Preface: Of the parables and other tales that have informed your style of interpersonal dealings, the way that you manage your relationships, which have had a prominent impact? For many, of course, there are the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Jing and the Analects of Confucius, the Bible or the Qur'an. For interpretation and anecdotal commentary, there are the Talmud, the Mencius, and the Hadith. Better scholars of philosophy than I have produced many ages' worth of analysis, annotation, and metacommentary on these work, though, so rather than attempt another Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership, I'm going to promote another book that conveys some messages about leadership, but that you may not have thought of very much as a good model: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.

( The Sons of Feanor and the Union of Maedhros )
( Maedhros: humility in strength, coalition leadership, building to last )
( Maglor: mentorship and mercy )
( Celegorm, Caranthir, and Curufin: do-it-yourself, enemies of enemies, and the power of oratory )
( Amrod and Amras: survivor type )
( Final assessment )

This is the first part of a seven-part series.

--
Banazir

We had two final project presentations today for CIS 730 (Artificial Intelligence). Both were among the five who worked on the Roguelike game Angband. Our goal was to look at specific behaviors and improve them.

The first student, Dave Lupo, wanted to improve the tendency of the BenBorg (by Ben Harrison) to be a shopaholic. He trained a feedforward artificial neural net (ANN) using backpropagation to compute a better "dive motivator". This lowered the ratio of time in town vs. dungeon, and he found that increasing the ratio of "time in the dungeon" to "time in town" increased survivability.

Dave plotted the "time in town vs. time in dungeon" curve for 13 characters before his improved dive function, and 14 characters after, and found that they did have higher XP-to-move ratios. He speculated that they had higher survivability as a result, though these results were inconclusive. (I suggested that he look at the slope of the line to see if ' it really improved survivability.)

Now, here's the funny part. The points were all at time of character death, because he lost most of the characters at low levels, but I was sure he didn't lose them all by level 14, so I asked him what the rightmost point was. "Oh, that's time of death after 150000 turns". I asked, "what do you mean, after 150K turns?" He replied that to impose a time limit, he didn't just end the borg run at 150K; he sets "target level = 99" so that it essentially goes: "Morgoth... I'm comin' to get you!" and commences a Rambo-esque death dive!

--
Banazir

taiji_jian reports the astounding but intriguing news that he has the Roguelike game Angband running on a brick of a P5-120 notebook computer I sent him, with Andrew White's borg, APWborg.

I'm not sure which is funnier - the fact that he got it working in Windows 98 on a 10-year-old Pentium notebook, or the fact that barring supa-Hiro-ism, we're both going to be in our forties by the time it finishes killing Morgoth.

--
Banazir