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!

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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.

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Banazir

The NSEconomy tool that jereeza found for the online government simulation game NationStates is one of the keenest things I've ever seen on Sourceforge. Talk about value added - it turns an otherwise boring and opaque qualitative descriptor of your nation into a CIA World Fact Book-style dossier that breaks your gross domestic product (GDP) and tax allocations down by sector.

Take a look at this stat sheet for the TEUNC region (Balrog Cuttings)! Neat, eh?

( A screenshot, for anyone having trouble connecting to NSeconomy )

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Banazir

Nationstates 2

I keep hearing about NationStates II and wondering a) what the chief differences in game content and mechanics are and b) whether people will be allowed to transfer old nations (which IMO would cause some issues with game balance, from the start).

They Came From Hollywood

Similarly, They Came From Hollywood looks to be smashing good fun.

Shards: MMORPGs and MPOGs

What's this I hear about free UO (and EQ2) shards?
I must admit, I'm curious about these purportedly free Ultima Online (and EverQuest II?) shards.
More than anything else, I'd like to see whether there's anything suitable as a graphical MU* venue of teunc/guggle.

I'd also like an environment for prototyping small vehicles and agents for massforge. Nothing on the level of WOW, though, which by all accounts is digital crack.

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Banazir

Late Friday night (in the wee hours on Saturday), I looked up E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series to see if I wanted to read Chronicles of the Lensmen, Vol. 2. I learned a lot about Triplanetary.

The Smurfy Dyson Sphere of Smurrowdelphia is patterned in part on a whimsical notion of a titanic flying arcology (part high-impulse generational ship, part Shkadov thruster, part spindizzy a la Blish). I shouldn't be surprised if the Smurrowdelphian(s) had some mindpowers, even if some were Lensworthy.

Meanwhile, The Dominion of The Great Orcish Horde has landed in Balrog Cuttings, bringing a taste of Draenor's finest (or worst, depending on one's point of view).

What the trask am I wibbling about? NationStates, of course.
There's no way to play the game and make much measurable progress based upon skill, as yet; however, the three-year-old rumor that NationStates II is coming out inspired me to re-create all my nations, a move that is generating a little interest. As for NationStates II? There may be trade. I'm not interested in another war game in earnest, so I'll be quite satisfied with adventuring and diplomacy.

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Banazir

Miscellaneous updatery from Banaland:

• Grading: Well, I finished grading the first assignment in CIS 560 by class time on Thu 27 Apr 2006, and it's as I wrote: instructors' marks are not model solutions, nor are they stack traces, nor even segfault error messages. Sometimes a score is just a score. Let's face it, though: asking for marks is really just a way for some students to ask "where they lost points", which is really just a way to ask for more points. I know whereof I speak: I was neurotically grade-conscious as an undergrad, and while I may arguably have no room to talk about grade-grubbing, I know almost every line in the book, whether it came out of my mouth or someone else's.


• VOIP: Lycos Phone works from phone to computer, and quite well at that, giving me total of 5 VOIP solutions in addition to my cell phone: iTalkBB for voice-to-voice, SkypeOut for IP-to-voice, Lycos Phone for voice-to-IP, and Skype and Google Talk (plus Lycos and Yahoo) for IP-to-IP.


• Nanowrimo: Halfway between Nanowrimo 2005 and 2006, 100000 words (and two challenges in), I have finished the first two "books", but I'm not quite satisfied with the turns of events; the last few chapters in particular feel more like a series of vignettes with loose ends, and I'm not sure how to wrap things up for the 2006 sequel.


• Chat: There is no way in the Eleven Hells I can catch a person who sails in and out of the chat room within 30 seconds; sometimes we go that long between responses during an active conversation.


• WOW detox: Still wishing World of Warcraft would stop swallowing grad students whole. So, zengeneral, tell me about those withdrawal symptoms!

And how are you all?

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Banazir

(c) 1985 Electronic Arts. Click on the image for the larger and higher-resolution version.

Man, do I feel old!

Context:
( The Bard's Tale, Ultima Offline, Wizardry )
( Kaypro Luggables )

You young whippersnappers! "Back in my day, we played CRPGs on Kaypros with 1x1 resolution... backwards, through the snow, on Sunday afternoon... and we liked it!"

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Banazir

(Click on image to enlarge.)

What's next, The Sims 2050: Carbon Footprint, or maybe a SimCity 4 add-on module? (The above really does look a lot like an MMORPG called HabboHotel, not that I've ever played that.)

Where's the Alternative Fuels MMORPG? Of course, if environmental issues made it into World of Warcraft zengeneral would probably start a Burning Crusade... literally.

In other news: I watched The Ring, and it was good, though no better than I expected from its reputation. More on this later.

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Banazir

What MMORPG was it that had Erudites as a race? EverQuest? What were (or are) their attributes?
Also, speaking of MMORPGs, what's this I hear about a massive WoW epidemic?

From jereeza:
( We Don't Need No Erudition: OKCupid quiz results )

Does anyone reading this listen to Rodney Crowell's music who owns a copy of Keys to the Highway, particularly the song "Now That We're Alone"? That song got a ton of air time on WPOC (the Baltimore, MD country station, one of the best in the USA) in the early 1990s; I can't understand why it's nowhere to be found these days.

Also, I am looking for a relatively rarer one: Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, "Vidi Aquam", Chant Compendium Volume 1. This is excerpted on the Chant site, but I've never heard the whole thing. Anyone have it?

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Banazir

If I have to look at one more royal family tree, the next disaster to strike tanelos is going to be the Constitutional Democracy bird flu. ;-)

This is as good a time as any for me to ask: is anyone using visual aids in Nanowrimo such as The Sims/SimCity/SimEarth, MMORPGs (such as World of Warcraft), or even something more mundane but thought-provoking such as Risk or NationStates?

Speaking of visual aids, I didn't remember Narnia having that many special effects-worthy scenes. I guess the magic is visualized by dint of Kids Today, with Their Hair and Their Clothes. :-D
(I know, carida_46 and mom_counsel - I don't really get to say that yet!)

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Banazir

P.S. Grading tonight.

Who's reading this and interested in computer graphics? Show of hands, please?

I ask for two reasons:

• I need a good CG community - computer-generated images (CGI) or computer-generated animation (CGA) are the preferred emphases, especially 3-D photorealistic rendering and 2-D and 3-D nonphotorealistc rendering (NPR).
  I just removed opengl, because it's a mostly-dead community, and I don't have the time to revitalize it.


• ( Every spring, I teach CIS 736, Advanced CG )


• I'm also teaching CIS 636 (Introduction to Computer Graphics) for the first time this spring. It hasn't been offered in my department since around 1998 (eight years ago).
  ( On the relationship between CIS 636 and EECE 636 )
  ( How CIS 636 and CIS 736 will be run )

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Banazir