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Spore is probably the most anticipated game of the year. Indeed, it has been anticipated for quite a while. It’s by the same dude who did SimCity and the Sims, yada yada, if you want to know all that you can check out the myriad gaming articles out there who care a lot more about the particulars than I do. The main thing of interest to me is the creature creator at this point, since Maxis just released a demo version of it. You can also buy a non-disabled version for $10 (digitally starting at noon CST today). The demo version limits the variety of parts you can add pretty significantly. What it does let you see is how well it animates and interprets the morphology of the creatures you make. And it’s pretty frickin’ cool.
Below is one of my creations, Otzertzen.
Figured I’d post this promo video the GWAP group did. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to participate in the filming of it since I was visiting my dad and family in Ohio for the first time after many years. So unfortunate in that I missed the filming, but the alternative was worth it. Johnny Lee had a not insignificant role in the making of the video, I believe. Check out his stuff if you haven’t, he’s doing some pretty amazing things with Wii remotes.
Today is the official opening day of GWAP: Games with a Purpose. This is one of two research projects I have been working on for the past few months, though my involvement with GWAP so far has only been in the form of attending meetings, minor testing, and offering my sage gaming advice (and by sage, I mean the herb). GWAP is the next phase in Luis von Ahn’s human computation project. If you visit and play some games, not only will you be rewarded with a good time, but you’ll be helping science! Science needs you. To play games. Now.
The Idea
Artificial intelligence has come a long way, but humans are still far better at computers at simple, everyday tasks. We can quickly pick out the key points in a photo, we know what words mean and how they are related, we can identify various elements in a piece of music, etc. All of these things are still very difficult for computers. So why not funnel some of the gazillion hours we waste on solitaire into something useful? Luis has already launched a couple websites that let people play games while solving these problems. Perhaps you’ve noticed the link to Google Image Labeler on Google Image Search? That idea came from his ESP game (which is now on GWAP).
The Motivation
What researchers need to help them develop better algorithms for computers to do these tasks is data. The more data the better. Statistical machine translation has improved quite a bit over the past few years, in large part due to an increased amount of data. This is the reason why languages that are spoken by few people (even those spoken by as few as several million) still don’t have machine translation tools: there is just not enough data. More data means more food for these algorithms which means better results. And if results don’t improve, then we have learned something else.
The Solution
Multiple billions of hours are spent each year on computer games. If even a small fraction of that time were spent performing some task that computers aren’t yet able to do, we could increase the size of the data sets available to researchers enormously. Luis puts this all a lot better than I can, and fortunately, you can watch him on YouTube (below).
So, check it out already.
I attended some of the final presentations of an undergrad class on Game Programming today with a friend. We went in expecting something more like a poster session, where people are arrayed around a room showing their work off to a few people who managed to crowd around them. The poster session is ideal for brief browsing, because you can skip anything you’re not interested in. Instead, it was a series of power point presentations followed by an on-screen demo.
A French-built supercomputer beat a 5 dan Go master in France a couple weeks ago. Go is a game I became very interested in in January 2007. I played several thousand games between then and a month ago, when I deleted my account on an online turn-based Go server. My reason for quitting was that it was taking too much time I should be using for studying, and I was letting it frustrate me too much. Go is a game that requires mental peace. You know how when you became a Jedi, you had to let go of your anger? Same helps for Go. I’ll take it back up again at some point, because it is a great mental exercise, but my obsession was just becoming too great.
The reason I picked up Go in the first place was that it remained outside the reach of computers. Of course, it was only a matter of time before it too fell. And actually, it hasn’t yet. Just because it beat a 5 dan French master, doesn’t mean it can beat a 9 dan master from China. So we’ll see.
The method this system used to beat said master was a Monte Carlo method. These are brilliantly simple in theory. You basically generate a multitude of random games for a set of moves and score each resulting game state. The next move with the best scoring set of random game states is chosen. This can also be thought of as voting. A set of random models each vote for a move. The most (or strongest) votes win. And when 10,000 monkeys agree…
Go (围棋, 碁, 바둑) is one of my obsessions. I’ve been playing for a year, mostly as ealdent on Online Go Server (OGS) and am currently about 12.5 kyu, though I shift around a bit. At the moment, I’m in a bit of downswing, mostly because stress and not concentrating is leading me to make foolish moves, plus I don’t have a lot of time to devote to analyzing what I’m doing wrong. One of the coolest things about Go to me is the fact that it is an accepted fact in the Go world that your health and mental state contribute to your ability. It makes sense: when you sit down to a game that requires hours of concentration, if your health isn’t good, you will be distracted.
So in one of my games against a lower-strength player (about 7 kyu lower), I just noticed the emergence of a really cool symmetry. I have a double snapback (I am the white stones) set up right now. If he plays at E12, I can kill the three stones at F11, E11 and E12 by playing again at F12. If he kills my stone at G13 by playing at H13, I can kill those three stones. Two identical snapbacks back to back. Cool huh? Plus, if he plays at F14, he will put my stones at E16 and F16 in the exact same snapback position by playing again at E15. Go is a beautiful game.
I recorded what this would look like via my cell phone, so sorry for the crappy video. I need to look into some sort of desktop recording software.
At a meeting at school last week, we discussed several ideas about just what made games fun. There were a variety of topics, from the definition of a game (versus a puzzle, a challenge, etc) to gender differences in game appeal. What interested me the most is the actual theory about what it is in a game or puzzle that translates to the experience of fun in the human brain. Many of the ideas we discussed came from the book A Theory of Fun for Game Design
One of Koster’s main points is that the human brain is a pattern matching machine. We find patterns everywhere, be they sequences of moves in chess or where to aim in first-person shooters. When the patterns are too complex or are just random (essentially the same thing from an information theoretic standpoint), the brain grows bored or annoyed. When the patterns are too simple and we discover them all (as in Tic-Tac-Toe), that is also boring. Koster says the following:
“If I were Will Wright, I’d say that ‘Fun is the process of discovering areas in a possibility space.’”
My advisor made the point that there is a certain zone you get into during a game where everything else goes away and you are totally focused. This can also happen with an Excel spreadsheet or coding (or knitting or playing sports). So we seek the zone. I think the zone is a state of mind where your brain is attuned to certain patterns and you are able to find new, related patterns quickly. The zone is a feedback loop that arises from the successful discovery of certain initial patterns that allows you to solve increasingly complex patterns.
When I used to play Halo, the zone was the most awesome experience of all. I would charge a base, kill all the guys between me and the flag, grab the flag, rush back out and zoom back to my home base to score. It was addictive (so addictive I had to get rid of Halo). So how do you make a game that encourages finding the zone? Koster’s book has some tips, which I won’t go into, but it’s worth checking out.
I love puzzle games that really challenge your mind. Planarity is such a game. You are presented with several vertices connected by edges. The vertices are shuffled and many of the edges overlap. The goal is to move the vertices so that the edges are no longer intersecting. Simple enough, right? As you progress in level, the challenge increases. More and more vertices are added. After beating level 7, I was too tired to continue, but that has nothing to do with the game. Too much homework and insomnia. Anyhow, the game is really awesome and I strongly recommend checking it out for anyone who wants to exercise their brain.
I stumbled on this the other day. The game is called Crayon Physics and it’s pretty much what it sounds like. You can make a crayon drawing of simple shapes like squares and circles and curves. The objects you create begin obeying the laws of physics (gravity and Newton’s laws of motion mainly). So a square drawn in the air falls to the ground. A circle drawn on a slope begins to roll. The first version is pretty simple. On each level you have to move the ball to the star. You can drop things on the ball to get it to roll, you can set up obstacles, build bridges, etc. It’s ingenious.
The next version will hopefully roll out soon. No telling though since it’s a guy working in his spare time. But looks to be excruciatingly cool. Watch me play one level while trying to record it on my cell phone.
What I really want is a battlefield style game (such as Halo, Battlefield) but in a medieval/steampunk world. So weapons include slow-loading muskets, crossbows, swords, bows & arrows, daggers, clubs, etc. There would be stationary siege weapons like catapults, trebuchets and scorpions. For vehicles, there would be horses, possible fantasy creatures (but not dragons — too powerful), ships, and air ships (like zeppelins). And of course, this should be an MMOG. Now someone go build it.
And check out David Edwards’ site (image link above). Some really cool digital art, if you’re into it. Naturally the airship is my favorite, but Sky Castle, Versity, and 3001 AD are right up there.
I love how art evolves. Well sometimes I hate it, but usually it travels in interesting directions. One of my favorite new trends is art in video games, video games as art, and art in video game advertising. Andy Warhol helped bring art to pop culture and advertising. That hasn’t stopped thousands of hacks from doing a lot of crummy advertising, but every once in a while you get something amazing. The same is true for video games.
Rube Goldberg devices are quite fascinating. However, whenever I see one in practice (below), I am nagged the entire time by A) worry that something minor will go wrong, causing failure and a lot of work; B) wondering about how much time this wasted; and C) who is the person who has that kind of time, patience and space in their home to devote so much real estate to something ultimately pointless. That said, they are freaking cool. This is by far the most elaborate one I’ve seen that’s actually real and not produced by people getting paid a lot of money. Of course there is the famous, much more elaborate Blue Ball Machine, which has been known to captivate many a mind (hat tip for first showing me years ago to Josh). Another crazy Rube Goldberg device below the jump.
If you’ve ever played a computer at a game of chess, go, checkers, or whatever, you’ve probably wondered just what the computer was thinking. Sure you know intellectually that it can consider many times the number of moves you can in the same amount of time. But what does it dismiss and what does it look at further? How does it decide what a good move is? Of course, it depends on the system and the game and is rather complex. I have only played around briefly with trying to program such a thing. I wrote a program in C++ to play checkers that looked three moves ahead (via depth-first search) and judged the merits of a move based on the points left on the board at the end. That was back when I was first learning C++, so the code was very sloppy and I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.
But on one of my random journeys through the interwebs, I stumbled upon Thinking Machine 4. It’s an online game of chess versus a computer opponent. The board is very modern looking, with polygons as pieces. Once you make a move, lines begin springing up all over the board, indicating moves the computer is considering. Depending on how hard it has to think (that is, how many possibilities it must consider), lines are thin or thick as new ones spring up. When the computer is not thinking, the board has a cool little optical illsuion to make you nuts.
In a study done by the Max Planck Institute, chimps were tested with the ultimatum game. In the human case, a player called the proposer is given a sum of money N. He must then offer some amount between 0 and N to another player, the responder. If the responder accepts the offer, they both keep the amount of money in the trade. If the responder declines the offer, both walk away with nothing. Predictably, humans usually make offers around 50%.
In the case of chimps, raisins were used. They were presented with trays that the proposer can only pull out so far. The responder can then pull the tray out the rest of the way if he accepts. The results? Big surprise here folks — wait for it — the chimp always accepted unless the offer was zero. Why? The chimp wanted some raisins. So the conclusion the researchers drew was that chimps don’t have a concept of fair play. The conclusion I think we should draw from this is that chimps aren’t vindictive bastards like humans. Oh, also that chimps want raisins and don’t have a damn clue what this game was about. Of course the chimp always pulled out the tray when there was something in it. He wanted the raisins and had no concept of what was going on. No raisins to pull out? No reason to try to pull it out. I think this says more about the cause and effect inference capability of chimps relating to actions that benefit other individuals than it does about notions of fair play.
Now maybe if the chimp looked down at the zero offer, rejected, and then shot the other chimp the finger, that would be another matter. I’m hoping there is a better explanation for why we should infer the fair play conclusion, and if so, please post a comment. Otherwise, this represents who knows how much wasted money. (And yes, I know the “wasted money” argument doesn’t hold water. If the result had been different, this would have been on the front page of the NY Times.)
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| (Credit: Tungsten Chew/The Tech) |
Some MIT students have tricked out the statue of John Harvard (aka the Statue of Three Lies) to look like Master Chief from Halo 3. Apparently, this statue is the target of many pranks. Go geeks! Read more about it here. Here’s the before shot:
Well big surprise, but a study has shown that students who game get worse grades. Obvious, right? The study, as reported by Ars Technica, actually set out to see if the amount you study affected your grades. The experiment was carried out at Berea college in Kentucky — a religious school in a dry county, so presumably alcohol consumption is not a major factor in the lives of these students.
To boil it all down, male students who gamed had GPAs (grade point averages) that were 0.24 points less than other students and coed roommates of someone with a gaming system saw a hit of 0.13 points. What’s interesting to me is the distracting influence a gaming roommate has. As Ars Technica points out, this could influence universities and parents both.
