Looking Across the Board

After long, long radio silence, I finally publish again!

I got the idea for this post recently, after having played a number of chess games online. This is somewhat unusual, in that I don’t typically write about chess; and yet, I’ve spent some time both playing the great game, and thinking about it, and I would like to share those thoughts.

Chess is often portrayed as a very analytical game, a process of deterministic decisions whose outcome, at the highest level of play, can be easily predicted many moves ahead. Nothing is further from the truth. Games between top chess players are matches of will as well as wit, of psychology as well as strategy. Chess Grandmasters make mistakes all the time - mistakes an amateur wouldn’t notice, but ones that nevertheless change an “obviously won” position into a drawn one. They do so for two reasons: one, human beings are not machines, and are generally error-prone; and two, chess is stressful business. Tournament games can last up to six-seven hours, and the higher the level of play, the more intensive the brain-work. My first chess games, as a wee six year old, were fun, moving the pieces around the board and gleefully capturing my opponent’s. My current chess games are intense mental exercises, where tiny slip-ups can easily lead to defeat.

Thus, the path to being a better chess player lies not only in meticulous study of the game, but also in psychological preparation. Accounts of world championship matches during the Soviet era (and beyond) abound with tales, verging on the paranormal: psychics sitting in the audience, sapping the will of one of the players; adverse lightning conditions created to instill headaches; ill-willed programmers who interfered with the decisionmaking of Deep Blue to throw Kasparov off during their momentous meeting. There is a well-known practice of “sandbagging” in large American tournaments: strong players will purposefully lose games in small tournaments, which results in their USCF rating going down. When the time for the big tournament comes up, their rating is so low that they are matched against much weaker opponents, and win easily. Chess may not be a sport in the sense of requiring physical prowess, but it is just as competitive - and vicious - as the Olympic events we will see this summer.

The methods listed above may help individual results, but it will not advance you as a chess player, it will not help you get to a truly higher level of play. That is not to say that psychological preparation is irrelevant to the pure pursuit of the game - far from it. And this brings me (at last) to the intended topic of the post: looking across the board, or, more explicitly, respect for your opponent.

I have played many games of chess, and lost quite a few. I think I can probably say that the vast majority of my losses can be attributed to a lack of respect for my opponent. I define respect here in a very specific way - not just respect for your opponent as a human being, or as the person you’re going to be sitting across from for a few hours. You don’t have to chat your opponent up (in fact, that’s frowned upon in tournaments), or take them out for drinks after. Respect for your opponent in chess means truly, 100% believing that they are capable of beating you, and that they will, unless you try your hardest to beat them. When you are in this state of mind, you play your best chess; you might still not beat Kramnik, but you will perform much better against opponents of your level than otherwise.

There are many reasons for why I’ve failed to “look across the board” in specific matches: I’ve been sick, tired, distracted by my thoughts or by other events. (A brief aside on sickness: I’ve actually played some of my best chess while running a fever. It might be that when I’m in that state, I feel so miserable that I need to concentrate on *something* that is not me, and if that *something* happens to be the board in front of me, I play well). I have also, plain old, failed to consider that my opponents could actually beat me: look at that kid, I would say mentally, with his rating of 700. He doesn’t understand chess nearly as well as I do. At best, he’s got a couple of dumb tricks up his sleeve. And so, I play poorly, miss optimal moves, and end up conceding defeat after a lackluster performance.

It is easy to list all of these reasons in hindsight, but much harder to predict what mental state I will be in before a match begins. I’ve tried different methods of mentally conditioning myself to “look across the board.” So far, I have found only two that worked.

One: play *less*. Ideally, you should play at most one long game a day, not every day. This is normally easy to accomplish, or at least, it was, before the onset of the Internet. Now, I can get online and play 10-15 quick games against human opponents on the Internet Chess Club. This is actually terrible for your game: at *best*, you will lose most of the games you play, and get discouraged. At worst, you will win a lot, but not learn anything, and get overly optimistic, so when you do eventually go on a losing streak, it’s all the more crushing. In contrast, a small number of long games forces you to concentrate on the games, and not on the results. You analyze your moves, think about your opponent’s strategy, and even if you come out the worse, you feel like you learned something from the game.

Two: (closely related to one). Don’t get upset over a result! A chess career is composed of many, many chess games, and the important thing is that you learn and grow in the course of your career, not whether you win or lose some particular game. This is true even for the strongest players out there. I remember GM Topalov’s performance in the nineties: he lagged behind Kasparov’s star, and seemed to “peak” as a strong, but not-memorable GM who had no shot at the world title. Now, in the 2000’s, Topalov had some amazing performances, both bad and brilliant, and is a much more impressive figure than he was ten years ago. He just kept playing, just kept improving his game. I don’t think I’ll ever be nearly as good as him, but I hope to emulate his dedication to chess and continue enjoying this great pastime throughout my life.

Signing out,

Vlad

Crudely Awakened

Yeah… bad pun and all, but I did happen to be in blogger-hibernation for a full semester. A lot happened, not much happened… I don’t know. The short of it is, I want to blog again!

Also, the specific impulses that have driven me to restart blogging are Scott’s recent “Thing a Week” post, and the “Crude Awakening” documentary. Scott’s post reminded me that I need not strive for a superb level of literacy in this blog, and the documentary inspired me to action. By which I mean, sitting in front of my computer and typing away…

First of all, if you haven’t seen this documentary, do so. It is worth it. It might not be as well put-together as Michael Moore’s films, but that’s almost a good thing - “Crude Awakening” feels like an honest effort to present one side of an issue, not like propaganda. Of course, I like Moore’s films as well, but… hey, they haven’t made me blog, and this did! And I, it seems, have a very high blogging threshold.

“Crude Awakening” is an articulate, if slightly one-sided, presentation of the phenomenon of “Peak Oil” - the highest points in the Oil extraction and production curves, followed by an inevitable downward slope. Being a computer gamer, my most immediate association with the documentary’s message was a game of SimCity 2000. In SimCity 2000, you had power plants; you always needed more, they were nearly the most important thing in your city. You started out with Natural Gas, and quickly moved on to oil-based production, which was better but still led to a lot of pollution… and then you were left with several options:

-wind/solar power, which, as “Crude Awakening” mentions, is not very efficient. In the game, it was plain old pathetic - after the oil monsters of your early gaming, the wind/solar fields of later hours just could not provide the electricity, took up too much space, and were overall not fun to look at.

-nuclear power. This was fun because you could watch a meltdown; of course, after the meltdown, you’d load back into a pre-nuclear save point and build something else. Also hideously expensive. (One thing the documentary mentions that I did not know is that Uranium is also a pretty scarce resource, and we would also run out of it pretty quickly if we instantly switched over to nuclear power).

-fusion/other futuristic devices. These were rather unrealistic, but definitely the power plants of choice after a certain point.

So now, back in the real world, we are left staring at imaginary pictures of our cities, and noticing angry “pollution” bubbles, and watching resource curves, and wondering where to go next.

We could always micromanage; but that is really not the human way out of trouble. Painstakingly checking every pop-up and window option in existence to optimize your expenditure while keeping all your people happy is for a computer, not for a human. Humans invent and weasel their way out of situations like this.

We could start over. But that’s a rather disappointing outcome, and involves coming back to the blank map, with nothing built on it yet, and having that “damn, I could have been making Arcologies!” now feeling as you re-lay down the groundwork of your first neighborhoods (which will function on crappy powerplants!) and deal with the horrors of the subway system.

Or we could do what I did, and hex-edit. I once hex-edited a volcano into SimCity. It was rather difficult, and I’m sure I almost erased my computer’s hard drive in the process… but So Darn Cool when it worked! It was inventive. It was going behind the virtual reality, and doing the “impossible” - impossible, simply because it lay outside the established (but also virtual) laws of that reality. It was cool.

I will leave the open question and corresponding cliche statements about life and code and secrets as an exercise to the reader.

snobby greek phrase of the semester

My friend Scott Caplan has long ago suggested that we, along with our mutual friends, do a rotating feautre on our blogs known as “snobby Latin phrase of the month.” The name is pretty self-explanatory. We should also try to use said snobby phrase in conversation as much as possible.

Being a lazy bum, I didn’t actually get around to finding a snobby Latin phrase until now. Also, it’s not Latin, but Ancient Greek, which I suppose is equally snobby. The phrase (transliterated) is:

Oid’ ho theleis, syka theleis.

Which means: “I know what you want, you want figs!”

The phrase, supposedly, comes from an old Greek story (whose author was not mentioned in my source), “about a man from Sicily who had undergone a shipwreck while carrying a cargo of figs, and another time sits on the beach and sees before him the sea lying gentle and calm, as if wanting to entice him to take another voyage. Thereupon he expresses his unseduceability in these words… [the phrase follows]” (Blumenberg 1997, pp. 56-57) Goethe once used this phrase in a consolation letter to a friend, comparing life itself to the fickle sea in the sailor’s lament. So yeah, pretty snobby

Enjoy, use in consolation letters, or utter dramatically when life just plain sucks. Also, if you ever happen to be shipwrecked with some figs… but in that case you may have other priorities.

Everyone have a good holiday season!

Vlad

from Slashdot…

A very cool wiki. Just a link… I may post more musings later, when i actually read more of it

Von Neumann Machines and CRPGs (Computer Role Playing Games)

I’ll start with the mundane fact that inspired this post: WoW was down today, preventing me from gaming online. Being a huge geek and somewhat addicted to the game, I started browsing for interesting WoW-related material online… finding, soon enough The Daedalus Project, a collection of essays, surveys and reports by Nick Yee, a grad Student at Stanford University. It’s a pretty awesome site, which attempts to explore the socio-psychological issues relating to MMOGs in a serious way. I highly recommend it

At some point, while browsing the site, I downloaded a video of Nick’s presentation to PARC, in which he talks about several issues in MMOGs. At the beginning of the presentation, Nick introduces the notions of the leveling grind/loop (this is a loose paraphrase). If you’ve never played an MMO before, you’ll appreciate exactly how *boring* this part of the presentation sounds. It goes something like this:

“So you talk to this guy and he tells you to kill ten rats. So you walk outside, and you see something that looks like a rat, and you smack it. It turns out to be what you’re looking for, so you kill ten of its kind, and come back to the guy. He tells you to kill twenty more rats. So you go outside again, but then you see another player, just like you. You figure you’d kill the rats twice as fast, so you join up with him, and form a group…”

I do not fault Nick’s presentation skills: this *is* boring. Now let’s skip ahead to the World of Warcraft “endgame:” quests accomplished at the highest level attainable, 60. A description of the player activity at this level can be found in the Leroy video, which, aside from being hilarious, is very good at showing two things:

- high-level quests are complex challenges, overcome only by coordinated effort and planning.

- following the ’see and smack’ principle that worked at level 1 results in utter failure at level 60.

When I formulated the above ideas in my head, they sounded strangely familiar… but I couldn’t place where from, until I looked back at my Cog Sci reading for this week, specifically chapter two of E. Baum’s The Mind Is a Computer Program, which discusses Turing and Von Neumann machines. That’s when it hit me: character leveling in MMOs (and indeed in most computer roleplaying games) heavily resembles evolution through interaction with self-replicating automata, i.e. Von Neumann machines.

First, a quick note on background: the wiki article is quite general, and at first glance doesn’t seem to include Von Neumann’s famous proof of self-replicating machines. I’ll reproduce it here partially; viewers familiar with Turing machines and logical constructions should be able to follow:

“There is no great difficulty in giving a complete axiomatic account of how to describe any conceivable automaton in binary code. Any such description can then be represented by a chain of rigid elements like that. Given any automaton X, let f(X) designate the chain which represents X. Once you have done this, you can design a universal machine tool A which, when furnished with such a chain f(X) will take it and gradually consume it, at the same time building up the automaton X from parts floating around freely in the surrounding milieu. All this design is laborious, but it is not difficult in principle, for it’s a succession of steps in formal logics. It is not qualitatively different from the type of argumentation with which Turing constructed his universal automaton.” (Von Neumann 1966, p. 84)

He goes on to say:

“Now, we can do the following thing. We can add a certain amount of control equipment C to the automaton A + B. The automaton C dominates both A and B, actuating them alternately according to the following pattern. The control C will first cause B to make two copies of f(X). The control will next cause A to construct X at the price of destroying one copy of f(X). Finally, the control C will tie X and the remaining copy of f(X) together and cut them loose from the complex (A + B + C). At the end the entity X + f(X) has been produced. Now choose the aggregate (A + B + C) for X. The automaton (A + B + C) + f(A + B + C) will produce (A + B + C) + f(A + B + C). Hence auto-reproduction has taken place.” (Ibid, 85)

Finally, and most crucially:

“You can do one more thing. Let X be A + B + C + D, where D is any automaton. Then (A + B + C) + f(A + B + C + D) produces (A + B + C + D) + f(A + B + C + D). In other words, our constructing automaton is now of such a nature that in its normal operation it produces another object D as well as making a copy of itself.” (Ibid, 86)

So how does this relate to gaming?
Very simply. All that has to be introduced is the notion of ‘leveling,’ which most of the viewers should be familiar with. When a character in an MMO or any CRPG levels, he/she usually acquires new abilities, or enhances existing abilities. Then let (A + B + C) be the original character, while f(A + B + C + D) be the “character sheet” of the same character at one level higher. Then, by analogy, the character can append its new character sheet to itself to produce the one-level-higher version, plus a copy of the same “character sheet” (allowing other players following the same leveling path to use the latter!).

Why is this cool, anyways?

So the technical comparison I’ve just made is somewhat trivial; but the framework it suggests is, IMHO, not.

First of all, one of the implications of Von Neumann’s work was that his machines can reach arbitrary levels of complexity, bounded only by the kinds of automata one could write down (and thus, only by the rules of first-order logic). Now think back to the Leroy video - overcoming difficult challenges, planning, coordination - very complex constructs from a logical point of view! It seems that the structural similarities I have traced out between MMO characters and Von Neumann machines correspond to functional similarities between the same.

Second of all, if we extend the analogy on the MMO side, we can try to represent character sheets as schematics, composed of the same basic elements as the characters themselves. Writing down these character sheets in terms of first order logic would be a notational nightmare; but we can probably try to create a second-order language of basic abilities, such as:

• attack bonus
• damage bonus
• armor class
• hit points

etc. Each of these abilities can easily be represented as a variable / subroutine within a computer program, which in turn is reducible to a logical construct. Now, given this second-order language, we can also likely represent every ability, spell, item, etc. in any MMO world as a sentence. I of course do not have an explicit proof, but one needs only to take a look at the way players write down MMO items/abilities in shorthand (for instance: “axe35-46dmg/spd1.6″ to indicate the relevant properties of a weapon) to get an intuitive sense that this is the case.

Third, and finally, Von Neumann’s work includes a further passage (which I won’t quote here) on mutation and evolution. The gist of it is: if we take the process of self-replication to be akin to biological reproduction, and introduce a random mutation to the machine in the course of the reproduction, one of two things might happen. Either the mutation will occur in one of the elements A, B, or C, rendering the resulting machine unable to self-replicate further, or “sterile;” or the mutation will occur in element D, resulting in machine (A + B + C + D’), able to reproduce further. If we add the concepts of evolution and of survival of the fittest into the resulting model, we approach a “machinistic life” framework wherein biological-type competition leads to emerging complexity from basic building blocks. The implications for carrying this framework over to an MMO are particularly intriguing: the players, potentially, are evolving “fit” characters who are able to make the best use of a set range of parameters (character stats) to survive and reproduce (in the replicating/leveling sense) in a hostile environment.

So who cares?
No, this isn’t all a revelation of The Next Big MMO (though it could be, if somebody wanted to). Rather, if this series of ideas holds up to further scrutiny, it might be a key towards emerging complex behavior in interacting agents! One twisted, probably unworkable scenario would be to create a test server of some MMO and secretly populate it with automata - computer programs that level and adventure along with the players. Preposterous, I know… but what would happen? Given the MMO environment, it might not be too difficult to make these automata pass a local version of the Turing Test (player interaction can be extremely limited, and it’s in principle possible to communicate via a small vocab of chat phrases). Many there would be a lot of failures; maybe, even in the best case scenario, one would only develop a group of level 60 automata that are really good at raiding, aggroing, and pulling; but maybe, just maybe, they might learn to cooperate and multitask in a general competitive setting). And that would be one step closer to AI.

Whew. This was long. Most of you guys have probably gotten stuck on the Von Neumann. But if anyone made it this far, thank you for reading, and please comment!

Vlad

Cornell

So… no updates in a while. Bad me!

First, the practical stuff: I’m at Cornell, at the School of Information. I’m going to classes: Human Computer Interaction Design (a class on creating user interfaces - veery fun! I might be doing a project on World of Warcraft), Computational Psychology (required for my Graduate Minor in Cognitive Science… see below), and a seminar on the spread of information in networks. I’ve actually gone to only one of those classes so far, because the networks seminar hasn’t met and because it was only on Monday *after* Comp Psych that I had a meeting with the professor and realized the class was worth taking and not, in fact, a repeat of classes I’d taken at Yale.

In the grand scheme of things, I have to take seven required classes for Information Science proper, plus three or four for my Graduate Minor. Getting a Graduate Minor is a requirement for all grad students at Cornell, but it’s usually a relatively fun and stress-free experience. Cognitive Science gave me a laptop to minor in the field. Ok… I’ll take it!

Now, as to the more ephemeral - it’s been a week and a half since I got to Ithaca. The city was all sunshine and happiness when I got here, but receded into gloomy rain about three days in, and has stayed that way since. The constant pitter-patter against my apartment windows is actually quite relaxing. The sound of trucks and loud stereos is not, but I’m way too used to that since my New Haven days. Or maybe since St. Petersburg… as a kid, I grew up next to a tram stop, and the street was constantly filled with grinding, clanging noises of iron on iron as trams came and went. But I digress.

Speaking of the apartment, it’s a pretty cool place. Definitely big enough for me, probably too small for two people - a nice-sized bedroom, a bathroom, plus a living room/kitchen stuck together. I’ve also been able to get (spotty) wireless here, which makes me happy. Wired internet is not getting installed until the 14th, but I can live with that. For now.

I’ll post more later on my life here, significant projects, etc. For now, all is well.

Vlad

…but they gotta pay!

So, this is just a bit of random silliness, derived from the goodness of GoogleAds. They market to the content of your e-mails - or chats - whatever that content may be. Unfortunately, I am not at liberty to discuss this one particular chat - but let me just say that one of the ads that accompanies it in my Inbox is: http://www.theexorcisms.com, the site of one Wanda Pratnicka, psychic extraordinaire. Amused, I explored it, and found this gem:

“Today I am a therapist for ghosts and for people. They both need the same care, understanding and the same dose of love.”

-Wanda Pratnicka

To which I have only to say… “ghosts need love too. But they gotta pay!”=)

Vlad

American Psycho

I just saw American Psycho. Umm… yeah. Ok. I think I need to put my *soul* back together for a little while, so I'll lay off a detailed review 'till later. For now, first impressions:

 - it's yet another writer's response to Crime and Punishment, albeit an extremely witty one. 

 - it makes late existentialism work. w00t.

 - on the scale of fucked-up-edness, it's at about Paranoia Agent, slightly lower than Requiem for a Dream but higher than, umm, the stuff I watch on a Sunday evening. It's still dwarfed by Chris Tam and the Insane Japanese Films That He Watches(tm).

 - it disses Yale (Kevin Bale's character went to Harvard, then Harvard Business)… but in such a hilarious way, that I could almost not take it seriously. The dialogue is something like:

 Main Character, whose name i forget: "Paul had this 'Yale' thing going on, I think."

 Detective: "What do you mean?"

 MC: "I think he was a homosexual, who did a lot of cocaine."

Riiiight… till later.

 -Vlad

Play!

So last Saturday, 5/27, I was in Chicago and lucky enough to witness the premiere of the world tour of PLAY! - a Video Game Symphony. The premise is simple: take an enthusiastic conductor, a full-sized orchestra and choir, and have them play songs from popular video games. I went in expecting something kind of entertaining, kind of amateur… and I was blown away.

Chicago is Over!

Hi all,

my first post-graduation event is finished! For those who don't know, right after graduation I went a little crazy and decided to road-trip to Chicago for the Chicago Open chess tournament. I was playing in the U1400 section, and did pretty well in the past three days - two victories and one draw. I lost both my games today, however, so no money for me Oh well.

Something to ponder: I did really well in my first games, despite the fact that I was sick with the flu. In fact, the only tournament I've ever won, I was sick with the flu… so perhaps the sickness actually helped me. If so:

a) should I inject myself with a flu-containing serum, or whatever appropriate, before the next tournament I go to?

b) if the flu does indeed help me win, does a) count as taking a performance-enhancing drug?

 Ahem.

Anyways, that's it for today!