Help! I need somebody (to play Pacman)

Hello all friends of Ben's PhD!


I'd like to invite you to take part in an experiment being run as part of my PhD project, entitled Player Profiling & Modelling for Adaptive Artificial Intelligence in Computer and Video Games. This experiment aims to address the thorny problem of building into a game, an A.I. that can reason about the player's preferences for the kind of experience they will have.
It involves two parts - gathering of data on player habits, and building an automated modeller based on such data.

The first step is where I need your help - to download and play my Pacman implementation; and complete an online survey that will determine the type of player you are (adapted from the original donated courtesy of Chris Bateman and iHobo, many thanks).
All you need do, is proceed to my Pacman web page and follow the instructions!
Also, please please forward this mail on to as many people as you think may be interested in playing a free casual game, or advancing the field of game play research (by a tiny amount!).

If you take part, your privacy is completely assured and you'll be enveloped by the warm rosy glow of helping mankind (have better games of Pacman)...
Remember, this is for posterity, so, be honest...


Many thanks!

What precisely is the point, Mr God? : Cassus Belli

I've rambled recently on about Dawkins and all that jazz, so I want to wrap that up by rambling a bit on a more general take on argumentation and God.

Lately, we've seen over here how action as born of speech forms our highest expression, to wit: "The future of mankind depends on our capacity to exercise this thought, to use it as the foundation for speech, by which to determine the action we should take."

Thought must be the foundation of communication, thus speech, thus the formal and/or inter-personal action that we take (which must be nearly all action, we are a social species after all - action that has no effect on anything outside the actor can hardly be considered worth accounting). So I've been told that speech/communication serves as a guide for how we take action, but I as see it, speech also serves a facilitator of action because without explaining our actions, documenting them, translating our intent for them, we circumscribe our ability to act by failing to be cooperative. This is why the public forum, the ear of the masses, is so important. Power comes from people, the power to act and act upon.

But as I said in the previously (post on Dawkins) its hard to get everyone to listen. How do you communicate about your actions in broadcast? Context is vital to communication, and incredibly difficult to convey. Its inherently hard to even define context, just look at the research on ubiquitous computing, where context is everything.

We need big ideas to anchor our little lives - massive, all encompassing concepts that change little with time, distance, frequency of repetition (chinese whispers). All communication requires analogy since people cannot share what is in their heads directly (is my colour green the same as your colour green?). Analogy requires reference points or measures with associated plausibility or truth-value, since without reference to source knowledge the analogy reverts to unsupported assertion (is my 'big as a house' the same as your 'big as a house'? Probably not, I live in a flat :D BUT seriously, one needs *at least* knowledge of the margins for variability).

In context of the post title, can you see where I'm going with this? High Rennaissance art had a very limited subject range, but vast variety of scenes, models and constant revolution in execution. Still, everyone knew what was being talked about when they saw a woman with a babe in arms, whether she's sitting on a throne or on some rocks by the sea.

In truth, it is no small thing to establish immutable truths (see what I did there? :D ). We can, of course, say there is no big 'T' truth. So that rules out universal points of agreement - one can always deny someone elses truth, if necessary from a solipsist standpoint. But still, the story doesn't end there - because we must avoid that very solipsist standpoint in order to maintain functional existence. Solipsism is an absolute stance - there are no half-measures. And it also seems rather untenable to me - if it is true that only my own thoughts exist, then I can have no relationship with anything else and must conclude that the thoughts themselves are quite of suspect existence - why are they occurring if there is nothing to think about? Oblivion beckons. If there is anything to think about,that's a point of reference outside oneself, which is not true solipsism and forces one to admit that the rest might as well exist as well.
From another viewpoint, if there is no objective truth, how can one dismiss anything as not being true since one has no grounds for comparative judgment?

My point is - there is no big 'T' truth, since we only exist in relation to anything else through application of our consciousness, which is an approximation model at best. So what possible use can one find for the truth concept? Well one can apply it as a working guide - with an inherent plausibility - to whatever can be demonstrated to offer a repeatable framework for one's consciousness model.
Then all truth is relative, relative to the degree to which one can personally understand it (as demonstrated), otherwise one is taking it on faith. For instance, I personally believe that Newtonian mechanics hold true, because (for example) when I run into a wall, I hit it and it hits me back equally hard. Once I can stand up and think again, I don't have to think very hard about the principle of the Third Law to see that it described the actions of the model that I call my perception/memory of the reality of what just happened, namely, running into the wall (I have done similar, alcohol was involved :D). In fact, I don't think about it at all, but that's because the Third Law was encountered years ago in school and assimilated once reason was satisfied that evidence supported it.
It doesn't have to be held true - in fact, this is a very rough approximation model indeed, as Newton stated the third law within a world-view that assumed instantaneous action at a distance between material particles. The wall doesn't really effect an equal force on me in the instant I hit it - it's more like a wave effect of forces on particles that the wall and I are composed of. In modern physics, action at a distance has been completely eliminated, except for subtle effects involving quantum entanglement. But it is a close enough approximation model - it is true enough - that it suffices for communication of related concepts in the everyday.

The degree of faith that one has in the model's universality determines its utility as a tool for communication. I suppose that is one reason why God(s) is(are) so popular, and so divisive - when you believe in the absolute, it makes the reference point absolutely clear; but if you realise that another's God reference has a different value, nothing can be communicated that depends on these reference points. Then it seems that historically the usual reaction is: one of you has to go!

**************************************
To paraphrase Huizinga, 'Its not the cheater who ruins the game, but the player who refuses to recognise the rules...'
This applies to what we're saying here with the (I think) relatively recent emergence of atheism as a tenable and respectable metaphysical position. And it's not atheism in the strict sense of the definition, since people have been denying each other's gods forever. It is rather, when someone stands aside from the metaphysical bedrock of the argument, and calls it scotch mist, that the communication really breaks down. Now the game is not even being admitted on its own terms!
It must (have) look(ed), to those who have true faith, kind of like Jack Thompson looks to game developers:
"You're developing mass-murder training tools!"
"No we're not, we're just entertaining people?"

Except the atheists would be saying
"You're mass murdering delusional zealots!"
"No, we're just saving people's souls"

And that is essentially where my ramblings are leading - atheism poses the unique threat to established religion of making it socially acceptable to do away with communication references to the absolutes that the religions deal with. Perhaps this is scientists, not priests/sages/soothsayers, are now the holders of all human wisdom and advisors to the powerful.
This shouldn't bother the faithful if they are not great espousers of organised religion, but it seems to anyway, perhaps because everyone wants to cheer for their team. Likewise, religion should never have been a threat to the pursuit of scientific knowledge, but perhaps its unsurprising that it has become so - because ever since quantum physics, science has not proven all that satisfactory in replacing religion with a clear and unchanging absolute reference framework.
And as the 'Truth' shifts about, communication becomes more ephemeral and people must adapt. Some people, they just don't like to adapt!

Bastards. Bastard Sons of a 1000 Maniacs

I was spammed. I feel so...dirty!
I worked as a spam filter technician a few years ago, so I know when it's happened. 140 bastard comments from bastard RX peddlers. Not too hard to miss :D

Thus, word verification is now on. Sorry folks.

Fucking spammers. I hope all the hypochondriacs die. Vitun apara. Va fanculo. Voi helleti, tvoyu mat, pog mo thoin, merde, cazzo, mingia, puta madre ...

What precisely is the point, Mr God?

[Above, Dawkins on the warpath again. I believe he's actually licenced to kill by HRM decree]

Having recently finished reading Mr. Dawkin's highly controversial anti-religious rant, the God Delusion, I'd like to chime in with a kind of review cum explication of my own views. These are probably aetheist/humanist, but lean away from Dawkin's antipathy to God without leaning toward religion. I think I'm more interested in the process of thinking about it than in the answers anyway, but this may be a function of my youth, and comparative distance from thoughts of death (by aging). No matter the person, I think mortality is a shadow over all thought. Even for the aestheist who professes to be reconciled/resigned to death without afterlife. It would be interesting to see if the positive correlation between education and aetheism is prefaced in life by a correlation between ambition to suceed and high educational achievement. The point being, people may want to be remembered in this life because they believe there will be no next one. Can't imagine how you'd go about designing such an experiment though.
Enough tangential rambling - on with the topical rambling.

Dawkins' hypothesis seems to be that the probability of a big G god's existence is so slight that faith in that probability is irrational and unproductive. Then he argues that since belief has so little demonstrable worth, and the negative consequences of religion are so great, the entire enterprise should be done away with. There's a good bit more to the book (although editing his personal anecdotes would still cut it in half) - but that is the gist as I understood it. To paraphrase:
'Faith in God is inherently worthless, is largely a consequence of psychological conditioning, and collectively has great negative consequences and few positive ones that would not be occurring without it.'
I don't recall the argumentation addressing the corollary of the last point - that religion's negative consequences might also be occurring without religion. That's an aside though.

Can we ask an important question - what is the point of this kind of attack? Surely people of a religious bent will not be 'converted' to atheism by a single polemic? Dawkins invokes the demonstrably tiny probability of a creator god, as though the tiny probability were not what seekers of religious truth were seeking in the first place (Things that are rather self-evident don't really require faith)! And as for those who might be persuaded, Dawkins is so acerbic, impolite and unrelenting in his attack on religions that those on the fence must be more likely to remain there than come to his side. They may well have been on the fence because they disliked religious fanaticism (now I can't compare atheist fervour with religious fanatics, but still...) so it's surely a turn off for such moderates. Especially when he says he has utmost contempt for agnostics!

But no. Despite all this, it is worth saying a lot of what he says. Much of it is one-sided, but much is also true. Some has not been widely publicised before. The logic is nice in places, particularly where he discusses the God hypothesis. Of course, he does nothing to demonstrate that one shouldn't believe in a creator God on grounds of the intrinsic lack of logic in the hypothesis, for it is a minority indeed that cares if its belief(!) system is validated by logic - mostly logicians and mathematicians, I would guess.
Still, we need the like of Dawkins. The scarier the Creationists etc get, the scarier we need someone to hold the other corner. Nobody listens to nice people. They listen to lots of people, and crowds are always easier swayed when you're loud and scary. The politicised Christians in the U.S. are particularly scary right now, and having angry uncompromising people like Dawkins tells the rest of America that they can hold their own views and get away with it. They don't need to agree with him, just be inspired to independence of thought. Not many tend to do that on their own. When something threatens one in a basic and fundamental way, we can either be Chamberlain or we can be Churchill.

To carry the analogy, taking the path of most resistance forces one immediately into conflict. The appeasement route looks like initially like live and let live, but how far can this go? It cannot be thought of as resolution, since neither opposing side is likely to abandon their mutually inimical stances by a process of entropy. Depending on the overlap of their spheres of concern, and their proximity, it would seem inevitable that the expansionism inherent in human nature is going to force the issue sooner or later.

So, whether by this eventual process, or if one first chooses the path of most resistance, one naturally comes straightway right against the other fellows beliefs, which he cannot abandon, which in fact he may have been hoping to foist onto you. What to do? However you cut it, believing strongly or having interests in something - anything - seems to have the potential to force you into a situation of conflict. If what Dawkins is doing is recognising this and drawing up his battle, I do not find myself inclined to fault him too greatly for it.

Goals

"A common theme prompts again at me/
I wonder what could the answer be/
Is it forwards I'm going or back/
Or is it moving wallpaper I'm looking at?"

I like the question of the validity of time as a frame of reference, but it becomes especially interesting if you shift perspective on your own life (in that kind of way you can shift your eye's focus from the close to the far away and for a second mothing makes any sense to your brain). Cease from looking at it as a major linear event interspersed with minor day-to-day diversions of attention. Think about your life as those diversions, with some moving wallpaper in the background. It's just as valid, if you accept that, for most people, most of life is filled with small diversions.

I tell you, it's one certain way to escape the self-indulgent attitude of the tragedian, or the socially-responsible, or the ambitious. At least for the length of time it takes your eyes to re-focus.

Another perspective on nihilism

Perhaps believing that we cannot know, or convey, the Truth to others, nor hope to have them believe something congruent to our beliefs, is not such a bad thing.

Nihilism: "Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief."

Can we imagine a perspective where we want to throw the baby out with the bath water?


Use of the above image is totally unpermitted - if anybody has a problem with that, please go read the rest of the blog while you're here. Then...unleash hell!

Adam Curtis

Pictured is not Adam Curtis, but R.D.Laing, whose work I believe could be appropriate reading these days. Curtis thinks so too, I'd say. He features many such slightly obscure but influential thinkers of the 20th century in his BBC documentaries on the state of the world today, and how it got here. A riposte to the charge of the dumbing down of TV (too little too late, of course).

In any case, the point of the post is just to highlight the benefit of watching Adam Curtis' documentaries 'The Power of Nightmares', 'The Century of the Self' and 'The Trap'; all of which you can find on google video here.

An insightful man, with an excellent speaking voice. Perhaps his theses would find it harder going in dialectic rather than broadcast form. Yet still even if there are points to disagree on, he forces you to reach for the counter-arguments, to think and that is a rare thing in television (even if it's not television I'm advocating you watch it on, the point applies).

Better than sitting down to another run of Coronation Street, I would say.

Revolution in the Third Age

I read this article recently, bringing me a little up to speed on the tone and mood in Zimbabwe right now which concerns me mainly because my beautiful ex-pat Zimbabwean friend is visiting her family there right now. Despite the non-occurrence of significant events, and negativity of the situation in general, the author ends on a hopeful note:

"I remembered Arthur Hugh Clough's "Say not the struggle naught availeth:

"For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main."

Despite all the fear and depression in Zimbabwe today, I sense that the tide of popular opinion is silently flooding in and that this dreadful regime will find itself overwhelmed from within.

David Coltart is the shadow minister of justice in Zimbabwe's Parliament and a member of the Movement for Democratic Change. He has been a human rights lawyer there since 1983."

Personally, I'm looking at this from the perspective of socio-political theory, since I have never been to Zim and have no on-the-ground experience of the place. From that perspective my thoughts are largely in line with this article, in that we are talking about a second order implied dictatorship. History has shown this kind of establishment is doomed to instability and thereafter some failure state, often brought about through the will of the people. The people probably must be their own saviours here, as few outside influences or economic factors seem to apply. Perhaps Brown’s recent position offers some hope of an guardian angel. Still, I would prefer to place my faith with the Zimbabweans.

Indeed, during the recent economic trouble, I have been told that the ordinances of the government amounted to little more than a comparison baseline for the price-fixers of the black market, where the bulk of trading was done. Reports of food and supply shortages were, I was informed, greatly exaggerated. Walk into a local grocery store, and the shelves were bare, white, cleaned out. Be a pretty local girl though, and have the shopboys offer you whatever you need. Connections, not power, was what counted. The people will have their way - the main surges in.

My motive for opening with Zimbabwe was not really to bring that issue to the table. I want it instead to serve to provoke thought on this – if it were necessary, what strategy would you use to effect some change of regime in our own society? The issue that Zimbabwe raises for me is, what constitutes 'the main' in the third order society of the west? Is it any longer possible to say what the tide of social change represents, never mind where it is flowing?
What would one be fighting for if the moral foundation on which one justified one's struggle was in fact the rhetoric of another age, another system long obsolete, and co-opted by the ideas and social structures whose birth-pangs killed what one thinks of as one's civilisation?
There is supposedly a clear exposition of this uncertainty, loss of bearings, in John Berger's new book Hold Everything Dear. I've only managed to read the review, but it suggested to me a good place to get a synopsis of the base, the material outcomes of the acting in this our third order society. However, one needs to go further to hypothesise about the motivations of society's actors, including ourselves - the individual and his/her collusive death-denial*. While one can't deny the feeling that we have moved beyond the enlightened despotism of the Leviathan - the necessary tyranny of government-controlled labour market societies - what can one say for certain about the norms that bind us now?
To understand one's role in society as a producer of worth in a labour market is to ascribe oneself a proactive role in a collusive market economy, which role seems for the most part to be a great illusion. I have maintained that such an illusion is foisted upon the citizenry of the systems of economic and political governance, by those actual systems. This is a claim unsupported by evidence and highly opinionated (somewhat supported by opinion here), but at the core is the idea, I will even say the fact, that society by definition is the very anti-thesis of personal freedom. We must constrain and restrict ourselves in order to live with other people (and of course, at heart this is a good thing). In the modern world, as the definitions of our societies become ever more blurred, should we not ask ‘wherefore do the constraints and restrictions that affect us spring’? What is their source, their process and their goal? Can we ever know, from our lowly individual perspectives?

Aside : : I won’t deny it is possible for a small number to control their own destiny, but for the most part the great societal forces that shape our lives seem so immutable – for example, so many demonstrate against globalisation, but change nothing. Why is this? And what effect does it have on our actions?

By control of destiny, I don’t mean those starred subjects of history and celebrity. Ben Cousins (go here and scroll down to the fourth article "Myths of Process and a Nonlinear View of History") illustrates rather nicely how this is a misapprehension of the nature of the achievements of these kinds of titans of history of modern society. What I mean rather is simply people who maximise a natural potential, irrespective of societal influences rather than because of them.

To get back on track, where do the forces that move our everyday lives originate, and how do they grow to have such irrefutable power? I think this quote (even though it was really addressing another topic) gives a clue “We’ve implemented these systems in the first place, [because] we’re trying to ensure we can experience desirable human contact while minimizing harmful contact.”
We built the systems ourselves. Of course we did, they’re not spontaneously arising entities (unless you’re a Creationist). I suggest that even though we created them, these systems are now well beyond our control.

ManBitesBlog points out, “human beings have this tendency to strongly identify each other based upon our affiliations–our tribal affiliations... But when the tribe is thousands, millions, of people large and those individuals that make up the tribe are scattered across the globe, each one a member of a culture with different traditions, different needs, different available resources, is it still appropriate to consider the larger system a composite of the will of the individuals within the system? Or to ascribe the properties and traits of the system to an individual whose efforts sustain it?”

The problem in our third order society seems to me to be then, that all the goals of all the individuals who might side with some idea or another, some formal social way of life, will be drivers of social change in directions that are neither mappable nor static. So everyone who is not living purely for themselves, every PTA member, green activist, right-wing separatist etc. is pushing toward something that nobody can identify. To see how this unguided activity can be dangerous, one need look no further than the common practice of science, which as ‘everyone knows’, very often drives towards a utility that is not forseen by the scientists, and not understood by the other stakeholders. Or, as ManBitesBlog again says so succinctly “If every single person lending their passion, drive and labor to the system is steering it towards goals which are to the benefit of the culture, then there probably wouldn’t be as much of an issue.”

But they don’t do that, do they? Individuals identify their energy and output with the system they do it within. To justify this, they can go so far as to claim “Greed is good”. Or, they may simply not forsee the ends to which their means allow - a striking example of this is the Iranian pro-democracy revolution which ended with the absolutism of the Ayatollah. I found it nicely summarised here.

In such a situation as we find ourselves today, it may be the best we can hope for is that conflicting drives in the general impetus, and possibly also apathy, lead to a zero sum game - but that would be a remote hope. The only constant is change.

* If it seems like I’m getting jargon-y in this piece, it is probably the influence of Baudrillard. Reviewing what I’m reading is beyond the scope of what I’m writing though, so I’ll just say it’s worth picking up but is quite a brain-fuck.

The opening image is the Great Zimbabwe, the largest and oldest stone structure in Africa south of the Sahara, after which the country is named.

A Reason for Atheism

I had never pursued a biography of Alan Turing, someone I admire greatly for his contributions to computing and the dedication and brilliance that allowed him to achieve so much so young (something I cannot hope to emulate anymore - he was 24 when he solved the Entscheidungsproblem).
But I have just read of how he died, and the gross injustice and humiliating details of the case sparked a sense of outrage I rarely feel about this jaded world. In short, having been forced by circumstance to admit to a homosexual affair in 1952, he underwent a bizarre hormonal treatment to avoid jailtime and had his security clearance revoked so that he could not continue his current work. Two years later, he was found dead, apparent suicide by eating a poisoned apple.

The whole thing, though it was long ago, disgusts me in a way I can't really express. The fact that it is close to home (geographically, not personally) is important, I think. With all the religiously apologised (if not motivated) pain and suffering caused around the world, it strikes me that perhaps it is time for a third way. Liberalism has been neutered. Conservatism has been overtaken by fundamentalism. Can there be a role for our creaky old continent to show a way to live by application of reason, following of common sense and respect for others? Not just on the level of the individual, but on that of nationstates as well.

I can't claim to be politically well-informed, but if there is a power other than China that is at least partly aetheist, and thus neutral in the religion wars, it must be Europe. If we could have risen above such dogma-driven intolerance as the Turing denouement within 50 years, perhaps a more proactive role in world affairs would allow us to show that the means by which we rose did not produce the end of apathy and impotence, but nor did it take us full circle back to technologised barbarism, as in the U.S. How far they have fallen from their Enlightenment founders! As for a new European Enlightenment - could we define it as a counting problem: how many places in the world today would it be safe to be Alan Turing? As to that, two things are needed: the generation of ideas, ideas powerful and universal enough to be worth following even in competition (though preferably not) with religion; and the organ of transmission that will allow people to hear. And I have no idea where to find either (mayhap it'll come in time). I imagine Turing would have had one or two.

[A nice article on Turing in the New Yorker]

A game survey...

From the onlyagame weblog, where resides the mastermind behind the survey I am using in my current research, comes the survey to end all surveys (until the next one :P ). This is important research, please take part. Think of the children.

"Ultimate Game Player Survey

This is a copy of a press release issued at the International Hobo site.

International Hobo Ltd is pleased to announce it’s new study into patterns in the game playing audience. Following the success of the company’s seminal DGD1 model, the subject of the acclaimed book 21st Century Game Design, we are now conducting a new survey in more detail than the original, from which we will develop a new DGD2 model of the gaming audience.

To take part in the survey, click here, or upon the Survey link in the site menu [at the ihobo site]. As an added incentive, you could win the game of your choice (terms and conditions apply) just for taking part!

We encourage everyone to pass the relevant link onto anyone who might be interested. Thanks for your support!"