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Saturday, December 15, 2007
Forwarded from Michael Agustin, duelity.net /religion - permalink - comments Thursday, December 13, 2007
Slow mo implies bullet time is a narrative device Recent news from Baylor College of Medicine, suggests that an experience of slow-motion during a physical crisis only occurs after the memories of the event have been made, and that the person's perception is not actually resolving events at shorter intervals, as when an overcranked camera records for slow motion. In the experiment, subjects were dropped for a few seconds into a net far, far below. Subjects reported time for freefall, which seemed to be a third longer than actual time. Subjects were equipped with watches with digits that flickered slightly too fast to see. It was presumed that subject would be able to see the digit if actually overcranking vision. The experimental setup is suspect. Just because vision is not overcranked does not mean that the motor-control apparatus of the brain could not be overcranking. Also, the subjects might have sufficiently useful subconscious survival mechanisms that prevent them from faithfully paying attention to non-life threatening digits while the body feels it is in peril. But if the experiment is valid and its conclusion too, then the experience of slow-motion in a movie or a videogame represents the memory of an experience and not a simulation (or even romantic expression) of an experience. It does not change how cool it is to go into slow-mo and defeat a flaming-chain-mace warrior in God of War II, but does suggest that the experience corresponds to a memory rather than a direct experience, which means, technically in this cinematic medium, wouldn't slow-motion qualify as a narrative device of recall? And so the experience of cinema or a videogame with such devices of recall is not exactly the eternal present (whose tense screenplays are wisely written in), but a once-removed memory of the present, as the narrator of Sands of Time is wont to remind us. /entertainment - permalink - comments Wednesday, December 12, 2007Recent news suggests that adequate (not too little or excessive) B12 and other vitamins can help prevent illnesses that don't manifest in a daughter or son until their adulthood. That raised my eyebrows. How strong is this correlation? Other news says that praising effort, rather than intelligence or innate talents, leads to healthier mental development and use of their natural gifts. /science - permalink - comments
Apples to Oranges: Lessons in reward design from neuroscience? According to news of paper by Padoa-Schioppa & Assad. in Nature Neuroscience, neurons in a primate's orbitofrontal cortex correlate to behavioral preference for a juice when presented with a ratio of apple and grape juice. Moreover, the neural correlation was invariant regardless of other options, suggesting that preference transitivity (A to B, B to C, therefore A to C) is reflected in neural activity of the orbitofrontal cortex. As commenter Neil Farbstein wrote, it's "comparing apples to organges!" This research was performed on rhesus monkeys. I wonder what their preference was in terms of a ratio of duration of how many days in testing 600 to 2400 trials of sips of juice compared to how many days surviving in the wild. Their methods on one male and female rhesus monkey were: Under general anesthesia, we implanted a head-restraining device and a recording chamber on the skull of the monkeys, and implanted a scleral eye coil. We used large, oval, custom-made chambers (main axes 50 x 30 mm), centered on stereotaxic coordinates (A30, L0), with the longer axis parallel to a coronal plane. Following surgery, monkeys were given antibiotics (cefazolin, 20 mg per kg of body weight) and analgesics (buprenorphine, 0.005 mg per kg; flunixin, 1 mg per kg) for 3 d. During the experiments, monkeys sat in a monkey chair in a darkened room. The head was restrained and the eye position was monitored continuously using a scleral eye-coil system (Riverbend Instruments). A computer monitor was placed 57 cm in front of the monkeys, and the behavioral task was controlled by custom-written software.Related to preference functions in Nature Neuroscience is Kable & Glimcher's article "The neural correlates of subjective value during intertemporal choice", which "provides unambiguous evidence that the subjective value of potential rewards is explicitly represented in the human brain." The actual interface of the simulation was a trivial computer game (or computer investing) of sorts: An offer appears on screen as money and delay (like "$40 / 30 days"), a button is held down, six seconds pass, a green dot appears, and the subject releases the button. For motor task independence, half the trials release indicated immediate ($20) or delayed reward (variable). The amount on the screen was money that would be given after the duration of delay. The article recounted the hyperbolic function of subjective value: SV = 1 / (1 + kD); in which subjective value (SV) equals inverse of subject-specific constant (k from 0.0005 to 0.1189) and delay of reward (D in days). This function might have application to reward design in games, especially if a similar formula holds true on the time scale of seconds or minutes of a single playing session. An example exists in harvesting or saving the little girls in BioShock. Harvesting has an immediate reward whereas saving offers a delayed reward. Are there other examples that illustrate delayed reward design? Especially for multiplayer games, the relative ranking of the reward compared to others is important, at least for men. Experimentin neuroeconomics lab at University of Bonn says the activitation of neural reward evaluators in the brain correlate to getting a higher reward or performing better than another participant. So competition, is rewarding for the winners to the extent that there are losers. And advance in a society is measured by surpassing the Joneses. /science - permalink - comments Tuesday, December 11, 2007
A lesson in unit AI, taught by bacteria
Imagine tactical artificial intelligence in which independent agents send signals to nearby allies about the presence of an outsider. And they send signals to all agents. These signals offer a proposed group cooperative activity, and the agents seek a quorum, a sufficient agreement among the agents to take a costly behavior that would help the group. The induced behavior might be to gas a massive enemy or bond together into an ad hoc defense barrier. You've just imagined what bacteria do. Bacteria talk to each other, inducing a quorum for cooperative behavior, that makes them seem to be a temporary multicellular organism, yet each agent is non specialized and not driven by a leader. Spontaneous cooperation. Imagine units in a game that behave by such intelligence. It doesn't sound so far fetched; aren't there already some examples? In theory, a lifeform in Conway's Game of Life could send flyers to another lifeform in response to an environment, but the board size would be enormous and so the search space for those configurations that communicate is intractable to design techniques. Will Wright employs cellular automata in SimCity to propagate local conditions. For example of emergent cooperation, did SimAnt have ants cooperate from the bottom-up, beyond pheronome trails?
 Biochemists use this knowledge to explore disruptions of bacterial cooperation, through jamming their communication, with agonist and antagonist chemicals. In a tactical game, a designer could construct counters to enemy collaboration in a bottom-up approach by launching jammers, which basically spam antagonist messages. Are there games out there employing bottom-up communication jamming? In some sense, there may be a waste of computational resources to simulate communication between units, because the computer can cheat. The computer has access to all the units and can emulate communication through top-down broadcasting, or jumping from the intention to the result without having the model the details of signal propagation. I seem to recall from some interview, that Sid Meier's Civilization cheats in a fashion related to signal propagation and faction knowledge. For a game, cheating the simulation is desirable to the point of freeing up computational resources for other threads that entertain. Yet it does seem to me that there are entertaining mechanisms around this area of emergent cooperation, inspired by biochemistry. /science - permalink - comments Sunday, December 09, 2007According to a source that may have some commercial members (and places an ad for carosine in its leading illustration), carnosine can extend life. Carnosine protects against glycation, which causes loss of elasticity. Older persons loose carnosine, so supplements may extend their life. As a person who has an ethical dispreference for eating beef (to minimize the destruction of sapience), I want to live longer and happier while allowing other advanced intelligences to also live longer and happier. So I have questions. Is carnosine the essential ingredient for humans, compared to anserine or other peptides? Carnosine is found in beef. It strikes me as odd that a useful peptide would only be found in the meat of only one species. Rats (and I would imagine) other species have carnosine in their muscle and brain tissue. Is carnosine efficiently found in other sources? Other mammals, birds, fish? Where do the supplements derive their sources? Would it also be from animal source, and if so, which animal? /science - permalink - comments Saturday, December 08, 2007
Noisy home impairs childhood language learning Recent news suggests that constant noise, such as from a television being on in the background, impair an infant's acquisition of their first language. Unsurprisingly, the noise distracts the infant from the speech. /science - permalink - comments Friday, December 07, 2007
Neural correlates of seeing and smelling Neuroscientists at University of Leiceister are using techniques from treating epilepsy to decode neural activity that corresponds to the visual perception of a person. Neuroscientists at Columbia University Medical Center noticed that the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (ltOFC) decreases activation after a human watches a violent movie. The ltOFC has been associated with suppression of aggression, but still no correlation to violent behavior has been demonstrated. The orbitofrontal cortex is also associated with adjusting response to a stimulus. Nature neuroscience says of the orbitofrontal cortex: Research on primates6, 7 and humans8 with selective prefrontal lesions implicates orbitofrontal cortex in switching or reversing stimulus.response associations (and consequently response.reward associations), rather than shifting an attentional set7. Engagement of orbitofrontal cortex in inhibiting prepared motor programs is consistent with reports of ventral prefrontal activation during tasks using go/no.go response choices9 and tasks of motor selection and preparation requiring withholding of responses10. The orbitofrontal cortex has also been implicated in the interface between affect and cognition by brain imaging11, lesion12 and neurophysiology13 studies. The weight of evidence thus suggests that in the context of the infrequent invalid trials, the orbitofrontal cortex participates both in the redirection of the response based upon a violation in stimulus contingencies and in possible changes of emotional state.While it might be that viewers are becoming desensitized, could it also or alternatively suggest that viewers are no longer needing to adjust their response to the stimulus after learning how to interpret a violent movie (as opposed to actual violence)? And if that doesn't smell funny, maybe this does. Psychologists are noting that subliminal smells affect attraction, through an elegant experiment design: present a smell, then show a face, and have the subject rate the face. /science - permalink - comments Monday, December 03, 2007Recent news supported by American Psychological Association says that teen brains are more prone to violence, impulsive action, and peer pressure than their adult counterparts. The age of 18, while not the turning point, does represent the right range of ages when frontal lobe maturity accelerates. So there might be, on average, some neurological basis for this ageist dividing line. /science - permalink - comments Friday, November 30, 2007According to news, a model of a neocortical column has been simulated in software. However it has no correlation to animal behavior. The simulation has 10,000 neurons and is only at the cellular level, not the molecular level. It would have to be 2000 times more neurons to reach the count of a rat brain, and 400,000 times as many neurons to reach human neural capacity. Let alone the architectural specialization of animal brains. Based on these estimates, I agree with Koch, that full brain simulation in 10 years is "ridiculous." Also, I believe that simulating human brain is premature. Why not follow the path of animal evolution? As I've said for the Turing test, don't try to simulate a human's intelligence. Not yet. We haven't even successfully simulated a rat's intelligence. I think we'll reach our goal of simulating human intelligence faster by starting with the next incremental step in simulation of biological intelligence from what we currently have. Let us climb up the evolutionary ladder one rung at a time, not blindly leap for the top rung. I personally have not heard that we've even simulated a goldfish's neural capacity that corresponds to actual behavior. Without linking the brain to a system that operates in an environment, then the neural behavior is crippled. At a minimum, the neocortical column ought to be exercised solving problems that brain faculties are well-adapted to. At a maximum, it'd be fascinating to see a robot with a brain. There's surely some Tin Man in robotics looking for a brain. /science - permalink - comments Tuesday, November 27, 2007Lance Gentile, passed this on for the improvement of writing notes:
/entertainment - permalink - comments Tuesday, November 20, 2007
How can a first-person shooter help a woman in math? According to University of Toronto psychologists, Playing Video Games Reduces Gender Differences In Spatial Cognition. According to Feng, Spence, and Pratt's paper, the experimental population played Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. The control population played Ballance. The tests were useful field of view (by Ball and Roenker) and mental rotation. The experimental population improved in spatial cognition; most notably female participants improved more, approaching the levels of performance of the males. Ian Spence links much press and discussion. Of educational interest, spatial cognition correlates to performance in science and math classes. The benefits for experimental population, who had little or no recent FPS experience, was achieved after 10 hours of play. I personally suspect that there is a rapidly diminishing margin of return on additional hours of play that correlate to educationally-applicable improvements to spatial cognition. There is a paradigm shift in visual cognition when one adapts to a first-person shooter, in part due to decoupled vestibular and visual feedback. A problem I personally have is a mild form of FPS-induced motion sickness. When the camera rotates from left to right, my visual stimulus indicates the environment (or my head) is spinning. But my vestibular system (in my inner ear) indicates that my head is not rotating. This conflict induces disorientation and mild nausea. This problem is exacerbated by a large TV screen and a dark room. The problem doesn't happen when the camera pans, tracks, or zooms. The problem also doesn't happen during a third-person game with a mobile camera. I bring this up, because the motion-sickness suggests there is an adaptation process that is occuring for FPS players who do not experience discomfort. Admittedly in wild speculation, this first-person adaptation process might correlate to educationally-applicable improvements in spatial cognition. For example, the ability to decouple vestibular and motion feedback might correlate to improvements in mental rotation, since mental rotation necessarily decouples the stable (non-rotating) vestibular state from the rotation task. Anyway, I'd like to learn more of the cognitive mechanisms at work here. Do you have any leads to suggest? /science - permalink - comments Saturday, November 17, 2007
 Garrett Lisi constructed a theory of everything in physics using the model discovered in late 19th century, called E8, whose reflectional hyperplane diagram has 248 points mapping symmetries in 248 dimensions. By particle physics standards, Lisi's model is simple. Even the simple explanation baffles me. Can you make sense of it? I find it hard to even distinguish the diagram from a religious mandala. /science - permalink - comments Saturday, October 13, 2007New York Times passes on not a new idea, that writing is colder than face to face communication, but dresses the old idea up in neuro-fangled clothes. Empathy, in the form of neural mirroring, is unavailable during text only communication, and so the text is cold. /science - permalink - comments Thursday, October 11, 2007
Elements of the Psyche: Does Myers-Briggs trump Bartle? In September 2004, I posted to the MUD-Dev list on Bartle Types. This week, I see a rash of posts on USC's Interactive blog using Bartle Types to analyze game design (Andrew Corpuz, Mike Stein, Katrina Johnson). So I thought I'd throw a Joker into the deck to mix it up. Here's the original post, converted to HTML: I have had a curiosity with Bartle types that led to an arcane opinion on player psychology. I failed overcome the laziness, so have not disproven my faulty opinion. Certainly not enough to study psychology. Instead, maybe I can just find a psychologist to beat it out of my head with much less work. My curiosity began with the title: "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs". These, of course, are four suits of cards. These four suits of playing cards were derived from the four suits of the Tarot deck. Correspondences being:
The Tarot deck was, among many things, a lexicon of medieval alchemy. These alchemists studied how to transform a leaden personality into a golden personality. That is, how to adjust the four elements in the persona, or the three alchemical essences of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury, in order to change their motivation and improve character. Turn lead into gold, or as Foucault might call it, the technologies of the self. Some alchemy included a theory of personal relationships, in which the ancient four elements were ascribed correspondences to personality types. These alchemical elementary personalities are:
There is also a correspondence from the elements to the Greek Gods, which the Greeks believed were origins of mortal personality. A Greek might say Apollo speaks through me, etc.
Which gives the correspondence to personality as:
Much of their utility comes in seeing how various elements interact, as tendencies for social and/or sexual chemistry. These were encoded into the Tarot deck, which gives us three columns of correspondences:
Carl Jung studied alchemy. From them he refined some proposals of personality attitudes and functions. From Jung, Myers-Briggs based the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which retains some correspondences from alchemical elements:
Keirsey designated four temperaments of the sixteen in MBTI. These corresponsences continue:
By knowing the origin and the original meaning of the tarot to the suit of a playing card, one may further correspond the tarot to the MBTI:
Rearranging suits to alchemical personality thus:
This then is not a far cry from a correspondence between Bartle types and personalities:
So, this would imply the following correspondences:
A few years ago, I asked Erwin Andreasen about this correspondence (MUD-Dev-L/2001Q3/msg00794). He tabulated several results from an informal quiz on a Bartle Quotient, which he kindly posted. Aggregating these four temperaments and doing correspondences yields:
Normalizing from the total in each Myers-Briggs Type, we see the modal correspondences are:
The correspondence suggests isomorphism, except for the NT temperament, Rationals. All but one match, and the one that does not is the least statistically significant, it is a difference of 1%. This shows bias in my opinion, the self-selected respondents, or the mapping of the questions. Probably my opinion. A couple other interesting third conjecture comes to mind. That is that being online, which is dominated by NT in this test (46% !), which has a tendency for intellectual domination, could express this through cleverness online, which the test might detect any form of domination as killer tendency. Another is that some players may have a tendency to embody a separate online personality than offline. And another conjecture is that killers have more fun (Amy Jo Kim). The conclusion of this weird belief, is my tendency to substitute (NT, SJ, NF, SP) instead of (E, A, S, K), since I'm more familiar with its use, history, and the relationships between MBTI personalities. Of course, any stone, with enough stock, can be turned into soup. I'm just pitching one more pebble in. All that was a long-winding road to get to an answer of the question "wherefor in-game artists?": Therefore, a player could create art to entertain, dominate, trade, or provoke. That's all in theory. In practice, I'm not sure what the distribution of artist personalities are in a computer-mediated community. I haven't encountered evidence to disprove the opinion, but haven't encountered evidence to prove it either. In my limited personal experience as editor of a library of player art and literature, I felt that various artists were doing it for different reasons and that their art, or literature, was intended to have these different effects: entertainment, domination, trade, provoke.
-- Ethan, September 2004 /entertainment - permalink - comments Tuesday, October 09, 2007
 Burning Man 2007This year's burning man was the most crowded and I believe the crowding eyes gave support and interest to bear the weight of the loftiest art on the playa that I have seen (at least since my first burn in 2000).There were so many pieces, here are just a few of my favorites when I happened to have a camera on me, categorized by light and mood. Click on a picture you like to see a larger image.
 
 
 
 
 
 As in previous years, Burning Man was an amazing and quasi-spiritual experience. It was more crowded than previous years (over twice as crowded as 2000), and this attracted the more casual and mainstream members, thereby diminishing the spiritual and countercultural side. For that reason, I'm wavering on whether to go back; but on the other hand, I lose myself in it and I return more aware of what technology, comforts, and conventions of the civilized world that enrich my life and which crush my spirit. Since all time at Burning Man is immediate and voluntary, one's character can shed the parasitic entrapments of civilization and thereby recognize them upon reentry.
/religion - permalink - comments Thursday, September 20, 2007
Want to make AI that can understand language? Ben Goertzel is going to try the Wikipedia way, get your teachers for free. He proposes to plant parrots throughout virtual worlds, such as Second Life, and let the players teach the parrot how to talk. The parrot, presumably motivated by some behavior in the game, is rewarded for successful communication. One side of me is skeptical, the other side is optimistic. The hitch to this is, why can't humans learn a foreign language through such exposure? They have the requisite needs, and if they don't have the requisite intelligence, then what hope does a manmade machine have? While directing online games that were localized from Korea, I sometimes ran into Korean players whose English vocabulary seemed to be limited to phrases equivalent to "GIMME GOLD" and "LEVEL PLEASE". By Goertzel's fitness function of game success, these would be fully-functioning English speakers. They spammed for what they needed. The hopeful side of me sees that like Wikipedia, the distributed network of parrots can aggregate the individual discoveries of any one parrot. Thus, improbable advancements would be adopted by all parrots and their success would encourage further language acquisition by human players who find the parrots interesting. I bet the first thing the parrots will learn and commit to memory is Monty Python's Dead parrot sketch. /science - permalink - comments Wednesday, September 19, 2007Stench predicts pain? This news would have you believe that. /science - permalink - comments Friday, September 14, 2007In Paul Bingham's articel from 1999, "Human uniqueness: a general theory", he asserts that the evolution of human language, nonkin alliances, and the resultant upsurge in technology and human domination of the planet are the result of javelins, slings, bows and arrows. He explains that the invention of prehistoric remote killing tools (projectiles), lower the cost for enforcing a coalition, which encourages language and technology for dominating the planet. That's an awful warlike explanation for humanity. Is it true? /science - permalink - comments Sunday, September 09, 2007TD Houfek passed along an excellent article commenting that our increasingly comfortable and customized environment is eroding our tolerance for annoyance and circle of friendship. At Burning Man, besides just the lack of commerce, I noticed that the physical hardship made interaction more obvious; everybody needed something physical (shelter, food, love), and it was relatively direct to communicate a desire to meet this need on the playa. In the real world, transactions often enter us into interactions with people we care nothing about, and for whom our goals are an efficient resolution with minimal friction, and therefore minimal contact. /politics - permalink - comments Thursday, September 06, 2007Elizabeth Kensinger and colleagues found that memories of emotionally charged events and items were remembered more strongly than other items or events. The original news posted this in a light that negative emotions are more readily remembered than positive emotions, but that part was muddled. Read the news. /science - permalink - comments
Does psychiatry replace religion? Setempber 2007 issue of Psychiatric Services stated that psychiatrists are least religious among physicians. Read the news. Is that due William James' influence through Varieties of Religious Experience? Or are the techniques and artifacts of psychiatry a substitute for religion? /religion - permalink - comments Monday, August 27, 2007
I am afraid, therefore I do not think When a predator is at a distance, a human worries but still makes plans. But when contact with a predator is imminent, a human stops thinking and starts reacting. This was the conclusion of a simple "Pac-Man" videogame experiment, recently in the news. That people are afraid of predators, especially when they are close is not the major insight of the experiment. This experiment reveals details on brain centers: activity in ventromedial prefontal cortex (which "helps control strategies") shifts to periaqueductal grey (which is "associated with quick-response survival mechanisms"). The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is also believed to overcome extinguished fear and consider long-term risks. This experiment may explain the convention in horror movies and light gun shooting videogames like House of the Dead, in which a monster pops up in the face of the camera. By the experiment's model, the audience is expected to process the image of a nearby monster with the quick-response survival mechanisms, and their consideration of long-term risks is inhibited. Although not part of this experiment, presumably the audience's consideration of the plausibility of the threat is also inhibited. Even though the videotape in The Ring is implausible, when its monster is out of the TV and in the camera's (or protagonist's) face, our ability to consider the implausibility of the scenario is inhibited. If this predator experiment is applicable to the broader scope and scale of political economics, the individual fears of a populace may translate into mass disregard for long-term risks in the face of perceived, immediate crises. Robert Higgs founded his insightful book on understanding American politics, Crisis and Leviathan, on the supposition that quick-fix programs, once institutionalized, remain long after the crisis has disappeared. This experiment exposes detailed mechanisms to explain from the individual up, how a society can fail to make plans for the future and thereby trade today's crises for tomorrow's systematic dysfunction, which burdens future generations with a loss of health and happiness. Briefly put, each individual, in the face of crisis, ignores long-term risk. Such a model of fear's inhibition of consideration of consequences might explain why nations support their leaders' wars, as Hermann Goring noted in the Nuremberg trials: Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.If the above experiment applies, then once the populace believes predators are at their doorsteps, their ability to consider consequences is inhibited and fight or flight mechanisms take control. Since a nation is too grounded to flee, the primitive brain concludes that the nation must fight. What is not newly revealed by this experiment is that people don't think when afraid; politicians and war-mongers have known that for centuries. To short-circuit critical thought, simply broadcast THREATS such as: terrorists, environmental disaster, sexual abuse, economic crisis, health care crisis, and job security. Not that these aren't legitimate issues; they are, but these legitimate threats are tactically employed to fund corrupt campaigns and stuff pockets that are not solving the problems. One tactic to inhibit consideration of long-term risks is the emphasis of imminent danger through threat keywords that can be avoided by the proposed action. For example, George Bush routinely pads and punctuates his speech with threat keywords, such as: freedom, terror, rape, mutilation, and ballistic airports. /politics - permalink - comments Saturday, August 25, 2007
1984 by 2024, or: Better mind control through neuroscience "Biomachines that bypass time consuming conscious activity ultimately may be fielded by the DOD. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is already working towards this end." says John Stanton. I like my "time consuming conscious activity," thank you very much. Keep your blood-stained fingers off of it. /politics - permalink - comments Friday, August 24, 2007
Videogame avatars may become embodied In recent news an avatar in a virtual environment was associated with the user's own body through control of movement of the avatar and tactile response by objects in the virtual environment relayed to the user's own corresponding body location. This suggests to me that humans have the capacity to relearn their embodiment to such a degree that an avatar could become as real as a physical body to the extent that control and feedback from the avatar were substituted for control and feedback on the physical environment. Gamers already know that they identify with their characters and even attempt to move their physical bodies out of the way when their avatar is threatened. This suggests at least activation of mirror neurons corresponding to one's own bodily state. With clever input and output devices providing more refined sense of embodiment (along the lines of the wiimote's contribution to game interface), a videogame avatar may become much closer to a virtual embodiment of its user. /science - permalink - comments
Approval, attention, comfort and prohibition are universal Scientists performed an experiment that may suggest that: Approval, attention, comfort and prohibition are universal. Members who speak different languages accurately categorized messages to infants. Read the news. What was not done, was to identify the content of the message, in addition to the category. Yet at least it is suggested that the overall emotional intent of a message might be universal and detected from nonverbal clues, such as "pitch, loudness, and rate of speech." I wonder, do the above categories (approval, attention, comfort, and prohibition) completely cover the gamut of persuasive human communication? If so, then every human communication that is intended to persuade (as opposed to inform or entertain) could be decomposed into segments that fall into the categories of approval, attention, comfort, and prohibition. /science - permalink - comments Wednesday, August 22, 2007
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematicians Is there an instinct for mathematics that is due not to human discovery but to natural evolution? Jef Raskin thinks there is. He points out that two independent systems, such as a physical environment and an abstract mathematical model of the environment should have no better than chance correspondence in domains for which they are not specifically or inferentially coupled. That mathematics inferentially couples with physical phenomena so well suggests mathematics may be a human instinct that precedes human civilization, and that natural selection may have favored the instinct for mathematical inference. Read more about the issue. Raskin also notes, but does not focus on the point that mathematics' fitness is in large part due to the clever application by humans who invent the applicable theorems out of the infinite space of possible theorems, the vast majority of which are false, yet mathematically valid. Newton's model of physics, or Einstein's model of extreme velocity were not entirely lying around the mathematical halls waiting for someone to notice them. They were constructed from the intellectual toolset, and in the course (especially in Newton's case), new mathematical tools were invented. It is not enough to say that mathematics is apt at describing physical phenomena, but some mathematicians are clever enough to invent tools from the rich set that has been selected for applicability to modeling the physical environment. /science - permalink - comments Sunday, August 19, 2007Knock knock. Who's there? A robot. /entertainment - permalink - comments Thursday, August 09, 2007
No, we are not living in a simulation
"Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" (by Nick Bostrom) is a fascinating article, which Gayle Dean brought to my attention. It is a bit bizarre to read right now, as my last few months have been spent programming simple simulations, so I'm well immersed in the notion of simulations. It reminds me of several things:
I was impressed by the attention to estimates at orders of magnitude. Since I know a little bit about computer science and their implications for simulations, I wish the author had brought up the analysis of algorithms. Computational power is of secondary importance to the efficiency of the algorithms being executed on those computers. His omission of the analysis of complexity, I believe, invalidates his estimates, not by a few orders of magnitude but potentially by as many orders of magnitude as his total estimate size (e.g., ~10^50 orders of magnitude). I think the author, Nick Bostrom, missed one more significant facts that could be true:
Substrate-independence is costly. The overhead required to engineer equivalent consciousness through virtual means of what could have been implemented directly via physical means is inefficient. For the quality of consciousness being striven for, optimizing the architecture of the substrate is of primary practical interest. For example, computers often operate on substrate-independence. Virtual machines construct computer architectures that only exist when the lower-level code is in operation. But these have an overhead, and can never compete with the run-time efficiency of their physical counterparts if the physical counterparts have equivalent processing power. The implications of chaos theory on a simulation were not stated by the author. Weather simulators fail to provide even a good two-week forecast, let alone a thousand year forecast, because the level of granularity being simulated is not equal to the physical level. Even simulating events on the neural level leaves out the atomic events which comprise the neural level. Butterfly effects could arise which make the simulation substantially divergent. A serious problem that the transhuman simulators will have is finding the actual starting conditions of the simulation. Without being precise, the simulation would not carry out according to history. Minute differences in starting conditions could mean the difference between life on Earth or not. Even if actually simulating an already correct model of humanity's universe were feasible, finding the right starting condition could imply executing the simulation several times until a good match was found. This match would be for the complexity of the simulation (say 10^50 per second), over the number of seconds needed to be simulated (say over a 1 million years, or about 10^14). That multiplies to 10^64. The proper configuration must be found, which would be a search of all possible universes, with each universe having a size of 10^64. That could be a search of 10^64 of 10^64, or 10^128. Now the problem is that we are above the number of molecule-seconds in the span of the universe. Even if a planet could perform 10^50 operations per second, it would take 10^50 planets 10^28 seconds (or longer than the expected life of the universe) to run the correct simulation at the level of human perception. There is an oversight on the complexity of the algorithm required to simulation human perception. The lower bound could theoretically be 0, but practically, since data is rapidly changing on the scale of seconds, it wouldn't be less than the size of the data per second. But that's just the lower bound. The usual high estimates (not upper bounds) for computer simulations are exponential relationship to the size of the data. That could mean for example that the simulation of 10^50 bits of data requires 10^(10^50) computations. 10^(10^50) is not a number followed by 50 zeroes. It is a number followed by 10^50 zeroes! Therefore, the universe in which this simulation occurs must be much much larger than the universe that we perceive. Thus, it would not be ancestors being simulated, but a much universe in this hyper universe. Simulating the universe to a level of granularity that we experience requires a universe with googols upon googols of more processing space, processing power, and processing ingenuity than our universe. In essence, it supposes (from the point of view of the simulants) omniscience and omnipotence. (There's a sardonic implication. There would need to be googols upon googols of spare time on their hands and very little creativity on the part of the simulation architects. Out of all the things they could come up with given omnipotence and omniscience, flaccid sacs of protoplasm were the height of their accomplishment? :) Scientifically, there's a vacuous extravagance. This hypothesis provides no new predictions that can be measured from within the simulation. It complicates all reasoning about the simulation. So the hypothesis is a disadvantage to anyone who believes it. Anyone is better off ignoring the extra layer of abstraction. Although Nick Bostrom supposes no ethical cost to the simulation, actually there is a vast question on ethics. The above computational estimates suppose costs that are higher than the known universe could have. The costs are beyond substantial. The ethical calculus to be performed is two-fold: If these resources are spent on the simulation, what is the ethical result. If the resources are not spent on the simulation, what is the most ethical alternative? Assuming that the simulation itself had no particular ethical harm to its inhabitants, the question becomes what good is the simulation. It would have to be sufficiently better than any other use of from 10^128 bits to 10^(10^50) bits of computation. It's hard for me to believe that such quantities, which may amount to the computational power of a googol human universes, would be best served in ancestor-simulation without there being a universe in which there is much more such processing power. So much so that this was negligible. On morality, and the threat of punishment, some probability of punishment would have to be taken into account. Nick took into account one hypothetical probability of experience being in a simulation and at the subject of the simulators. But there is a cost for monitoring the simulation and assessing its inhabitants' behavior. If there are some ten billion (10,000,000,000) ethically-monitored inhabitants then the raw probability for individual assessment would either be low, or the analysis performed would be relatively cheap to perform. If it is not cheap to perform, and is an accurate assessment of moral behavior, through a complicated ethical or moral calculus, then the probability of it being performed would expected to be low given the number of agents available for review. It might be highest for agents whose decisions were creating the largest ethical difference, such as persons in power. But auditing these persons would not be as simple as forking their simulation data. The analysis itself would likely require an exponential asymptotic order of processing power compared to the data being analyzed, which makes auditing more expensive than running the simulation by many many more orders of magnitude. Such omnipotent beings who were going to simulate a phenomenological universe of humanity would either have to give up precision, in which case there's little reason to suppose that the simulation bears relation to the original experience, or the omnipotent beings would have wasted significant resources; resources so significant as to be relatively infinite from our vantage point. A waste on such scale seems hard to account for as form of Intelligent Design, which this simulation argument is a variant of. It would at best be unintelligent or aimless, and infinitely more likely not to be a simulation at all but to be the real thing. /religion - permalink - comments Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Drink water or you'll lose your mind Peter Ragnar claims that long-term dehydration promotes Alzheimer's disease, among other things. In the Army, drinking water was recommended as a cure-all, from heat and frostbite, to even memory and test performance. I have to admit, despite the other flagrantly poor information disseminated in my military training, the value of water was worth its tedious and coercive lecture. /science - permalink - comments Female rats behave as males when a pheromone sensor is disabled for lack of TRPC2. Weird. /science - permalink - comments
Happy endings begin relationships Hm, maybe not surprising, but this psychological study finds that putting someone into a good mood, such as from a happy ending in a movie, increases the person's appraisal of a potential partner's sexual and commitment interests. Full article is here. /science - permalink - comments Recent news suggests that the explosive vocabulary of a toddler, called "word spurt," might be explained as a form of code breaking, analogous to solving a puzzle. Specifically that children do not learn the words being provided in sequence, one at a time, but that they are processing many common pieces of the puzzle in parallel. The model suggests that once some pieces of the puzzle are figured out, then by process of elimination other pieces may be put into place. It's amazing to realize that each little child is performing an operation that might be as hard or harder than Turing cracking the German Enigma cipher in World War II. As a game designer, it's also fascinating that the puzzle-solution metaphor might be an apt fit for a model of a toddler's first language acquisition. As there are user interface, task decomposition, reinforcing feedback, tutorial, and learning curve techniques through which a designer teaches a new player the rules to a game, or facilitate the solving of a novel puzzle, there may be some lessons that game design can impart to first language acquisition. And vice versa: that the techniques of language acquisition can impart patterns applicable to designing puzzles with approachable solutions.
Human language learning and the Enigma cipher: Both are decoding complex signals through stages of mappings.
/science - permalink - comments Friday, August 03, 2007A news article suggests that mirror neural activity is adapted to the body of the observer. Specifically, when observers who have no hands but use their feet to do tasks commonly done by hands, watched others manipulating objects with their hands, the observers' mirror neurons mapped to their feet were active. This suggests they were considering the same activity, but how they themselves would perform the activity. Related findings in neurolinguistics suggest that understanding of a situation, concept, requires relevant experience. Furthermore, one might speculate that all understanding occurs from an egocentric perspective. That everything from contemplating photons in a model of relativity to what's for dinner occurs as effects and actions taken by the body. One might, as Einstein said he did, imagine what it was like to ride a photon. Without relevant experience, then, understanding is impossible. As Jerome Feldman, among others pointed out, this is a death knell for disembodied artificial intelligence that is capable of natural language comprehension. Computers without the pains and pleasures of humans cannot "mirror" the experience of humans, and so, cannot comprehend the language of humans, which is grounded in the human condition. The language of pure AI would be worse than autistic; it would be alien and incomprehensible. The language of disembodied AI would be worse than autistic; it would be alien and incomprehensible. A necessary prerequisite to human language comprehension is a sophisticated and salient model of human perception, cognition, emotion, and society. But perhaps natural language processing is not impossible. Just as a person without a hand may contemplate the behavior of a manipulation of the hand by the mental architecture mapped to their foot, an artificially intelligent computer with equivalent faculties with which to map human psychophysics, pattern-recognition, drives, desires, joy, sorrow, humor, customs, taboos, mating, game-playing, and metaphors could pass a Turing test. Such a machine without a heart, like a person without a hand, might mirror the human condition by mapping to its own worldly experience. /science - permalink - comments Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Music and the brain that listens to it In Neuron, an experiment on detection of musical transitions suggests that detection of such transitions is a primarily a right-brain activity and uses networks that maybe shared with the recognition of temporal patterns in a visual stimulus, too. Finally, there is something to say about music that is more than just the psychoacoustics of pitch or timbre. It's been a while since neuroscience has probed music. This article not the grand unified theory of the neurophysiology of music, but it's a start! The scientist in me welcomes the decomposition of the human condition into definitive details that explain how we appreciate music, or for that matter, any art. /science - permalink - comments Friday, July 27, 2007While reviewing the literature of mathematical methods in utilitarian ethics, I came across a summary of perhaps the original utilitarian calculus, formulated by Jeremy Bentham. His is a hedonistic model similar to my own. Here is Bentham's felicific calculus. One of the things I saw missing, though, was a metric of quantifying pleasure. I had quantified pleasure, or so I thought. As I looked at an overview of utilitarianism, I found that the metric of quantification of well-being I had employed was a form of the more general notion of preference (not just of psychological pleasure), which in the 1950s Kenneth Arrow had already suggested for utilitarian evaluation. That is, what one prefers ought to be the axis of ethical evaluation. To give the numerical value a scale, my own quantitative approach modeled such preferences through a scale that (as Rob Bass brought to my attention) resembled quality-adjusted life years, but goes on more generally to allow for better than normal health conditions. Since it is posed as a thought experiment, it is also based on individual preference rather than systematic one-size-fits-all assumptions of what diverse members of a population might prefer. Encouraged by this interesting and compatible prior art, I was about to update my own arithmetic model of comparative ethical calculus when I stumbled upon a resource that showed clearly, someone had beaten me to a definitive mathematical model of utilitarian ethics. Not just in theory but in actual application, boiled down to a form in the style of one of the greatest institutions of utilitarianism. From Swift magazine, here is the definitive utilitarian calculus. /politics - permalink - comments Thursday, May 24, 2007 When I was a kid, my mom sent me to the store to buy her a Mr Pibb, almost every day for a while. For my effort, she gave me a quarter. As it happened, the back of that Wolfpack convenient store had one arcade machine; it was Gyruss for a while. Each day I paid one quarter, and each day I learned one lesson. With brief but persistent practice I discovered that learning happens. And I learned to love Gyruss. Twenty years later, I found myself revisiting that arcade cult classic. I designed a videogame demo for a 3D arcade shooter, that would have the basic topology of Gyruss (or Tempest), a 2D-plane mapped onto a 3D cylinder. But I also had aspirations of procedural art, of beauty procured from algorithms. A colleague in the Interactive Media program at USC, Dooyul Park, showed me his work and others, and talked about music, procedural graphics, and interactivity. That inspired me to map music-synchronized gameplay and procedural graphics onto my childhood passion. With the help of three programmers and a composer, the five of us programmed an arcade shooter that is generated procedurally, from cues scripted by the composer. Edgar, the art director, made a modeller that exports C++ Ogre code, and then he made the environment and some animations with it. For my part, though my background is game design, I mostly programmed. The geometry was easy to implement, but the music synchronization system, which forms the skeleton of all the game and visual events, was the most advanced programming I've done. In the end we made an engineering demo. The semester didn't allow time for design, as we spent most of it programming the tools that would enable us to then create the game, much less refine its content. Yet the demo was a hit, and I see the potential. So for the last two weeks I optimized its performance to play on computers (like mine) that are older. It's no 96k Kriegger, but it is reasonably compact. Setting Ogre aside, the executable, which includes the procedurally generated graphics and level, is a megabyte and a half. But is it fun? I think it's hard for most, but worth a try. Play and find out. http://www.finegamedesign.com/euphonics /entertainment - permalink - comments Thursday, May 10, 2007
Why we demo: The psychology of developers and demigods Last semester I watched the demo day from the outside, observing its strengths and problems. This semester I decided to become part of the problem. I took my high ideas and led a project. In the process I learned about the psychology of a particular breed of software engineers, game developers. During the week leading up to demo day the lab in which the demo would take place swelled with students. For long hours of the afternoon and night, chairs were filled and monitors were gazed upon by glassy eyed game enthusiasts with the technical savviness to give their ideas a shot at realization. From the long hours that the developers spent in the lab, and the near-party atmosphere, especially during the last weekend when every computer was occupied till late, I came to admire the dedication of these upcoming engineers and artisans. They were clearly not doing this for the grade; they were in it for the love of the game. I haven't witnessed that kind of long-hours anywhere else, except, during crunch time in a commercial game. That these students were pouring all their spare time into projects that would live for only fifteen minutes apiece, was admirable and indicative of the collective psychology of game developers. As I had discovered from the pass/no-pass intro to cinema production (CTPR507), grades don't motivate me. At all. Only the admiration of my peers motivates me. That class drove me to great lengths in which the most I could hope for was to entertain my classmates for 5 minutes, through the production of a movie. Here I found myself in the same loop, but making digital entertainment. As folks in cinema (or anyone without experience in computer science) are so apt to overlook, and as Peter Brinson put it, making games is just as hard as making movies, except in videogames you have to build your own camera. In the lab, I was surrounded by people not just dedicated, but addicted to the process of digital creation. Along with the tedium of training a machine with less intelligence than a guppy, comes the power to create a microcosm. Inside the Visual Studio, one becomes Yahweh, bespeaking light into existence within the electronic void. Within the hall of the one-eyed OGRE, one becomes master and demigod of a tiny digital realm. During our first month of class in Computer Science 529A (Advanced Game Project), I was impressed at the intelligence, breadth and depth of knowledge my fellow students had for videogames. My experience disspelled half of the stereotype that engineers are the implementers and "designers" are the idea generators. During an extemporaneous class exercise that dissected Super Mario brothers, one student (Danny), covered the nuances of the design and cultural impact of that 8-bit classic with such poetry that his impromptu performance verged on the art of spoken word. In discussing videogames of yore we were all exposed, geeks and gamers, each and every one of us. Not just any kind of geek, but the kind that is insatiable for innovation; the variety that takes elitist pride in novelty and thumps its chest at their ability to dominate the machine. During our pitches for projects, I was impressed at the grab bag of creative concepts and pent-up childhood nostalgia. Behind every pitch was the chambered psyche of a pre-teen boy (or girl) who had one of their young, life-fulfilling moments in digerati. While some of the pitches were a Return to Castle Vanity, about half of them were stellar ambitions to push (or at least lick) the envelope of interactive art in videogaming. The three projects that the class voted to greenlight were indicative of the crave to innovate. Alphabetically, these were: Cirque du Slay, Drum God, and Euphonics. And don't succumb to the software engineering stereotype. Each project was an interdisciplinary effort. Cirque du Slay was championed by an engineer whose alter ego must be a magic wielder. From the gems of an Arduino, and electronic entrails he crafted a glove of power +1. Fully articulated bend sensors for each finger would be the interface. The story came from John, a witty writer. With the glove, you would in short order slap around denizens of a banal circus, using a variety of clever gestures. Drum God iterated on Guitar Hero, but for the Wii, by drumming. The level of visual quality that five students plus a few modellers in the sister pipeline class (CS 281), was comparable to recent years' commercially released rhythm games. And oh, you got to play the air drums with a Wii. I can't speak objectively about Euphonics; it was my pitch and my fortune to be teamed up with both an amateur musician and a dual-classed artist-programmer versed in the illusions of Maya and cryptomancy of C++. Together we programmed an arcade shooter that rendered procedural graphics and whose action was synchronized to techno music. Our class was only one of many that day of demos. The others were also stocked with zany mashups, enveloping a kernel of passion. Bushido Beat and Motorball, both which demoed last semester, continued their development, each blending genres and cultural contexts. There were mobile games and networked games and serious games, but regrettably I didn't get to see these. I slept through half of the morning, having spent the night as did more than a handful of others, coding and tweaking. I make no excuse. In the psychology of entertainment software, there is both the dedication to quality, and the addiction to work, which is inefficient and self-destructive. Like gamblers at a slot machine, we pushed the button and pulled the menu down in hopes of hitting the debugger's jackpot, hacked code that obeyed our wishes. And yet, as the house is betting on, we end up in debt to both sleep and quality assurance. On demo day, we each had our fifteen minutes of fame. Industry headhunters perched and even endured technical failures to see us. As ironic as last demo day, in this hall of computer science, technical issues tarnished the glory. From what I saw, most of the games themselves survived for their ten minute bouts with reality, but the projector system itself failed us. Awaiting our turn from the overflow room, I shook my head at the video monitor that relayed a digital image from the video camera in the demo room of the projector, that emitted the light whose image was constructed from a machine; from a machine that the mind of an obsessive-compulsive, and quite talented, team had created and controlled. From this image of an image of an image, I could still make out the childhood centers of pleasure and dreams in the brain that were firing for these sleep-deprived slaves to digital creativity and gods of the machine.
/entertainment - permalink - comments Saturday, April 21, 2007At USC, fellow students and I designed and developed a crude version of a casual videogame with a political and ethical message about livestock farming, namely factory farming versus free range farming. A number of testers confused its free range advocacy with veganism (which advocates abstinence from animal products regardless of the quality of life of the animal). The issue seems to be hard to disentangle during discussions on what it means to value the quality of life for animals while recognizing that in living, tradeoffs in quality are necessary. Being a game designer who has held a number of diverse dietary, religious, and political positions, I have wondered what the "game" mechanisms (or in nicer clothes: the mathematics of interaction) are for the ethical treatment of animals and humans. So last Christmas while inspired by conversations with the animal rights philosopher, Rob Bass, I explored a model that aims to alleviate some of the contradictions of ethical calculus when comparing different species to each other. Read the article in its evolving draft. /politics - permalink - comments Saturday, April 14, 2007
Better Violence through Videogames While playing Indigo Prophecy, a videogame about a possessed murderer's search for his controlling killer, the in-game representation of the Internet had a story about children gunning down their classmates. The title of the story alluded Videogames claims Children, blaming videogames for real world violence. Quantic Dreams' succinct satire article reminded me of my own longer piece. As a game designer and veteran, I am compelled to raise the concerns for our children: What are the facts of videogames and violence? And, intimately related to this, what are government videogames doing to our children? Read the full article. /politics - permalink - comments Sunday, April 01, 2007A friend of mine in Salt Lake City is about to celebrate the release of his videogame, which is slated for Easter 2007. The topic of the videogame, although a bit reviling, intrigued me. After swearing that I would protect his identity, he relayed to me a story from the game's development. Since he is still under NDA (non-disclosure agreement) for his work, I told him I would write it as fiction and keep the salient details discreet. But after I heard what happened, I have to admit that one of the secrets slipped out. (Sorry M., I hope you'll understand.) For those of you interested in a behind-the-scenes story of a disturbing tactical videogame (without having to pay for the game), then read this story. /entertainment - permalink - comments Sunday, January 28, 2007
American idiot: Politics for interactivity (or, How I learned to stop worrying and love democracy) Today at lunch, Bruce Block brought up the limited interactivity of Heroes TV show, in which a viewer's response to a television show could alter the outcome of that show (or some future show?) I was reminded of American Idol which employs the gimmick of user votes (in the form of cellphone calls according to Robot Chicken), to affect the selection of the winner. All at the table who were listening agreed that it wasn't interactive. It was a weak illusion only capable of sustaining the belief of the feeble-minded. "Like politics," I muttered. Modern voting at the Federal level in the United States is less interactive than a banal television show. The cycle of interactivity for a TV show might be once per week, but for the president or members of congress, it is once every four years, about 200 times less frequent than a week. And the amount of interactive impact (or influence) that any single citizen has is less than one in a million. Generally it is closer to one in 40 million. One in 40,000,000 over the span of about 1300 days. That's terribly noninteractive as far as any system is concerned. Suppose your typewriter only responded once every four years, and not if just you had a request, but 20,000,000 others did as well, for say, a different computer. (Nevermind the enlightened realization that typerwriters are obsolete technology.) You wouldn't consider it responsive or interactive. Yet millions of simpleton sheep vote with conviction that they are participating in the machinery of democracy. Their participation amounts to less of an impact than a cellphone call to American Idol. And I would suspect, their entertainment value was not nearly as good as that banal broadcast. Why is that some of us insist on upholding the illusion that once a few years ritual participated in by millions, is an interactive, choice-centric ritual? If the votes are indicative of anything, it is a bellweather for the American Idiot. /politics - permalink - comments Saturday, January 27, 2007
File System Interface: Bumping and Grinding or Foresight and Finding? In June 2006, a bumptop interface was demonstrated. Pushing the interface metaphor of a desktop to its physics simulated extreme in a virtual environment, the bumptop interface manipulates and organizes files by simulating momentum, volume, friction. On top of the virtual environment are several clever metaphors such as decks (of cards) and books. Where the demonstration excels, is in the graceful and efficient gestures for quickly and intuitively aggregating files, such as drag and cross. See the demo. However, the interface suffers from literalism. In applying the desktop metaphor more completely, the problems of a physical desktop were also retained. Bumptop enables a user to keep a more cluttered set of files than current two-dimensional interfaces. You could literally lose your file underneath a stack of others. It doesn't scale well either. Having more than a hundred files, which is common for a music collection, would be hopeless to organize. A few other problems are coyly demonstrated in this parody demo. What I would like to see in an evolution of the desktop and folder metaphor, is multiple hierarchies. In a spreadsheet or music manager, you can sort and filter by categories, such as electronica or trance. You can also sort by date acquired, artist name, and so on. Whereas in Windows XP and Mac OS X you are still stuck with a single hierarchy. Your directory tree is fixed. In Unix, you can create symbolic links to other directories and emulate multiple hierachies. But these cannot be maintained as such. Let me expose the problem and this proposed solution through example. I may have a piece of music for an intended game. On Windows XP, does this music belong in "My Music" folder or the folder of the intended game? Whichever I choose, I have reason to believe I will want to find it when looking at other music, or when looking at this particular game. A link is not good enough, because the destination of the link might move, and furthermore, there may arise many other hierarchies that are precluded. If this piece is electronica, I want a hierarchical tree view of the files by musical genre. If the game is arcade, I want a hierarchy by game genre; yet if it is also a music game, then I want it in that category, too. If the game has an intellectual property that spans potential music, movies, or merchandise, then I want to organize my files by intellectual properties. And if I am collaborating, then I may want to organize files by author. Rather than having to pick and adhere to a single hierarchical structure, I would rather have an index by a variety of hierarchies, so that as my needs change, the relevant data is organized to meet those needs. Of course not all information is going to be available about what future needs may arise, but even such tags as the genre(s), author(s), media, intellectual property, and so on, would be relevant and available. This would not be trivial to implement as a legacy system. How an indexing service would gleam essential details for categorization is in the scope of Google Desktop's mission and its complexity may also be on that software's order of magnatude. /science - permalink - comments Sunday, January 07, 2007
The Cell's Eye /science - permalink - comments Study in Neuron proposes a neuroeconomic model that purchasing consideration is neurally similar to weighing pleasure versus pain. If a product costs too much, then consideration is shut down due to neural activation similar to when imagining pain. If the product is desirable, then neural activation resembles the imagining of physical pleasure. This model overturns the conventional economic model of pleasure versus pleasure consideration as the consumer's primary purchasing simulation. The model explains why purchases increase on credit card, assuming that credit purchases have less real (through lack of immediacy) imagined pain. Read the news. Or (if you have access) read the original article in Neuron. Could this model provide insight into game decisions as well? Are two alternate moves in Go considered in terms of imagined pleasure versus potential for immediate pain? Would the model suggest beginning players (who cannot foresee consequences) would be blinded by immediate pleasure or immediate pain, with pleasure correlated to immediate gain of territory, killing of opposing stones, and pain correlated to loss of territory, loss of stones. Would the stubborn principle to avoid immediate loss and subsequently lose more, which is common in amateur go and poker players, be explained by this model of contraindicating influences that simultaneously answer the subjective question: How pleasurable will this option be? How painful will this option be? In poker, the options to fold, call, or raise are often considered as risky behavior. One part of the article implied that the pleasure perceived to follow may loosen critical assessment of the probability that the pleasure will follow. If you have ever had four cards of a straight and one more card to be dealt, you know what I mean. The odds are low, but if (just if) that next card is the one you need, you've got a great hand. The prediction of pleasure (neurally defined as relative blood oxygen level at the nucleus accumbens) encourages risk-taking. And contrary, once invested in a hand, the prediction of loss (neurally defined as relative blood oxygen level at the insula) inhibits critical weighing of the expected gains and losses (at the mesial prefrontal cortex). So, one might stay in for fear of losing. Strictly speaking all bets placed in the pot are sunk costs, but most beginners (myself included) do consider the cost until actually folding or revealing a weak hand. Related (as I consider my own to-do list), does the neuroeconomic model provide insight into procrastination. If a task is intrinsically loathsome, and there is no immediate pleasure, then it might go undone. Why are taxes done late and future prospects calculated early? To avoid immediate pain and experience immediate pleasure. Now, step away from the parlor table and step into the smoke-filled room in which the big game is played: politics, where the chips are exchangable for death and property. The conclusion of the neuroeconomic experiment suggests that immediate anticipated pain inhibits critical consideration of the options. This conclusion has deep ramifications to public relations techniques, generally falling under the umbrella of fear-mongering. If the neuroeconomic model is generalizable, then successful fear-mongering is the activation of a module in the brain (insula) that inhibits critical consideration (mesial prefrontal cortex). A subject so influenced would uncritically accept an alternative to the anticipated pain. In the game of human death, one example of this tactic is the argument that another nation has a weapon of mass destruction. The imagined pain of mass destruction, or the imagined terror couched in the term terrorism, shuts down (in untrained listeners) critical consideration of other options to a dilemma, such as efficacious national defense for the purpose of maintaining the quality of life of that nations' citizens. /politics - permalink - comments Friday, January 05, 2007
Your program is not your programmer As relayed by Lisa Von Ahn on Scientific American: David Platt lambasts programmers for confusing their users, through such questions as asking if they want to save their work before quitting an application. Such prompted dialog messages were implemented not by programmers' impetus, but from the concern of usability designers back in the 1980s when saving work was both fragile and easier to miss doing when exiting an application. The interaction design professor, Donald Norman, in his late-80s classic The Design of Everyday Things, recommended exactly the opposite as David Platt. Since the 1990s, the problem of unusable software is no longer just the programmer. It is the designer's fault. When design experts disagree (such as Platt and Norman) it makes the course of usability design appear to a sequence of fads. Modal confirmation dialogs in one decade, out the next. David Platt also recommended getting rid of deletion confirmation dialogs, something that Norman also argued for. Of course you would rather be safe than sorry when destroying information that took hours or months to generate. Platt does have it right when he echoes Norman's two-and-a-half decade old truism: Blame the designer, not the user. But Platt blames the programmer, who in some cases is the designer, but in most cases is optimizing an engineering problem: how to enable a user to accomplish a task with the simplest mechanisms (as complexity requires programming construction and maintenance) while asking the user to learn as little as possible about structure of those mechanisms. In terms of evolutionary sciences, the environment in which software evolves includes the human and the machine. Such things as save-request dialogs and deletion-confirmation dialogs are elegant solutions to that very problem: Few moving parts to maintain and a small cost to the user, especially given the alternative (to garble or lose a document). Such modal dialogs are not the only optimal solution to the problem, but they are valid implementations for minimizing costs while maximizing usability. The field of user interface design should continue to strive for even better solutions, but should do so with an implicit understanding that unimaginative implementation of pie-in-the-sky user requests, which Platt is contributing, are what has made the previous (and current) decade's software contain the features that Platt was criticizing. Read the inciting article. /entertainment - permalink - comments Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Thought-behavior: Forecasting the future through simulating behavior A Washington University team isolated some areas of the brain that are activated when imagining an event that is going to occur. The activation is distinct from recalling a past event. Both, it seems, activate areas of the brain associated with planning motor control. The hypothesis is that the brain is simulating behavior in the situation being imagined. Read the news article. This suggests that memories and imaginations are based in behavior. I am reminded of a term I had begun to use in 1995, while training in at the US Army Signal Corps school, to denote the inextricable bond of thought and behavior in humans, that of a single conjoined term, thought-behavior. To think, in an attenuated manner within the brain, is to behave in simulation, and I conjectured had neural activation similar to the performance of the behavior itself. /science - permalink - comments Monday, January 01, 2007
Distributed Creation (Or, Have you hugged your laptop recently?) Rob Bass recommended the book by Andy Clark (Natural Born Cyborgs), which discusses human interaction with machines in a natural and continuous method. In short, the article expounds on the idea that the brain is not the principal agent in the process of creation, but is the facilitator of creative work with the cooperation of a plethora of mechanical and electronic devices. As if I didn't already have enough ego invested in interactive media, here's more fuel to the fire of the utility of effective interaction design. Read Andy Clark's article which asks: are we Natural Born Cyborgs? |
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