method of thinking is a hindrance. One example is some problems I was having with archery in Belegarth. There was a rule that you had to draw your bow back only half way when shooting at an opponent within 15 feet. (The issue is that if you shoot a target at full draw at close range, then the arrow will be going very fast, and is likely to hurt.) People were complaining that I was not following this rule, so I brought a tape measure so I could practice judging distance. This didn't completely help, so I came up with the idea like taking video and then going over it afterward so we can see what the distances were, and whether I was judging them correctly. They said that it wouldn't work because "there are too many variables." I was confused - I thought there was only one relevant variable: the distance to the target. At one point one of them tried to help me by asking me to stand in one place, then backing away and saying "okay, this is 15 feet." When I asked to measure to ensure that his judgement was accurate, he said that "it doesn't matter" whether it's accurate or not. This made me even more confused: how can it possibly not matter?

The problem here seemed to be that I was focusing on the particular rule about 15 feet, while what they probably had in mind was a more general concept about how to do Belegarth archery safely, which is why they thought there were "too many variables," and getting the distance right isn't the most important factor. It seems to me, though, that if the 15 foot rule isn't a good proxy for safety, then why is it in there at all? It would make more sense to say something like "The velocity at impact shouldn't be more than X feet per second," with X chosen appropriately. Then you could test to see what combination of draw distance and ranges given you that velocity (this would only need to be done once for each bow, before any battles).

Basically, I tend to interpret things based on what they say. If the game mentions 15 feet, I assume that they mean 15 feet. If they actually mean something else, then they should say something else.

Origins 2011: Part 3 - "Learning From the Masters"

2011-07-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

Another thing I did at Origins was go to some seminars. I did this because the seminars are one thing you can only really get at gaming conventions, and lots of them are interesting. At Gencon I went to a seminar on balance in games that I really liked, so at Origins I signed up for two seminars that sounded interesting: "Making Magic Real" and "Internal Consistency." When I got to the seminars I found out they were about books and literature rather than games, but they were still interesting. The seminar on "Making Magic Real" was given by fantasy authors R.T. Kaelin and Jean Cade, and they talked about how good stories need to have limitations on the magic. I mentioned that games are good sources of ideas because games are all about setting up limitations - for example, in "Magic: The Gathering" you have to draw a random set of cards at the beginning and can only cast what is in your hand. They said this would be a good idea for a story - a mage who doesn't know what spells he is going to get each day. The seminar on "Internal Consistency" was given by science fiction author Timothy Zahn. He had a list of a series of ten plots from different stories and asked us to describe what was inconsistent about them. For example:

PLOT: A small, ragtag resistance force tries to overthrow a universally hated dictator.

PROBLEM: If the dictator is universally hated, why is the resistance force so small? (Perhaps most people are too afraid to rise up, but in order to project his power the dictator would need a police force and army, and those people at least would have to support him.)

PLOT: The last two humans on Earth seek shelter from the vampires.

PROBLEM: If there are only two more humans on Earth, where are all the vampires getting their blood to feed?

Overall, both seminars were fun to go to. One thing that was funny was during the "Internal Consistency" seminar when Zahn was talking about how writers can make their stories more consistent. One example he gave was the "Jurassic Park" movies and television shows, where the security system that is used to keep the dinosaurs in was very poorly designed - "even zoos have better systems for keeping animals penned in." He suggested that one thing writers can do to make their stories better is to do more research. For example, Zahn suggested, if you were writing a story like that you could "call up your local zoo and ask them to explain how to design an impenetrable system to keep animals in = and how that system could be beaten." Of course everyone in the room laughed, because we all had exactly the same reaction - that the response you would get is similar to what would happen if you wore this "Personal Electronics Vest" when going through airport security.

Origins 2011: Part 2: "Knights in Columbus"

2011-07-02T23:12:00.000-07:00

As before, one of the fun things to do at Origins was the LARPs (Live Action Role Playing). The National Security Decision Making Game was running, although I didn't participate in it. Even though I liked it the first time because of the novelty, it seems like in order to get into it you have to be able to manipulate people, and that isn't a skill I am particularly good at. I did three different LARPs: “Nero”, which is a swordfighting game like the ones I've already talked about, “TerrorWerks”, a science-fiction adventure where you shoot enemies with Airsoft weapons (the enemies shoot back with Nerf guns), and “Rising Lash,” a game where you go through the dark, solving puzzles and fighting zombies. Nero was a three-part adventure where you were trying to rescue Lady Serenity, an adventurer who was kidnapped by an evil necromancer. (By the way, how come necromancers are almost always evil? I mean, all they're doing is recycling decomposed organic waste. It's environmentally friendly!) Anyway, in Part 1, we started out by going and fighting some orcs, who had a map saying where Lady Serenity was being held. The next two parts had us journey there, and in the third part we finally reached the evil lair. As you can see from the picture, the door was guarded by a magical Sudoku puzzle. Once we got in, our leader tried to negotiate for the prisoner's release by offering a magical item:

Leader: “I offer this magic ring worth 120 gold pieces for the girl!”
Boss: “There's no way that's worth that much.”
Leader: “Even if I were overstating its value by half, it would still be worth 60 gold pieces.”

I tried to point out the mathematical error but he didn't understand it. Anyway the boss tried to double-cross us but we got rid of the bad guys. Also, I volunteered as an NPC so I could see the adventure from the monster's eyes.

In TerrorWerks, we were soldiers trying to invade a robotics research facility where a bad guy has uploaded a virus to the central computer which reprogrammed the robots to be hostile. Our goal was to fight through the robots and get to the central computer to install the antivirus software. I played the engineer, and my special power was to unlock the doors – I had a kit with wires that I was supposed to connect between certain points on a grid to light up a bulb, and I also had a gun to defend myself. There were also computers that had information on them, such as that the big “super-robot” at the end has a control panel on the back that you could use to turn it off. When we got to the robot, one of the other players disabled it with a grenade while I ran around back to the control panel. The robot turned back on and no matter how many switches I flipped I couldn't turn it back off. When I tried to run back away from it I tripped over one of the poles holding up a wall and dropped my gun, but fortunately my teammates where there to back me up. Eventually we got rid of the evil robots, put the antivirus in, and got out.

Rising Lash was a relatively straightforward zombie game. We go through a series of rooms fighting zombies, and if you get hit you fall down. You can be healed by a doctor, but you get infected, reducing your combat capabilities. You can get rid of the infection with an antivirus (the biological kind this time, not the software kind) but there are a limited number of those. At the end of the scenario, if you survived without getting infected (or have an antivirus to heal you) then in the next scenario you level up and get extra powers. The scenario we did this time was pretty easy and pretty much we all got out alive.

By the way, if you are into video games you have probably heard about the so-called “freemium” business model. This is where the main game is free but you can spend real money for benefits in the game, such as in-game items. A lot of free-to-play MMORPGs use this model, and apparently some of the LARPs have caught on to the idea. For instance, in the zombie game if you buy one of their promotional T-shirts and wear it to the game you get extra armor. TerrorWerks also sells promotional “swag” and has a tiered reward system where one piece of swag gives you extra health, two pieces gives you a healing item, and so on.

Also, in keeping with the whole “being a hero and helping people” theme, there was a blood drive going on. There was an announcement on the PA systme that said they wanted as many people to donate as possible because there was a “critically fortunately I wasn't able to because I went to Vietnam last year.

Origins 2011: Part 1 - "A Hero's Journey"

2011-06-28T22:56:00.001-07:00

Last week was the Origins gaming convention in Columbus, Ohio. I wrote about it last year on this blog, and I went again this year. The first interesting part of the adventure was getting there. I originally booked a combination flight/hotel deal on Travelocity. The flight was from Champaign, through Chicago, and then to Columbus. However, the day of the flight, I was informed that the flight from Champaign to Chicago had been cancelled, and they automatically rebooked me on a flight the next day. I looked online and found that if I took a Greyhound bus to Chicago, I could still make the flight from Chicago to Columbus, so I called Travelocity and asked them to book me back on the original flight. However they informed me that was impossible because the flight from Chicago to Columbus was also cancelled. I wasn't sure they understood what I wanted, because I looked online (if you put the airline and flight number into Google it will give you the status of the flight) and that flight was showing as on time. However, when I called American Airlines, they told me the same thing. Eventually I decided to just not use the outbound ticket and take a bus from Champaign to Columbus instead, and take the plane back. (I felt really stupid for booking the flight in the first place and not remembering that there was a bus, especially since I took the bus from Champaign to Columbus to get to my brother's graduation.) looked online to see if I could get a refund for the part of the ticket that I didn't use, and I actually found that for some airlines if you don't use the outbound portion of the ticket, they won't honor the return portion. So I had to call American Airlines to change the ticket. I called and was directed from phone number A to phone number B, then to number C, then back to A, then to B again, and finally after about half an hour of waiting they told me that they were able to change the ticket, and I wouldn't get a refund because it was booked through an external source, but it wouldn't cost me anything extra. (It would certainly have been annoying if they charged me extra for not using part of the ticket.) Anyway, it worked out and I ended up in Columbus the night I expected to. Also, it was a good thing I decided to take the bus because as it turned out, the flight the next day that they originally rebooked me on was also cancelled.

So here are a few things I learned. First of all, always check to see if there is a bus or train before booking a flight. Second, I wonder why sites like Travelocity don't also incorporate things like buses and trains into their tool - it seems like it would be useful to have a tool that figures out the best/cheapest way of getting from point A to point B whether that involves a bus, train, plane, or some combination. I guess it just doesn't come up that often. Third, always book directly through the airline if you can because it is easier to change your flight that way if necessary. Fourth, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the Champaign-Urbana airport has an average of 28% of its flights delayed and 6% cancelled, compared with the national average of 20% delayed and 3% cancelled. After I move to Colorado I will usually be using Denver International Airport, which is better at 18% delayed and 1.6% cancelled, which of course makes sense because the people who work at the secret underground base there wouldn't want their evil plans ruined by flight problems. Of course, if there really was an evil conspiracy going on there, information about it wouldn't stay posted on Wikipedia. Or maybe that's just what they want you to think, and it's a clever diversion. (Of course, I don't actually believe that there's a conspiracy or anything, I just thought it was funny.)

But that's just part of the adventure. Next time I will tell you about what happened after I got there!

Interesting Pictures: Gaming

2011-06-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

Will you look into the world of gaming? Games show many things.

Things that are...

... things that were...

...and some things which have not yet come to pass.

I wonder what the "non-simplified" version of this game looks like?

Although gamers are not usually major consumers of personal hygiene products, this manufacturer has developed an innovative way to market to this under-served demographic.

A recent "Magic: The Gathering" card set focuses on the conflict between the artifact-based Mirrans (not shown) and the virulent Phyrexians (represented by the symbol on the box). Evidently, the City of Champaign public works department supports the Phyrexians.

Debit Card Swipe Fees

2011-06-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

In the news recently there is talk about legislation to reduce the fees that retailers pay to banks for debit card transactions. The fees currently average 44 cents per transaction, and the proposal is to cap them at 12 cents per transaction. Here are my thoughts:

- Clearly, the socially optimal amount to charge for swipe fees is equal to the marginal cost. And the marginal cost is probably very small; I imagine most of the costs of running the transaction system are fixed costs that don't depend that much on number of transactions.

- Of course, that only really matters if debit card transactions are at least somewhat price-elastic; i.e. number of transactions is affected by how much they cost. If the number of transactions is unaffected by cost, then changing the fee just redistributes money; it doesn't affect overall efficiency. (Of course, people do care about how the money is distributed.) And I would imagine that the price elasticity is very low: consumers don't care about swipe fees when they use their debit card (since they don't pay them) and most retailers don't choose not to accept debit cards just because of the fees (except sometimes for small transactions).

- The discussion from both sides seems to be centered on whether it will help or hurt consumers, which is reasonable. The pro-regulation side says that businesses will pass the savings on to consumers, while the anti-regulation side says that will not necessarily occur and banks will be forced to increase other fees or reduce perks like free checking to make up for the lost revenue.

- From the retailer's perspective, the swipe fee is like a tax on the transaction, so whether it's the consumer or the producer that ends up paying it depends on the relative elasticity of supply and demand for the goods, as described here. Of course, almost none of the coverage that expresses opinions about this questions even mentions price elasticity. (You could do a similar analysis to answer the question about whether banks will increase other fees; think of the reduction in swipe fees as like a tax on the banks based on how often their customers use debit cards).

- Of course, I don't have any data on the questions above, so I don't know who is correct. But one thing I did notice is that pro-regulation advocates say it will "help small businesses" and take money away from the "big banks", while anti-regulation advocates say that it "helps giant retailers" at the expense of "small credit unions." My question is: How did the whole "big business equals bad, small business equals good" thing start? I mean, isn't the theory behind capitalism that the way businesses become bigger is by improving efficiency to lower costs and responding to the needs of their customers to increase revenue? Maybe Joe Kernen is right that we are being indoctrinated with anti-capitalist values.

News Quiz

2011-06-06T15:54:00.000-07:00

1. Which of the following is an actual reality show about to enter its second season?

(a) The Auditors, which features stories of taxpayers who have been audited by the IRS, from the initial contact through the final accounting of taxes owed.

(b) Extreme Couponing, in which shoppers save thousands of dollars through strategic use of coupons, store promotions, and similar deals.

(c) Health Care Hustle, which features a "behind-the-scenes" look at the business side of a doctor's office in Oakland, California.

(d) Wikipedia Wars, where contestants compete to use Wikipedia to find the answers to trivia questions while strategically editing it to confuse their opponents.

2. Which of the following is an actual recent scientific finding?

(a) The gene responsible for blonde hair also produces neurotoxins which lower intelligence.

(b) Using Twitter and Facebook immediately after studying for exams improves grades.

(c) The most important factor in determining how much students learn in college classes is how funny they think their professor is.

(d) Showing Apple fans images of Apple products activates the same areas of the brain as showing religious believers images of deities.

3. Sarah Palin recently made which of the following false claims about American history in an interview?

(a) Part of the purpose of Paul Revere's famous ride was to warn the British that they would face American resistance.

(b) Alexander Hamilton once gave a speech warning of the dangers of financial bailouts.

(c) Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves because he wanted to sabotage the Southern economy.

(d) President Kennedy ordered Predator drone strikes on Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis.

Interesting Pictures: Politics

2011-06-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

Here are pictures of Lyndon LaRouche supporters, from my previous post. Despite their kookery, they promote some sensible policies like increased investment in science and technology.

In order to do that, though, they'll first need to cut excessive spending. Unfortunately, nobody wants their own pet program cut.

Maybe the cause of the budget problems is that our children are being indoctrinated with anti-capitalist values in our schools. (He must have gone to a different school than I did, because I don't remember being indoctrinated with anything.)

Interesting Web Sites: Economics and Statistics

2011-06-03T15:58:00.000-07:00

Another feature of this blog that I am going to start writing more often is web sites that I think are interesting. I already mentioned Cheap Talk,a blog written by economists that applies economic and game theory analysis to topics as diverse as crime and politics, and corruption, and has lots of interesting new ideas. While browsing some of the old posts I came across an article that mentions a company that I interviewed for a job at (but did not get an offer.) There are lots of very interesting blogs written by economists; probably the most well known one is Marginal Revolution, and if you scroll down you will see links to other blogs about economics, inclusing one about statistical analysis.

Interesting Pictures: Technology

2011-06-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

With my new iPhone I have been taking lots of funny and interesting pictures, and I haven't gotten around to posting them on my blog .. until now! This is the first of a series of posts with pictures in them.
Apparently, this port replicator is not a Jedi Master yet. And what's that on top of it?

As it turns out, its just a little thing to change the "gender" of a VGA connection. (On many different types of connectors, the part that sticks out is referred to as the "male" side, and the socket you stick it into is referred to as the "female" side. The intended metaphor is left as an exercise for the reader. For the answer, see here.)

This pinball machine is in the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) lounge. As you can see, not all computer science students are just into software; they like to do stuff with hardware too.

This computer is hooked up to a vending machine, and enables you to pay for caffeinated drinks using your university ID. It keeps track of the total amount of calories and milligrams of caffeine purchased.

Not all advancements in technology involve high-tech electronics. One example is the microwave popcorn bag. While versions of this technology date back to 1973, a recent breakthrough holds the promise to significantly reduce cleanup effort.

More Interesting Stuff

2011-05-24T14:24:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago I started the Weight Watchers diet program. Weight Watchers is cool because it is based on a point system, where each food has a point value based on the amount of fat, carbs, protein, and fiber, and you can eat whatever food you want provided you stay under the target point value depending on your weight and activity level.

I just finished my classes, so no more tests or exams ever! But I still have plenty of work to do because I have to write a paper for a conference which is due on July 6, and then I have to expand that paper into a thesis which is due on August 8.

Today in the mall in Champaign I found a stall selling "Power Balance" bracelets which are similar to the bracelets I mentioned in the previous post in that they work by the placebo effect. They cost about $30, but you can save a lot of money and buy functionally equivalent "placebo bands" here.

Another thing I am planning to do more often on this blog is to post links to other web sites which I find interesting. One interesting web site I found is Cheap Talk, a blog written by two economists. They have lots of discussions of economic theory applied to a variety of topics including game theory and ticket scalping. (Under the "game theory" tag if you scroll down you will see a post called "how to get bumped" about how to score free airline tickets, and below that is one about ticket prices in restaurants which is also interesting.)

I just got an email asking me to support Illinois athletics by switching my energy provider to "Fighting Illini Energy." One of the options that they say they offer is the ability to choose a plan that provides 50% or 100% of your energy from renewable energy sources. (What does that even mean? I mean, isn't electricity fungible? All of it goes from the power plants, onto the grid, and then into your home. I didn't even think it was possible to track a particular "unit" of electricity from the power plant to your home.)

The gaming club on Saturdays at UIUC is still going on over the summer. Since it is summer the building we normally play in - the English Building - was locked so we ad to go into the student unoin. The only problem was that the area of the student union we played in had a TV tuned to MTV, so whenever a song came on that any of the other players had heard before, they would all start singing along and making lots of noise, and they kept doing that even after I asked them to stop several times. Apparently they thought it was funny. I think what I will do next time is say something like "Let's say you had a friend who was in a wheelchair, and you kept taking the wheelchair away so he couldn't get around. Now maybe you might think it was funny but probably he wouldn't think it was funny. So just like some people have a hard time getting around without wheelchairs, I have a hard time playing games when everyone is making lots of noise. Maybe you might think it's funny to make lots of noise so I can't concentrate, but I don't think it is funny."

Weird Stuff

2011-05-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

Today in the airport I saw a group of people handing out literature for the LaRouche movement. I've heard that the LaRouche movement is a bunch of kooks, but I was interested in learning more. Part of what they said made some sense, like how we should spend less money on the bailouts and more money on technology and infrastructure. But a lot of their literature descended into conspiratorial kookery, such as claiming that JFK was assassinated by "British Empire bank-connected assassins" for wanting to get us out of Vietnam, claims that White House science adviser John Holdren supports forced population control (no, he doesn't). But their literature also taught me something about science that I didn't already know: it talked about using electromagnetic fields to predict earthquakes, and I thought that didn't make any sense but I looked it up and it turns out there is scientific evidence for that.

Another thing sort of related - in the mall today I found a stall selling "negative ion bracelets" for $25. It is an ordinary rubber bracelet that (according to the person selling it) had a small amount of volcanic ash embedded in it to emit "negative ions" that supposedly improve your strength and balance. I asked for a demo and he gave me a "balance test" with and without the bracelet, but the bracelet didn't make much of a difference, which makes sense because there's no scientific evidence that the bracelets do anything. Also, it seems that the people who wrote the brochure about it didn't know much science either, because it said something like "negative ions are natural ... when water mist falls to earth, it loses an electron, which turns it into a negative ion." (Of course, electrons have a negative charge, so if the water "lost" an electron it would gain a positive charge.)

----

And also, something that might be interesting on the Internet - the web site I linked to above is part of a network of "Stack Exchange" web sites which allow you to ask questions and get and look up answers on a variety of topics - it started off with computer programming but on expanded into lots of other fields like math and statistics. It works a lot like Wikipedia in that it is entirely community driven where people post answers to and edit each others' questions.

Job Search Conclusion

2011-05-10T15:20:00.001-07:00

So my long job search is finally over, and I got a job at Numerica Corporation. I had interviews at a couple interesting places. One was Two Sigma Investments, a financial company based in New York City. I got there a day before the interview, which gave me some time to explore the area. I tried to get a taxi to the Dave & Busters in Times Square, but I tried to get in a taxi and they said they didn't know where it was (even after I showed them the map on my iPhone.) I took a subway there but when I tried to go back, my phone was out of battery power so I couldn't use the GPS to find my way back. I again had no luck finding a cab, so eventually I had to go into a subway station and use the pay phone to call the hotel to get directions back. The next day I had my interview which ended early, so I got to use the extra time to go to a local game store. Then I got to the airport and the flight was delayed. The flight landed back in Chicago about two hours later, and I had assumed I had missed my connection so I used the rebooking phone to call for rebooking, and they said that the only flights they had were for two days from then. I decided instead to just stay in a hotel and take the train home the next morning, but while I was walking back to talk to the airline about reclaiming their backs I saw the departure board which saw the connecting flight was also delayed, so I was able to get on it and get home. Also, one of my professors was on that plane coming back from an NSF panel, and he took me home. Unfortunately I didn't end up getting the job.

Lots of interesting stuff happened on the interview for Numerica. My flight was originally scheduled to leave at 7:00 AM. I overslept and woke up at 6:30, and rushed out the door in the vain hope of getting to the airport in time. I got there at about 7:10 but fortunately the flight was delayed until that afternoon. I got rebooked on a 2:15 PM flight which gave me time to go back home, do some stuff at school that I needed to do, get the charge for my laptop (which I left at home), then go back to the airport. On the flight from Champaign to Chicago a different professor I know was also on this flight. I landed at the Denver airport and took a taxi out to Loveland. The hotel was next to a strip mall so I was able to go out to dinner and also finish up a presentation on my research, which I gave as part of the interview. The interview went vrey well. During lunch, I mentioned that I was interested in board games, and one of the people who worked there was also interested in board games and knew of some board game stores in the area, and offered to take me to them that evening. It was probably the best interview experience I have ever had.

So I decided to accept their offer, and I will be starting work by the end of August. I definitely think that stopping with a Masters degree rather than continuing with a Ph.D. was the right thing to do. I'll be able to continue doing what I love doing, and I'll also be making a lot more money than I am as a graduate student. I am not sure what I will do with all that money, but there are other people in this world who need the money a lot more than I do.

An unusual poster

2011-05-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks there has been a whole bunch of posters up in the Student Union that say "Rise Against Bad Religion." I assumed these were advertising some sort of protest march against religious extremism, but I was in the game store today and I heard people talking about it, and it turns out it was actually advertising a concert featuring the two bands "Rise Against" and "Bad Religion."

In an email from Maryland PIRG

2011-04-04T21:10:00.000-07:00

Maryland PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) is a student advocacy organization that I somehow got on the mailing list of at Maryland and they still send me stuff. Their most recent email included the following:

"Some proposals in Congress would significantly cut student aid - the U.S. House voted to slash Pell Grant funding by $5.7 billion – cutting, on average, $785 in financial aid for over 9 million students."

"over 9 million" * $785 is over $7 billion, not $5.7 billion. (On the other hand, this may make sense if the $785 number is the median, and not the mean.)

New Blog Feature

2011-04-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

As you may notice, I went back and added category tags to all my blog posts. This makes it easier to find previous posts. For instance, if you want to look at all my Gaming Math problems, you can click on "gaming-math" on the right hand side.

From USA Today

2011-03-28T20:48:00.000-07:00

A recent article in USA Today discussed standardized testing in D.C. public schools. It mentioned that some high-performing schools have very high numbers of answers erased on tests (when you erase an answer on the Scantron sheet and put in a new one, the machine can detect the residue). The article claimed that this could be possible evidence that teachers tampered with the tests prior to submitting them for grading.

The following quote appeared:

"Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That's more than half of D.C. schools."

This statement is not too surprising. If the distribution of erasure rates were symmetrical, then in any given year half of them will be above average. Since the schools above average will change from year to year (if only due to random variation), then over a 3-year period more than half of the schools will be above average in at least one of those years. (For instance, if the erasure rates are random and independent, then each year each school will have a 1/2 probability of being above average, so each school will have a 7/8 probability of being above average in at least one year.)

Aside from this sentence, the rest of the article was actually fairly good statistically. It mentioned that this particular school hasd erasure rates so far higher that it wasn't due to chance, and included a lengthy discussion of possible alternative explanations for the data.

Gaming Math - Problem 17

2011-03-18T15:12:00.000-07:00

Recently, University of Illinois computer science professor Sheldon Jacobson has developed a mathematical model to predict the distribution of seeds in the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament. (The NCAA basketball tournament consists of 64 teams divided into 4 regions with 16 teams each. It is a single-elimination tournament, and within each region the teams are "seeded" from 1 to 16, with the teams in order from strongest to weakest. The team that wins in each region goes to the "Final Four".) There is a web site allowing you to explore the results of the model. A key finding, reported in media coverage about this web site, is that the most likely combination of seeds is not (1,1,1,1), but rather (1,1,2,3).

Problem 17: Seeds of Victory

According to the web site, the probability that all four 1-seeded teams will go to the Final Four is 1 in 31.82, while the probability that two 1-seeded teams, one 2-seeded teams, and one 3-seeded team will go to the Final Four is 1 in 14.05.

In the article, Jacobson made the following statement:

"But I can tell you that if you want to go purely with the odds, choose a Final Four with seeds 1, 1, 2, 3.”

For concreteness, suppose that you are asked to pick, for each region, which team is going to the Final Four, and you are only considered "successful" if you correctly pick all four regions. Assuming that the probabilities given by Jacobson's model are accurate, is it true that picking a (1,1,2,3) split is more likely to be successful than a (1,1,1,1) split?

The answer is here.

Job Search

2011-03-16T09:14:00.001-07:00

So, last week I made my decision: I will be switching to a Masters degree program. This does mean that I won't get to do that internship at Lawrence Livermore, because the internship requires that you commit to staying in school through the Fall semester. This actually turns out to be okay because I will get to stay at school through August to finish up my thesis. There's a fair bit of work still left; I have to finish up all the remaining programming work, write documentation on all my code so that my replacement can figure out what's going on after I leave, and of course write the actual thesis. Also, I have started to look for full-time jobs for after school.

I went to the Engineering Career Services office and got my resume and cover letter looked at, and they basically had me rewrite the whole thing using the format described in the career guide, which made it look much better. I took the new resume and cover letter over to the Graduate College's career services office, and they told me that my resume and cover letter looked very good, and they only had a couple minor stylistic changes. I searched for jobs online and through job posting on bulletin boards in the Computer Science department. So far I have submitted resumes to 9 companies, and have gotten phone interview requests from 2 of them. One of them was MathWorks, which makes Matlab. Another was Palantir Technologies, which makes a data analysis and visualization platform (read the web site if you are interested). They wanted to interview me for a "Business Development" position, and I'm very interested in what that position entails. I'll report back when I see how the interviews go.

And one more thing. When I was in elementary school and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would answer "math test-question editor", because I took lots of math tests like the Math Olympiad during that time and often I found the test questions ambiguous. During my online job search, I found an online job advertisement for a math test-question editor. But things have changed a lot in the past 15 years, and I decided not to apply for that job.

The results are in

2011-03-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

I have two pieces of good news to report:

First, I passed my qual! I haven't got the “official” announcement yet but Jeff told me that the qual has been graded and I passed it.

Second, all the votes are in and I am now going to be an official member of House Valdemar in Belegarth. They are in the process of making the special tunic for me and I will have an official “initiation ritual” next Saturday, March 12.

EDIT: I typed "not" instead of "now" before.

News Quiz!

2011-02-28T11:46:00.000-08:00

Now it's time for a new feature on this blog: the News Quiz! These are some questions about local (and some not-so-local) news events - whatever I find interesting.

1. So-called "Castle Doctrine" laws give citizens the right to do what?

A. Participate in medieval re-enactment.
B. Use lethal force to defend their homes.
C. Engage in collective bargaining over rent payments.
D. Build moats around their property.

2. Which of the following companies have been recently praised by gay-rights advocates, and why?

A. Verizon, for canceling a planned ad campaign that featured two characters getting "stuck" in a same-sex relationship due to a competitor's poor cell-phone service.
B. Bioware, a video game company, for announcing that the highly anticipated space-adventure video game sequel "Mass Effect 3" will provide the option to have the player's character engage in same-sex relationships with aliens.
C. Facebook, for giving users the option to set their Facebook status to "in a civil union" or "in a domestic partnership."
D. Wizards of the Coast, for printing a series of "Magic: The Gathering" cards that feature pairs of same-sex characters that get bonuses if you have both of them on the field at the same time.

3. A new iPhone app is designed to make it easier for religious believers to do what?

A. Pray
B. Confess
C. Proselytize
D. Find churches

4. The University of Illinois computer science department took it as praise recently when a report came out showing that the department is number one in what?

A. Academic integrity violations
B. Nobel Prize winners
C. Percentage of students using alcohol
D. Average number of Facebook friends

==========================

Answers:

Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4

Gaming Math - Problem 16:

2011-02-24T09:21:00.000-08:00

Problem 16: "Fall Out Pick Up"

The video game "Fallout 3", and its sequel, "Fallout: New Vegas", are set in a post-nuclear-war world where most civilization has been destroyed and the few people remaining alive must scavenge for supplies to stay alive. Each piece of loot that you can pick up has a weight and value. There is a limit to how much weight you can carry, and when you get to a town you can sell your loot for bottle caps (the game's currency) based on its value. The problem of maximizing the total value of items you can pick up while staying within your weight capacity is known as the "knapsack problem" and is a well-known NP-complete problem.

In the game, however, there is an additional complication. You only observe each item one at a time, and because of the dangers and rival scavengers it is impossible to go back and pick up an item that you dropped or left behind. So you have to make a decision about whether to pick up each item, as well as which items to drop in order to make room, as you see each item.

(a) Is there an algorithm that gives the optimal result in all situations? (There is no limit on the running time of the algorithm.)

(b) The "competitive ratio" of an algorithm is the worst-case ratio of the value of the solution found by the algorithm to the optimal solution. For instance, if an algorithm always gives you a set of items with value at least equal to half the value of the optimal solution, then its competitive ratio is 0.5. Does there exist an algorithm for this problem with competitive ratio greater than 0? If so, give one; if not, prove it is impossible.

(Hint: Imagine there was an "adversary" controlling the capacity and sequence of items, and it gets to observe which items the algorithm selects before deciding which new items to present.)

(c) Suppose that the capacity is C, and the highest weight of any one item is M. Give an algorithm for this problem with competitive ratio 1-(M/C).

The solution is here.

Breaking News: Solution To Illinois Budget Crisis!

2011-02-23T14:42:00.000-08:00

As you may know, the State of Illinois has been facing a severe budget shortfall and has recently been forced into massive tax hikes. Also, in the 2008 election, then-candidate Mitt Romney accused then-candidate Rudy Giuliani of turning New York City into a "sanctuary city" for illegal immigrants in order to get more workers and tax revenue. Recently, it appears that Illinois is following this plan, becoming a "sanctuary state" for Democratic politicians who want to avoid voting on bills. Lawmakers have referred to themselves as "refugees", and have been stimulating the Illinois economy by purchasing essential items. There has been speculation about whether police would be able to arrest the rogue legislators and extradite them back to their home states to stand trial. As for me, I am just waiting to see what the Capitol Steps song about it will be like.

More on Echo360

2011-02-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

Because I posted on my blog about Echo360, I have been contacted by a marketing person from Echo360 who is interested in what I have to say. Here is what I told her about my experiences so far.

I think Echo360 is a very useful tool, but there are some other features that would help. One thing I think would be useful is to integrate a discussion forum with the lecture capture. The way I would envision this working is that when a student is watching the lecture online, if he has a question he can click a button and type his question in, then the question would be tagged with a timestamp indicating what point in the lecture he asked that. And there would be a way to link to a particular timestamp in the lecture. Then the instructors/TAs can log on and look at the questions, and when you looked at a given question you would have a link to the associated point in the lecture. Or an instructor could answer by pointing the student toward a particular place in the lecture. This would be useful to me because oftentimes when I talk to students, they say the instructor told them something which doesn't sound right to me, but it's hard to clear up the confusion without the lecture in front of me.

Another problem, which is a little more technical, has to do with the sound. The way our setup works is that there are two microphones, one worn by the instructor and one "shotgun" microphone. The one the instructor wears has much better sound quality but only captures what the instructor says, while the shotgun microphone can capture everything in the room. So one of the things I have to do is when the instructor pauses for students to ask questions, switch to the shotgun microphone, and then switch back when the instructor starts talking. This often isn't very reliable and you don't get all the questions. So a useful tool would be to have two or more audio channels going into the system, and it would automatically switch between them depending on who is talking.

I'm also taking a TA training seminar where we are reading the book "Teaching At Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors" by Linda B. Nilson. That book talks a lot about how traditional lectures aren't very good at promoting student understanding, and has lots of suggestions for how to improve lectures. For instance, one way of improving lectures is to periodically stop and give students a question to answer and discuss in order to keep them engaged. Something like this could be incorporated into Echo360 - if you had a system like the one I described in the first paragraph, then the instructor could put a question on the whiteboard and ask students to answer it by posting something. It might even be possible to set up a system where the instructor can set the lecture to automatically pause and ask the student a question, and not to continue until the student gives an answer.

More Belegarth Action

2011-02-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

Also this weekend I went to Wolfpack Opener, a large Belegarth event. We had to squish in the back seat of a truck because we were low on space in cars, but we got there fine. The battles were exciting, and especially since I am an archer it was fun because it's inside, so everyone bunches up and there are lots of easy targets. There are different types of battles including "line battles" wher everyone lines up in two lines and you fight each other, and also "four corners" battles where each player gets a different color wristband, each color has a corner associated with it, you are fighting against anyone who is not your color, and the referees will periodically call out a color and anyone who is dead with that color comes back alive.

Another thing is they're in the process of voting to see whether I get to become a full member of House Valdemar. So far the vote is going in my favor, but not all the votes are in and several of the key members who are supposed to vote haven't been out to practices in a while and we haven't been able to get ahold of them to get their votes. Maybe they're hiding in Wisconsin.

The qual is finally done!

2011-02-19T21:44:00.000-08:00

I had my qual exams this Thursday and Friday. According to the qual web site, normally the qual has 8 questions on it, and a passing score requires "nearly perfect" answers to about 3 of the questions and partial answers to 3 more. This time there were 10 questions on the qual, and I was able to get complete answers to 5 of them and partial answers to 4 more of them. So I think I passed, though I won't know for sure until the results come in, probably next week.

One thing that this does mean for the blog is that you will get to see more of my "Gaming Math" problems. The main reason I haven't been able to put up more of those problems recently is not because I haven't played any games with interesting math or computer science problems in them, but rather because most of the time I can't actually solve the problems I come up with. But preparing for the qual has helped me get better at solving those kinds of problems so that means that you will see more of them.

Here is a problem:

Gaming Math - Problem 15: "For Science!"

In the board game "Battlestations," players control crew members aboard a spacecraft, and they are sent on dangerous missions. In one of the missions, the players are trapped in a region of space containing N wormholes, and the only way to get out is to go through the wormholes in a specified sequence. The only way of finding out what that sequence is is by using the ship's Science Bay, which allows the player to ask any yes-or-no question about the sequence.

1. In the scenario described in the game, N=4. What is the minimum number of questions required to guarantee figuring out the correct sequence?
2. For an arbitrary N, what is the minimum number of questions required? Find an algorithm that achieves this minimum number, and prove its optimality.

(Hint: Don't forget that you can ask any yes-or-no question about the sequence.)

The answer is here.

More school stuff

2011-02-14T10:23:00.000-08:00

- I have just finished creating, assigning, collecting, and grading the first homework assignment of the year as a TA. This homeowrk was about formal logic, including propositional and first-order logic. (Propositional logic just has variables which can be either true or false, while first-order logic allows variables to be arbitrary objects, there are "predicates" that are basically functions which take objects as arguments and return a boolean variable, and there are "quantifiers" which allow you to say things like "for any X, P(X) is true" or "there exists an X such that Q(X) is true". We thought this part would just be review (these are Masters students in computer science, so we thought they would already know about logic) but some of them had trouble with simple things like the difference between validity (statement is true all the time regardless of the values of the variables) and satisfiability (statement is true for some assignment of values to the variables.) In fact one of the problems we had to "cancel" and make it an extra credit problem because it had to do with proofs in first-order logic, a topic we didn't cover (I didn't realize that we weren't going to cover it when I wrote the homework, and the professor didn't notice when he was looking at the homework before posting it)

- I have my Ph.D. qualifying examination this Thursday and Friday. I have looked at most of the previous quals and it seems like I pretty well prepared for it. Another thing is even if I do decide to only get a Masters degree, passing the qual is a good idea because if I pass the qual I am exempt from the distributional requirements for a Masters (there are still two distributional requirements, hardware and systems, that I haven't taken courses in so I would need to do that if I were to go that route).

Gaming Convention Season, Part 2

2011-02-08T09:16:00.001-08:00

Here are some more games I played:

Space Hulk:
In this game, there are two sides: the Space Marines and the Genestealers. The Space Marines are invading a spaceship that has been taken over by the evil alien Genestealers, and the goal of the Space Marines is to complete their mission before getting killed. The Space Marines have the advantage of ranged attacks and special abilities, but the Genestealers have the advantage of improved melee capability as well as numbers (new Genestealers come in every turn, but the starting Space Marines are all the Space Marines get). So the Space Marines have to be aggressive in getting to the objective, because they are going to lose a war of attrition. This tendency was even more pronounced given that we were playing by the wrong rules: we were spawning 50% more Genestealers per turn than we were supposed to, but we also made a mistake in how the Genestealers move that was equivalent to giving the Space Marines a one-turn head start. We played two rounds, once where my team was the Space Marines and once where my team was the Genestealers. As the Space Marines, we didn't realize this strategy and tried to advance carefully, but were soon overwhelmed. As the Genestealers, our opponents rusjed forward, taking advantage of their head start, and we managed to sneak in from the side and kill them but not until after they had destroyed one of the two objectives.

Rating: 8 out of 10. This game has significant strategy, and it is also fast-paced and exciting, and is designed to reward aggressive play. The one thing that isn't so good about this game is the pieces: some of the pieces break easily, often fall over, and are hard to fit on the board spaces.

Goblin Supremacy:
This is a card game in which players form a goblin army from cards that have goblins on them. There are three "ranks" of goblins, and the higher level goblins are worth more points but you have to have lower level goblins of the same type in order to play them. You can only have five goblins of each rank, but if your row is full you can "mutate" goblins by discarding cards, that transforms them into another goblin from your hand. The carsd have abilities that go off when they are played, when they get mutated, or when they are "activated" by spending "activation tokens." A significant element of the game is figuring out how to "combo" different abilities together and in what order to do things to maximize your cards - creating a sort of "Magic: The Gathering" like gameplay.

Rating: 7 out of 10. I liked the "Magic-like" gameplay, but the main problem with the game was that there were just *too many* decisions at each step - for instance, a typical turn might have you with 6 cards in hand, then deciding which 3 of them you want the least so you can discard them to activate a "zombie mutation" which lets you search through a 30+ card discard pile to decide which one card you want to mutate your guy into. This sometimes makes the game take a long time - I think we started playing this one at about 9:30 or 10:00 and had to end early when the room closed at midnight. Especially near the end of the game it gets slow, because what often ends up happening is that you keep finding ways to discard cards to draw cards so you can cycle through the deck to find the one card that fits in the few spots you have left.

More from the Daily Illini

2011-02-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

In reference to a FOIA request from a student environmental group for information about coal disposal at the University power plant:
"The letter also said the University has seven days to submit the unredacted documents. Hardy said the University received the request Jan. 30 and plans to respond by the Feb. 9 deadline."
[Again, this actually makes more sense than it sounds. The "seven days" is seven business days.]

Gaming Convention Season, Part 1

2011-02-07T17:04:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the games I played at Winter War:

Dungeon Lord:
In this game, players play as lords of minions in a dungeon with lots of rooms. Each player selects a starting room, and then during each turn there are several phases. First, players get gold depending on how many rooms they control. Next, there is an auction where cards are turned up that represent minions to bid on, and players bid gold on the minions. After hiring minions players place them on the board, then they move the minions, then there is an action phase where minions can fight or bribe other players' minions to gain control of the rooms. At the end of the game whoever controls the most rooms wins.

Rating: 8 out of 10. The auction mechanics, where players can spend money on things like hiring minions, bidding for initiative order, buying extra actions, and bribing enemies, add significant strategy to each turn even when you are not in direct conflict with another player, and encourages players to pay attention to what everyone else is doing even if they are on the other side of the board.

Race for the White House:
In this game, players play the role of candidates in a presidential primary. They travel around the country, stopping in cities to pick up votes. There are event cards that turn up that do things like make certain issues (like defense, health care, etc.) "active issues", which means that candidates who have strong positions on those issues become able to pick up more votes, and give a chance for players to receive campaign contributions. By the time you get to election time, you figure out who has the most popular vote in each state, count up electoral votes using a ballot system similar to that used by the Democratic and Republican parties, and whoever gets 270 or more wins.

Rating: 4 out of 10. While I originally thought this game would be good because I have had good experiences with other election-based games like Campaign Manager 2008, I found that this game had a lot of unnecessary complexity. Having complex rules can be fun if it adds to the strategy, but in this case it didn't. For instance, some of the event cards make it so you have to cross-reference the issue on the card with your character's position rankings to find out whether you gain or lose votes and then you adjust the vote totals in the state you're in and each adjacent state. This is a complex process that takes several minutes to resolve each card, and dozens of cards come up over the course of the game. But the event cards are completely random and your positions on issues are fixed, so there's no way to plan for the event cards or respond to affect the outcome. And the parts that aren't random are largely non-interactive, with the main challenge being to remember how many votes your opponents have in each state.

Gaming Convention Season

2011-02-06T22:49:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went to Winter War, a 2-day gaming convention held in the Hawthorn Suites (they had this last year as well.) This weekend there was Metacon, a gaming convention held by the University of Illinois gaming club. Tomorrow I will post about what happened (It's really late tonight).

Trip to Vietnam: Part 2: "Ritual Components"

2011-01-27T07:18:00.000-08:00

The first major cultural experience I had in Vietnam was going out with my mom on a mission to perform a traditional Vietnamese prayer ritual to pray for the health of her brother, who is in the hospital with cancer. Religion in Vietnam is an eclectic mix of Buddhism, animism, and lots of ancestor worship, so it is kind of interesting. The theory behind Vietnamese intercessory prayer is that you have to "save a life to get a life", and the way you "save a life" is by purchasing small animals to release into the water at the pagoda (a kind of temple). There is a street in Hanoi that has a market that happens every five days where you can buy animals for this purpose. We went to the market but couldn't find what we were looking for. My mom forgot to bring her Vietnamese phrase book, so in order to communicate with the locals he had to take out a BlackBerry and use a free translation Web site. At first we asked about where to buy "animals to release for good luck," and we were directed to a street that seemed to just have some pet stores, but no market. We also asked where the "five day market" was but they couldn't understand us. Eventually we found our way to a fish store that had someone who spoke English, and they informed us that the "five day market" actually occurred the previous day. So we just bought three fish there for 5,000 Vietnamese dong (about $0.25) each, what a later passerby informed us was a "rip-off", and it should have ben more like 2,000 dong ($0.10). There were also lots of vendors that sell votive offerings to burn, including packages of replica $100 bills. We went to the pagoda, where we pray in front of a large golden Buddha flanked by columns of packaged food items, then go to an area where we burn the money to have it rise up to our ancestors, and then went to release the fish. Since I was under the impression that Buddhism was all about transcending your material needs, I was surprised to see the commercial imagery such as the money and big golden stuff. It's clear the Vietnamese are really into the whole religion thing, as throughout Vietnam there are a whole bunch of vendors selling ritual components, including paper replicas of motorbikes and clothes to burn. According to Vietnamese tradition, burning paper replicas of things is how you send them up to heaven to provide for your ancestors in the afterlife, and Vietnamese believe that your ancestors need the same things in the afterlife that they needed in our life. For example, if your ancestor was a heroin addict, you should burn paper replicas of heroin needles to send them up there. It makes sense, I guess, because if you're already dead anyway, it can't harm you any more to inject some heroin, right?

My Teaching Assistant Job

2011-01-19T07:11:00.000-08:00

This semester I will be a TA for CS 477: Formal Software Development Methods with Madhusudan Parthasarathy. This course is about how to mathematically prove that programs (or at least parts of them) are correct. The first 3-4 weeks of the course is about propositional and first-order logic (which I mostly already know) but after that the stuff will be new to me. There are a total of about 30 students in this class, 15 of which are I2CS students - I2CS is the online program. I am the only TA for this course. I will not be giving any lectures or leading discussion sections but there will still be a considerable amount of work to do. I will be doing the following:

1. Helping to write the homework assignments and answers, and also grade the homework assignments. The professor also has money in the budge to hire a grader but we don't think that will be necessary (also, the graders are all undergraduate students, so it will be difficult to find a grader that knows the stuff in this course).

2. Communicating with the I2CS students via e-mail. Also I will have "office hours" which will be conducted via Skype.

3. Operating the camera that records the lectures to be posted on the Internet for the I2CS students. The camera is mounted on the ceiling and it is operated remotely from a "Media Services" room in the basement. Most of the process is automated; there is an "Echo 360" system that is programmed to automatically record during the period of time that the class is scheduled and then post it on a secure server for the I2CS students to log in to. I just have to make sure the camera is working and pointed at the professor. The system is kind of cool - the projector and the screen that the projector projects on to can also be controlled remotely, just in case the professor can't figure out how to operate them.

4. Updating the course web site with the lecture notes and stuff.

Trip to Vietnam: Part 1 - "Wondrous Items"

2011-01-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

I started my journey to Vietnam by taking a train from Champaign-Urbana to Chicago. I spent the evening in Chicago, and I went to a Dave & Busters and went shopping at a bookstore and a Best Buy. Then I took a cab to the airport and got on a 12 or so hour flight to Narita, Japan, where I would take a connecting flight to Hanoi. On the flight there was a SkyMall catalog, and it was funny to look at all the stuff in it. The primary demographic for this catalog is clearly metrosexual secret agents who have trouble when it comes to science and technology, as is evidenced by the following categories of items, including:

(1) Items that can't possibly work as advertised according to known scientific principles, including an acupuncture device that claims to heal you using the "latest ancient technology" (actual ad phrase), a "Wine Aging Accelerator" that claims to accelerate the aging process of wine by using magnets, and a "Hollywood Cookie Diet" that claims to allow you to lose up to 21 pounds in 13 days by eating nothing but cookies.

(2) Espionage devices, including the Covert Alarm Clock Camera, Covert USB Audio Recorder, Spy Sunglasses, and Cell Phone Spy Recon device. And if you are worried about the enemy purchasing one of these gadgets and using it against you, you can always engage in counter-espionage of your own by using the Mini Handheld Bug Detector.

(3) Multimedia format converters, including the USB Turntable (LP to music file), Cassette To CD Recorder (cassette to CD), Slide And Negative Converter (slides to picture file; I don't know why you wouldn't just use a scanner).

(4) Personal grooming devices, including the 3-In-1 Smart Groomer, HairMax hair laser comb (for only $460, it uses laser technology to help regrow your hair, which is confusing because I thought lasers removed hair), and Home Electrolysis Roller.

Eventually, I got to the Hanoi airport. It was a much smaller airport than either Chicago or Narita. Also because we are in Vietnam all the signs are in Vietnamese and English, and there are some amusing translations. For example, the list of items you're not allowed to bring through security includes spears, scimitars, tridents, and laser guns.

This was in the paper yesterday

2011-01-14T11:41:00.000-08:00

"Even with a 2 percent a year spending cap written into the bill, Rep. Roger Eddy, R-Hutsonville, said state spending would be able to grow 17.5 percent over four years."

Web Page Up

2010-12-05T22:18:00.001-08:00

I created a web page on the University of Illinois web site about me. It includes information about my past, current, and future research plans. You can find it here.

More fun stuff going on

2010-11-14T14:26:00.000-08:00

The second session of the 4H robotics club happened today, and we focused on programming this time. There's a special programming language that is used to program the robots, that is based on putting together visual "blocks" that represent commands (like "move", "turn", "play sound") and so on, as well as programming language constructs like loops and if/then statements. The kids seemed to have a slightly harder time doing this part than the building part, and they got about halfway through the tutorial heet that they gave them.

Then in the last 10 minutes of class I did my peanut butter and jelly sandwich activity. At the advice of the other instructors, I used just the jelly in case anyone had any peanut allergies. It was fun and the students laughed a lot whenever something went wrong, like when they instructed "take the bread out of the bag" and I dumped the whole loaf of bread on the table.

Also, in keeping with the "learning how to build stuff" theme, a new facility has opened on the Champaign-Urbana campus: the Champiagn-Urbana Community Fab Lab (CUCFL). The CUCFL is one of a network of dozens of similar "fab labs" around the world, and has facilities you can use to design an object on the computer and then create it. There is a laser etching machine you can use to cut a shape out of wood or acrylic, and there will (soon) be a "3D printer" you can use to design a 3D object in a computer aided design tool and then actually "print out" a 3D model of it. An article in the Daily Illini about this is here. According to some articles about the phenomenon, "fab labs" have proven to be a useful tool in empowering citizens of rural areas and developing countries to exercise their innovation.

Adventure Comes to Champaign-Urbana!

2010-11-10T11:05:00.001-08:00

I've already blogged a lot about my adventures in Belegarth and Dungeons & Dragons. But I've also learned that just like in College Park, there's plenty of exciting adventuring action right here in Champaign-Urbana.

First of all, if you're interested in combat-related encounters, there's plenty of those taking place in dark alleys across campus and the surrounding areas. Of course, you will probably want to level up your combat skills first. On the other hand, it might be a better idea to follow the cardinal rule of adventuring and not split the party in the first place.

But just like in Dungeons & Dragons, combat isn't the only way you can get your excitement - there's plenty of non-combat skill challenges that are just as dangerous. Recently, a new alcoholic drink called "Four Loko" has gained popularity among students, despite the fact that it has been referred to as "blackout in a can". One 23.5 ounce can of it has as much alcohol as 6 cans of beer and as much caffeine as 2 cups of coffee - which is dangerous because mixing caffeine and alcohol is not recommended. In a recent encounter, 9 out of 50 drinkers failed their saving throws and had to be hospitalized.

Of course, if you manage to survive the dangers, secret treasure rooms and ancient relics are just waiting to be found. Just be careful not to have your just rewards stolen by greedy leaders, and if you want to go back to a tavern to share drinks with your fellow adventurers, always be on the lookout for evil mayors who want to close them down for their own nefarious purposes.

Teaching Others

2010-11-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

So, last week I had the first session of that 4-H robotics club activity I mentioned before. It went pretty much as I expected. Another student brought in a PowerPoint presentation about robots, and then they built a robot out of Legos from a kit and instructions provided. There were 15 kids, divided into four groups (because we had four kits available). They were able to finish building the robot itself, and in later sessions we will show them how to add sensors to the robot and program it. On the "guide to instructors" on the 4-H website it suggested a fun activity to teach them what programming is all about: bring in some peanut butter, jelly, bread, and tableware, have them write down a list of instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then they read the instructions to me and I execute them. The point is to show how being clear and exact is necessary - for example if they write "put the jelly on the bread" that could mean put the whole container of jelly on top of the bread. Then they can see how to "debug" the instructions so they work right. The next session will be on November 14 so after that I will be able to tell you how it went.

But coming soon I won't just get the chance to teach elementary school age kids - I'll also get the chance to teach college undergraduates. It turns out that there isn't enough money in the grant for our project to fund me for next semester, so I will have to be a T.A. for next semester. I just learned this today so I don't know what class I will be a T.A. for, or even if I will actually be teaching students (I know that some TAs just grade papers). I will keep you posted with more information once I find out more.

Star Wars As You've Never Seen It Before

2010-10-21T20:33:00.000-07:00

This week I went to a new role-playing game being run at the game store. It is based on Star Wars, but with lots of funny twists and excitement to it.

The game began with us rolling up the stats for our characters. We started out by rolling for the basic stats like strength, dexterity, intelligence, and such, but in keeping with the science fiction aspect, one of the stats was "Robot Nature." According to the rulebook, you don't have to be a robot to have "robot nature" - the "robot nature" score is used for all sorts of "robotic tasks" like manual labor and standing guard, and "most supermarket customers have lots of robot nature themselves." Then we rolled for our race (human, robot, or one of many different types of aliens), character class, and also random starting equipment. As soon as we got to this point, we realized that the barriers between franchises had broken down - one character got a "tricorder", from Star Trek, and another got an "omni-tool", from the Mass Effect video game. A third character got a "Theopolis-class computo-face," described by the GM (gamemaster) as an "iPad with a built-in A.I.", or as we started calling it, an "AI-Pad." I got a "Grapple Rope Gauntlet" and a "Traveler's Guide to Koozebane" (a planet from the Muppet Show). Then we went onto our "Drama Rolls" and found out more facts that would lead to intra-party conflict: one of our members (a Jedi no less) had an Imperial bounty hunter's license, and two other party members (including me) had bounties previously placed on them by Jabba the Hutt.

Also, we looked at our special powers and under "psi-witch" (the "Jedi" character class) it said they had a special power of "1 pound mental force." I asked for clarification:

Me: "So 'one pound mental force', is that 'force' as in mass times acceleration?"
GM: "It means 'if there's an object that weighs one pound or less, you can use the Force to move it."
Another Player: "But in space, since there's no gravity, wouldn't everything have no weight at all, so you could throw a spaceship around with the force?"
GM: "We're using bad movie science, not real science."

But before we could start killing each other, we all learned we were part of a secret Rebel cell, and went to a busy cantina to get our first mission from our contact:

Contact: "We have to keep this on the down low, since this is a secret mission."
Me: "But if it's secret, why are we meeting in a busy cantina where everyone can hear us?
GM: "It's a role-playing game. You always meet in a bar."

Later we found our mission: we had to break into an Imperial research lab to rescue some civilians who were being held captive. We first needed a vehicle to get there, and we got one by stealing a hover-speeder, but we had to get a "station wagon style" one to hold all five of us. We made our way to the destination, but found the entrance was guarded:

GM: "You see four guys ... let's see ... they're an Imperial Death Squad, because I don't want to have to look up the armor rules. There's also a fifth guy that has a big weapon that looks like something a lowly intern at ILM* cooked up. - there's a big beer keg on his back and he is holding something that looks like a big tube with duct tape on it."

*Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects company that made the special effects for the Star Wars movies.

Anyway, we blasted the "beer keg" and it exploded and sprayed hot plasma everywhere - and since the Imperial Death Squad didn't have armor, they were defenseless against it, so they all got killed. With the initial guards taken out, we made our way into the interior of the facility. Our tricorder detected two rooms of interest - one with the civilians we were supposed to rescue, and one with "weird energy readings." We broke the cardinal rule of adventuring (YouTube link) and split up to investigate the two rooms. The "weird energy reading" room had a killer robot controlled by a mad scientist, but the Jedi used the Force to grab the remote control and turn the robot against its master. The other room was also weakly defended, so the guards in that room were dispatched and we returned victorious.

Octoberfest

2010-10-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

This weekend I went to a weekend-long Belegarth camping event called Octoberfest. It was quite an entertaining experience.

I first found another member of the park who agreed to give me a ride up there, and he wanted to go on Thursday. We agreed that he would pick me up on Thursday afternoon, after my meeting with my research group. Previously, my professor asked me to send him visualizations of the output of our program so that he could put it in a presentation. I sent them to him before the meeting, but when we viewed them at the meeting he told me that the visualizations didn't look right and I would need to redo them. There wasn't enough time to do them before I had to head up, so I called the park to ask if they had wireless Internet access there. They said that they do have Internet access, but "it doesn't always work because of the woods." I was surprised that a campground would even have wireless Internet, and the statement about "it doesn't always work because of the woods" made me a little suspicious that he thought that "wireless Internet" meant a 3G signal (which wouldn't help connect the computer to the Internet) but I put my plan into action anyway. I brought my laptop up, and when I got there I found out that they did, in fact, have actual wireless Internet. So I was able to finish my work and send it off.

The next day, I put the computer back in the trunk of the car, left the 21st century behind, and got suited up for a day of medieval warfare. There were big battles with dozens of people on a side, and there were many different scenarios, including castle battles (there's a wooden castle on the field with platforms that you can shoot from), realm battles, and unit battles. There were only about 5-6 other members of House Valdemar there, so we had to use tricky tactics, like waiting until two larger groups were engaged with each other and then stabbing one of them in the back. At the end of the day there was a feast, which was soup in a "bowl" made of bread. I didn't have any soup and just got the bread bowl, and there was also a stall selling quesadillas. After the feast, I wandered around the campsite looking for something to do and I saw that in one of the buildings a game of Texas Hold-Em was starting up. I played some Texas Hold-Em, and the first game I was eliminated about in the middle, and in the second game I came in 2nd place out of 6.

Then on Saturday there was another day of fighting. There were no more castle battles this day because there were too many people to fit in the castle, which was a shame because the castle battle was my favorite part of the fighting on Friday. But there was still lots more realm and unit battles. At the end of the day there were some tournaments. I participated in the archery tournament. I won the first round but got eliminated int he second round by the player who would go on to win the tournament. Then there was another feast, and after the feast there was supposed to be the "Bardic Games", which is a contest where you do a "bardic performance." When I heard about that contest I entered it, planning to do an improv comedy routine, but never got a chance since the contest was canceled since I was the only one who signed up. Also, I did run into Steve Cecchin, the head of Nero Chicago, the Nero group that also meets at Stonehouse Park. He said there was a special Halloween event that is happening that weekend and that he could try to find me a ride up there. I haven't decided yet whether I will want to go.

Some more news

2010-09-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

1. The Lego robotics thing won't be starting until the 4th week in October, and will only be once a month on the 4th Sunday of each month. So there will be no more news about that until then.

2. I will be presenting my work at the CS Grad Expo on October 4. I will try to get some sort of picture up then.

3. We just submitted our annual report to the National Science Foundation. If you want to see it I can try to put it up here soon.

4. I have gone to several Magic card tournaments in the past few weeks. I have started to get better at the tournaments and I actually got in first place in one of tham (out of about 12 people or so). The only problem is that now whenever I play multiplayer (that is, games with more than 2 people) everyone gangs up on me because they assume that I will beat them if they don't. It is impossible to convince them otherwise even if there is a situation where, say, I have no creatures with any useful powers on the board but the person across from me is just one turn away from using his power that will make all his creatures indestructible for the rest of the game.

5. At Belegarth, I have identified several things that I need to get better at, and I have devised a plan for doing so, as follows. These plans have not been implemented yet but I will post again as I see how they come out.

PROBLEM: Sometimes I can't remember who is on my team. Asking the target is rarely useful because it simply alerts them that I am about to shoot them. Not asking is problematic because it sometimes results in me shooting people on my own team.

SOLUTION: Take photos of as many players as possible. Write a computer program that will do the following: (1) display a random selection of these images, each labeled as "red" or "blue", then (2) display images one after another and ask me to identify which is on which "team." This way I can practice team identification.

PROBLEM: I am supposed to only "half draw" the bow back when shooting from under 15 feet. However I sometimes have a hard time determining whether it is 15 feet.

SOLUTION: Tape a piece of tape near the side of my glasses, with two tick marks on it. The distance between the tick marks will be calibrated such that the apparent distance between the tick marks is equal to the apparent height of an average-height target at 15 feet. (The principle is similar to the principle described here, except that I don't need to know the exact range, just know whether it is more or less than 15 feet.)

PROBLEM: Different people have given me conflicting answers as to what exactly "half draw" means. Basically, the "draw length" is the distance between the nock (the place where the arrow is attached to the bowstring) and the front of the handle of the bow when you draw it. The maximum allowable draw length for full draw is 28 inches. The question is that even if you just put the arrow on the bow in the "neutral position" and don't draw it at all, the "draw length" is not zero; it is about 7 inches or so (because the bow is curved.) So does "half draw" mean 14 inches (halfway between 0 and 28) or 17.5 inches (halfway between 7 and 28). I have gotten both answers from different players, and sometimes they tell me one thing but when I have them demonstrate and measure it, it's clearly something else.

SOLUTION: Bring a tape measure to practice. Have as many archers as possible demosntrate where they think "half draw" is, and measure it. Take the average of all these measurements, then put a "half-draw mark" on the arrow at that location. Get the half-draw mark checked by a herald (that's like a referee). Additionally, in case I am playing and there is a different herald who disagrees with the first herald on where half-draw is, bring replacement tape so I can re-mark the arrows if necessary.

A new semester

2010-09-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

So a new semester just started. A few cool things have been going on:

1. I signed up for two classes: "Adaptive + Multigrid Methods" with Luke Olson and "Finite Element Analysis" with Dan Tortorelli.

The class on Iterative+Multigrid Methods is about techniques for solving large systems of linear equations. Large systems of linear equations arise a lot from approximating a partial differential equation by a separate linear equation at each point on the mesh. "Iterative" means that you solve the equation by coming up with an approximate "guess" and then repeatedly improving the "guess" until you get close enough to the solution. "Multigrid" means that rather than just using one mesh, you have several different meshes of different sizes, and you use the solution to the coarser mesh (which can be computed faster) in order to get a better guess for the solution of the finer mesh.

The Finite Element Analysis class is in the mechanical engineering department, so most of the students are mechanical engineering students. It is interesting to learn more about how the mathematical techniques I am learning about are actually used to model physical systems, although one problem (from my perspective) is that since most of the students are not computer science students a lot of time is spent going over basic programming concepts that I've already seen over and over. For example today the professor spent most of the class just explaining how to write a program that reads input from a data file and puts it into a matrix.

2. As for my research, we have gotten to the point where we can produce reasonably good looking visualizations of the meshing process. Once I finish that part (probably in the next few weeks) I am planning on making a web page where I can put them up so you can look at them.

3. In Belegarth, last week there was the Numenor "Opener" to mark the start of the semester, where lots of people come, including some from other groups, and they do lots of different battles. One of the battles was a "Unit Battle," where the different "units" (units are groups of people that fight together and often have distinctive uniforms) all fight. For that battle I temporarily joined a unit called House Valdemar. During that battle the leader of that unit (who is also the owner of one of the game stores I play Magic at) was so impressed with my archery skills he asked me to join the unit. The way it works is that now I am a "petitioner", and after a couple months the members vote on whether to keep me in as a full fledged member. So I guess it's kind of like a fraternity (not that I would know).

4. I have volunteered to be an instuctor for a 4-H club activity that teaches kids how to build robots using Lego Mindstorms toys. The way this happened was that one of my classes is in the engineering building, so when I was getting out of class I saw a flyer up on the wall advertising this, and it sounded really cool. It's going to be an hour once a week for 6 weeks, and it probably going to start in a couple weeks or so (they haven't set up the schedule yet). I did check to make sure it will end before December so it won't interfere with our vacation plans.

Gencon

2010-08-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

So I just got back from Gencon. There were a few cool things I did here. First, I did some of the same stuff I did at Origins, including some of the same LARPs, an exhibit hall where they were doing demos of games, and some rooms where there were board games set up that you can play. There were a few things I did that were different and worth talking about:

NSDM: They were running the NSDM (National Security Decision Making Game) here again. I played in it but this time it was a lot less exciting than the first two times. Part of it may be because this time there were three cells, so I only got to see about one third of what was going on. Another thing I found is that since so much is based on the actions of the players, it really can be exciting or dull depending on what the players do. While I am glad I participated in NSDM the first few times as it gave me plenty of ideas for blog posts and was really cool, I will probably not do it again. Part of the problem seems to be that in order to get things done in the game you have to be able to deceive and manipulate people, and that's not really my strong suit.

True Dungeon: This is a really cool LARP-like event that is run only at GenCon. When you go into the game, you are given a bag of 10 "treasure tokens" and then get sent into a "training area" where you choose which character class you want to play. You go in as a party, and it is based on Dungeons and Dragons except that instead of rolling dice, you do different physical challenges to do your thing - for example, fighters have to slide pucks on a shuffleboard to hit their opponents, wizards have to memorize a chart with various "planes" on it to cast their spells, and so on. During the game you can earn more treasure tokens by opening locked chests and completing certain challenges. At the end you get to keep your treasure tokens for future events. Some groups have been doing this for a while and have accumulated whole piles of treasure tokens. You go through a series of rooms, and you have exactly 12 minutes in each room, so it is pipelined so that there is one group in each room at a time. Sometimes there are puzzles in the rooms and sometimes there are monsters to fight. This was cool although expensive ($35 for one two-hour adventure if you pay in advance, or $40 if you pay at the door).

Seminars: Also at the convention there were seminars, usually given by game designers and publishers, where they revealed information on upcoming games and discussed different aspects of game design. I went to one of the seminars, entitled "The Myth of Game Balance." The presenters' thesis was that modern role-playing games are too focused on "game balance" - meaning the idea that all the characters should be roughly equal in power (or at least that everyone has an equal amount to contribute, even if they contribute in different ways) - and that that makes it harder to to tell good stories in role-playing games. Some examples they gave were:

- In RPGs, wizards are almost always physically weak and fragile compared to other types of characters. This is almost totally an invention of RPGs because wizards need a drawback to balance out their spellcasting ability - in fiction and literature, wizards are often also accomplished swordsmen.

- In superhero stories, different characters have vast differences in powers - e.g. Superman can do almost anything, while some minor characters have much more limited powers. If all characters are restricted to having roughly equal power then this type of story does not work.

- Games often have many rules and restrictions that keep certain powers from becoming too powerful and making sure characters are balanced - for instance, spellcasters might be limited to casting a certain number of times per day, or some games have complicated point systems that you use to calculate how much each power is worth. This can make it so players are more focused on the mechanics, and less on the story.

The presenters spent about the first 10-15 minutes laying out their ideas, and then the rest of the one hour seminar was discussion and questions from the audience. I asked him what he thought of the HERO System, because I thought that was a counterexample to his thesis - the HERO System does have a complicated point system to "balance" characters, but it is designed so you can make whatever kind of powers and characters you want, and can tell basically whatever story you want. (And if you want to have characters with differing power levels you can just give them different numbers of points.) He said that he had heard of that system but it just illustrated his problem because of all the complicated rules; he said that one time he had played a HERO game and the DM had created a character, and he had a bow as a weapon. However they had to rebuild the character as soon as they got into the first fight because the DM realized he had forgotten to give the bow a ranged attack, so he couldn't actually shoot arrows out of it.

Another idea I brought up was that focusing on the game mechanics doesn't have to detract from the story; it can actually add to it. I gave the example of an item from Dungeons and dragons (this is an actual item in one of the books, not something I made up) that tells you how many hit points a target has. He thought this was "silly" and didn't want to hear about it further. The point I wanted to make, though, is that such an artifact, despite having a power that involves the game rules (like hit points) so specifically, actually has a lot of story possibilities. Would it be possible to use the artifact to identify "future heroes" based on their hit point values, since in the game PCs (player characters) have different rules for determining how many hit points they start out with then NPCs? How much of the system would they be able to figure out using this information? How would people react to a device that could tell them this information? Would bad guys be able to use the device for nefarious purposes, or try to steal it?

Overall, though, it was a very interesting seminar and I will try to go to more seminars at future conventions. Also they told me about a funny book they published called "Qerth", a campaign setting for their "QAGS" (Quick A** Game System) that makes fun of Dungeons and Dragons. For example, some of the special powers include "Detect Player Character" (used for identifying other PCs in a busy tavern to meet at the beginning of the game), "Cheese Identification," and "Find And Remove Traps" (hint: think acronym). You can create characters with character classes such as "Murderer", "Rabbi", and "Troubadour," and then fight monsters such as the "Flesh-Eating Caruso", "Troglophile," and "Corner Barbarian" in an exciting afternoon of "Fantasy Adventure Gaming" (hint: see previous hint).

A new LARP: Nero

2010-07-15T10:24:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I participated in a new LARP (live-action role playing game) called Nero. It is quite different from any of the LARPs I have played in so far. Some of the key differences are as follows:

Format and Quests

In Nero, you are "in game" for the entire time from when you get there to when the game is over. (Events are the entire weekend; they last from Friday night to Sunday morning. There is one event every 2 weeks to a month.) This means that, for example, you can be walking from your cabin to breakfast, and be attacked by monsters! So you always have to be prepared. There are also quests that you can go on, called "mods" (short for "modules.") There are a few different ways to get "mods":

1. Sometimes NPCs will come into the tavern and be there to give you quests. (So just like I said that Amtgard was live-action Dungeons and Dragons, this is more like live-action World of Warcraft.)

2. There are sometimes "town mods" that everyone paticipates in, like when the entire town is attacked by monsters.

3. In the woods there are "mod cards" laying on the ground that say things like "You see a shack in the woods. If you wish to investigate, see plot."

There is an "NPC camp" where the "plot team" (the team running the quests) is housed. If you get a quest then you go to the plot team and they run it. Sometimes you have to wait in a queue if all the NPCs are busy running other quests (see, it's live-action World of Warcraft).

Character Creation and Advancement

To create your character you first choose one out of four classes: fighter (melee weapon user), rogue (sneaky thief), scholar (spellcaster), or templar (hybrid fighter/scholar). Then you have a certain number of "build points" to spend on your stuff. You start off with 30 build points but can get more even prior to your first event via "goblin blankets" (see below). Then you spend your build points on skills, like the ability to use certain equipment or cast certain spells, or special powers like "waylay" (allows you to sneak up behind an enemy and knock him unconscious with one blow) or "healing arts" (allows you to tell how many hit points someone is down and whether he is unconscious or dead). As you advance and get XP, it gives you more build points. Some players who have been playing for a long time have over 200 build points.

XP gain is measured in "blankets" - each "blanket" is a number of XP equal to the number of build points you have. The number of XP needed for each build point goes up quadratically with the number of build points you have, however, so your advancement slows the farther up you get.

There are three ways to get XP:

1. Each event, you get one blanket just for showing up. This is your "Base XP."
2. Each event, you can "max out" and get one more blanket. You can do this one of two ways: (a) turn in silver pieces equal to the number of build points you have, or (b) volunteer to play an NPC (i.e. a monster) for 4 hours.
3. Each month, you can also get up to 4 blankets worth of XP from "goblin blankets." You buy goblin blankets with "goblin points," which you get by donating needed items to the group and through other kinds of service (like helping to clean up the site).

Before I got to my first event, I looked on their web site and they said they needed electronic anti-pest devices. I went to Wal-Mart and found a package of 5 of them for only $25, so I got the pack, kept one for my apartment, and gave them the other 4, and they gave me a whole month worth of goblin blankets, so I ended up with 43 build points to start. I played a scholar, and this allowed me to buy lots of spells and a couple auxiliary skills.

Combat and Spellcasting

In this game, players have a certain number of "body points", which are like hit points in other games - each hit takes off body points, and once you are down to zero body points you are unconscious. You can also wear armor, which gives you "armor points." Armor points are like body points, except they are taken off first (so they're like a shield that enemies have to get through), and you can "refit armor" by spending a minute outside of combat, which gives you all your armor points back. You can also buy a skill called "dexterity armor" which gives you extra armor points without having to wear actual armor. Many players have 20-40 body points, plus at least a dozen more points worth of armor and assorted protective powers. As a first-level scholar, I had a measly 4 body points. That means for me that it is a good strategy to stand back and cast spells, and not get in close. When you swing your sword you do a certain amount of damage, based on what kind of weapon it is, what weapon proficiencies you have, and if the weapon is magic.

As for spellcasting, that works by having "spell packets" that you throw at the target. You only have a certain number of spells per recharge cycle - spells recharge at 6:00 AM and 6:00 PM each day. I had a total of 21 spells per cycle, but they run out pretty quickly in combat. Of course as you get more build points you can buy more spells, and more powerful spells. Some people who have been playing fora while have 60-70 spells per recharge cycle, plus they are more powerful so they need fewer spells to kill a monster. My strategy was once I ran out of spells, to go play an NPC until they next recharge cycle, so I could still fight and do something useful.

Death and Resurrection

Unlike in Amtgard and Belegarth, in this game death is a big deal. The way death works is as follows:

1. If you are knocked down below 0 hit points, you start a one-minute "death count." During this time someone can heal you or "First Aid" you to stop your death count. If you run out of time then you are dead. An enemy can also "Killing Blow" you while you are on the ground to kill you immediately, but most monsters don't do this.

2. Once you are dead you start a 5-minute "dissipation count." During this time someone can cast a "Life" spell on you to raise you with no penalty. However if you run out of time then you dissipate, and have to go back to the resurrection circle, which is located in a cabin. Then you have to wait for someone "invested in the circle" or one with a certain special power to come by and start the resurrection. The resurrection takes 15 minutes.

3. You keep track of how many times you resurrect at a circle. Each time you resurrect, you increase your resurrection count by 1. Then, if your resurrection count is greater than 2, you draw a stone from a bag with 10 stones, N-2 of which are black, where N is your resurrection count. If you draw a black stone you are permanently dead and have to create a new character. (Some players, however, create backup characters and level them up with goblin blankets so that if their main character dies, they don't have to go all the way back to level 1.) You can also spend goblin points to reduce your resurrection count. You can spend 100 goblin points (each goblin blanket is 50 goblin points) to reduce your resurrection count by 1, but not below 2. (This even if you "buy back" every death, there is still a 1 in 10 chance of perma-death for each death after the first 2.)

I had to resurrect at a circle one time that event. I died when fighting goblins and nobody had a life spell, so they had to take me back to the tavern to get me a life spell. Unfortunately they took their time gathering treasure after the goblin fight, and I wanted to tell them that they had better hurry up since the 5 minutes were counting down, but of course I couldn't say anything because I was dead. They carried me back but the dissipation count ran out while I was about 200 feet from the tavern. Fortunately the rule is that at your first event, your resurrection count cannot go up (just to give a break to new players.) At least now that I understand the game better, I can make sure to invest in better defenses next time.

Origins, Part 2: The More Things Change...

2010-07-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

One cool thing at Origins was the dealer room, a large room where lots of game companies were demonstrating their new games. Many people in the game industry were there, including Lou Zocchi, the inventor of the 100-sided die*, and Steven Long, the writer of the HERO System rule book. (It's too bad that I forgot to bring my iPhone so I could take pictures, that I didn't bring along any books for autographs, and also that I didn't get around to telling Mr. Long what I thought about the quality of his writing**.) Another thing I learned was that the popularity of sequels is not limited to movies and video games. Even in board games there are a lot of expansion packs and sequels being sold. Also even games that are supposed to be new often borrow a lot of mechanics from other games. For example, I participated in a demo of one game with the following characteristics (the implication should be obvious from context even if you don't know about the game):

1. In the game, players are working cooperatively, and win or lose together.

2. The game is played on a map consisting of interconnected regions. There are several types of objects that can be in these regions, including (a) players, (b) "tokens", which players are trying to get rid of and which come in four different colors, and (c) "special markers", which help players move around the board.

3. During a turn, the players whose turn it is does the following three things in this order: (a) take a certain number of "actions," (b) draw two cards from a "good deck" and keep them, and (c) draw one or more cards from a special "bad deck", do stuff based on what it says on it, then discard it.

4. Actions include the following: (a) attempt to remove tokens from the region you are in, (b) move to an adjacent region, (c) move to any region on the board by discarding a card matching that region, (d) move from one region containing a special marker to another region containing a special marker, and (e) discard a card matching the region you are in to place a special marker in that region.

5. When you draw a card from the "bad deck", it will tell you where to put new tokens. If a card tells you to place tokens in a region, and there are already three tokens in that region, you instead put one token in each region adjacent to that region. If this happens too many times, you lose the game. You can also lose the game if the card tells you to put tokens of a certain color out, and all the tokens of that color are already on the board.

6. The goal of the game is to "complete" all four colors. You can complete a color by going to a certain location and discarding a large number of cards of that color. Once a color is completed, tokens of that color still appear as normal, but it is possible to automatically remove all tokens of that color from the region you are in when taking a "remove tokens" action.

7. This game is NOT Pandemic, nor is it, according to the game designer, "anything like Pandemic." It does, however, cost about twice as much as Pandemic. (The game is, of course, Defenders of the Realm.)

---

*Several years ago, I did a standup comedy routine about Dungeons and Dragons, and I said the 100-sided dice were "too much like frat brothers" because they "kind of rolled around a lot and wouldn't stop until they landed on the floor." I was not the only person who thought this, because since then Mr. Zocchi has redesigned the die to add a hollowed out inside with pebbles in it as a "braking system" so it doesn't roll around too much.

**What I think about his writing is that the system itself is great because you can create almost any power you want with it, but he is in desperate need of an editor (the credits in the book do not have an editor listed). This is because most of the book is filled with a lot of excess verbiage. The best example I found is the following (copied verbatim, including the parentheses:)

A mentalist who achieves this level of Mind Control could make an enemy attack one of his (the enemy's) allies/teammates (instead of the mentalist's allies/teammates, whom the enemy is fighting) or even just surrender. He could even make the enemy direct his attacks against himself.

My proposed rewrite is:

A mentalist who achieves this level of Mind Control could make an enemy attack anyone that that enemy could legally target, including itself.

I showed this to Dave, the GM of our Hero System game, and he agreed, saying that "when a computer science graduate student can write more clearly than you can, it's probably time you should get an editor." I actually think, however, that computer science actually teaches you to write more clearly: a lot of what math and computer science are about is finding ways to express complicated concepts in unambiguous and concise ways.

Origins, Part 1: The Political Intrigue

2010-06-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

Probably the most unique, fun, and exciting game I played at Origins was something called the National Security Decision Making Game, or NSDM. This game is a political/military simulation based on real-world politics, and is designed to be similar to actual "wargame" exercises used by the military in real life. The way the game works is that each game (which lasts 4 hours for "fast play" or 8 hours for a "mega-scenario") is set in a different country, or sometimes multiple countries depending on the number of players. At the start of the game, the people running the game (known as the "controllers") give a brief presentation on the basic idea of the game, and then an overview of the situation in whatever country we are running. Then, each player is given a card indicating what person or group of people they are going to play - this could be a particular person (like the President), a political party, or a particular ethnic or interest group. These cards give players a brief overview of their objectives, goals, and capabilities. Then, players break out into their individual "cells" (each country is a "cell") and start making deals and doing stuff in order to achieve their goals. Players can attempt to take actions and pass policies by writing them down on slips of paper and getting the appropriate groups to sign off on them, then turning them in to the controllers. There are no dice rolls and few hard-and-fast rules in this game: mostly, the controllers (many of whom have real-life military experience) decide the results of any actions. However, the meat of the game is not in the military conflicts themselves, but rather in the negotiation and buildup. Also, sometimes the controllers will interject events in the form of "news broadcasts," but players can also instigate things on their own. At the end of the game, there is a debriefing, which is divided into three phases: the "Excuse Generation" phase, the "Mutual Recrimination" phase, and the "What The Hell Were You Thinking?" phase. In the debriefing, the controllers reveal the whole story, ask players about why they made the decisions they did, and give out rewards for the most successful players.

The first game I participated in was set in Indonesia. The controllers gave a brief overview of Indonesia, showing us a map and pointing out the various groups, including the natives of Borneo, who are under threat of being forced off their lands, and the Aceh party, a group who lives in the northwest part of Indonesia (which has lots of reserves of natural gas) and dreams of becoming independent. Another important issue is that the Indonesian military is responsible for a lot of the administrative work (like road work, health inspections, etc.) that is normally performed by the civilian government, and many in Indonesia want more civilian control over these functions. Role cards were distributed, and I was given the President card. The card stated that my goal was to keep power, gain credit for improvements in the country's condition, and assert more civilian control over the military.

As the scenario opened, all the groups started working on their domestic priorities, making deals to advance their groups' interests. The Chinese ethnic group, which consists largely of businessmen and entrepreneurs, went around to other countries (played by the controllers) to solicit foreign investment. Other initiatives included a bill for natural disaster preparation, which led to a player being designated as the "Indonesian FEMA person." The Muslims tried to integrate the goals of promoting their religion and other groups' aims for economic development by proposing the construction of a Muslim-themed amusement park called "Allah World." I focused on the goal of gaining civilian control of the military. I convinced the groups with economic interests to go along with the plan by arguing that more civilian control would reduce the appearance of and possibility of corruption, which would make Indonesia a more attractive place to do business. However, I wasn't able to convince the military to go along with the plan, and although I made several attempts at compromise I couldn't get military support. Then the controllers announced an upcoming election, sending all the political parties into campaign mode. While there were about 15 minutes left until the election and I had spent almost the previous hour unsuccessfully trying to pass my initiative, I started going around to all the interest groups and signing whatever bills they wanted me to sign in order to gain support. During the election, each of the candidates gave brief speeches, then all the groups voted. The non-military groups (except for the opposing political parties) all supported me, and the three military players weren't paying attention during the voting process and forgot to vote, so I won with about 80% of the vote. The military and the opposition parties then began making plans to unseat me.

Soon afterwards, we were faced with our first foreign crisis: a Malaysian vessel caught an Indonesian pirate ship engaged in piracy, chased it all the way back to Indonesian territorial waters, and captured it. As I was trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution, the commander of the Indonesian air force (who was a player who had just walked in and asked to join the game, and was given that role) launched an unauthorized airstrike on the Malaysian vessel. This gave the three other political parties just the excuse they needed to impeach me for "improper military response" to the situation. Seeing the writing on the wall, I resigned without a fight. (Later on, they revealed that their original plan was a military coup, but decided on impeachment instead because part of their goal was to uphold the "trappings of democracy.") In the confusion, however, the Aceh party put its plan into action - it declared independence and stopped all natural gas shipments to the rest of Indonesia. The rest of Indonesia tried a measured response, trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution while preparing for an invasion if necessary. But when Malaysia started sending over troops and military aid to help the rebels, the rest of Indonesia realized they were in for more than they bargained for. As the situation rapidly escalated into full-scale civil war, time was up and the controllers ended the scenario.

At the end of the scenario, the controllers gave out rewards for the two best players. In second place was the Chinese player, who stayed under the radar during all the conflict and gun-running and successfully focused on their economic goals. But the first place reward was for the Aceh player, who spent the entire first half of the game expertly manipulating all of us - convincing the military to pull their troops out of the Aceh region, making secret deals with various parties to buy weapons, and convincing Malaysia to help them in exchange for the Aceh region's vital natural gas resources - and none of us even realized what was going on until it was too late. (In this whole scenario, the only controller-initiated event was the pirate ship thing - everything else was the players' idea.)

--------------

I liked this game so much that a couple days later I participated in another session. This time, I got there early enough that I was able to see a montage of player quotes that happened during previous games. They've been doing this for 20 years, so there are lots of them, such as:

"I need to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Is the Dungeons + Dragons room out of their jurisdiction?"

"When I want your opinion, I'll subpoena you."

"When will the show trial start?"
"It's not a show trial, it's a legitimate legal proceeding."
"Okay, but when will it start?"
"Just as soon as we can manufacture enough evidence."

(After being blown up by a suitcase nuke in a previous game, and later seeing someone not involved with the game wander into the room carrying a suitcase) "Oh no, not another suitcase!"

Anyway, this one had more people, so they split us up into two "cells": South Korea and Japan. I was assigned to the South Korea cell, and my role card said that I represented the farmers' association. At the beginning of the game, our first major issue was how to deal with the threat posed by North Korea. There were a few major options on the table - increase spending on the military and mobilize more troops up to the border, try a more open solution using the carrot rather than the stick, or ask China for help. I suggested that we capitalize on the North Koreans' dependence on food aid from South Korea to use it as leverage, and we eventually decided on a compromise plan that included elements of all three of the plans people had proposed. The first ew minutes of the game were relatively calm, with the exception of Kim Jong Il's player taunting us from the sidelines. But the situation soon escalated, when it was discovered that North Korea was smuggling drugs and counterfeit money through tunnels under the DMZ into South Korea in order to drain money from and destabilize South Korea's economy. As we scrambled to figure out how we would respond, we were hit with yet another crisis - a few days after a radiation leak was discovered in a nuclear sub, a South Korean vessel was attacked by a giant sea monster! This extra crisis turned out to be a false alarm - it was just a publicity stunt by a movie company to promote their new monster movie. (The nuclear accident wasn't part of the stunt; they just capitalized on it to manufacture the "sea monster attack" story.) At this point, I was mostly on the sidelines as my group's main interests were domestic, but it was still exciting to see how the situation would unfold. North Korea got more and more aggressive, sending artillery corps down to the border to get within range to fire on Seoul. We also learned that the internal situation in North Korea was getting more and more unstable, with Kim Jong Il assassinated, his son taking his place as leader, and all contact cut off between the North Korean and South Korean governments. The last straw was when Seoul was hit with a biological attack: a terrorist had contaminated the water supply with botulism, leaving over 1000 citizens dead. We interpreted this as an act of war, and invaded. We had the help of China and Russia, so we thought it would be an easy fight. But as soon as we started to invade, North Korea threatened nuclear retaliation. We thought that China had told us that they had "dealt with" the nukes, so we pressed on. But unfortunately that information was based on faulty intelligence. We called North Korea's bluff - but it wasn't a bluff.

During the debriefing, however, the true identity of the player responsible for the bioterrorism was revealed: it was a rogue general in the Japanese cell! Apparently he had his own ulterior motives, such as increasing his own power, and thought that a biological attack would be the perfect instigating event. We had all just assumed that the North Koreans were responsible because earlier in the scenario, they had kidnapped five Japanese doctors including a virologist, so we thought they were using them to develop the biological weapon. They also gave out rewards for the most successful players (there were going to be six awards this game, due to the larger number of players), but unfortunately I had another game to get to and was not able to stay and see who won. But since the end result was nuclear annihilation of the entire region, it's hard to say that anyone really achieved their goals. And as for the cause of North Korea's belligerence in the first place? We never found out, but the controllers did say that everything North Korea did (remember, there was no North Korea cell in this game except if you count the Kim Jong Il player, so most of this was controller-initiated) was based on what North Korea players "did to themselves" in a previous game.

Origins

2010-06-26T23:36:00.001-07:00

I just came back from the last day of the Origins gaming convention. There is too much excitement for one blog post so I will be posting lots of different stories over the next few days. Overall it was lots of fun, and I got to play lots of cool games and live-action role playing events, including political intrigue, human-on-zombie action, space marines fighting space pirates, and much more!

Champions: Phoenix, Part 7

2010-06-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

The battle continues...

----

Our brave heroes got into the car and started driving away from the giant robots. Unfortunately, none of the people in the car actually had any skill points in the "Driving" skill, so they had to stop ant stop signs and obey all traffic laws or else they would be forced to make a driving skill roll that they would most likely fail miserably. Fortunately this was still enough to evade the robots for a minute or so, long enough for the injured team members to recover enough to get back in the fight. Just as they were cornered and about to have to fight their way out, two heroes teleported in to help them: Field Effect from before, as well as a new heroine who was mysteriously teleported in from an alternate timeline. One of the heroes who was already here was alarmed at this sudden intrusion:

Rift: Don't you know the rule about grass, cash, or ass?

Technomancer:What's that? Is that a technique for defeating giant robots?

Since the robots were so huge, they were incredibly easy to hit. Field Effect used this to his advantage very well, using his "Move Through" maneuver to gain extra damage, enough to destroy the three robots. Unfortunately that wasn't all that the evil Beta had up its sleeve: it sent three more robots around to different locations in the city and detonated them, then sent a fourth one flying through the Arizona skies at supersonic speeds - headed directly for the Mesa!

With the clock ticking, our heroes frantically tried to come up with a plan. Technomancer managed to establish a mental link with the evil Beta, and tried to convince it to give up its destructive ways. Beta replied that it was motivated by self-preservation: in order to avoid becoming obsolete, it would have to destroy anyone with the abilities to make improved versions of it. When Technomancer asked why it seemed to be going on an indiscriminate spree of destruction, Beta replied that it was for funding purposes - he needed money for "maintenance costs" and one way of getting that money was by accepting contracts to blow things up, apparently. Technomancer told Beta that he could make more money by channeling his efforts into more constructive activities. Beta replied that he was willing to continue the negotiations in person, and asked Technomancer to meet it back at the warehouse. Technomancer eagerly jumped at this opportunity, but the rest of the team saw the obvious trap and vetoed the plan.

In desperation, Field Effect asked his producers for help. They informed him that his sister was being held hostage at his house and they he could choose to either rescue him or be teleported on top of the flying robot in order to destroy it. After some discussion, the team agreed to split up: three of the members, including Technomancer, went to stop the robot while the other three went to rescue Field Effect's sister. On the robot, Field Effect ripped it to shreds with his super strength while Technomancer created a force field that gave all of his allies the power of flight so that they could safely bail from the crashing robot and land safely. Back on the ground, the heroes managed to rescue Field Effect's family, but unfortunately the new heroine from an alternate timeline, being new to the whole hero business, got confused as to who was on which side and zapped Field Effect's brother-in-law with a lightning bolt. But no sooner was this threat dealt with than yet a new twist emerged...

"Champions: Phoenix", Part 6

2010-05-21T23:35:00.000-07:00

The story continues...

----

Field Effect couldn't come this time, so we had to adventure without him and never got a chance to find out what happened to his sister. Instead, we tried to follow up on our previous leads, looking for the mysterious place where they lured people with promises of jobs and then disintegrated them. (Evidently, the economy must have been pretty bad.) We interrogated the three people we captured before. The first one, no useful information. The second one, "Yellow Juice," told the whole story - he said he had been taken in a bus with covered-up windows so he couldn't see where he was going, then got taken to a warehouse where the shenanigans took place. Unfortunately he didn't remember enough information to tell where he was taken. The final one was "Purple Heart," except the word "heart" was replaced by another word beginning with the letter H that I can't write because this is a family friendly blog. She was the mentalist and stated that she knew where she was taken because she read the driver's mind, but was only willing to give up the information if she would be promised release, and neither Agent Randall nor the rest of the team was willing to make that promise. Fortunately, they were able to get enough information from the previous interrogations, that with the help of a few good die rolls and an assist from All-Purpose Bob, they able to pinpoint a potential location based on electricity usage.

Our brave heroes traveled to the site, and found an abandoned junkyard with several large piles of junk. While going there, they met up with a new hero, "Mr. Sarcastic," who has special powers including a "Cutting Remark" and a "Witty Riposte." They approached the site, then Rift desolidified and went in to scout out. Unfortunately, he accidentally triggered the junkyard's alarm system - and the junk piles suddenly rose up out of the ground and formed themselves into robots almost thirty meters tall! Our heroes wisely decided to back off, and the junk piles receded. However, our new hero soon showed his true nature when Mr. Sarcastic decided to teleport right on top of one of the junk piles to investigate. The junk pile opened up and grabbed him - and his defenses failed to activate! The battle was begun.

Rift jumped right into the action, hovering in the air and ruthlessly blasting the giant robot. The robot also tried to throw Mr. Sarcastic at Rift - although he missed, when Mr. Sarcastic landed his defenses again failed to activate and he was knocked unconscious. Technomancer desperately tried to channel his energy into Rift to improve the power of Rift's blast, but he couldn't get his equipment to work. The robot slammed his giant fist directly on top of Rift and Technomancer, stunning them both. Rift was able to recover and continued blasting, while Technomancer desperately tried to teleport to safety. Alpha, on the other hand, had sensed the evil Beta's presence and fled the scene. Unfortunately, the robot trundled outside the perimeter and hit Technomancer, calling him the "creator." Technomancer couldn't take the hit and fell unconscious. Rift was finally able to bring the robot down with a well placed blast, but as soon as that happened, the other seven giant robots started to activate...

Will Mr. Sarcastic prove to be an asset or a liability? Will our heroes turn the tide of battle and defeat the robots? Will the author of this blog realize how cliched and overused the phrase "tide of battle" is? Find out next time on "Champions: Phoenix?"

Math and Gaming Superstitions

2010-05-15T13:35:00.000-07:00

Even though you would expect that gamers would tend to be rational and good at math, I have noticed that gamers have a lot of superstitions and misunderstandings of probability.

For example, the sheer variety of dice-related superstitions is legendary. Frequently gamers will refer to some dice as being "lucky" or "unlucky." This in itself may sometimes make sense because it is possible that a die might be defective and so produce uneven results, but there are lots of superstitions that can't be explained that way. For example, one gamer told me that his group didn't want him to touch their dice because any dice he touched would suddenly "have their luck drained" and "roll horribly for months." And if you do a google search for "dice superstitions" you will find a whole lot more, like people who put dice that roll poorly in a freezer to "teach them a lesson."

Another common category of misunderstandings is not understanding independence of events. Frequently when someone gets a very good roll on something unimportant he will express regret at "wasting" a good roll. Of course getting this roll in no way impacts any future rolls. Last night I was playing Magic: The Gathering. It was a "draft" format which means you pass booster packs around, "drafting" cards out of the packs, and making a deck with the cards you draft. My opponent had a "Tome Scour" card in his deck that "mills"a target player five cards - i.e. makes him put five cards from the top of his library (draw pile) into his graveyard (discard pile). The main use of this type of card is in "mill decks" that try to win by emptying out the opponent's library (because if you have no cards to draw at the start of your turn you lose.) My opponent didn't have kind of deck but did say that he liked that card because "in the last game, I milled out lots of really good cards." Of course, milling out cards does not affect the average quality of the cards coming up - it's just as likely you will mill out poor cards and leave the opponent with the good ones.

Of course, sometimes the players aren't the ones that get the probability messed up - sometimes the players know more about probability than the game designers. My problem from a while ago, "Mathematically Challenged," is based on the actual skill challenge system in D+D 4th edition. If you didn't allow the "aid another" trick described in the problem (and the rules actually said you weren't supposed to allow that trick) I think the calculation was something like the characters had about a 7% chance of succeeding at an average difficulty skill challenge. After this was discovered, they released errata* that changed all the difficulty levels and challenge rules so that instead of it being a 7% chance of success, it was more like a 99.7% chance.

*There are currently over 100 pages of errata to D+D 4th edition, most of them to fix things which proved to be too powerful or easy to abuse. One recent example was Wormhole Plunge, a power that creates a one-square zone where whenever an enemy is in that zone, you can teleport him three squares. The trick was to teleport him three squares straight up, so he falls down and takes falling damage. After this he is then in the same square as before, so you can repeat the process. And the teleport is a free action, so you can do it as many times as you want in one turn, so you can keep going until the monster is dead, no matter how tough the monster is. And this is a power you can get at level 1. The fix was to make it so you can only do the teleport once per round.

"Champions: Phoenix", Part 5

2010-05-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

The adventures of our brave heroes continue...
------

When Field Effect returned, Agent Randall was anxiously waiting to speak with him. During the interrogation, Randall first realized he was getting nowhere, so they moved the interrogation into a sealed room, blocking all incoming and outgoing signals - including the one linking Field Effect to the aliens. With the interference from the producer's voice eliminated, Field Effect did his best to convey the situation. Although he still couldn't talk about it directly due to the neural block, he dropped the hints he could and eventually clued Agent Randall in. When the interrogation was over, Field Effect pleaded with his producers to remove the neural block. He stated that the government thought he was a threat to humanity, and was planning on locking him up, but if he could talk about it freely he could allay those fears and strike up a mutually beneficial deal. The producers said that they wanted to do so, but couldn't - putting in the neural block was illegal under the aliens' own laws, and if their government found out they would lock them up. Also, they gave out another shocking fact - when the aliens went to Earth to start the whole thing off, they weren't actually representatives of the alien's government as they claimed - they were just from the entertainment company making the show! Fortunately, there was an alternative option:

(Note: In the game, players create characters based on a point system, and you can get extra points by taking "complications", such as Field Effect's inability to talk about what happened. During the game, you get experience points, and you can spend experience points to improve your powers or to "buy off" complications, at which time you're supposed to come up with an in-game explanation for the changes.)

Rift: Technomancer, can you scan his brain and use your technology to remove the neural block?
Field Effect: He will be able to, just as soon as I get 7 more experience points.

Fortunately, he actually miscounted and only needed 2 more experience points, and was able to get those by increasing one of his other disadvantages. So Technomancer took him back to his lab and was almost ready to use targeted radiation pulses to burn out the neural implant and remove the block:

Technomancer: Before we begin, it's standard policy that you have to sign this superpower-alteration-experiment liability waiver form.
Field Effect: What? It says, you're not responsible if I grow extra tails?

The experiment proceeded as planned, and the only side effect was that the amount of susceptibility damage he takes when he gets teleported increased by 50 percent, but it was well worth it. We returned to Randall and resumed negotiations. Field Effect pleaded to be allowed to join Project EAGLE, because the aliens wanted him to be in danger, this would place him in danger, and if he was not in danger (and thus the show got boring) then the aliens could start making bad things happen. "The more danger we are in," he said, "the safer the world is."

Before we could finish our negotiations, however, the producers thought the show was getting boring, so they teleported us into a superpowered battle scene. We saw a guy being chased by thugs wielding blaster rifles. He was hit, then frantically fired off an energy bolt before being hit again and going down. Our brave heroes leapt into action, covering the victim while engaging the thugs. Field Effect flipped over the truck that the thugs were in - several thugs managed to jump clear, but a few got trapped under the truck. Then more thugs came in from a side street and opened fire! Technomancer ran up and got them in a stasis field, but Field Effect pounded the ground, destroying the stasis field but leaving the thugs unharmed. (Clearly not much coordination here.) Fortunately, Technomancer ordered Alpha to go around the corner and flash the thugs to blind them, which worked. Seizing the opening, the rest of the party unloaded with their area-effect attacks, taking out all the thugs before they could get off another round of shots. While waiting for the police to arrive, we tended to the victim, who soon woke up. He tried to leave the scene, but Field Effect stopped him. Eventually, he revealed why he was so anxious - "I don't want to go back to the Mesa," and tried to blast Field Effect but Field Effect knocked him out before he had a chance. As it turned out, the victim was Blueheart, a paroled supervillain who had just violated the terms of his parole by using his superpowers in a threatening manner (even though it was in self-defense). We then examined the guns, and began tracing them back to their source.

The source of the guns was apparently a militia leader who had a house on the outskirts of Phoenix. Field Effect, Technomancer, and Rift went to investigate, while Strobe stayed behind at home. They first alerted H.U.R.T. as to what they were up to, and H.U.R.T. told them to "proceed with caution." That proved to be good advice. As we advanced toward the house, we avoided two booby traps, then managed to get within Rift's teleport range. Rift teleported onto the roof of the house. He noticed several motion sensors, then reflexively froze in place just in time to avoid setting them off. However, he then decided to dance on the roof to set them off on purpose, to try to "flush out" the bad guys. This was not a good idea, as when he did so, the house exploded! The blast knocked him out, though fortunately he had his defenses up so he suffered no permanent injury. Field Effect used his stretching and super strength to put out the flames, but the fire destroyed any usable evidence.

We returned to Phoenix and reported back to Agent Randall. With the neural block gone, Field Effect could relay communications to and from the producers to the rest of the party. Randall agreed to let us join Project EAGLE, and they would provide us with a base of operations. Each side also had a few other requests - Field Effect wanted a few hours per week of "private time" that they wouldn't film, the producers wanted Agent Randall to wear a superhero costume, and so on. But the negotiations were a success, and just as they left, the producers chimed in with some news. Field Effect's sister, they said, "might need superpowers right about now." When Field Effect asked why, the producers said that "you might want to find out."

What will become of our heroes' latest enterprise? Will they find out what is happening to Field Effect's sister in time to save her? Will our heroes finally discover why nearly every superhero on the planet has relatives who keep getting in trouble? And will our heroes have the chance to enforce Arizona's new immigration law against the other kind of alien? Find out, next time on "Champions: Phoenix!"

Updates on school

2010-05-05T15:45:00.000-07:00

I will post the latest update on the superhero game soon but I have other things to talk about - like the fact that I just finished my last class of the school year! Of course school is not yet done - there are still the final exams and final project.

Also, I am making more progress toward finding a research advisor;. I talked to Sheldon Jacobson and he gave me some interesting papers to read. Also, Roy Campbell said he would set up a meeting between me and some people in the Beckman Institute because it looks like there is really cool stuff going on there, although that hasn't been done yet. Also, I went to a guest lecture by Eric Brewer of Berkeley about technology in developing countries (just look on his web site for some of the projects his group has done). That lecture definitely inspired me to start looking for projects that, like those, can have a major social impact in the real world rather than just publishing papers. (This doesn't necessarily have to involve developing countries, at least not directly: computational methods are also used in other important application areas such as energy and the environment.) I don't believe there are any computer science research groups at UIUC looking at developing countries, but Roy Campbell has previously advised a project along those lines so at least he would know where to start. I am planning on talking to him again a couple weeks from now; I'll post again when I know more.

"Champions: Phoenix," Part 4

2010-04-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

This session, Field Effect's player couldn't make it to the game because his wife's birthday party (in real life) was that day. I commented that in the game, one of the disadvantages you can take for your character is a "DNPC" (dependent non-player character) - that's someone your character is responsible for that keeps getting into trouble (e.g. Lois Lane for Superman). In this case, none of the characters in the game have DNPCs, but apparently the players themselves do.

Anyway, continuing on...

-----

Our heroes were hot on the tail of the people who were behind the robotic attacks. Technomancer suggested telling Agent Randall all that they knew and asking for his help, but that plan was quickly shot down by the other heroes, who thought that Randall might arrest them if he learned Beta was behind the illicit sale. Technomancer recovered the hard drive from Beta's wreckage and searched it for any useful information, but all could come up with was "off-world concerns" - not much to go on. Then, our heroes rented a car and drove out to the ambush site, hoping to get more information there. Agent Randall and his crew were already investigating the area, and asked for the heroes' help. They had found a piece of alien-looking technology in the wreckage and asked for help reactivating it. The technician, "All-Purpose Bob", couldn't do it, but Technomancer easily could. It began sending out an audiovisual signal, which could be played back on Earth equipment (apparently alien technology uses file formats compatible with Earth's). It displayed scenes from the battle, and then looped back to show a stunning image - an alien television control room, staffed by the same aliens that had abducted Field Effect weeks earlier! Realizing the Field Effect may know something about the alien threat, Radall asked to speak to Field Effect about this "matter of global security," but Field Effect wasn't there. With that line of inquiry closed off for now, our heroes went back to Phoenix and hit the streets, hoping to find more information about ACME, the group that had attacked them to start off this whole thing.

Their inquiries soon led them to a warehouse, where apparently villains were luring unsuspecting victims with promises of job offers, then disintegrating anyone who didn't make the grade. In preparation for the attack, Technomancer made a few modifications to Alpha in order to lessen its capacity for wanton destruction and teach it more about "helping people". In particular, Technomancer replaced Alpha's energy blaster with a "stun only" radiation beam, and added in a "biological energy enhancer ray" that increased its target's strength and toughness. With that done, Technomancer, Rift, and Strobe made their way to the warehouse. When Rift peered in, he saw a bad guy armed with a bow - the kind you shoot arrows out of. While this may have simply been someone who got our superhero adventure mixed up with Dungeons & Dragons, it could also be a real threat, so we were on our guard. Rift tried a surprise attack, teleporting in and blasting the enemies. Unfortunately there were two other villains - a mentalist and an electricity blaster - and they were able to get the drop on Rift and knock him out temporarily. The electricity blaster then teleported outside and blasted Technomancer, Alpha, and Strobe all with a blast of electricity. Technomancer and Alpha were of course vulnerable to electricity, so the blast fried their systems and stunned them for a round. Strobe fortunately stayed up and hit the electricity blaster with a mind-control-based paralysis ray, after which he teleported back inside the warehouse to assist with the fight there. Now that all the threats outside the warehouse were eliminated, Technomancer wanted to get into the warehouse where all the action was. But that was easier said than done: the door was locked, Technomancer was the only hero on his team without teleport capability, there was no Field Effect to use his super strength to break down the door, and Alpha couldn't blast the door down because his weapons were now stun only. But just when Technomancer thought he was safe, the bow wielder went outside through the side door, snuck around, and shot him in the back! Technomancer quickly wheeled around and blasted the bow wielder with a stasis field, then ordered Alpha to finish him off. Unfortunately, Alpha saw the villain trapped in the stasis field, remembered what Technomancer had told it about "helping people," and blasted him - with the biological energy enhancer ray! As the bow wielder used his newly enhanced strength to try to bust out, Technomancer desperately pumped more energy into the field. Technomancer finally convinced Alpha that the bow wielder was actually a bad guy who should be shot at, but soon realized that he had miscalibrated the stasis field, and it was actually deflecting Alpha's shots away from the bad guy! he recalibrated the stasis field and shot the bow wielder with the new field jsut as he had finished breaking out of the old one. A few shots from Alpha later, and the bow wielder was unconscious.

But the battle was not over yet. Just as Technomancer and Alpha finished dealing with the bow wielder, the electricity blaster broke out of the mind control and started attacking! Technomancer was hit again, but managed to get the electricity blaster in another stasis field. The electricity blaster was almost able to get out of it, but Strobe and Rift had finished dealing with the mentalist inside, and teleported back out to finish off the last bad guy. When we investigated the inside, we found that the villains were aspiring new supervillains trying to get a position in the evil organization, and were recruited to "prove themselves" by waiting there beat up the heroes who showed up. We called Agent Randall to send in a "pickup crew" to cart these villains away to prison, and went back to await our next adventure.

Will our heroes finally get down to the bottom of the ACME menace? Will the truth about Field Effect be revealed to the world? And will Technomancer be able to use Boolean logic to teach Alpha how to tell friend from enemy? Find out next time, only on "Champions: Phoenix!"

"Champions: Phoenix", Part 3

2010-04-03T19:52:00.000-07:00

"Their vision is sight-based!"

- One of the players, on discovering a villain's secret weakness

---

The story continues...

Our brave superheroes, along with H.U.R.T. Agent Randall, were transporting the vile Future Shock villain group to the place where they belonged - in prison. But on the way, six evil flying robots, all clones of Technomancer's own, barrelled down on the vans. Before our heroes could react, the robots blew up the tires on the front van, sending it toppling over. The van in the back tried to swerve out of the way but failed, ending up on its side. The heroes inside the van were shaken but not hurt, so they quickly piled out and entered battle with the evil robots. Technomancer's robots were offline at the moment because H.U.R.T. didn't want them turned on after seeing the incident from before, but Technomancer had a backup plan. He first reconfigured his variable power pool gadget to counteract the enemy robots' repulsor fields and drain their flight capability. He managed to jump out of the van and get one shot off, draining half of the flight power from the robots, but before he could get another shot off the robots focused fire on him, knocking him out and knocking him all the way across the field. Field Effect then rushed over to one of the robots and punched it. The punch connected, knocking it back - and it knocked it back even more than normal, because the robots' knockback resistance was linked to their flight, which got drained. But there was more - at that moment, Field Effect's producers gave their viewers a surprise - they downloaded new superpowers directly into Field Effect's body! The battle continued, with both sides taking a beating. The robots' energy blasts easily pierced the heroes' armor and defenses, but Technomancer's plan had had an effect - each time the heroes hit the robots the robots were knocked clear out of the battle area, and it took several rounds for them to get back into range. Nevertheless, it was a close battle, and it looked like it could go either way. But with the fate of our heroes at stake, Agent Randall revealed his true nature - he was a retired superhero himself! He came out of retirement for a few more combat rounds, jumping out of the wrecked van, drawing the robots' fire, and throwing entangle balls at the remaining robots, delaying them enough so the heroes could finish off the rest. After the battle, Technomancer activated his robot Beta, and a few blasts from its healing ray treated the victims of the crash, and the transport proceeded without further incident.

After getting back to Phoenix, Technomancer turned ion his robots to debrief them on the day's events. Technomancer first turned on Alpha, and started explaning the situation. Without warning, Alpha turned his blaster on the deactivated Beta and fired! Before Technomancer could stop it, Alpha had turned Beta into a pile of scrap metal. Alpha told Technomancer the shocking truth - it was actually Beta that was the evil one. Beta had secretly reprogrammed Alpha through the mind link to cause him to gain sentience, and Beta was also the one that sold the robots' schematics on the black market. Technomancer's original plan was to salvage Beta's hard drive to recover any information as to who he might have sold the plans to, but Alpha was so scared of another Beta being built that he quickly blasted the hard drive, ruining any chance of successful data recovery. Technomancer soon resolved to treat Alpha like a sentient being rather than a slave, and to try the best he could to teach him how to interact with others.

Finally, our heroes made plans to register with the government's Project EAGLE as an official super team, but got hung up on choosing a name for their team. The super-team naming char in the rule book produced suggestions that were "too cliche," and all the other ideas players came up with were either politically charged ("Desert Storm") or offensive to one ethnic group or another ("The Phoenix Indians.")

Will our brave heroes figure out a name and become an official super team? Will they be able to track down the nefarious villains who purchased the robots' plans? And will Technomancer ever be able to teach Alpha right from wrong in a world where the superheroes' efforts do at least as much collateral damage as the villains themselves? Find out next time, only on "Champions: Phoenix!"

Visit from Grandma and Grandpa

2010-03-24T00:09:00.000-07:00

This weekend, my grandparents visited me and I showed them around town. Before they came I knew it would be interesting because they are strong Republicans while I am a Democrat - unfortunately they did not come on March 9 when the university was sponsoring a depate about national health care. But there was still lots of excitement:

Thursday

On Thursday, they arrived about an hour late because their GPS gave them bad directions. Then they took me out to dinner at IHOP, where they showed me lots of interesting things that have happened in the news recently. They accused the Democrats of "trickery" in getting the health care bill passed, because some of the congressmen got special deals for their home districts in exchange for their vote (as if there were any major piece of legislation where that doesn't happen). Then we went to get a shave and haircut. Apparently none of the haircut places in town offer shaves, because it's against local health regulations - clearly another example of how Big Government makes life harder for honest businessmen. However, it was also an example of how "big government" regulations can spur investment in new technology, because they offered to get me a better electric shaver. I informed them that the one I had worked just fine, so we didn't need another one - thus showing that in this case, big government regulations actually saved money. Then they dropped me off at my apartment, and they went to a hotel.

Friday

On Friday, they picked me up at my apartment and drove me to class. I introduced them to the people in the department office, and they both were happy to meet each other. They also wanted to meet my research advisor Jeff Erickson but he was not here today. We left to drive around campus, but unfortunately when we were pulling out of out parking space, another car backed out at the same time and hit the side of our car. Fortunately nobody was hurt although both of the right side doors were damaged, and the car rental company had no spare cars so we had to drive around in the same car for the rest of the weekend. Then we went to the shopping center on North Prospect Avenue to have lunch and get some stuff like new clothes. Finally we went out to dinner. Apparently Grandma and Grandpa had spent the last night watching Fox News and had started channeling Ann Coulter, because they told me what they thought about the latest news on Obama's health care bill:

Me: "What don't you like about the health care bill?"
Them: "For one thing, it reduces payments to doctors. Doctors are like everyone else, they want to make a living. If doctors start making less money, we won't have as competent doctors."
Me: "Other countries with national health care systems pay their doctors less. Do they have less competent doctors?"
Them: "They have worse systems, yes. America's health care system is the best in the world."
Me: "That's not true. According to the World Health Organization's rankings, the U.S. health care system is only ranked 37th."
Them: "The World Health Organization? Isn't that an arm of the U.N.?"
Me: "Yeah, I think it is, why?"
Them: "Don't believe anything the U.N. says. If it were up to me, I'd kick the U.N. out of the United States."
Me: "What don't you like about the U.N.?"
Them: "On every vote on Israel. The Palestinians attack the Israelis, then the UN says it's Israel's fault."

I pointed out a headline in the newspaper that said that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) had determined that Obama's plan would reduce the deficit, but they said that was "bullshit." Another interesting headline was in local news. The story was the following: UIUC was planning to retire Chief Illiniwek, the former Native American mascot, because it was "offensive to Native Americans." A student group called Students for Chief planned to rent out space in the student union for a dance in support of the Chief, but was at first denied. The student group used a FOIA request to get the e-mails between school administrators concerning this decision, and discovered a concerted plan to keep them out of the hall, such as claiming that the room was booked even through it wasn't. Confronted with this evidence the administration relented and allowed them to have the dance. Then the student group asked the local ACLU chapter for help in suing the school for trying to violate their free speech rights. The ACLU chapter declined to pursue the case, saying that since the dance had ended up happening, there was no violation of free speech. Grandma and Grandpa said that this explanation - that they didn't pursue the case because in the end free speech was not violated - was "a fudge", and the "real reason" was because the ACLU wanted to appear "politically correct" by not supporting something "offensive" to Native Americans.

Saturday

On Saturday they took me first to the D+D Game Day at Armored Gopher Games. They stayed for a few minutes just to see what the game was about, then they went off to do their own thing. They picked me up later in the day, and we went to the mall and got some stuff. Then they took me back to my apartment, so that I could go to the gaming club at school. Unfortunately when I got there I found that it was closed due to spring break. So I spent the rest of the evening at home playing the new video games I got.

Sunday

On Sunday we first went to the bookstore. While we were at the bookstore I ran into one of the people I play D+D with. He thanked me for saving his character's life: in our previous battle, my character had fallen unconscious in the middle of the battle so I spent most of the battle standing up looking at the scene. From the angle I was standing I could clearly see the DM's rolls behind the screen, and could tell that he was fudging die rolls left and right. Although I didn't say anything directly to the DM, I did whisper in the other player's ear what was going on. The DM might have realized I was "on to something" and fudged the rolls less, thus making his character not die. At the end of the battle all but one of us was knocked unconscious, there were only a couple enemies remaining, and as a last ditch attempt to defeat the villain before they escaped, the last remaining character fired a wide area burst across the battlefield, killing the remaining monsters but also me. (Actually I don't really mind that my character died because now I get to play a new character with a different class. The character I have come up with is an artificer - that's the class with the "socialist healing power" I mentioned before.) After we finished up at the bookstore, they droppdd me off at the Armored Gopher's board game night, and went off on their merry way.

Blog Experiment Conclusion

2010-03-18T22:45:00.001-07:00

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read this post until you have read the three posts before this one (the two about the superhero role-playing game and the one titled "Being a Superhero in the Real World"). Then scroll down to see the rest.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

The post titled "Being a Superhero in the Real World" was a demonstration of several scientifically proven persuasion techniques.

The superhero theme of the post, as well as its placement immediately following two posts about superhero role-playing games, is intended to take advantage of the real scientific result that getting subjects to think about superheroes makes them more likely to volunteer for charity.

The post itself was a demonstration of the "SPICE model" of persuasion, described in a recent article in Scientific American. SPICE stands for Simplicity, Perceived Self-Interest, Incongruity, Confidence, and Empathy. The four bullet points under "but wait, there's more" appeal to simplicity, self-interest, confidence, and empathy respectively. The overall tone of the post, mixing serious real-life issues with mimicry of TV salespersons and discussions of superheroes, is an example of incongruity.

(But seriously, you should definitely read Peter Singer's stuff. Even if you don't agree with all of it, the issues he raises are definitely thought-provoking.)

Being a Superhero in the Real World

2010-03-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

In comics, movies, and (as you've seen before) role-playing games, brave superheroes can make the world a better place by fighting evil. Even though superpowers don't exist in real life (as far as we know), a recent book argues that it's easier than you think to be a superhero in your own way. The book "The Life You Can Save" by philosopher Peter Singer argues that by giving just a small fraction of our income to charities working to help the poor in developing countries, we can save the lives of others at little cost to ourselves. But wait, there's more:

- It's simple. In order to be a superhero the "regular way," first you have to figure out how to actually get superpowers, then you have to worry about being sued if your powers malfunction, like in the session report below. But with giving money, all you have to do is pick an organization from the list and reach for your checkbook!

- It helps you, too. Learning to live on a little less money will help you in case there is an economic downturn, so why not start now?

- I am so confident in my message that I've taken the pledge myself. Why don't you do the same?

- I'm writing this blog post because Ihave your best interest at heart. You wouldn't want to go through life not thinking that you've done what you could to help, would you?

----------

So what are you waiting for? Operators are standing by! Act now! Sign up today!Don't make me keep mimicking cheesy TV informercials!

"Champions: Phoenix", Part 2

2010-03-16T20:42:00.001-07:00

The superheroic adventure continues...
----------
After the supervillain knocked Field Effect over, our intrepid heroes discovered that they were in for more than they bargained for - a super team known as Future Shock, consisting of four supervillains, was out to ambush them! As another villain rushed up from behind the building, Field Effect played dead, hoping to lure the enemy into complacency. As the villain rushed past him to attack the rest, Field Effect got up, activated his superpowers, and ran the villain over! Meanwhile, Rift teleported on top of a building and started firing energy blasts down at the enemies, while Strobe went the other direction and tried to blind the enemies. For Technomancer, on the other hand this was the perfect time to try out his latest experiment - a "kinetic stasis field" that could stop any enemy in their tracks! As Technomancer tried to get the stasis field to work, he asked Alpha to go attack the bad guys. Unfortunately, while he was doing this, he and the robots were inside a van belonging to Rift, and he forgot to open the doors first, and the robots had no arms. So in order to get out, Alpha blasted the back doors off the van. The battle was soon joined. Technomancer hit one enemy with his stasis field - and that was a good choice, because all of his powers were based on his super running speed, which he oculdn't use, so he spent the entire battle futilely trying to wriggle his way out of the field. Technomancer also hit the enemy mentalist with the stasis field, but that didn't affect his mental powers. There was a third enemy that Technomancer couldn't hit because he kept dodging the attacks - he had a power that once per round, he could move out of the way to dodge an attack. Beating him would require a coordinated strike: Technomancer first attacked him to force him to use up his free dodge, then Beta used its Aid power to improve Alpha's offensive capability,then Alha let loose with a blast, which hit its mark. Meanwhile, the fourth supervillain had recovered and knocked out Field Effect, but a well timed assist from Beta let him get back in the fight. A couple rounds later all the supervillains were unconscious.

Soon on the scene were agents of the special police force known as H.U.R.T. (Hyper-Ultra Response Team). While they wre talking to the rest of us, Rift teleported into the temp agency to investigate for information. On seeing a computer that he couldn't get access to, he went back out and teleported Technomancer in. When the police found out we had teleported in, he said we had "messed things up" by investigating before they could get a search warrant, and that they would have to "manufacture some probable cause." As it turned out, however, the temp agency was merely a front and contained no useful information, so it wasn't too much of a loss. At any rate, they recruited us to accompany the villains as they were transported to Mesa, a prison in the New Mexico desert specifically designed to house superpowered criminals. But the transport would not happen until the next day, leaving plenty of time for more action...

That night, Technomancer told Alpha that he had done a bad thing by blowing up the van, and that he should only attack things that Technomancer tells him to:

Technomancer: "You are a prototype. Your purpose is to protect people by blowing up bad guys. If it works, they'll make lots more of you so you will be able to have lots of friends. But if you blow up things you're not supposed to blow up, your makers could be sued. And if that happens the program will be determined to be a failure, and you will be shut down."

Unfortunately, that reasoning backfired: Alpha concluded that it "wasn't his fault" if he started blowing things up, because it was his maker's fault. Also, he said Technomancer was "annoying" because "all you do is tell me what to do." When Technomancer explained that he would only ask him to destroy bad guys, Alpha asked him "how come you are the sole arbiter of who is good and who is bad?" Alpha flew off and started blowing up unoccupied cars on the streets. Fortunately, Field Effect got wind of what was happening and went to the scene, using his negotiating skills ot talk the robot down. [Another player said that Alpha had become a "robot teenager."] Technomancer tried to get his backup robots out of storage, but found out they had mysteriously disappeared.

The next morning, after the chaos was over, it was time for the transport. There were four vans, one hero and one villain in each van. Technomancer was assigned to the van with the mentalist:

Technomancer: "I can use this device to suppress the mentalist's mental powers, in case he tries to escape."
H.U.R.T. Agent: "Has that thing been tested?"
Technomancer: "Uh... no."
H.U.R.T. Agent: "Listen. If you use that thing on him and he gets brain cancer, we can be sued. So don't do that unless it has been tested."

We boarded the vans and set out for our destination. As it turns out, the reason that the bad guys were after Technomancer in the first place was to steal his robot technology. An as it turns out, they might have succeeded, because as they were driving along, a group of flying objects looking suspiciously like Technomancer's robots approached them from up ahead...

Who will win this next confrontation? Will Technomancer be able to defeat his own creations? Will the vile Future Shock be brought to justice? And is there any legal precedent regarding who is liable if a robot gets infected by an alien computer virus, develops sentience, and goes out destroying things? Find out, coming up next time, on "Champions: Phoenix!"

"Champions: Phoenix", Part 1

2010-03-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

A while ago I blogged about how I was going to participate in a superhero role-playing game. I just completed my second session of it, and so far it is very exciting and incredibly funny! Here is the story so far:

-- Cast of Characters --
Technomancer (that's my character) - a "gadgeteer" who has the ability to create new gadgets in the field. The way this works in game is that there is a "variable power pool" where you have a certain number of points that you can allocate to build powers, and you can switch them around. Also he has two flying robots to help hime - "Alpha" which has an energy blaster to hurt enemies, and "Beta" which has powers that can aid his allies.

Field Effect - A "super strength" character with a very interesting background. His background is that he was captured by aliens and given superpowers, then put back on Earth as part of a "reality show" being broadcast on the aliens' home planet. There are invisible cameras filming him, and he gets "stage direction" in his head from the "producer" talking to him to tell him what to do. Also, if things are getting boring the "producer" will teleport him to somewhere more "interesting," like in the middle of a fight.

Strobe - A light-based "energy projector" type superhero. He has the ability to blind and paralyze enemies.

Rift - Has the power to go through "dimensional rifts" that he uses to teleport, and then blasts enemies with energy rays.

-- The Story So Far --

The story starts in the near future, in a mall in Kempe, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. Technomancer was there looking for Alpha, whose A.I. had developed a personality of its own and decided that it wanted to go shopping at Hot Topic. But unbeknownst to him, he was alking right into a trap. He saw a bad guy come up to a victim, inject him with something, and the victim fell over, and the bad guys started carrying him away. As Technomancer moved in to help, a dozen or so thugs armed with blasters surrounded the area and attacked! Technomancer used a telekinetic field to grab the bad guys and stop him from carrying the victim away. Seconds later, Field Effect got teleported into the action, and quickly carried the victim to safety. Strobe and Rift also enetered teh fray, and a pitched battle ensued. Technomancer aked Alpha to shoot the bad guys, but its blaster didn't fire! Fortunately, teamwork and strategic telekinesis use won the day, and all the thugs were soon defeated.

After that Technomancer discovered that the reason Alpha's blaster didn't work was because a computer virus of "unearthly origin" disabled it. As it turned out, the virus was put there by Field Effect's producers in order to make it "more interesting for the viewers" because otherwise "the fight would have been too easy." Also, Field Effect tried to walk away from the scene but kept getting teleported back. Since Field Effect isn't allowed to talk about the whole "reality show" thing, his producer told him to blame the teleporting on a "time hiccup." Also, we interrogated the bad guys and talked to the victim in order to find out what was going on. As it turned out, the bad guys were members of the evil organization known as A.C.M.E. (American Criminal Mastermind Enterprises) and they engineered the situation in order to lure Technomancer into a trap to steal his robots. The victim was an innocent dupe, who had been paid $500 to "go to the designated spot in the mall and wait there" and didn't realize there was an evil scheme. We also discovered that the thugs here weren't actual members of A.C.M.E. - they were just "goons" hired off the street and given blasters. So we had to investigate more to find out the source.

Our investigation took us to a seedy area of Phoenix, where a group of goons were driving around the city in a van looking to hire more bad guys. We found a van that matched the description, and Field Effect disabled it by punching the hood and removing the engine block (remember he is the one that has super strength). The occupants played innocent:

Occupant: "You destroyed my car! It's going to cost a lot of money to get it fixed."
Field Effect: "Don't worry. It's under warranty, isn't it?"
Occupant: "I got it used."
Field Effect: "Well, you should have gotten a certified pre-owned vehicle!"

Eventually the occupants admitted they were hired by a "temp agency" to go out and hire the goons. We next went to the temp agency, hoping to wait until it opened to get more information. Field Effect was waiting outside, in his normal form with his defenses down, when a supervillain rushed up at high speed, ran him over, and stunned him. And with that, session one ended.

Will the villain's surprise attack work? Will our brave superheroes manage to turn the tide of battle? And will they be able to put the villains into jail without violating their Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure? Find out next time on "Champions: Phoenix"!

Blog Experiment

2010-03-12T21:10:00.001-08:00

This week, I will be conducting an experiment using this blog in order to investigate a real scientific finding. The experiment will be conducted over one or more blog posts, starting today and ending a week from today. At that time I will make a post explaining what the experiment was.

So as not to introduce bias, I will not state here what the experiment is. That will be up to you to figure out! (Feel free to guess, that's part of the fun!)

NOTE: I meant to make this post earlier in the day, before I made my previous post about Illinois government. So that post could be part of the experiment. Or maybe not.

Breaking News: More Evidence of Cylon Activity in Illinois Government

2010-03-12T17:50:00.000-08:00

"I need your sage advice: Should I spend money I don't have?"

- Overheard at GameStop

----

Unlike my last blog post about Illinois government, this time I won't make any accusations about who is the Cylon: I'll just lay out the facts and let you be the judge.

A few days ago, Governor Quinn unveiled his new "budget plan" - which involves borrowing $4.7 billion, leaving $6 billion worth of bills unpaid, including cuts to education funding, but no tax increase. The Chicago Tribune reported that the reason he did this was to encourage state senators to vote for a tax increase, because nobody would like the alternative. And Quinn's "Illinois Budget web site" now states that he supports a tax increase (see the bottom under "Increased State Revenues.")

And budgetary problems aren't the only "crisis card" that's shown up recently: pretty soon, restaurants and retail business across the state may be the host to yet another round of exciting combat action. That's right, a new bill is going to be passed to allow concealed carry of handguns in Illinois. There are just two interesting amendments that supporters of the bill added: one said that any state legislator who voted against the measure will not be allowed to get a concealed carry permit for himself, and the other says that any retail business that bans handguns inside the business will be civilly liable if a concealed carry permit holder get injured or killed in a violent crime at that business - the theory being that if the business "disarms" the permit holder, who then "can't defend himself" and gets hurt, the business should be liable..

Questions for discussion:

1. The point of the first amendment discussed above is that politicians shouldn't be "hypocrites" by voting against concealed carry but then getting a permit themselves. Should this principle be extended to apply to other laws too? For example, if Legislator X votes against a tax cut that passes, should Legislator X still have to pay the higher tax rate?

2. As for the other amendment, does it work both ways? If the business DOES allow concealed guns, a concealed carry permit holder legally brings a gun in, and the gun is discharged (either accidentally or on purpose) and injures someone, is the business liable for allowing the gun on?

3. If the purpose of concealed carry is to deter crime, then why make it "concealed"? It seems to me like if I was carrying a gun to deter crime, I would want criminals to know that I am armed so they will be deterred. (On the other hand maybe the idea is that if concealed carry is legal, then criminals won't know who is armed and who isn't, so would play it safe and not attack anyone.)

Geekiness in perspective

2010-03-05T22:25:00.000-08:00

Today, I had the following conversation (paraphrased) with a member of my Belegarth group:

Me: I'm confused about the rules for checking arrows to see if they are safe. It says you're supposed to push down on it to see if you can feel the core. But any arrow you can feel the core if you push hard enough. So how do you know how hard you are supposed to push?

Him: There's no way to quantify it. It's not like testing it, like in a lab. Testing the weapons is personal, different people do it differently.

Me: Okay, so clearly the best strategy is to get the arrows tested by a representative sample of weapons checkers, so that it's more likely to pass everywhere (like if you take it to a different group).

Him: Don't worry about that. Everyone does it the same way, they just do it differently.*

Me: Okay, well how about this idea. I can bring a scale and have them push down on the scale with the same force that they push down when checking weapons. Then I will know how hard to push down when I am testing the ones I make.

Him: That's not necessary. People will think you are weird for doing that.

Me: Why? I'm just using quantitative data. Is there something wrong with using quantitative data?

Him: It's geeky as hell.

Me: Let me get this straight. Someone who does live-action role-playing is telling me that it's wrong to be geeky?

Him: Some of the people there don't consider it "role-playing." They're there for the fighting.

Me: Okay, let's rephrase. 'Someone who does foam sword-fighting is telling me that it's wrong to be geeky."

Him: "Not all of them think foam sword-fighting is geeky."

*This sentence, however, is not paraphrased. I distinctly remember him saying "Everyone does it the same way, they just do it differently." I laughed out loud when he said this, though I don't think he realized what was so funny.

Saving Green by Going Green

2010-02-28T13:05:00.000-08:00

A recent article in the Daily Illini reported on a proposed increase in the "student sustainability fee," a fund which will provide funding for energy-saving initiatives. As an example:

He pointed out that their recent project of replacing Krannert Center’s fluorescent lights with LED’S will pay for itself in three years and save the University roughly $70,000 per year. The committee funded half of the project with a $225,000 grant.

First of all, observe that this statement is mathematically incorrect. If half of the project cost $225,000, then the total cost of the project was $450,000, so it will take about 6.5 years to pay it back at $70,000 per year.

Second of all, observe the economic puzzle. Effectively, the project is an investment with a guaranteed annual rate of return of $70k/$450k = 15.5 percent. So as long as the market rate of interest is less than 15.5 percent, which I assume it is, the optimal strategy of the university is to borrow money to finance this project, and even after paying back the interest they will actually have more money - so they should do that even in the absence of any additional funding from a "sustainability fee."

(Here is an economics article discussing similar anomalies, mostly in the context of individual purchasing decisions like whether to buy a new refrigerator.)

Gaming Math - Problem 14

2010-02-24T21:43:00.000-08:00

Okay, as promised, here's the one about eigenvectors:

Problem 14: Community Events
---

The "World of Warcraft" tabletop roleplaying game is based in part on the computer game of the same name, but also includes other features, including rules for in-game towns and communities. In the game, communities have a "community behavior map" consisting of a list of attributes, including "wealth", "greed", "happiness", "disaster", and so on, each with a numerical value. Different events can affect different attributes. Also, there are "links" going from one attribute to another, and each link has a different "intensity," which can be positive or negative. If a link goes from A to B with intensity I, then whenever an event affects attribute A, attribute B also changes by an amount equal to the amount attribute A changed, times the intensity of the link. For example maybe "wealth" and "happiness" have a link with an intensity of 0.5. Then if a group of adventurers brings back lots of treasure, increasing the "wealth" by 10, the "happiness" will increase by 10 x 0.5 = 5. Of course the intensity can be negative - an increase in the "disaster" attribute will probably reduce other attributes.

The rules specifically state that impact is only felt one link away from a factor. For example, suppose attribute A is linked to B and attribute B is linked to C. If an event affects A, then B will be affected by the link, but that change does not then continue on to affect C through its link. Suppose, however, that this rule were removed; you calculate the changes based on the initial event; then the changes based on the links; then the changes caused by the links from those links, and so on.

What conditions on the links and their intensities are necesary to ensure that this process always converges?

The answer is here.

Gaming Math - Problem 13

2010-02-22T20:47:00.000-08:00

I previously wrote on this blog that I am talking two courses this semester: one on scientific computing and one on planning algorithms. Coincidentally, I have recently played a couple games that offer nearly perfect examples to illustrate concepts that we are learning about in these courses. Here is the one about scientific computing the other one will come up soon.

Problem 13: Characteristic Characters

In the HERO System, player characters are defined in part by a list of numerical "characteristics," such as strength, intelligence, dexterity, defensive capability, etc. When creating characters, players spend "character points" (CP) to purchase characteristics. Each characteristic costs a different number of CP per point of the characteristic. Most characteristics only cost 1 CP per point, but some cost more. For example Dexterity costs 2 CP per point because it affects important combat factors such as initiative, and Speed costs a whopping 10 CP per point because every point of speed increases the number of "phases" you get to perform actions each turn. For example if I were to buy 15 points of Dexterity and 5 points of Speed, that would cost (15*2) + (5*10) = 70 total CP. Note that you ARE permitted to buy a negative amount of a Characteristic.

The rules for purchasing Characteristics changed significantly between the 5th edition and 6th edition of the game. In 5th edition, Characteristics were divided into two categories: "base characteristics" and "figured characteristics." Base characteristics were purchased as described above. However, "figured characteristics" each had a base value that you got for free, that was a linear function of the values of the base characteristics you purchased. For example, let's say "maximum hit points" had a base value of (3 * Constitution + 2 * Strength). Then if you bought 15 Constitution and 10 Strength, you would get (3*15 + 2*10) = 65 hit points "for free", and you could then buy more for a given cost in CP per point (or buy a negative amount, effectively "selling back" the hit points you got for free.)

In 6th edition, figured characteristics were eliminated; they instead became treated the same way as base characteristics - you don't get any "free points", you just have to buy them up as normal. Some of the CP-per-point costs of the various characteristics were altered to compensate.

Now here is the question:

Prove that regardless of what the costs and "figured characteristic functions" were in the old system, that it was possible to modify it - changing costs but eliminating figured characteristics - such that every possible combination of characteristics costs exactly the same under the new system as under the old system.

The solution is here.

More politics as usual in Illinois

2010-02-13T21:32:00.000-08:00

Recently, the primary elections were completed. Pat Quinn, the incumbent governor (he was Blagojevich's lieutenant governor) won the Democratic primary. His running mate in the general election was going to be Scott Lee Cohen, but he had to drop out once it was revealed that he had engaged in some less-than-savory action of his own.

Pat Quinn said that he didn't know anything about the incident with Cohen until after they had become running mates. Admittedly he did not choose Cohen to be his running mate; in Illinois there is a separate primary for governor and lieutenant governor, and the winners of each join forces in the general election. Perhaps Cohen was actually a Republican sleeper agent tasked with infiltrating the Democratic primary and winning so as to discredit the Democratic candidate. However, there were five other candidates in the Democratic race, so one would expect that they would have brought Cohen's incident to light in the primary, when they were competing against Cohen. So maybe they are the real sleeper agents. (As you can see, this is another instance of realism in board games. In the Battlestar Galactica board game, players are tasked with finding out which among their number is secretly a Cylon. In real-life politics, politicians have to find out who is really working for them and who is secretly plotting against them, and that is not always simple)

Exciting Combat Action - After Action Report

2010-02-13T21:12:00.000-08:00

So today was the "big day" with all the action. The Belegarth event was quite exciting. There were well over 100 people on the field, and it was indoors so it was close quarters. That meant that you had an unbroken line of people stretching from one end of the field to another. This made archery much different - easier to hide behind the lines to avoid getting hit, but trickier to find lines of fire that will hit enemies without being blocked by your own guys. Also you run out of arrows pretty fast, so you have to look on the ground to find arrows to pick up. But overall the event was really cool.

Then I got dropped off at the game store to play the superhero game. Unfortunately three out of the five people couldn't make it, so rather than run a whole adventure he just ran a single practice combat to get us used to the combat system (since we hadn't played Hero System before). He pit us against two opposing villains: a "blaster" (guy who shoots energy blasts) and a "brick" (strong and tough guy.) My teammate was a blaster the ability to fly and teleport. The first round of the game my teammate teleported over to the enemies to shoot them at point-blank range. He hit one of them, and tried to use the knockback to send him flying into the other one, but missed. Then the enemy brick got up and ran him over using a "Move Through" attack, knocking him unconscious. In order to save my teammate, I tried to move my support robot over and use its "Aid" power on him, but it would only work if I "hit" him with my Aid "attack." I didn't give my support robot any OCV (Offensive Combat Value; the stat that determines how good you are at hitting people) because I thought that it's an auto-hit if the target is willing. It is, but in order for the target to be "Willing" he has to be conscious. So I missed witht my Aid, but I has another trick up my sleeve - I moved my combat robot over and activated his "Flash" attack to blind both enemies. While the enemies were stuck defenseless (and mostly attack-less, too) since they couldn't see us, I used the robot to blast the enemy brick into oblivion while I myself used my "Telekinetic Field Generator" to telekinetically grab the blaster so he couldn't do anything. Finally the enemies recovered from the blindness but by then the battle was a foregone conclusion.

Exciting Combat Action

2010-02-10T21:01:00.001-08:00

A few exciting things are coming up this Saturday. First I am going to Wolfpack Opener, a Belegarth fighting event. Then I am going straight to Armored Gopher Games for the first session of our superhero adventure game. Wil my superior archery skills dominate the battlefield at Wolfpack, or will the enemy break through our lines and overrun me? Will "Robotic Man" and his army of flying robots defeat the forces of evil, or will the enemy discover and exploit his secret weakness? Full reports coming up soon after these events!

While we are on the topic, remember that back at Maryland I wrote that students didn't have to leave campus to participate in exciting combat action. Apparently, the same thing is true at UIUC.

Winter War, Part II

2010-02-04T16:04:00.001-08:00

Battlestar Galactica, Game 2:
On Sunday Morning, I played Battlestar Galactica again. This game there wasn't nearly as much intrigue as the first one. However, at the beginning of the game, we got unlucky draws from the Crisis Deck and drew lots of cylon attack cards, so we were soon mobbed by Cylon ships and boarding parties. Then we got a crisis card that gave the Admiral (Helena Cain) a chance to take the title from the President (Laura Roslin). In this game, Roslin is actually one of the worst Presidents because she has to discard two skill cards every time she activates a location - and the President is going to be activating the "President's Office" location a lot to draw quorum cards. So I thought Cain made the correct move by taking it (there was no need to worry about her being a Cylon - it was a 4 player game, so there was only one cylon, who had already revealed himself). But Roslin wasn't very happy, and used her once-per-game ability to look at the top four quorum cards and play one in order to put Cain in the brig. Then later she spent more cards getting Cain out of the brig, and giving herself the President title back. All this distracted us while the Cylon was able to advance the boarding parties up the "Boarding Party Track" and get to the end to kill us.

Starmada:
This game is a starship battle game. The scenario was that there are two players, the attacker and the defender. The idea is that the defender is defending a "planet" (not actually on the game board, but supposedly off behind his side of the game board) and the attacker is trying to destroy it. The attacker had far more ships (1000 points worth of ships to the defender's 600) but the defender has time on his side - if the attacker doesn't kill the defender within 5 turns, the defender wins. In the first game I was the defender, and soon realized that if I engaged them head on I would be at a large disadvantage, and figured that the best option was to scatter, forcing the enemy to chase me down. The person running the game said that that option wasn't allowed, because the point was to "defend the planet" and the planet would be lost if I moved far away from it.
Him: If you just run away over to the other end of the board, the enemy ships will just ignore you and attack the planet, so you don't win.
Me: So you're saying that if the enemy reaches mu edge of the board, then I lose?
Him: No, it's just that you have to stay and defend, not run away.
Me: I'm still confused. I mean, if the planet is off my edge of the board, can I go sideways to the corner, and I'm still near the planet? Where exactly is the boundary that I have to stay inside?
Despite the fact that he was never explicitly clear on where the boundary was , I was still able to damage the enemy capital ship's engines, then back up each turn, making it so by the time his main capital ship got into range it was too late to make a difference.
We had time for another game so this time I was the attacker. I knew that I would have to strike hard and fast in order to win, so I chose ships that had powerful engines and also ships that had fighter wings (since fighters move fast and so they can close distance). This strategy worked - my fighters surrounded the enemy ships and too one of them out, then I hit his big capital ship with my powerful "spinal mount" weapon, and he conceded. My main comment on this game was that 5 turns seem way too short, because it takes 2-3 turns just to get in range to even shoot most of your weapons.

Miniatures Wargame:
I forget exactly what this game was called, but it was a miniatures game where there were "humans" fighting against "demihumans" like elves and dwarves. The backstory was that humans had invaded the demihumans' lands and cut down their trees, so they were fighting back. I played the humans. The way the game worked was interesting. There were a few kinds of units. Aside from the basic infantry, cavalry, and archers, there were the following special units:
1. Siege weapons, such as cannons. These have a "bowling ball" effect, meaning that during the "missile fire" phase when you fire them, you draw a line out to maximum range in the direction the weapon is pointing, and you made an attack roll against each model it contacts. Also, it has an interesting rule: if the first unit that the line touches is a unit that's engaged in melee combat, the shot has no effect. But if the first unit in the line is a unit not in melee, it will continue through to hit units in melee. I asked the person running the game if it could hit friendly units, and he said yes. The next turn there were lots of enemies lined up perfectly for me to shoot at, but they were all in melee. So I deliberately positioned the very corner of a friendly unit in the line of sight, hoping to sacrifice that one model to allow the shot to go through. He said that it wasn't allowed to do this (I think he interpreted my question as what happens if the friendly unit is one of the later units in the path, not if it's the first unit.) Also another thing is that the sequence of play is missile fire, then movement, then melee, then morale checks, and you aim your cannons during the movement phase. So during the movement phase you have to try to predict what is going to happen in the melee phase and who will be viable targets when the missile phase comes around again. Also sometimes you want your units to fail their morale checks, so they will back up and the enemy will be a legal missile fire target.

2. Spellcasters - each side has a wizard and a cleric. At the end of each turn, each spellcaster can cast one spell from a list, and they can cast it anywhere they can see. Also the cleric can resurrect any one dead model on the battlefield. That again makes movement interesting because you have to try to position your spellcaster so they can cast a spell at the target they want to cast. One of the mage's spells is a "teleportation" spell that will teleport a friendly unit to anywhere within the caster's lne of sight. One thing you have to remember to do is to avoid letting your enemy teleport their unit right next to your caster so they can kill your caster. One time my ally needed help on the other side of the battlefield so I carefully positioned my caster to have a line of sight over to the other end of the battlefield to teleport my unit there, but at the end of the turn I realized that I didn't have teleport, because I controlled the cleric, not the mage.

Anyway this was a fun game. It was 2 on 2 - each player controlled half their side's army. I controlled he right half and my ally controlled the left half. The battle was on and I successfully took control of the right flank, while the enemy pushed my ally back on the left flank, leaving his large archer unit exposed. However, strategic spell use on our part enabled us to block him from attacking that flank for a couple turns, letting me complete the conquest of the right flank and start to wheel around. As I did that, I realized the enemy had left his cleric in the open, and I ran him down. At this point, the enemy counted up the number of units each side had, realized they had no chance for comeback, and conceded.

Winter War, part 1

2010-02-01T18:50:00.001-08:00

Last weekend I went to Winter War, a gaming convention held every year in Champaign. There were games going on from Friday evening through Sunday evening so there were plenty of chances for exciting action. Here are the games I played:

Age of Conan: This game is a 4 player game set in the time of Conan, and each player controls a different kingdom and attempts to get victory points by conquering other provinces, completing special objectives, collecting gold, and taking control of Conan on his adventures in order to collect "adventure tokens" representing the three types of rewards - monsters, treasures, and women. At the beginning of the game, when our armies weren't big enough to conquer anything, I took the initiative to focus on collecting adventure tokens and get ahead in that area. Most of the other players tried instead to send out emissaries to ally with nearby provinces in order to acquire gold. In this game whenever you try to ally with or conquer a province, there is a die roll to see if you succeed, and there are "sorcery tokens" that let you reroll die rolls. One thing that was not clear from the rules is whether or not if you use a sorcery token and don't like the result of the reroll, you can use another sorcery token to reroll it again. The rules say that "only one sorcery token may be used per roll" but other players interpreted that as meaning that once you use a sorcery token to reroll, the reroll is a "different roll" so you can keep using sorcery tokens. This interpretation actually helped me at the beginning, as other players wasted lots of sorcery tokens on rolls that I could clearly calculate had very little chance of success. In the middle of the game, I used my adventure tokens to "bid" for an artifact, the Sword of Atlantis, that significantly improves offensive capability. I used this to conquer several territories and get ahead. Unfortunately near the end of the game, I overextended myself and got myself caught between two opponents, and got attacked from both sides and lost lots of territory. With time running out, I had an army stranded in enemy territory, and I had to strike out and make a desperation move to attack the nearest enemy territory hoping to conquer it. First I had to get rid of the enemy that was there to turn it neutral, then do a "campaign" to conquer it. I expected the initial siege to be a pushover because I had a bigger army and the Sword of Atlantis, but it didn't turn out that way. During the siege, there were three times where my opponent had a 1 in 27 chance of rolling well enough to kill one of my guys - and he succeeded two of those times. Fortunately I managed to get him, and with just two out of five soldiers left, completed the campaign on my last turn of the game, which gave me just enough victory points for the win.

Heroscape: This is a hex-based collectible miniature game where you build your army with points, and unfortunately this did not turn out as favorably. The mission was a 3-on-3 battle where there was a central castle in the middle that we were both competing for. There were six premade armies that we drew from, and the army I drew was the only army with no ranged attackers. The opposing team managed to get inside the castle and shut all four doors in the first couple turns, and then they could get on the castle walls and attack us with large height bonuses. We had no flying creatures, so the only way it would even be possible for us to retake the castle is to break down the doors, which have extremely high defenses (and of course to break down the doors you have to stand in front of them, out in the open, which is a very vulnerable position). Also my army started in the corner opposite from where all the action was, so by the time I was even able to get my army over to the action (remember, I had no ranged attackers, so I had to close to hand-to-hand distance) the battle was basically over (we lost).

Battlestar Galactica: This board game, based on the television series, features players as crew of the Battlestar Galactica trying to get to Kobol. However some players are secretly Cylons, robots disguised as humans that are programmed to destroy humanity. At the beginning of the game each player is secretly dealt a "loyalty card" indicating if they are human or Cylon, and then halfway through the game there is a "sleeper agent phase" where everyone gets another loyalty card, so you can think you are human and then turn into a Cylon. Each player chooses a different character from the show, and each character has three special abilities - one which can be used every turn, one which can be used only once per game, and one which limits them in some way. I chose Gaius Baltar, whose once-per-game ability is "Cylon Detector" which lets him look at any other player's loyalty cards. Also in this game there are two special titles - President and Admiral. The President gets control of the "quorum cards" which can help humanity deal with problems (or which can be used by a clever Cylon to sabotage them), and the Admiral gets control of Galactica's nuclear arsenal as well as choosing which of two destinations they jump to at each hyperspace jump. Also, some "crisis cards" come up that force the President or Admiral to make a decision. I started out as the President and Helena Cain started out as Admiral. Near the beginning a crisis card came up that forced both me and the Admiral to discard most of our "skill cards" and draw "treachery cards," a type of skill card that is useful mainly to Cylons. A couple turns later a crisis card came up that forced the Admiral to make a choice: either the Admiral and President each discard two skill cards, or the President has to give up his title to the Admiral. I argued that Cain should choose the first option: it's too dangerous to have all the power in the hands of one person if he turns out to be a Cylon, and discarding cards would give him a chance to prove his loyalty to humanity by discarding the treachery cards. I threatened to check him using my Cylon Detector:

Baltar: If you make me give up my Presidency, I'm going to check you. Normally I wouldn't use my power until the sleeper phase (because that way I get to see both loyalty cards rather than just one) but this seems really suspicious.

Cain: I have be best interests of humanity at heart. It's always a good idea to have the titles for yourself.

Baltar: Actually, let's see. I think I'll give you another chance. We're about to jump, so if you pick a 1-distance then I'll check you, otherwise maybe not. (Destination cards have "distance" values from 1 to 3 that indicate how far you've jumped. In general you want to jump as far as possible, so picking a low distance destination helps the Cylons.)

Another player: See, Baltar, you're not very decisive. I think it's good that we don't have you as President.

For the rest of the first half of the game, me and Cain want back and forth accusing each other of being Cylons. After the sleeper phase I checked her - "nothing personal," just that she could have gotten a cylon card and I want to make sure. Guess what, she was human all along. The game continued with a race to the finish line, and we eked out a victory.
The game is so fun that it makes me want to watch the show. Unfortunately, the DVD box set costs $250, so I'm not sure if that will happen...

(Part 2 coming soon!)

Superheroes, classes, and math, part 2

2010-01-23T19:27:00.000-08:00

So after the first week of classes, and the character creation session for the superhero game, here is what has happened:

- I don't have anything particularly interesting to say about Stephen Bond yet.

- Steve LaValle is kind of a funny professor. The first day in class he said that "normally I try not to stay too close to the book, but in this case I am kind of confused as to whether I should do that, because I wrote the book." Also he had us look through the book and vote (by email) on which chapters we want him to focus on for the class. Not everyone turned their vote in on time, so he said that "just like real elections, we have low voter turnout here" and joked that "actually, I'll just ignore the voting and do whatever I want, just like the real government."

- Jeff Erickson called me a "great graduate student" on his web page.

- At Armored Gopher Games we had our character creation session for the superhero game. I had to take a cab there because my bike got a flat tire. But it was really cool and people had lots of funny superhero ideas. One of the superhero ideas was an alien who was given superpowers and sent to Earth to live among the humans as part of a "reality show." One of the character's disadvantages is that occassionally the "producers" will teleport him to a "more interesting" location, or teleport him back to the mothership to alter his powers. My idea was a "gadgeteer" type character who has an army of robotic UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that will help him - like a "combat" one that has powerful attacks and a "scout" one that has stealth and detection powers. Dave said that this was a good idea for a character, but warned me that the focus of the game was on the heroes, and if the robots took up too much of the spotlight, he would find ways of disabling them.

Superheroes, classes, and math

2010-01-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

Today is the first day of classes at UIUC. I didn't have any classes today because all my classes are on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. In addition to working as a research assistant for Jeff Erickson, I am also taking two courses: Planning Algorithms with Steven LaValle and Numerical Analysis with Stephen Bond.

Additionally, on the gaming front, I'm about to start playing in a new role playing game campaign run by Dave, the owner of Armored Gopher Games. The game is going to be a superhero game, based on a rule set called the HERO System. The unique part about the HERO System is that unlike games such as Dungeons and Dragons where you have to pick from a given list of powers, in the HERO System there is a point system where you spend "character points" to create your own powers by picking from a list of effects (like "ranged killing attack", "energy blast," "entangle," and "transform,") and add in "advantages" and "limitations" to improve or restrict your powers (such as "armor piercing," "limited number of charges," or "reduced endurance cost.") As you can probably guess, there is a lot of math involved in this, which is why I'm excited about it. For example here is an actual conversation about one of the powers in the game, which allows you to have a group of "followers."

Me: "So, if you build your follower as an N-point character, you can have (2^k) of those followers for a point cost of (N/5)+5k, right?" (I am writing this formula on the whiteboard)
Dave: "That could be right, I don't know. You're talking in a foreign language to me. That's math. I don't speak math."
Me: (Pointing to a page in the rule book) "It says in the rule book that the follower costs 1 point for every 5 points it's built on, and you can double the number of followers by spending 5 points extra. Like it says in this example, if the follower is a 200-point character, he costs 40 points, and you can get two of him for 45, or four of him for 50, etc."
Dave: "Yes that sounds about right."

Anyway, we're going to be finalizing our characters on January 23rd, and then the actual game is going to start the second Saturday in February. I will post more on my blog about any more superhero action!

Gaming Math - Problem 12

2009-12-08T15:42:00.001-08:00

Problem 12: Energy Crisis

In the collectible card game "Magic", players get "land" cards which they can play to generate "mana," which represents magical energy that can be used to play other cards which represent magical spells. Each land card can be "tapped" for one mana per turn, and different cards cost different amounts of mana to play. If you get lots of cards but not enough mana to play any of them that is called being "mana screwed." Unhinged, a "joke" Magic card set, contains a card called "Mana Screw", which allows the user to (as many times as he wants to) spend one mana to flip a coin, and if he wins the coin flip he gets two mana (for a net gain of one.)

Problem 12.1:

Suppose that a player has X mana, and he has a spell that he wants to play that costs Y mana (where Y is greater than X). He uses Mana Screw's power repeatedly until he either (a) runs out of mana, or (b) gets enough mana to cast his spell. What is the probability that he will get enough mana to cast the spell.

Problem 12.2:

There exists another Magic card called Krark's Thumb (this is not a joke card) that allows the user to, whenever he is called upon to flip a coin, flip two coins and ignore one. Thus if a player used Krark's Thumb he would have a 3/4 chance of winning each coin flip, rather than 1/2. Suppose that such a player had one mana, and wanted to play Gleemax, another "joke" card that costs 1,000,000 mana. He again continually used Mana Screw's power until he either ran out of mana or got enough to play Gleemax. What is the probability of success? (You can take the limit as Gleemax's cost approaches infinity.)

(Hint for both problems: Let f(x) be the probability of success starting from x mana, and find a recurrence relation for x.)

The solution is here.

Gaming Math - Problem 11

2009-11-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

At the board game night no Sundays at the local game store there is guy who has been coming in to playtest a new card game he invented. The game is based off of computer fighting games like Mortal Kombat. The way it works is as follows: Each player chooses a character, and each character has a deck of "attack cards" and "defense cards." The players take turns attacking and defending (so the first turn player 1 attacks and player 2 defends, then the second turn player 2 attacks and player 1 defends, etc.) The sequence of play in each turn goes as follows:

(1) The attacker draws attack cards until he has 5 attack cards in his hand; the defender draws defense cards until he has 3 defense cards in his hand.

(2) The attacker plays attack cards. Each attack card has three attributes: a "range" (high, medium, or low), a numerical "attack value" indicating how much damage the attack does, and a "level" (1, 2, or 3). The attacker can either play any one attack card as a basic attack, or he can play a combo. To play a combo the first card in the combo has to be level 1, then the second level 2, then the third (if it's there) level 3 (you can play either a 2 or 3 attack combo)

(3) The defender tries to block the attack. Each defense card is either a "High Block", "Medium Block", or "Low Block." In order to block the attack he has to play a block card that matches the range of the attack. If there is a combo attacks must be blocked in order. For example if it's a 3 hit combo, and he blocks the first and second attacks, the third attack still does its damage. If he doesn't block the first attack because he doesn't have a matching block card, he takes damage from all the attacks, and he can't block the second or third attacks even if he had a matching block card.

(4) The attacker can discard attack cards he doesn't want, and the defender can discard defense cards he doesn't want.

(In the actual game there are more complicated elements, like "counters" that let you turn your enemy's attack back on himself, "special moves" that let you power up your regular attack cards with special powers, and certain characters have special rules, etc. But for the purpose of this problem we are just using the elements above.)

----

Problem 11: You've Been Blocked

Consider the game above. Assume that the defense deck has an equal quantity of high, medium, and low block cards, and ignore finite deck size effects (i.e. assume that each time you draw a card from the defense deck, you have a 1/3 chance of getting each of the types of cards, regardless of what cards have already been drawn).

Problem 11a. If the defender has just drawn a new hand of three cards, what is the probability that he will successfully be able to block a 3 hit combo where each of the attacks has a different range? How about if all the attacks have the same range (e.g. 3 medium attacks)?

Problem 11b. Suppose the defender draws a new hand of three cards. What is the probability that if I attack with a single attack (e.g. a medium attack) he will be able to block it?

Problem 11c. Suppose I've just attacked with a single medium attack, he blocks it (thus using up the medium block card). If I attack him with another medium attack on his next turn (don't forget he gets to draw a new card to replace the block card he used up) what's the probability he will be able to block it? (Assume that the defender will always block an attack if he has a block card available.)

The solutions are here.

Trip to Chicago

2009-11-25T21:31:00.000-08:00

Since there are no classes this week since it is Thanksgiving, I decided to go up to Chicago to see some sights there.

I got to the Illinois bus terminal on Monday morning and bought a ticket for the 11:00 Greyhound bus up to Chicago. Unfortunately there wasn't enough space on the bus for all of us so they had to bump me to the 12:00 bus. I knew planes could be overbooked but I had never heard of a bus being overbooked. Anyway on the way up there the bus broke down. Fortunately there was another Greyhound bus there to rescue us. By the time I had gotten up there and checked into the hotel it was already 4:00, and most of the attractions were closed. Instead I took the subway over to downtown here I could have dinner at the ESPN Zone and explore the rest of downtown where there's lots of shopping. I got a new winter coat (my old one was really worn out) and got a cool looking miniature RC helicopter from Brookstone. Also in Chicago there was a whole store that sold nothing but Legos. Here is a picture of the display outside:

All those things are made out of Legos. On Tuesday I went to the Museum of Science and Industry. There were some cool things there - in one of the activities we got the chance to use a "Human Patient Simulator" medical training dummy of the same kind as those actually used in medical schools. The way it worked was they showed us how to check for different vital signs (pulse, heart rate, breathing etc.) and then we were assigned to go up there, check the vital signs, and diagnoes the patient by matching the results to the results on a diagnosis chart we were given. Also while I was there I ran into Courtney Fontaine, one of the people that I took the comedy class from back at ComedySportz in DC. She now works at the science museum, and is also in another comedy group (not ComedySportz, although there is a ComedySportz in Chicago). She was having a performance that night and I went to see it. There were several comedy groups performing that night, and there were lots of funny parts. Courtney's group got the suggestion "gift-wrapping", and I thought it would be a boring suggestion but they went off on lots of funny tangents with it. The last group I gave the suggestion "Dungeons and Dragons" to, and I was actually quite impressed with their knowledge of D+D themes - they incorporated lots of classic D+D elements including traps, castles, wizards, and even "elemental powers" into their routine. The climax of the scene was funny - someone was talking about going to the "center" of a castle to find treasure, but someone else misheard it as "senator", and the scene then segued into a senator on a talk show whose shtick was "gratuitous profanity" - but since this is a family friendly blog I won't go into it any further.

Then on Wednesday, I first went to the Travisa office to drop off the materials for my trip to India, then went back to get my stuff from the hotel. There wasn't really enough time to go to another attraction so I just went to the train station (I figured I might have better luck on the train rather than the bus) and got there about an hour and a half before the train was scheduled to leave. It was a good thing I got there early because I got the last available ticket to Urbana-Champaign. The train left on time and only got back to Urbana-Champaign about 20 minutes after the scheduled time.

More on the strike

2009-11-11T22:20:00.001-08:00

Here is a letter to the editor in the Daily Illini opposing the strike:

Do Not Support the Strike

Here's my analysis of this argument:

1. The claim about graduate students "colluding to gain market power" doesn't make a lot of sense. By exactly the same logic, one could claim that the university itself consists of a lot of separate employers of graduate students (namely the individual professors) that are "colluding" into one administration to negotiate. So why is that not "market power?" Why is it "collusion" from one side but not from the other?

2. The statement about "if the university paid below the market rate, students would be attracted to other universities, so they would be forced to raise it" makes sense, but that's exactly the point of the strike. The students aren't willing to work for the wage they are being given, so they're going to refuse to work for that wage. That's exactly how the market is supposed to work, isn't it?

3. The statement about "the benefits come to ... those with political clout" doesn't make sense either. The students are asking for wage and benefit increases across the board - as far as I'm aware, they're not asking for any special favors for anyone with "political clout".

Finally: Proof that the Stimulus is Working!

2009-11-04T14:18:00.000-08:00

Jeff Erickson said recently that he wanted to consider hiring me as an RA for next year. The interesting reason is why: he recently received a grant for $200,000, and it was money that came from a program put in place by the stimulus package, so in order to keep the money he has to show that he is creating jobs. I haven't decided yet whether to take that offer or whether to work on a different project (after all, I still have about 1.5 semesters left on my fellowship to decide).

However, maybe that's a good thing: the graduate student employees' union is considering going on strike, because they have been without a contract for over 10 weeks and they claim they are not being paid a living wage. I guess that makes me non-union "scab" labor.

Bonus Question: What is wrong with this analysis of the teaching assistant pay situation?

More game happenings

2009-10-24T21:13:00.000-07:00

Here are some more interesting things that happened during D+D games:

1. Our mission was to go to a place several days travel away to meet a friendly tribe of goblins to retrieve part of a set of artifacts we were looking for. As we traveled around the road, we ran into several groups of goblins from a different, enemy tribe, which we were able to defeat. Also according to the module (a module is a published "adventure book" for D+D) , "the journey along the road is long and arduous" so ever day of travel we had to make an Endurance skill check and if we failed the skill check we lose a healing surge. We all made fun of this , and our group's ranger, who was riding a horse, thought it was ridiculous that "I"m walking along a road, riding my horse, and I still lose my healing." Fortunately, since the module was "poorly written" (the DM's words) all the skill checks had such a low DC (difficulty class) that most of us made them very easily. (The way a skill check works is that you roll a 20-sided die and add your character's score in that skill, and if the result is equal to or higher than the DC then you pass the check.) And in fact it didn't even matter anyway since you get your healing surges back at the end of each day. But anyway when we got to the rendezvous point, the goblins we were supposed to meet were not there, and in its place were a third tribe of goblins, who had stolen the artifact. They said they would give it to us if we passed their "test" which involved fighting them one-on-one at a time with special rules (no healing allowed, if you push the other guy out of the ring then you win, if you damage the opponent and they don't damage you in one round then you win, there are special "meditation" and "mitigation" skill checks that you can make that give you bonuses). We lost this challenge mainly due to lucky dice rolling on the part of the DM (at one point I think he rolled two or three "natural 20s" on the 20-sided die in a row). The goblins then ran off with the artifact into a cave, and we wrote in our notebook: "Next time, use OUR rules." We pursued them into the cave, but unfortunately the cave ended in a dead end and there was an obelisk that turned out to be a teleportation portal that only goblins could pass through, so we couldn't pursue them any further. Also, we needed information the goblins had in order to complete the rest of our mission, and once the goblins had ran there was no way to get that. (See, the DM wasn't lying when he said the module was poorly written.) We gave up in failure, destroying the portal in order to punish them, and went back to our contact - a military leader - to report back. We were originally planning on claiming that all the goblins were dead when we got there and the artifact was nowhere to be found. However, while talking to the contact it turned out that after we left (but before we arrived at the rendezvous point) they had gotten a letter explaining that the artifact had been stolen. At this point our ranger berated the contact, saying that he should have "used magic" to inform us of the new information while we were on our way and blaming our failure on the "bad intelligence." The scenario ended with us all being shipped off to a far-away land to begin a new adventure ... and we won't know what that will be until Thursday.

2. Our mission was to retrieve a set of four statues that had been illegally smuggled into a city. First we went to a warehouse. While we were on our way the rogue made his Perception check to notice two people following us. Three out of the seven people in the party then made Stealth checks to sneak up behind them, so they immediately ambushed them, killed one of them, and intimidated the other one into surrendering and giving them additional information. The city guards then saw the seven of us standing around a dead body, and obviously wanted to know what happened. The rogue then Bluffed the guards into believing that they attacked first, and the Bluff check worked. Then we got to the warehouse and had to kill more smugglers, though this encounter was easier because if we hadn't killed the other two before, they would have joined forces with the ones in the warehouse. Then later on we found that there was another statue that was being held by a merchant (who was working for the smugglers). The encounter called for us to confront him and then he would run into a building, where we would have to fight more smugglers. However, we dealt with the problem a different way: while he was having tea in an open air market the rogue stole the statue out from under his feet while the rest of the party (including me) attacked and brutally murdered him. Again the guards showed up and this time we Bluffed the guards into believing that he was a spellcaster and we killed him in self-defense since he was about to cast a spell at us. At the end of the scenario, one of the characters whose alignment was "Chaotic Good" decided that "you know what, I might as well just change this right now" and erased the word "Good" to leave just "Chaotic."

3. Our mission was to go through a dungeon to find an evil demon and kill him. The paladin kept using his "Detect Evil" ability on everything as we went through the dungeon to find out where he was:

"You see a circular room with a well in the middle, a gong near the well, and there's a door on the other side."
"I use Detect Evil on the door."
"No, the door is not evil."
"I use Detect Evil on the gong. Is the gong evil?"
"No, no evil there."
"Okay, then let's go down the well."
..later...
"You're all down the well and you see a corridor in front of you. There's a door on the left side of the corridor."
"I use Detect Evil."
"Yeah, there's some evil on the other side of the door."
"How much evil?"
"About two Hit Dice worth of evil."

(Hit Dice are a measure of how powerful monsters are. Our party was made up of several 3rd-4th level characters, so 2 hit dice meant a very weak monster for us. The demon we eventually had to kill near the end was around 10 hit dice.)

On my iPhone (in real life of course) I have an app called the YouMeter. The YouMeter displays a fake "meter" on the screen that you can give it whatever title you want (like "Tragic Fashion Meter") and it goes yup when you push the "Activate" button. (Like all these "gag" apps there's a secret way to control it - where on the button you push it controls how high the meter goes.) So I got lots of laughs by setting it to "Evil Meter" and turning it on the next time the paladin used Detect Evil.

4. I don't just play D+D, I also play board games - the game store had a board game night on Sunday nights. I already talked about realism in D+D, and there's also plenty of realism in board games too. For example one game we were playing was "Power Grid", a game where you build power plants, fuel them, and connect them up. One turn during the "Energy Market" phase we all wanted to buy the oil but there wasn't enough for everyone. Also another game we played was "Automobile" where you play automobile company owners, and at the end of the game nobody had made any money. (Too bad there's no "Bailout" phase in the game.)

Goings on at school

2009-10-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

I have blogged enough about gaming for now so I will telll you what has been going on at school laterly.

I got the grade on my midterm back in Algorithms. I got 96 out of 100 (the highest grade in the class).

Also I am taking the mandatory CS 591-PHD orientation course, where each week they have a different guest speaker. We have had some cool lectures with some very distinguished lecturers, includnig Dan Reed who told us about high performance computing research going on at Microsoft, and Bill Gropp who told us about the new "Blue Waters" project at UIUC. Blue Waters is slated to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world, with the computing power of over 1 million laptops, and is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2011.

One interesting fact: part of the reason they are building Blue Waters at UIUC is because of the cold climate in Illinois. Supercomputers generate large quantities of heat and thus need to be cooled to avoid overheating and burning out, and that costs a lot of energy. Dan Reed also talked about this problem in regards to large corporate data centers. In fact, he told us, some corporations are discovering that in some cases it is actually cheaper to not even bother with extra cooling and simply replace computers as they fail rather than spend lots of electricity cooling them all. (That solution would not work for Blue Waters because unlike data centers that have lots of separate, redundant computers, Blue Waters is all connected and one part failing could ruin any computation that is in progress.)

On the other hand, this is probably not a good cooling solution for any large-scale computing application.

RPG Math - Problem Index

2009-10-11T10:44:00.001-07:00

Now that I have finished my 10th RPG Math problem I am going to post an index of all the problems along with what category they are in.

Problem 1: Ineligible Receiver (of bullets) Downfield (Geometry)
Problem 2: Too Many Men on the Playing Field (Exponential Growth)
Problem 3: Take Cover! (Geometry)
Problem 4: Divvying Up The Loot (Algebra)
Bonus Problem: Divvying Up The Loot, Modern-Day Edition (Algorithms)
Problem 5: Mathematically Challenged (Optimization)
Problem 6: Taking Inventory (Algorithms)
Problem 7: By Our Powers Combined (Combinatorics)
Problem 8: Focus Fire! (Optimization)
Problem 9: The Killing Fields (Motion Planning)
Problem 10: All Decked Out (Expected Value)

RPG Math - Problem 10

2009-10-11T10:18:00.001-07:00

Problem 10: All Decked Out

The card game "Dominion" is based on building up your deck of cards during gameplay. There are three types of cards: "Action" cards, "Treasure" cards, and "Victory" cards. Treasure cards have a number of coins on them, while Victory cards have a number of victory points on them.

A player's turn goes as follows. First, he draws five cards from his deck. Then, he plays up to one action card. Action cards can have one or more of the following effects:

"+X Cards" - Immediately draw X more cards.
"+X Actions" - You may play up to X more actions on this turn. (This allows you to create long chains of actions if you play +action cards and then use your new actions to play more +action cards.)
+1 Buy" - Increases the number of cards you can buy in the Buy Phase (See below) by 1.
"+X Coins" - Add X coins to the number of coins you have available in the Buy Phase (see below.)

After you finish playing actions you go into the Buy Phase. You add up the number of coins on all the treasure cards in your hand plus any +coins action cards you played. That is how many coins you have available to buy another card to put into your deck, and better cards cost more gold.

The way you win the game is by having the most victory points worth of Victory Cards in your deck at the end. ut of course Victory Cards are useless when you draw them, so they dilute your deck - and a key strategic element is when to start buying victory cards.

(***)

Here is the problem. Consider a simplified version of the game where you have an unlimited number of actions per round (you can keep playing action cards until you run out) and action cards only have the effects "+X cards" and "+X coins". Give a formula that can be used to calculate, given the composition of your deck, the expected number of coins you will have available to spend at the end of each turn.

You may make the following simplifying approximations:

1. All draws are independent - i.e. if 1/3 of your deck consists of treasure cards with a value of 2 coins, then each time you draw a card, you have a 1/3 chance of getting a treasure card with a value of 2 coins.

2. There is no chance of running out of cards to draw. (In the actual game, once you run out of cards to draw you can reshuffle your deck. It is possible to draw your entire deck in one turn, but that is rare.)

The answer is here.

RPG Math - Problem 9

2009-10-07T20:03:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have been talking to some professors in order to get advice on what classes I should take during the next few semesters so I can fill out my Program of Study Form, where I will create a plan for what courses I will take during my time at UIUC. One professor I talked to is Steven LaValle, a robotics researcher who specializes in motion-planning and navigation algorithms for robots. Some of the problems discussed in his book include things like, given a map of an environment and limited sensing ability, what's the best way for the robot to move in order to get enough data to find out where it is in that environment?

Recently, when I was visiting the Amtgard group in Peoria, the first part of the quest involved a motion strategy problem very similar to these. The scenario was as follows:

- The battlefield was approximately a rectangular field. At one corner was the "destination."
- At the beginning of the game, all the 'questers' (about 6-8 of them) were blindfolded, disoriented, and placed at an unknown location on the battlefield.
- The goal of the questers was to get to the destination. If a player ran into the edge of the battlefield, he would be directed back in by a reeve, no penalty suffered. However there were also "kill zones" in the battlefield that contained enemies. If a player moved into (or too close to) one of the "kill zones" then the enemies would kill them. (The player would then come back to life a few minutes later where he was, and would have to move away from the kill zone before continuing.)
- Although questers were blindfolded, they could still hear what was going on, which meant they can hear if someone is getting killed and would then know approximately in what direction that kill zone was.

Although I had actually read some of LaValle's book, I didn't remember enough of the part about motion planning under incomplete information, so that didn't really help me much - I got hit a total of three times (although I only died once - it took two hits to kill me, and I got healed when I got to the destination.) But that did give me an idea for another RPG Math problem. this is a much more simplified version of what happened in the game, but it should still be interesting and give me a chance to talk about some more algorithm techniques. With that out of the way, we now present...

Problem 9: The Killing Fields

Consider a square battlefield X units on a side. The battlefield contains a total of N "kill zones", the location of which is unknown, and each of which is a circle of radius at most 1. (Kill zones may extend off the side edges of the battlefield, but may not cross or overlap the top or bottom.) The goal of the "attacker" is to go from the bottom edge of the battlefield to the top edge of the battlefield. The attacker can start at any point on the bottom edge and move in whatever path he wants to get to the top. If the attacker hits a "kill zone", he is dead, and has to go back to the beginning and choose a new path, and he knows exactly where he was when he was hit. The goal of the attacker is to minimize the number of deaths before he is able to get to the top.

9a. Prove that no matter what method the attacker uses to choose his paths, there is an arrangement of "kill zones" such that he will take at least N deaths. (Hint: Imagine that you were the defender and you knew the attacker's strategy. How would you place the kill zones?)

9b. Suppose that N < (X/4). Show that the attacker has a strategy such that he will never take more than N deaths.

9c. Suppose that N > (X/2). Suppose that the attacker uses the strategy that minimizes the "worst case" number of deaths that he will suffer. What is the maximum number of deahts that he can guarantee he will not suffer more than, in terms of N and X?

The solution is here.

Realism in Dungeons and Dragons

2009-10-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

On Dungeons + Dragons websites there are a lot of ideas about how to make the game "more realistic." Some of these discussions are quite comical, such as claims that "it's unrealistic that special power X works against monster Y" when at least one (or in some cases both) of X and Y doesn't even exist in the real world, so it makes no sense to ask whether it is being represented "realistically." But today I played a game of Dungeons and Dragons that was quite realistic - maybe a little too realistic.

The setup was as follows. Our party was a group of missionaries for the deity Sarenrae, who preaches "compassion and peace" as her highest virtues. Our objective was to go into a tribe of gnolls (a type of monster), convert them all to Sarenrae's faith, and kill anyone who refused to convert. Helping us were some gnolls from a rival tribe that had a "blood feud" with the tribe we were trying to convert. During the discussion the DM (Dungeon Master) told us about a "serpent king" or something that all the gnolls were ruled by. When a player asked how the two tribes could fighting each other if they were both under the "serpent king," the DM said that "the Iranians and the Iraqis both worship Allah, but they hate each other."Another thing that came up during this talk was Sarenrae's "holy book" that apparently included a section on "who you're allowed to kill." For example you are allowed to kill someone who refuses to convert, but you have to give them a chance to convert first.

Anyway, we went off to our destination and we had to find Flynn, a "gnoll boss" that was the leader of the town. First we went to a goblin who could tell us where Flynn was. The goblin agreed to tell us where Flynn was only if we promised to kill Flynn. Our party's paladin (a paladin is a holy warrior who must follow a strict code of honor or he loses his special powers and becomes a "fighter without bonus feats") refused to promise to kill Flynn (because we have to give him a chance to convert first, and if he converts we aren't allowed to kill him.) Eventually we just went off and searched on our own and eventually found Flynn's lair. There were four gnoll guards that were guarding the stairs up to the lair. We tried to convert them but they at first refused. Then the paladin offered to give them gold to leave their posts, so we could go to the boss (after all the paladin was looking for the non-violent solution). However they agreed only under the condition that we agreed to kill Flynn (because if Flynn found out the guards had left their posts, he would kill them for their disobedience.) For reasons already discussed our paladin couldn't make that promise. The negotiations continued, and after he doubled the gold offer we were close to a deal, but another of our party members made a preemptive strike and attacked the gnoll guards. He thought he was doing our gnoll allies a favor by killing their mortal enemies, but our gnoll allies saw it differently - he saw the "treachery" and feared that we would kill them next, so our gnoll allies turned on us. Also in the chaos, the guards called Flynn to come down and help them in the fight. So we ended up fighting the gnoll guards, our former allies, and Flynn, all at the same time. When explaining why our gnoll allies had turned on us, the DM explained: "The Sunnis and Shiites hate each other, but when the infidels come, they turn on them."

Fortunately for us, all the gnolls were so weak that they were easily dispatched. Maybe it was for the best that that part of the game didn't turn out too realistic.

RPG Math - Problem 8 (Now With More Combat Action!)

2009-09-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

This problem isn't based on a role-playing game, but rather on a tabletop wargame, but it is still too good to pass up.

The game this problem is based on is Warmachine. Warmachine is a wargame in the same vein as Warhammer Fantrasy or Warhammer 40k, where you have miniatures that you move around on a board measuring distances rather than on a square or hex grid. However, Warmachine has several features that make it so I like it more than those other games:

1. There are fewer models you have to put together to form a decent army, and each model has fewer pieces.

2. There is more variety in units - each different type of unit has unique special powers. This makes the game much more interesting and more strategic because you have to look at what the opponent has brought to the table (you are allowed to look at the "stat cards" that have the opponents' units' stats and powers on them) and figure out how best to counter their powers with your own. Also there is more strategy in army selection as you try to put together an army that has powers that complement each other. For example one very useful combo is the "Bile Thrall", which applies a "corrosion" effect to targets it hits with its Bile Cannon, combined with the "Cankerworm," a large worm-shaped "warjack" (i.e. battle robot) which has an Ablation ability that allows it to ignore half the target's armor when it hits an enemy unit that has corrosion on it. In one game I successfully used this combo to kill an enemy warjack in one turn that was so heavily armored it would have been very difficult to kill any other way. Unfortunately I then made a tactical blunder: I left my "warcaster" (the army's leader) exposed in a place where the enemy could use one of his last remaining units to charge and kill him.

Anyway this is an RPG Math post so let's get right to the puzzle:

Problem 8: "Focus Fire!"

In Warmachine, there are some units (like squads of infantry) that are composed of lots of identical models. Some of these units have the "Combined Melee Attack" or "Combined Ranged Attack" special ability. This special ability allows the unit to, rather than having each model in the unit attack separately and make separate attack and damage rolls, combine several models' attacks into one attack with bonuses to the attack and damage rolls.

When using combined attacks, the player can choose how to group the models into attacks. For example, if a unit had 8 models, the player could choose to make 8 separate attacks, to make one attack that combined all 8 models, to make two attacks using 3 models each and one attack using the remaining 2 models, etc.

Assume that the unit has N models, and the player's goal is to maximize the total expected amount of damage done to the target. Let F(x) be the expected damage done from one attack with x models. Suppose you are given the values of F(x) for each value of x between 1 and N inclusive. Find a polynomial-time algorithm* to compute the best possible grouping.

Hint: Let G_i(j) be the best possible expected damage using j models in groups of no more than i each. Think about how to calculate the values of G_i if you already know the values of G_(i-1).

The solution is here.

*This means that the running time of the algorithm is bounded by A(n^B) for some constants A and B.

RPG Math - Problem 7

2009-09-23T18:57:00.001-07:00

I already gave you one problem about algorithms, so it's time to give you a problem related to what I am studying in the other class I am taking this semester - combinatorics.

Problem 7: By Our Powers Combined

In the Xbox 360 game "Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2," the player controls a team of superheroes as they battle evil. One of the key weapons in this fight is "Fusion" attacks, which are special attacks that combine two heroes' superpowers. Each pair of heroes has a Fusion attack., and when the player chooses to use a Fusion attack he chooses which two heroes to do the attack with. (For example, a team of 4 would have 6 different possible pairings of heroes and thus 6 different Fusion attacks.) There are three types of Fusion attacks: "Targeted," which are attacks that do a lot of damage to a single target (useful for fighting bosses), "Clearing", which attack all enemies in a wide area (useful for clearing out large groups of enemies), and "Guided", which allows the player to steer the attack after it fires to sweep up as many enemies as possible in the attack.

Since every pair of heroes has a Fusion attack, this situation can be represented as a complete graph with the vertices representing heroes, the edges representing pairs of heroes, and each edge labeled with what kind of Fusion attack that pair has.

There are 24 heroes in the game, and the player can bring 4 of them into battle at a time. Show that it is not possible to assign Fusion types to pairs of heroes in such a way that no matter what team of 4 the player chooses, he will always have at least one of each kind of Fusion attack available.

Major Hint: If there were only 6 heroes in the game, teams only consisted of 3 heroes, and there were only two types of fusions, then the problem would be the special case of Ramsey's theorem described in the first "Example" in the link, and there would be no way to do it. You may use this result in solving the problem, and the technique used to solve the problem is very similar to the technique used in proving that result.

The solution is here.