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I have a recurrent fantasy of speaking to one of history’s great luminaries and discussing his impact on the world decades or even centuries later. The fantasy takes two parts. I enjoy imagining how best to explain events, like the Protestant Reformation or the advent of computers, which the luminary may find difficult to grasp. I also enjoy imagining his reactions—to his own fame, to news of success or failure, to the course of events of a type he would enjoy. How would Shakespeare react to knowing he would become the single most celebrated writer? If you were to show him, say, a film version of Romeo and Juliet, would he be more interested in the performance (and possibly huffy over how he didn’t mean it to be done like that), or the wonders of film technology and Hollywood budgets? How would Jefferson react to the triumph of Hamiltonian notions of industry and finance over pastoral ideals? Would Galileo rather hear about Newtonian physics (towards which he was groping) or the vast changes wrought by computers and steam engines (of which he had no inkling)? And if the latter, how could one best explain these tools so far beyond his experience?

But despite the sheer breadth of historical figures, I keep returning to two in particular. Bach and Lincoln.

J. S. Bach died painfully aware that baroque music was passing from fashion, and that classical music was supplanting it. He wrongly expected baroque to vanish, and, by some accounts, put considerable effort towards the end of his life into writing music that would make a case for baroque music’s preservation. Look, says the Mass in B minor, the old school can do this; don’t toss it aside. Nevertheless, people did. The world turned, and Mozart, Haydn, and Rossini rewrote the orchestra in their own image. But the world keeps turning. Mozart continues to make the short list of the world’s greatest composers, but, according to several interviews I’ve heard with leading musicians, performers and composers today admire Mozart and Beethoven, but hold Bach in reverence. It does my heart good to hear it; Bach is my personal favorite, and I love him for writing the music of God. Not religious music, but perfect music—or at least flawless music. Bach captures the spirit of the celestial spheres in perfect harmony. I wish I could share with Bach his lasting status as the great-granddaddy of Western musical theory. Plus I’m curious what, just what, he would think of jazz.

Lincoln didn’t die in that same despair; he lived to see the Union victorious. Unfortunately, he missed out on the aftermath, and a chance to put things right in a way his successors could not. I’d like to thank Lincoln for his heroic achievement, and let him know things came out pretty well, all in all. I doubt he would be deeply surprised at learning of the US rise to superpower status, but I’m curious how he’d feel of our 20th-century entanglements in world affairs. Frankly, I’m curious how he’d feel about a lot of things, including events of his own day. We forget, in the face of Lincoln the legend, Lincoln the man, and how coldly calculating he could be. Because it’s my fantasy, I can picture getting answers not designed for maximum political effect. Most of all, I’d like his advice on what we should be doing now, as a mature nation, to preserve our democratic virtues against a hardening of democratic institutions.

I particularly wish I could tell these people whether history proved them right or wrong. Maybe because, on some level, I’d like to know whether my understanding of current events will eventually prove right or wrong, and I won’t be here to find out.

Posted by at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eileene recently began watching The Dresden Files TV series, and liked it enough to pick up the books upon which it is based. Always ready for sources to mine for my current Mage campaign, I read the first book in the series, Storm Front. It was okay: coherent, but uninspired, a story of a mage making a living as a private detective, but without sufficient grit to be noir. I found it funny when I tried to capture that sense of mediocrity by telling Eileene it felt like a book for teens (“Young Adult” is the preferred euphemism.), and she replied that she had originally asked the book store for a copy describing it as a young adult novel.

It turns out it isn’t. Or at least, it isn’t marketed as such. But I decided to examine my pronouncement a little more closely. If we independently decided it must be a young adult book, it can’t just be because the book is bland. So I went back and picked out some salient features that didn’t seem so important the first time around…

1. Harry Dresden is a slob. He wears a black duster over grungy t-shirts, gets up late, and forgets appointments. That doesn’t stop him from complaining about how hard it is to secure contracts, or how he doesn’t have any nice stuff.
2. Dresden is surrounded by hot chicks. Four women are significant enough to have speaking roles: the femme fatale who hires Dresden, his contact in the police department, a vampire madame, and a hooker who knows something but plays coy. All of them are at least superficially attractive; three are flirtatious.
3. Nevertheless, Dresden never gets laid. Events conspire to make sure he doesn’t even get a kiss. As often as not, the “event” is Dresden saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
4. The world just unfairly dumps on him. Everyone thinks he’s a bad guy, or a loser, or both, just like Harry Potter in his young adult series. Karmic fallout hits Dresden in a variety of ways: a demon smashes up his apartment, an evil sorcerer decides to kill him, and he can’t go to the hospital for fear that his aura will cause dangerous malfunctions in the medical gear. But what occupational hazards of magic does Dresden dwell on? Driving an uncool car. Junky clothes. And especially the way powerful figures blame him for everything, and it’s never his fault. You just know that, no matter how many times Dresden saves the day, or how overtly supernatural the events surrounding him become, Detective Carmichael will never, ever believe in magic, or that Harry is anything but a con artist.

Is there anything there for a young male, sufficiently geeky to be reading fantasy novels, not to identify with? I don’t know where the television series is aimed, but the books are being sold to the wrong audience. A slobby but genuinely decent guy, surrounded by hot babes who won’t have sex, and authority figures who dislike Dresden for no reason at all? That is publishing gold in the YA section.

Posted by at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had to drink a pint of a milky barium solution this morning so my innards would show up better on the cat scan. I had my choice of berry-, banana-, or unflavored. I went with berry. It was yucky, but not as yucky as I’d been led to believe by the sympathetic eyebrow lift of the radiology staffer that handed the bottle to me.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say it tasted better than several kinds of packaged candy. Artificial banana flavor tastes like nail polish to me, so maybe the banana barium drink was truly awful, but it couldn’t be any worse than those repulsive wads of spongy orange packing material marketed as “circus peanuts.” Nor could it be worse than Necco wafers, those chalky disks you see most often in a Valentine’s Day variation, with brief love messages stamped on the front. (“BE MINE,” or “LUV LUV,” or “CUTIE,” for example). And especially not worse than Dots, those hardened driblets of sugar paste stuck so firmly to the paper strip they came on that eating them meant supplementing your dietary fiber with a fair amount of wood pulp.

Wax bottles with syrup inside, Razzles, Red Hots, Jujubees, anything licorice—they were all nasty. But if there were nothing else going, kids would eat them. Couldn’t pass up a chance to eat some candy!

Since flavor was never the issue, it seems to me you could get kids to wolf down broccoli if you compressed it into inedible lumps with barely enough sugar and wrapped it in colorful paper sleeves. The marketing would require some care. If you called them “Brocco-bites: good and good for you,” kids would suspect the same kind of parental trick that makes them say, “If you’re hungry, eat a carrot.” No, the trick is to make eating them seem slightly transgressive, like those little plastic garbage cans with sugar tablets shaped like fish bones and wormy apples. Call them “Mean Greenies,” or even “Nasty Greens.” Then put them next to the chocolate chips in the baking goods cupboard, warning kids not to eat too many, because you don’t want them to get sick. Kids would start sneaking them on the side. After they’ve eaten a few, roll your eyes and say, “I don’t know what makes you eat those things. When we were kids, we at normal candy, like miniature Snickers bars. (Of course you didn’t; you ate wax bottles with syrup inside. So lie.) Vegetable problem solved.

Posted by at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I enjoy Harper’s index. While I found the two following factoids noteworthy, they hardly came as a surprise:

Number of local Republican officials who have been investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2001: 37

Number of local Democratic officials who have been: 262

Naturally, one has to take factoids with skepticism, because they lack potentially significant context. Maybe there’s good reason for this discrepancy. Maybe the Democrats outnumber the Republicans by seven to one in local government. Maybe the Democrats are seven times as crooked. Maybe the crooked Democrats are no more numerous than crooked Republicans, just seven times as careless about leaving evidence around.

Maybe my Aunt Matilda is the Tooth Fairy.

A discrepancy of three to two, or even two to one is just within the realm of plausibility for an impartial Justice Department. A discrepancy of three or four to one begins to look like favoritism. A discrepancy of seven to one approaches criminal abuse of power. In light of the current scandal over firing eight U.S. attorneys insufficiently willing to cooperate with Republican election campaigns, such abuse sounds simply like business as usual in Washington, part of the general strategy championed by Tom Delay of doing everything possible to establish reliable party supporters in every office at every level of government, and then to use that leverage to cement control over the political process, including future elections.

No specific issue, or even collection of issues is sufficiently important to warrant destruction of our political process in order to insure the “right” people are in power to make the “right” decisions about the issues. Not abortion, not Iraq, not trade regulation, not gay rights, not anything. Although I denounce one-issue voters—precisely because they tend to overlook government abuse in the interest of their cause—this comes close to a single issue commanding my vote. Politicians who undermine democracy, even in a good cause (and the current administration isn’t even operating in good cause), can do America more harm than politicians who are wrong about everything else.

As the bumper sticker goes, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

Posted by at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So… the kidney stone turned out not to be a kidney stone after all. In some sense, that’s good news, because very few conditions are worse than a kidney stone. My joy at the news, however, is greatly diminished by the fact that I’m still in pain, and getting passed from doctor to doctor in an attempt to find out what the problem is. Each appointment takes a few days. Each test takes a few days for the results to come in. And several steps aren’t medical at all, but a few days’ delay waiting for our insurance to pre-approve a procedure. That’s a mighty slow process when it hurts to walk around the house. But I’m not here to gripe about that, because these delays are justified: offices are busy with other customers, so I can’t just drop in and get service, tests take time, and doctors need tests to make an accurate diagnosis before prescribing treatment.

I am here to gripe about the unnecessary delays. The step I completed today was waiting for insurance approval of a second cat scan, this time with dye, and two x-rays. The insurance company refused, insisting instead that I see a surgeon first.

I balked at the promise of another delay, and began asking questions, like: Why? We-e-ell, because we want to eliminate the possibility of a hernia. But my GP checked for a hernia and didn’t find any indication of one. Would a surgeon be able to tell any more from a purely external examination? We-e-ell, maybe not, but he could give his official approval for the cat scan and two x-rays your GP asked for. But I’m not getting the tests for my amusement, nor did I make them up on my own initiative; isn’t my GP’s request sufficient? We-e-ell, we didn’t realize your GP already considered hernia. Tell you what: the approval for cat scan without dye is still applicable all the way to April 29, so you could use that to get all the cat scans you want, with or without dye, until then. And we don’t need to approve x-rays.

So, ultimately, it turns out they didn’t need to approve anything at all. The procedure they use to prevent unnecessary medical tests in fact permits any number of unnecessary medical tests, as long as they’re taken within the space of about a month. I’ve waited five uncomfortable days, counting the weekend, for a legal step that was both ineffective and entirely unnecessary. And when the insurance company finally did get back to me, it was to insert another unnecessary step. Only by complaining did I make them rethink the idea. And not only would the extra step serve no purpose, it would cost the insurance company money. Let me repeat: they wanted to pay more money to drag out my treatment.

Napoleon famously quipped: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” Maybe. But in the hard-eyed world of the insurance industry, it takes a special breed of incompetence to work that way. Presuming my case is not isolated, the predator-infested free market is supposed to make short work of slow, fat, diseased companies that simultaneously harm their customers and spend extra money to do it. So where are the sleek insurance companies ready to offer faster service at a cheaper cost (because they spend less by avoiding needless costs)?

Somehow, I suspect Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield is not doomed to extinction. Rather, it’s working just the way it should…by some perverse logic. Perhaps it costs more to hire people who can execute a more effective approval procedure than it does to live with an ineffective one. Perhaps apparently pointless trouble serves to discourage enough patients, or let them get well on their own, to make up for any expenses with the patients who go through with it. Perhaps some federal law—and federal laws do not live by the law of the free market jungle—makes this ineffective procedure the most cost-effective within legal bounds. I don’t know, nor am I likely to find out. But in the meantime, I’m getting a brush-up on my assertiveness training.

Posted by at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Designing good AI in a computer game is hard. Apart from a handful of cases where a simple optimal strategy is concealed beneath the game’s surface complexities, computers are notorious for poor performance in strategy games. They overreact to short-term challenges and opportunities, or overlook them. They fail to combine tactics in ways that magnify the results. They overlook exploitable loopholes. They blunder forward with a chosen strategy without fine-tuning it to their opponents’ behavior. They fall for the same tricks over and over.

Easy victories make for a bad game. But because good AI is hard, designers often decide to cheat. Computer players get free units, or cheaper goods. They peek at the map. Random numbers are skewed in their favor. Sometimes, they operate under entirely different rules. This preserves the challenge, but often at a sharp cost: it’s possible to catch the computer cheating.

Simple cheating, like lower costs or skewed battle results, is so easy to design that the option is often placed right in the startup menu. Choosing a high difficulty setting is an open invitation to give the computer opponent(s) a handicap, just as easy settings give the same artificial bonus to humans. That’s okay; players expect it, and can choose to play with or without.

Other kinds of cheating are decidedly not okay. Computer opponents in the original Warcraft, for example, did not gather and spend resources on new units, as the human player did. They went through the motions of collecting resources, but in fact simply received new units on a regular basis, independent of whether they had the gold to pay for it (or indeed, if they had collected excess resources). Destroying a computer opponent's economy was pointless. Colonization placed settlers in a race to declare independence from their respective mother countries, and make that declaration stick. A player needed at least 50% of his colonists to favor rebellion even to try; computers, possibly due to a programming error, needed only 50 rebels, a huge advantage in colonies upwards of 300 people, which could only be overcome by annexing awkward, mismanaged, unwanted colonies. Civilization would, among many, many other cheats, allow computer opponents to change production in a city under attack during an attacking player’s turn, to permit an emergency garrison to appear before the next turn’s renewed assault, something the human could not do on the defense. 1830 formed coalitions against the human(s), sabotaging human stock prices and line development even at the expense of losing—badly—while blatantly ignoring one another’s lucrative lines.

Catching a computer cheating takes a lot of the fun out of a game. If you lose to a computer, you may not be losing because you’re playing badly; you may be losing because the computer literally holds all the cards. And the dice. And the unexplored sections of the mapboard. In extreme cases, it may not just peek at the cards ahead of time, but actually draw whichever card it wants. As a corollary, when you’re winning, you must suspect it’s because the computer is letting you win. A hard-fought factory is the most satisfying outcome, and a cagey designer could program the game to give you just that, every time. Cheating makes losses frustrating, victories hollow.

Still, computer cheating is a fact of life, because smart computer opponents are so very difficult to create, and I can sympathize with designers who settle for cheating while seeking do better. Unfortunately, the fact that cheating is endemic to computer games has an unpleasant side effect, which is my thought for the day:

Even when I don’t catch a computer game cheating, I suspect it is.

That hurts the fun. Games are good mental exercise, at least during the learning curve between the point of learning to play and learning to play well. Ideally, trouble winning should be the mark of a good game, suggesting hidden depths of strategy and tactics to explore, and should inspire a flurry of interest. Instead, because cheating is so common, I first start looking for the ways computer opponents are taking unfair advantage. If I find them, I often stop playing entirely, because there’s small satisfaction in developing a strategy that should, by all rights, succeed, and there’s not much point in learning to get better at a rigged contest. And that’s a shame.

Posted by at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A friend recently recommended Black & White 2, sequel to the brilliant, ambitious, but ultimately flawed Black & White, which grafted a learning AI onto a standard RTS. In both games, you take the role of god of a primitive tribe, seeking to increase your divine power by increasing the worship you receive. You can do this with constructive miracles, which cause your worshippers to prosper and multiply, or destructive ones, which encourage them to worship out of fear. Either kind of miracle can convert neighboring tribes, if you’re sufficiently impressive, and the land’s appearance soon begins to reflect your divine or infernal nature, becoming a pastoral paradise or a hellish wasteland. This good-or-evil dilemma gives the game its name.

The real selling point of Black & White, however, was your animal avatar, or “pet.” A gigantic animal—ape, wolf, lion, ram, or many others—acted as a semi-independent extension of your will. It would learn from the slaps and tickles you bestowed which you behaviors you forbade and condoned, respectively. More interesting, it would also learn behavior directly from you. If you frequently cast rain miracles to benefit crops, for example, your pet would soon go bringing rain on its own initiative. Navigating the maze of training your pet, and watching its own unpredictable innovation could be fascinating. For example, I read one story of a player who taught his avatar to play catch with large boulders. Later, when a hostile god hurled a fireball at the player’s village, the avatar caught the fireball, then, putting two and two together, hurled it back at the enemy’s village, to good effect. Bravo!

But avatar behavior could also be incredibly frustrating, so frustrating that many players (including me) simply gave up. Many complained of being unable to break their pet of eating its own poo. I never got my pet past the hurdle of moving villagers to where he belonged. Encouraged to pick up villagers, my pet would pause, look up at me, look at the villager, look up at me, look at the villager, then eat the villager. No! Bad monkey! No biscuit! Correcting bad behavior beyond a certain complexity, once learned, was difficult. How could I punish my creature without causing him to learn not to pick up people at all? How could I reward it for picking up people without rewarding his man-eating tendencies? How could I train a pet to eat only farmers and not priests? When the creature learned new tricks on his own, training him to repeat or cease them was nigh impossible, because the player probably didn’t know why he was doing it in the first place.

Lionhead Studios trumpeted unpredictable pet behavior, even to the point of surprising the developers, as a triumph of AI. I soon began to suspect it was simply semi-random behavior, from which Lionhead culled the most intelligent-sounding cases.

But they learned from public comment. From what I’m told, this second incarnation of Black & White makes the training process transparent: as your creature acts, a window tells you what it is thinking: “I’m picking up a person,” or “I’m eating a person,” or “I’m eating a priest,” or “I’m hurling rocks at an enemy building.” Thus, you can know which behavior, precisely, you reward or punish. And when you tickle or slap your pet, a window again tells you what he pet thinks: “I am more inclined to throw people into the ocean,” or “I would rather die than eat my own poo.”

I’m ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it gets the player past some very frustrating problems. The game is better as a game, with clearer relationship between cause and effect, thus better rewards for good strategy. On the other hand, it pretty well destroys the illusion of artificial intelligence, and the wonder of interacting with your pet. The game is poorer as a toy, with poorer rewards for exploration of the engine for its own sake. If Black & White were at heart a strategy game, this would be a good thing. But the market is saturated with well-made strategy games. Black & White earned all its attention as a toy, a chance to play with an independent, if somewhat clumsy, thinker. I would like to see the sequel, but I can’t help the feeling that what magic the original had will be gone.

Posted by at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Easter candies are on the shelves, as they have been since February. Other Easter products, like baskets and bunny ears, appeared more recently, but, judging by their share of the shelf space, nobody shows much interest in them. Despite the egg dying kits, Easter remains a church holiday, unlike Christmas. Still, everyone I know, including atheists, Unitarians, and Jews, still marks Easter with a candy egg, or even a marshmallow peep.

Because even when it isn’t our holiday, we like to mark passing holidays for the sheer pleasure of the ritual itself. At least I do, and I doubt I’m alone. This was the first year that Eileene and I missed St. Patrick’s Day, because we were busy showing my parents around New York area restaurants. Neither of us is Irish. We still had a corned beef brisket the following Monday, though it wasn’t the same.

Eileene and I don’t celebrate everyone’s holiday, of course, for a few reasons. For one thing, there’s only so much time in the year, and holidays overlap. We’re also ignorant of many holidays. I know of Yom Kippur, for example, but I don’t know about it: what one traditionally wears, eats, and so on. Still, there’s no reason in principle why we shouldn’t enjoy it as we do Chinese New Year, in a thoroughly secular and americanized fashion, and with an eye to the food.

But the real reason, of course, is that we didn’t celebrate those other holidays as kids. We like doing the ones we grew up with, precisely because they’re the ones we grew up with. It keeps us in touch, however distantly, with childhood and family.

Posted by at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)