Mark Schaller

Video game music nostalgia

2004-04-22T22:50:02Z

Mmmm, ya gotta browse to minibosses.com to check out some free music downloads. I can't say that the music is exactly what you've been missing, but to be reminded of a time when taking down Dr. Wiley's Skull Castle was the greatest of your concerns is always worthwhile.

anakanemison @ 2004-02-18T01:19:00

2004-02-18T06:21:48Z

Yeeha! I'm really looking forward to GenCon! Matthew, and Reid, and Annamarie! I must study for an exam, but I'll post with more specific details of my excitement soon!

anakanemison @ 2004-02-17T01:22:00

2004-02-17T06:26:40Z

Oi! Forgot! GenCon is now accepting registrations! It's this August, in Indianapolis, from the 19th to the 22nd. Tom Kanger and I will be going for sure, and with a few others I suspect. It's lots of fun, and y'all should come.

Specifically, especially, Reid--is there any chance we could convince you to join us in a weekend of gaming goodness?

anakanemison @ 2004-02-17T01:00:00

2004-02-17T06:22:01Z

Judging from what's on the web, everyone who owns a digital camera has become an amateur photographer, and everyone who owns a webcam has become an exhibitionist. I own one of each... hmm...

I never understood the webcam thing. Maybe it was the IM program I had, but it always seemed to be more of a pain than a pleasure. The room has to be well lit, and you need a lot of bandwidth, and the picture quality wasn't very good, and it was choppy. Plus, except for some unusual circumstances, you had to make sure you weren't in a state of undress while chatting, something that (I'm afraid to admit) happens pretty frequently, late at night.

They've sold millions of them. Doesn't it boggle the mind, how much smut we've collectively produced?

(And if anyone really wanted to see me naked, they'd ask for it, right?)

In other news, I thought about writing some stuff on statistical natural language processing, but it ended up being indefensible crap, so I deleted it.

The other garden

2004-02-16T08:21:03Z

Let's say you've moved back to the town you grew up in. Your new house is nicer than your parents' was; it has a big backyard for your growing dog and whatever. But your old house, or where your old house was, had a garden you remembered being pretty, and you liked spending time there while getting taller, and now, it's filled with litter from the freeway, and the last owners really let the place go, and that tree's all dead now, in ways that make you wish you could uproot it and plant another one, like you remember. If you could, you would--of course, you've got no time to do anything, and you have to pay for dog food at least, instead of a tree, and all you've done is slowly drive by and feel crappy that the owners, whoever they are, aren't anything like your parents aged 33 and 36. So, in your head, you do all the things that you can't do, because imagining is easier than moving atoms.

My *point* is, moving bits isn't harder than imagining at all, and I'd like to move back to the town I know.

A note to self, made public for the sake of kicks and giggles

2003-06-27T23:17:05Z

I was reading Zwaan and Radvansky’s Situation Models in Language Comprehension and Memory, and it struck me as surprising, by the fourth page and by the section named Not All Language Processing Tasks Require Situation Models, that it was strange that experimental psychologists placed so much weight on the reliability of the time-to-respond metric that I found in the paper so often. It seemed like it perhaps was the only metric available to them. (When all you have is a hammer....) I tried to think of why it was useful, and what the metric really corresponded to. The presumptions underlying the use of delay as a metric seem to be, I’d guess, that it takes more time to think about something more disconnected with what was on the mind before. A person reads a sentence on topic T. They then answer a question Q after a delay of t seconds. If they are asked question Q’ instead, then the delay is t’ seconds. If t < t’, then question Q is related to topic T more than question Q’ is.

What does this have to do with GP (genetic programming)? Well, one of the questions we’ve been trying to answer for a while is: “How can the GP decompose a complex problem into sub-problems?” This is an important question to ask because if we could answer it properly, then we could evolve behaviors to solve sub-problems instead of the whole problem, which would reduce the time to evolve solutions, and also reduce the complexity of the whole solution.

One idea was to statistically analyze game states and the probability of moving from any particular game state to a different game state. This could be implemented recursively to break down game states further; any game state (S) which leads to multiple other game states (D) could be broken down by analyzing which sub-states of (S) are more likely to lead to one of the game states in (D) than another.

But another way of dividing up a game state could be to propose a division, execute GP on each state, and consider the division useful if the GP is found to evolve successful behaviors more rapidly on one than on the other. The GP would of course have to take into consideration its own margins of error in such a calculation, but this is a second idea... Consequently, there are surely a great number of conceivable ways to automate the decomposition of complex problems!

Are you a bright?

2003-06-25T22:57:15Z

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,981412,00.html

Who out there is willing to come out of the (not closet, but something .. ?) and proclaim that you're a bright? I'm riding along the edge of brightness.

Makin' the meme, pushin' the meme...

An email, sent to me by one of my bosses. Dude.

2003-06-25T22:53:33Z

No, I'm not kidding. I talked to her (I forget if her title is CTO or Chief Scientist or something like that) at the meeting in Irvine and told her we'd send her a demo as soon as we had it running.

>
>The Google CTO? You're kidding, right?
>
>-mark
>

>>Any progress? Anything you need help with? Whatever happened to the weekly updates? ;-)
>>The Google CTO is waiting... ;-)

Erp

2003-06-19T22:43:51Z

Some scary email dialogue with my boss:

I say: "The second sub-task is the major one, and it is somewhat ongoing: implementing a [...] . Assuming I [...], this task should consume between 120 to 160 hours."

He says: "if you have not already started on this task, lets talk about it. It could be more beneficial if you did the same thing, but focused on [...] since that's what we'll be working with next FY."

Note that the removed content protects the research interests of Sandia. I can't much elaborate on that. However, it is important to also consider that the subject matter my boss would like me to do the same thing with, but focus on instead, is completely unrelated to the work I had intended to do.

Somewhere, I can hear Jesus laughing.

Other things I will miss about Sandia once I'm gone

2003-06-19T01:58:05Z

Arriving to work and proving my identity to a machine-gun-carrying guard at the gate.

Getting out of my car and realizing that someone has double-parked their goddamn huge tank in front of my office building.

. . .

No, really. There was a tank sitting in front of our building's "No Parking" sign today. Who will ticket it, I wonder? It was still there when I went home.

Daily bursts of radiation from my friendly neighborhood fusion researchers.

$3.00 burritos the size of a adult's head.

Working with people who occasionally say, "Yeah, it's a brute-force method, but that'll just make the hardware guys happier that their supercomputer is making all the difference."

Saying to myself, "This would take a hundred days to run on a normal computer. In that case, I'll just put it on the CPlant and look at the results tomorrow."

Nauseatingly gratuitous American flags bloody everywhere.

Fighter jets flying overhead a dozen times a day.

Receiving my security clearance two months after moving out of Albuquerque... *sniff* It's like a tradition...

anakanemison @ 2003-06-18T03:29:00

2003-06-18T09:27:51Z

Fuck.

It's 3:30 AM and I'm awake--wide awake. The kind of awake you'd like to feel at 10:00 AM.

This means that the chance of me waking up to my alarm at 7 AM is precisely zilch.

I thought the all-nighter was something I would leave behind once out of school. Happily leave behind, I might add.

Aggravation.

Delenn, part 5 of ? (gotta finish it soon)

2003-06-15T23:25:14Z

[...]

Delenn, continued.

For twenty years, the castle guards told Delenn that she was "too important to leave the castle. Stay inside, where it is safe." Her parents were very old, and very wise, speaking the language of the spirits, and having left behind the language of people. They lived in the castle, but Delenn did not see them, since the castle had grown so large.

Delenn was a friend to everybody, and helped everybody, but she was not happy. She had never been to the greatest tree in the world, nor had she fought an army of monsters, nor had she read all the books in any library, not to mention any library that had books that never ended. One morning, while watching the sun rise and paint its warm colors on her castle walls, Delenn decided that something had to be done.

She called out to all the people who lived in her country, saying, "There will be a contest for all my people! The fastest runner in the land will be chosen. May he or she who is the fastest of all be at the gates of my castle tomorrow morning, and they will receive a great reward." The people heard her call, but all knew that they could not possibly win--all, that is, except for four women, who ran to Delenn's castle and waited.

The next morning, Delenn saw the four runners in her throne room, and all her woke up early to attend the meeting. The first runner approached Delenn, and said, "I have run here from the northern border of your kingdom, Delenn, and not one of all the forests between my house and yours kept me from meeting you this morning."

The second runner approached Delenn, and said, "I have run here from the eastern border of your kingdom, Delenn, and not one of all the cities between my house and yours kept me from meeting you this morning."

The third runner approached Delenn, and said, "I have run here from the western border of your kingdom, Delenn, and not one of all the deserts between my house and yours kept me from meeting you this morning."

The fourth, and final, runner approached Delenn, and said, "I have run here from the southern border of your kingdom, Delenn. I passed through forests and cities and deserts in order to meet you this morning, too. And while my friends here may be faster than I am, I can draw you the shape of every tree I saw, tell you the name of every person I met, and sing you the song of every desert wind I felt, to your satisfaction. Because of all that I experienced on my journey, I would be as happy now if you turned me away as I would be if you announced me the winner."

Delenn smiled at the fourth runner, and announced her the winner.

[probably half done; i needta write the end... dunno how tho]

anakanemison @ 2003-06-14T12:49:00

2003-06-14T18:50:52Z

Happy graduation day, friends! I love you guys. I hope it's a wonderful day for each of you.

Boom

2003-06-10T20:45:58Z

A Croatian woman, probably a post-doc, just moved into my office at work. (My office has five unused desks, so I'll probably be getting more as the summer students start arriving.) She just experienced her first Z-pinch quake, and was understandably surprised.

After all, it's not every day that a gigantic device designed to research fusion reactions sets off a chain reaction that consumes, in one millionth of a second, as much power as the rest of the world, and causes the earth itself to jump!

...unless you're working here at Sandia.

Day off with pay...

2003-05-26T04:59:22Z

...are the four most wonderful words in the English language. (When properly used.)

Oh, puh-leeeze

2003-05-23T23:01:18Z

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1091802,00.asp

Oh, lordy. Some people have over-active imaginations. Plus, this is hardly the greatest introduction to GP that I've ever seen. Anyway, I just thought I'd throw this out, since I've been rather quiet recently. Work is beating me, beating me, beating me down.

Hope you're all well!

Request

2003-05-18T02:42:15Z

Does anyone know any females who are going to Ann Arbor in the fall for either work or graduate school? A girl and I are looking for a third roommate for an apartment.

The other girl is Sharada, Evan Ho's girlfriend. He's a senior at K college, and a long-time friend of mine. He is going to Ann Arbor to work, but has already obligated himself through a lease agreement. Anyway, Sharada's family doesn't think it would be that hot of an idea for the two of them to live together.

Sharada's family would feel more comfortable with the arrangement if the three roommates were FFM, which is why we're asking about females who are looking for a place to live.

Unfortunately, I'm stuck way out in NM, and Sharada's in NY, so we're kinda powerless to find people on our own. So, I'm asking for help! Can anyone help?

Thanks!

Delenn, part 4 of ?

2003-05-18T02:35:08Z

[...]

Delenn, continued.

"When I was a young boy, I saw my parents die of the plague. My mother had been the most beautiful woman in all the world, and my father had been the most entertaining man. Their deaths were terrible for me. I saw my mother lose her grace and her heart, and she passed away, a shadow of who she had been. My father grew slow and clumsy, and could not bring together two of his previously agile fingers, nor two of his previously kind words. When they were gone, I decided that I could not live happily until I had found something as beautiful and fascinating as my mother and father had been. So, I started at your castle, and walked south.

"What I came upon, in one of the most unlikely places of all, was something so beautiful and fascinating, that I became a storyteller in order to tell others about it. In a way, it was more tremendous than the largest tree in the world, more dangerous than an army of monsters, and more precious than anything that has ever been written in a book."

"So," Delenn asked, impatient, and with a growing ruffle in her brow, "what did you find?"

The storyteller smiled deeply, and it touched his eyes. "Nothing that I can say aloud will help you understand, Delenn. Perhaps one day, you will travel south of your castle, and find it too."

The night was old, and Delenn's family was falling asleep. Uncles were passed out in the bushes, and grandmothers were asleep, with their aged heads resting on each other's shoulders. The storyteller stood up to go, and finding Delenn's parents asleep on a hill, made his way to the gates of the castle. After a moment of thinking, Delenn chased after him--but he was already gone, and the castle guards told her not to leave the castle, saying, "No, Delenn, you are too important to leave the castle. Stay inside, where it is safe."

[Not done yet...]

I swear, I came upon this page during the normal course of my workday

2003-05-15T22:54:21Z

People who are so skilled at killing time that they should be paid for it:

http://www.spinnoff.com/swhc/FF-Phaser.html

Freakin' funny. Laugh.

Data mining notes to self (and other interested parties)

2003-05-13T21:13:02Z

Investigate web pages:

(Data mining techniques overview)
http://www.thearling.com/text/dmtechniques/dmtechniques.htm

(Main page of above site:)
http://www.thearling.com/index.htm

Thanks, folks!

2003-05-13T19:29:46Z

Hi everybody! Thanks for letting me hang out with all of you for the weekend! I had a great time, and while the weekend wasn't what I would call restful, it was definitely wonderful. I hope that the next few weeks, for those of you still at K, are exciting and memorable. For the rest of you, have a great summer!

Seems kinda like a goodbye, eh? Well, I'm not going anywhere. *^_^* More Delenn to come, and some nifty work details, hopefully later in the day.

Delenn, part 3 of ?

2003-05-06T06:12:57Z

[...]

Delenn, continued.

"A long time ago, a librarian finished reading 'Zythia and the zoriffic Zsansabar', and realized he had read every book he had ever seen. He was so depressed that he decided that he would walk to the end of the world, and throw himself into the stars. So, he walked west from your castle for a hundred years, and asked the stars every night to lead him to the world's edge so that he might die. After walking for a hundred years, he found himself in a tremendous desert. (There he saw a thing, far in the distance, but that thing is of no matter.)

"When he thought he would never see another thing besides sand (and, of course, the other thing), he came upon a tremendous building the size of a mountain, with tremendous doors. Naturally curious, he pulled the doors open, slowly, and what he saw made him happy for the first time in a century-"

Delenn exclaimed, "It was a library, wasn't it?"

"-yes, Delenn, it was! A library unlike any library the librarian had ever seen before, or read about! There were more books on one shelf of one bookcase than he had ever read. So the librarian sat down, and began reading. He read for a thousand years, and found, near the end, the book 'Zythia and the zoriffic Zsansabar', and since he didn't like it the first time he read it, and seeing it meant he was at the end, he grew sad again. He put the book away, turned towards the doors, and began to walk out. But before he left, his gaze happened upon a small book that he hadn't seen before, a book that had fallen between the bookcases, a book with a very bizarre title, 'omega'.

He picked up the book, opened it up to begin reading, and walked through the doorway. Sure enough, that small book had more pages in it than the librarian could count, and as he read, he walked, and he walked all the way back to your castle's west wall before realizing he was home! He was so happy to have found such an incredible book, he went back to his library, and continued reading. To this day, he is still reading 'omega', and he is very happy, because he will never be done."

Delenn's eyes had grown to twice their normal size, and he hurriedly asked, "What is south of my castle? There must be something incredible there!"

The storyteller grinned, and said, "Yes, Delenn, there certainly is!" But then the storyteller's face fell.

[More to come...]

Delenn, part 2 of ?

2003-05-05T07:19:28Z

[...]

Delenn, continued.

"One time, long ago, there was a warrior who decided that he would find the end of the world. He walked east from your castle, carrying a sword bigger than any other sword in the world. The warrior walked for a hundred years, stopping at every city along the way. In each city, he went to every tavern--in every tavern, he ate every bowl of food, and drank every drop of ale! All the food, and all the ale, eventually made him big like a giant, and the ground would shake wherever he walked. Finally, at the end of a hundred years of travel, he came to the borders of our land--and there he stood astonished at what he saw: a field full of monsters!

"Even as large as the warrior was, the monsters were larger, and they were ferocious. Many had teeth the size of spears, and claws like scythes. The monsters attacked the warrior, and they fought for an entire year, sweating in the summer months, and shivering throughout winter. At the end, despite that there were so many monsters, the warrior won. However, the battle had made him tired, and so he decided to walk home. It took him a hundred years to get home, as tired as he was, but he was happy, despite having not reached the end of the world, but because he had fought and killed more monsters than anyone else ever had."

Delenn knew her cardinal directions, and knew that the story had to be only half finished. She pleaded with the storyteller to keep telling his story, and he did.

[More to follow.]

X-men 2

2003-05-05T07:16:45Z

We just saw X-men 2 today. I thought it was quite good, although I missed the kind of memorable and surprising scenes we were given in the original, such as Magneto's experience with his parents at the concentration camp, and the intimate exchanges between Wolvie and Rogue. The first movie might have been a little rough in its entirety, but I wonder what scenes from the second, if any, reached as high a level as those.

(Adding extra ambiguity for the people who haven't seen it yet:)

All I can think of is the scene depicting the family they stayed with and left, and the last shot, with the three of them behind the window. I thought that symbolized a great deal about our fear of the unknown.

I wished there was more "mutant = terrorist" in the movie, though, since I love any opportunity to be critical of our terror-happy lifestyle. Remember your duct tape and plastic, kiddies. They'll protect you from the evil mutants.

1 AM blues

2003-05-05T07:07:10Z

Man, I feel so tightly wound up. People are supposed to have figured out, by the time they're twenty, how to manage themselves in these kinds of situations, right? Unfortunately, my list of calming methods is pretty short:

1) Go for a walk. Problem: it's 1 AM, and in Albuquerque, walking alone is inviting trouble.

2) Sit outside. Problem: it's 1 AM, and it's really cold out, and there isn't anywhere to sit, and the primary calming mechanism is watching life pass by, and life isn't passing by anything at 1 AM; it's sleeping somewhere.

3) Talk to people. Problem: it's 1 AM, and no one here is up. And it's even later in the east, and anyway, talking on IM is frustrating, and phone conversations aren't as good as the real thing. But, given all that, who is there to talk to here? My grandpa? My mom? There are some conversations that you can't really have with family, and I haven't found anyone here to really talk to. (I'd say, "yet", but I'm not too optimistic.)

This is a major problem, since I most often feel this way at 1 AM.

Maybe if I just arranged to always be asleep at 1 AM, the problem would go away! But then my new problem, how to fall asleep earlier at night, could be even more challenging than this one.

Um, anyway. I'm sure I'm capable of scintillating posts; this one just doesn't happen to be one, and y'all will just have to live. Take care, folks.