Tea Leaves

I’m not retarded.

Courtesy of the forums at Quarter To Three comes this little gem: IGN declares the Playstation 3 to be the “best new game console” of 2006. Their rationale? The PS3 plays DVDs and you can install Linux on it. And maybe there might be a good game or two sometime next year.

When the remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates! was released in 2004, I completely passed it by. I was thoroughly addicted to the original 1987 release. I simply assumed that the major effect of any remake would be to embitter me by wrapping the trappings of the franchise around a sucky game.

I recently rented the game from Gamefly, out of morbid curiosity.

I was wrong. The Xbox version of Sid Meier’s Pirates! is a rare bird: it updates the earlier game to the modern era while maintaining most of what made it unique.

The game has gotten a graphical overhaul, as you’d expect, but the improvements go below the surface. The clever-but-clunky combat system (which always reminded me of combat from the Apple ][ game Moebius) has been streamlined and improved. It maintains the same basic mechanics — attack or parry low, middle, or high — but feels more cinematic. More dramatic. More piratey.

Sailing has become much easier, a development about which I feel conflicted. On the one hand, no one can deny the essential boredom of trying to sail East in the original game. Going from Cartagena to Barbados was an exercise in frustration, and it felt like it took hours. In the new game, sailing with versus against the wind is largely a distinction between “your ship sails incredibly fast” and “your ship sails only somewhat fast.” On the one hand, that’s a crime against “realism”, so perhaps it should bother me. On the other hand, we’re talking about a game where none of the daughters of the colony governors have smallpox scars on their face, so really worrying about “realism” at this point is silly. On the whole, I think this was a good call. When you get into ship-to-ship combat, the direction of the wind has the expected (and, dare I say it, realistic) effect; it’s just on the overmap that it becomes a nonissue.

Speaking of pox-ridden daughters, one new addition to the game is a “romance mini-game” where you dance a minuet with, apparently, one of Elizabeth Bennett’s less intelligent sisters. On the Xbox it’s fairly mechanical and easy, but I’m told that in the Windows version of the game it is diabolically hard.

The game maintains the various “missions” available in the earlier title, although it’s much easier to encounter them now. You are perfectly free to ignore the game’s main quest and practice life as a peaceful trader, a nationalist privateer, or as a rogueish marine freebooter. The original Pirates!, along with Elite, might have been one of the first “sandbox” games. The remake honors that tradition.

You’ll find the Xbox version of Pirates! on discount shelves in used game stores everywhere. This is, it seems to me, a no-brainer acquisiton. It provides most of the fun of playing the original version with none of the annoyances. It’s a fine addition to anyone’s game library. I’ll be buying a copy shortly, and you should too.

It’s the time of year to do “best of the year” or “most of the year” or “worst of the year” lists. I couldn’t focus on any one theme, so after spending some time in a food-induced coma, I came up with the following hodge podge of “of the year” topics.

Sports Gaming Console of the Year

The Sony PSP. Between Madden ‘07 and MLB 06: The Show, I’ve logged dozens of hours playing sports on this shiny black wonder. Both games play at least as well as their PS2 counterparts and neither is particularly stripped down. Madden in particular is better in every way when compared to the same game on the 360. The only real negatives are the load times in each game, but the instant-sleep more than compensates for this.

Moron Launch of the Year

There is a tie in this category. First, Sony gets the nod with the PS3. The only people who appeared to care about the PS3 launch were the Ebay scalpers. High price, a launch lineup that made the 360 look rich and the whole “looks-even-more-like-ass” emulation snafu didn’t help matters. The result is that in stores everywhere, people are stampeding past in-stock PS3’s to look at the empty Wii shelf.

Tied with Sony is Microsoft, with the Zune. The Zune is a cunning combination of an integrated user experience that barely works and completely screws all of the third parties that Microsoft signed on to their “open” DRM system. Way to go.

Unexpected Ass-kicking of the Year

Nintendo Wii. I still don’t have one. Everyone I know wants one.

Most Infuriating Of the Year List

The normally excellent NPR interview program Fresh Air ran a list of “Cultural Defining Moments” the other week. In addition to having a title of questionable grammatical correctness, the program appeared to define “cultural” as “anyone famous being an asshole”. Topping the list were Borat, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, George Allen, the cartoons involving the Prophet Mohammed, and Stephen Colbert pissing off the uptight journalists at that special dinner they give to themselves.

What strikes me about this list the paltry amount of cultural content that it contains. Colbert and Borat are nearly sophisticated satire, but the rest of the list contains nothing that indicates the use of higher level brain function. To me, it seems to be more of a list of wet dreams for the people in the media who cover the media. It gives them a lot to talk to themselves about, while we look on and wonder why in the world anyone would care.

Left-Center Hard-on of the Year

NPR actually allowed the term Obamamania into the national news cast and then allowed their senior political reporters to go to NH an drool all over the annoited one and behold his supernatural glow. I feel sort of sorry for Obama, because he has obviously been annoited too soon, which means that at some point between now and 2008 he will become the new Howard Dean, and flame himself out in spectactular fashion.

Dork Nation Event of the Year

NPR has now run no less than three full length stories populated by people hanging around in Second Life. God what a bunch of geeks.

Game that Generated the Most Comments of the Year

This one is easy. No game generated more text on this site than Oblivion. I count eight or nine actual articles about the game. And, who can forget this classic collection of comments where we met an obscure yet brilliant Computer Science researcher.

Accidental Food Product of the Year

Karen made chocolate truffles. She forgot the egg yolks because she was having a busy day, full of distractions. As a result, the truffles taste like butter infused with dark chocolate. Or dark chocolate infused with butter. I can’t decide. Still, it’s a truly unique food sensation.

Next-Gen Raspberry of the Year

Ubisoft gets this one because the best way to play the new Splinter Cell game on an Xbox 360 is to buy the version for the Xbox and play that under emulation. The graphics are a bit worse, but you get actual co-op missions, much faster load times, a camera that is backed off a bit so I can see my feet, dialog with subtitles, and more depth in the game’s narrative. It’s sad that creating all those high resolution textures for the 360 game ate up so much schedule that they couldn’t actually, ya know, finish the game.

Most Tortured Camera Launch of the Year

The Leica M8. Following on the heels of the ten pound digital back that they produced for their already five pount behemoth SLR, the R8, Leica finally answered the prayers of small-handed photographers everywhere by producing a digital body with the form and mechanics of their M series rangefinders. By all accounts, this should be the perfect digital camera for the guy who does not want to carry a bazooka-shaped professional SLR. Of course, this being Leica, they outsourced the sensor development to that other old world photographic power, Kodak. And, together, they botched it. Because of insuffciently aggressive IR filtering, the camera has color balance problems, especially in the dark tones.

In a fabulous twist of irony, the proposed fix for this problem is for Leica to give you a cheap IR filter to put on each of your lenses. You know, the ones with the glass of magical and mythic status. To get correct color, you have to put a cheap filter on your $4000 lens. Leica truly knows how to torture its faithful cult members.

I got this working today in the Atom, RDF, and RSS 2.0 feeds. It’s not working in the RSS 1 feed, but WordPress’s RSS 1 feed sucks anyway, and if you’re using that feed you should change to a different one.

Using the RDF feed as an example, all I did was change this line:

to this:

Hope that helps those of you who were looking to do something similar.

Surely, I must be one of the first people to post to their blog from a Nintendo Wii. I’ve only found one other Wiiblog entry so far.

To type, you use the Wiimote like a laser pointer. It’s a bit ponderous. But editing is quite easy.

Hmmm. I wonder how much work it would be to attach little Mii icons to each post…

The user-agent comes across as “Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en)”

Happy festivus, everyone.

Today I got tons of stuff done at work, finished editing three articles for Played To Death, did the Christmas shopping, and began work on a gift I’m making for someone.

But I didn’t write a real article for the weblog. My apologies. Anyone have a time machine?

When I was in high school, I was a bit of a dork. No really, it’s true. Back then even a passing interest in the emerging digital technologies was looked upon with suspicion and would get you beat up during study hall. We geeks were antisocial outcasts relegated to self-created school ghettos while the normal people did normal people things while dressing better.

Over time the things that used to amuse us dorks have slowly wormed their way into the everyday lives of normal people. So while they may still be better dressed, a sociological flip-flop has occurred. The evidence is all around us. Normal people have turned into bigger dorks than any of us could have imagined possible. Collectively, we have become Dork Nation.

The roots of this Borg-like assimilation of the normals were starting to take hold during my college years. It was during this period that modern user interfaces and modern networking technology were developed in the basements of university buildings, research labs and a few obscure computer companies. It would take ten more years before graphical interfaces and easy to use networking were polished into the shiny perfection of the Internet.

It was at this point that everything tipped. I had just moved back to Pittsburgh after finishing graduate school. Strange things started happening. The CMU coke machine was in the news as an Internet Appliance. NPR started giving out an e-mail address for listener comments. They couldn’t quite figure out how to read an e-mail address with the right cadence though. At one point, I got in an elevator and perfectly normal looking people had a conversation about how their Mapquest directions had steered them wrong. Pretty soon, the net had taken over.

These days people can’t be away from their e-mail long enough to collect their carry-on luggage. You’ll see them standing in the aisle, thumbing away on the tiny little keyboard like a 13 year old Japanese schoolgirl. Then, in the next seat over will be a 50 year old business man talking into one of those wireless cell phone headsets that make you look like Jean-Luc Picard after he has been assimilated.

Every square inch of our public spaces seems to be filled with networking and laptops. The worst thing that can happen on a business trip is for you to lose your Internet. You can’t even escape laptops in bed.

It’s suddenly hard to tell the difference between normal people and dorks. The guy you are partying with at the local hip dance bar could, the very next day, be writing code next to me and doing a better job of it. Dorks come with all sorts of different talents and interests now, not just the technical toys that sucked me in. There are dork musicians, dork writers, dork filmmakers, dork artists of all kinds.

You can’t turn around at the movies without running into a dork on the screen. Dork action heroes type search phrases into their laptops and watch progress bars with nervous anticipation. This year, we even found out that James Bond, in addition to all of his other talents, is an expert at cracking the highest levels of computer security.

There are real world dorks in the movies as well. WordPlay, which ran in theaters last year and was somewhat successful, is a heartfelt and loving ode to the crossword puzzle solver. Here we follow computer technicians, librarians and professional puzzle people as they travel to the national crossword puzzle tournament. The tournament provides all the highs and lows of any great sports movie. And as if to show how mainstream the whole thing is, the film interleaves this story with interviews from real famous people who are also crossword geeks. Jon Stewart! Bill Clinton! The Indigo Girls! Mike Mussina! Even the jocks have turned out to be dorks.

In recent years the Christmas season seems to bring out the dork in all of us. This year was no different. Costco, Wal*Mart, and Target were all filled to capacity with TVs that use the souls of engineers to generate a picture. The Apple store had tables with literally several dozen pre-boxed iPods ready to become gifts. Right next to them was another table with pre-boxed laptop computers. Well-dressed people walked through the store mesmerized by the shiny bounty.

But the hottest items of the year were the things you could not find in stock. Regular people lined up in droves to try and find a Nintendo Wii or a Playstation 3. Twice now I have arrived at my local Target at 8am in a failed quest to get a Nintendo box for myself. Twice I have observed something amazing. Near the head of the line were multiple generations from the same family waiting together for their chance to obtain the glowing white box. The kids I can understand. The college students I can understand. The 45 year old camping out all night I have a hard time with. And yet there they are.

And we know they are everywhere because the next morning they get interviewed on NPR. Just ten short years ago this group of people couldn’t pronounce an e-mail address with the right cadence. Today they don’t even read paper letters on the air anymore. Only e-mail. A couple of years ago they ran an infuriating piece on how the digital generation is simply inscrutable to the poor normal people of the world. Now you can catch them running interviews from inside an online multiplayer video game.

The rest of the news media have nothing to be proud of either. The New York Times quoted Joystiq, a haven for geek news of questionable accuracy and even more questionable editorial standards, in their review of the Playstation 3. Time magazine has proclaimed 2006 to be the year of You Tube, with runner up prizes going to del.icio.us and Technorati. I am not even sure what Technorati is for, and there was a link there from the front page of this very site for the entire time I have been contributing.

In the larger view I don’t really know what to make of this. I am not an observer of larger social trends. I just know how these trends affect my daily existence. All I know is that I grew up loving this stuff and now I have an uneasy feeling about never being able to escape it. I can’t escape it in the news. I can’t escape it in my escapist entertainment. I can’t even escape it at home. The other month I went home to discover that my parents had been using Skype and a Skype router at home for what must have been at least a year. There I was with only a passing notion of what Skype even was (although I did think iChat was pretty cool). My parents had out-dorked me.

Maybe this is where the root of my anxiety lies. For all of my life my identity has been wrapped around the notion that I was out on the bleeding edge of the geek universe. But as I have grown older and more mature, this has become less and less true. Everything that I used to think was pretty cutting edge has become so mainstream that even the wankers at center-left news radio stations understand it. This leaves me in an uncomfortable personal position. I have lost my edge. I have been left behind. When the next wave of cool toys hits I’ll be sitting on my porch screaming in a raspy voice at the local kids wondering why they need to play with such a darn fool device when in my day a normal computer with a god-damned keyboard was just fine. The kids will look back at me and try to figure out just how someone can get so old and clueless.

We’ve cut over DNS, and so you are viewing the new site. Our old articles are still available at their original URLs, so any direct links you had to them previously should still work.

For the time being, we are requiring logins to leave comments, until we better understand our spam-fighting options. But don’t think of it as yet another annoying password to remember: think of it as a chance to join our community (by remembering yet another annoying password). (psu informs me that we’ve turned off requiring logins, but I encourage regular posters, particularly those who might want to write for Tea Leaves, to go ahead and register anyway.

While you’re here, please enjoy Corey Kosak’s article Computer Scientists and Cruciverbalism”.

It’s good to be back.

It seems to be a reasonable childrearing principle that you should give kids a break in order to foster their creativity.  “Look, Mummy, I’ve made you a dinosaur out of cotton balls and toothpicks!”  “Oh Billy, that’s so precious.”  And it is.  But at some point, say after Billy has gotten his PhD in computer science, you need to finally expose him to the idea that the world is a competitive place and he needs to be a harsher critic of his own stupid ideas.

Every computer scientist in the world has, at some point, decided that he is going to write a computer program to generate crossword puzzles.  (That was my generation… today’s crop of top graduate students wants to write computer programs to generate Sudoku).  Just to be clear, the problem of crossword puzzle construction is different from that of crossword puzzle solving.  Solving, at least according to the TV ads, is what you do when you want to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon in bed with your hot boy/girlfriend, a pencil, your chrome/glass furniture, and a copy of the New York Times.  Construction refers to what the poor shlubs have to do to create those puzzles.  Specifically, it means starting with an empty grid (containing a smattering of black squares which define the boundaries between words), and then filling it with letters such that all the across and down slots contain different, valid words.  There are numerous technical conventions as well: the grids are typically square in shape, have a size of at least 11×11, and have rotational symmetry.  Experts try to keep the word count low (lower word count implies fewer black squares which implies a lot of interlock).  Before you publish such a puzzle you would also need to provide clever yet precise clues, but so far clueing is considered outside the scope of what a computer can do.

While reasonable people can differ about whether it makes sense to use taxpayer-funded defense money to pay a bunch of slackers to jerk around, the real problem is that every single person approaches the problem anew as if they were the first person to ever consider it.  You may be wondering what such people do when they graduate and get research jobs.  Give a computer scientist his first $500K grant, and I can guarantee you exactly what will happen:  “Look Mummy despite being ignorant of forty years of prior art I’ve built you a videoconferencing/telepresence system”.

But I’m talking about crossword puzzles.  If you want to be just like these computer scientists, here’s what you do.

• Think about the problem for 15 minutes.  Surely once you lay down a few words in the corner, the rest of the grid is so constrained that your search space is really small.  Right?
• Buy a copy of USA Today, and look at its crossword.  Stay in denial about whether expert constructors consider it a hard grid to fill.  After all, it must be good.  Lots of people read USA Today.
• Get some easily accessible online word list.  You’re so sophisticated that you know not to limit yourself to /usr/dict/words, so after some googling you find you can get OSPD (Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary) or WEB2 (Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2nd Edition, which hails from the 1930s) online.
• Debug your program and be really impressed with yourself as it completes its search and fills your grid in like 5 seconds.  The fact that you’ve got QAT crossing QINTAR, as well as ESNE crossing ANOA… well, those are valid words, right?

This actually happened to me.  I found some guy who built such an automated crossword generator and showed it to me.  (By the way, he’s a friend.  Yes, I mock my friends.  And yes, after a few turns of the crank I have more mockery than friends.)   I took one of its output grids and gave it to another (not-yet-mocked) friend of mine, who happens to be a world-class crossword puzzle constructor.  Remember, I’m not talking about solving here.  I’m talking about construction: taking an empty grid and filling it with stuff.  It took him less than five minutes and I think he used his pencil eraser twice.  In other words, he filled the thing longhand almost as fast as he could write and did almost no backtracking.

Congratulations, you tragic little man, you have just built a computer program that quickly solves a problem that most practitioners would find trivial.

Because my gnomish anger is exceeded only by my thoroughness, I then asked my friend to provide me an example in the reverse direction: with a grid that he was able to fill successfully (so a solution is known to be possible) but that he found difficult (it had taken him several hours to do so).  I gave it to the other guy and asked him to feed it to his program.  It failed.  Horribly.  It was a total nightmare.

(One must take care to be precise when one is talking about with programs that run for a long time, especially those you suspect may never terminate.  To use a metaphor: strictly speaking, it is not correct to say that Matt Damon will never go on a man-date with me.  Perhaps Mattie and I will both go on severe calorie restricted diets and live to be 150; perhaps a thousand years from now, an insane alien computer will regenerate our personas from, in his case, footage from the film “Stuck On You”, and in mine, some DNA I may have left on a towel at the Holiday Inn).  My point is that the best you can say in these cases is that “Matt Damon has not gone on a man-date with me YET”.

Or, in the instant case, if a computer program correctly implements exhaustive search, sooner or later it will try all possibilities in the puzzle space.  Just realize that “later” can be, like, ”way” later, as in, dude! the sun just blew up and melted my ’puter!.”  In cases like this you basically have to pick a cutoff time and if the thing isn’t done by then, you pull the plug.  That’s what happened here.  He ran it for a few hours, maybe overnight, and then admitted failure.

I need to add a little postscript here.  Initially I wasn’t sure how this piece wanted to end.  Coming back to it after a couple of days, I realize that, I actually think doing research is a worthy endeavor.  And I think it’s quite common that some young punk comes along with an insight and shows a bunch of crusty old fools how things should be done.  So if you are a young punk, now that I’ve told you what NOT to do, I really ought to tell you what TO do.  One suggestion is this: because the search problem is, as they say, “embarrassingly parallelizable”, I’d like to take one of the open problems (an open 8×8 with no black squares) and see if you could find a fill for it using, like, some vast grid of 1000 CPUs.  Maybe you’d have to make a friend with access to a farm at MIT or Sandia or Google.  And remember, no words can repeat in the grid.  Allowing for repeated words makes degenerate grids that are very easy to fill.

Another suggestion is to study how humans create these puzzles.  They generally don’t use exhaustive search; they use insight, see patterns, know a bunch of tricks, and basically do a bunch of rejiggering when they find themselves painted into a corner.  It would be interesting to formalize this approach and see if you could get a computer to do the same.

 

“All the power of WordStar with all the hardware requirements of Windows 95″. And all the flexibility of VAX/VMS.