1. If the number of mines indicated by this square is equal to the number of neighboring mines already flagged, clear any uncleared/unflagged neighbors.
2. If the number of mines indicated by this square is equal to the number of neighboring mines already flagged plus the number of uncleared neighbors, then flag all uncleared neighbors as mines.

These rules should be obviously correct to anyone who’s ever played Minesweeper; in fact, I can’t even imagine making any progress in a Minesweeper game without them. So I decided to implement these rules in Gnomine, the open source version of Minesweeper that comes with Gnome on Linux. It only took me a few hours before I had this patch (applicable to gnome-games v2.20.1). Of course, this patch assumes that no mines are ever incorrectly flagged, but I think that’s a reasonable assumption.

And after playing with it, it’s surprising how much of the board can be cleared mechanically before you ever even get to any interesting decisions. When the sweeping does stop, what’s left are a few random decisions, where you can’t do any better than a 50/50 guess, and also the genuinely interesting positions where you have to apply set theory to make deductions.

I sent this patch off to the gnome-games mailing list owner, and have yet to receive a response. I’m sure that adding minor features to gnomine is absolutely no one’s top priority, but maybe if someone else has been similarly inspired, they might find this patch useful.

As a side note, it is interesting that the stock market performs better and with less volatility during Democratic presidencies:

Using the Dow Jones industrial average as the benchmark, Stock Trader’s Almanac shows a $10,000 investment compounded during Democratic presidencies since 1901 would be worth $279,705 after 48 years. The same $10,000 investment during 56 Republican years would have been worth just $78,699. If you adjust for inflation, the value of a $10,000 investment under Democratic presidents is $33,426.The inflation-adjusted value under Republican presidents is $26,145.

So I got inspired to spread the message, both about Sarah’s Scandals and the horror that may soon be her presidency. (Do you really think McCain will live long enough to become a Maverick again?) I found zazzle.com and went on a tear.

The great thing about bumper stickers written in the future satirical tense is that if the unthinkable comes true, they actually become more stylish. At least until President Palin signs the Protect America First Act into law, which bans any bumper stickers which do not contain a Pro-Palin message.

Share and enjoy!

I know the quality of audio on Youtube is pretty bad, but she doesn’t care. She’s excited that she can finally listen to these songs again, and she’d be content with just having an mp3 constructed from the Youtube videos. In fact, she’d be ecstatic.

How hard can this be? I’m learning some jQuery myself–it’s all the rage, what with the mashups and the AJAX–and I thought I could make a simple client-side webpage that AT LEAST just gets at a user’s favorites from youtube and prints the URLs of each .flv for download. Youtube has a nice little API, you just GET from a sensible URL, and it returns XML. jQuery has some nice functionality to get elements from the XML and I would just add a few rows a table with the right information. No problems anticipated.

Web 2.0 is a Steaming Pile

Well it turns out that Firefox and IE won’t allow an XML request to a different domain than the page is hosted at. It’s called the “cross-domain restriction”, and while it’s meant to provide security, it actually just provides a major headache for anybody who actually wants to do cool stuff with various web services. I want to make some mashemups!

So what should be a simple client-side XML request and parsing is not actually possible without some server-side code on the same domain as the client web page. I tried using the JSONP trick (a workaround for the cross-domain restriction is to execute arbitrary Javascript from the target site), but this only solves half the problem. To get at the raw FLV from Youtube, you need to pull a query parameter from the target location of a redirected URL. I just need the headers! Dammit.

Well, as long as I have to make my server do anything other than serve a static page with some Javascript, I’m going to do it right. With this approach I can also “convert” the FLV to an MP3 on-the-fly, which is all Mom wants anyway.

My Solution

I’m posting my entire solution here, in case anyone else wants to duplicate and/or extend this service for themselves. This took me about 8 hours of futzing around with various AJAX/Python/Apache2 bullshit. Which is about 6 hours longer than it would have taken me without that cross-domain restriction parapet in my way.

The webserver needs to have python2.5 and ffmpeg installed, and be configured for Python CGI. I also made an Alias regex which makes saving properly-named mp3s a lot easier:


Options ExecCGI
AddHandler cgi-script py
AliasMatch ^/yt2mp3/(.*)\.mp3$ /var/www/htdocs/tube2mp3.py


These files all need to be copied into the htdocs directory:

• tube2mp3.py (cgi/python): youtube flv to mp3 converter. Given query parms ‘video_id’ and the corresponding ‘t’, grabs the raw FLV from youtube, converts it to mp3 using ffmpeg, and dumps it back out as audio/mpeg. Minimal latency and no disk storage required (all done using python and pipes). I’m pretty proud of how tight this turned out to be (thanks to Python’s subprocess module making pipes easy), though it took me quite awhile to get the arguments to ffmpeg just right.
• annotube.py (cgi/python): youtube query forwarder. Sends a query ‘q’ (prepending ‘http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/’) to youtube; for each <entry> in the result, goes back to youtube to get ‘t’, and stores it as an attribute (’t’ of course) on <entry> tag. Unfortunately, this script incurs no small amount of latency, and provides no feedback.
• style.css (css): gives it that distinctive look.
• index.html (ajax): Sends a query through annotube and creates some links to .mp3s, that the AliasMatch rule above sends to tube2mp3.py to convert from flv gotten from youtube.

And there you have it. I love you, mom!

Given that I believe a major environmental crisis is unavoidable, how might we ensure that genuinely sustainable communities could become a reality? Firstly I believe we should use the most powerful tool of the current age to design exactly how future communities should look, what technologies and system of government would be most appropriate, and how to ensure that such communities remain sustainable over time. Computer games already exist which allow users to design cities and societies. It would be a relatively simple undertaking to design an on-line computer game which would allow interested parties worldwide to refine the details of exactly what such a future society should look like. Remember that if communities develop in a haphazard manner, it is likely that they will fall into many of the traps that our current society has.

This, along with my current interest in educational science games, inspires me to reimagine Spaceship Earth Beta, my ongoing imaginary platform for exploring issues and strategies of sustainability, as a massively-multiplayer computer game.

First, there must be two competing goals which different players are working towards:

1. To develop a society proven to be sustainable over a large time-scale;
2. To be selfish or violent or “evil”, taking advantage of loopholes for personal wealth or power or ego, which ultimately leads to making the whole society unsustainable.

The first goal must be concretely measurable. Concrete definitions of a small number of metrics must be defined such that, if they can be maintained or improved over several generations of players, they would indicate that the society as a whole is sustainable. These metrics would at least include:

• energy consumption and reserve
• cultural preservation and distribution
• tolerance for error (human, software, external catastrophe)

Playing the game through multiple generations of players, with different personalities and each generation being more detached from the start of the project, is important; cultural values are not transmitted by default to the next generation.

The second goal, while perhaps irritating to the larger community which devotes itself to the first goal, is nonetheless vital and the players which achieve it must be revered, even as the players who attempt it must be reviled. All systems which are composed of humans with individual volition will have members who desire to destroy the system, even if they must sacrifice themselves. The system must be resilient against any single point of failure, or any small-scale collusion against it. The exile or incarceration of citizens for what amounts to this “treason” must be enforced; their murder must carry the same emotional weight as it would in reality.

I do not believe that we can plan from the outset a completely sustainable system; the “metarules” that are in existence from the outset of the project, and the texts which define its culture and values, are all we can really control, and their ramifications can only be understood from playing them out to a reasonable conclusion. Now, the results of a computer game are obviously not the same as the results of the same experiment conducted in reality. However, we can work to create and refine the starting set of metarules to have the greatest probability of success.

This simulation will have to be run many times with many different people. This makes it different from existing MMORPGs which run continuously, with game designers (”GDs”) modifying the game rules to maximize fun and membership. Many variants will be obviously flawed, others more subtly so, but they should be aborted if and when they are irretrievably broken, and the system analyzed post-mortem to find the flaws that led to its demise, and a new system started with the modified meta-rules.

We already have so many pieces of the puzzle, but even if the puzzle is ever completely solved and all the scientists become specialized mathematicians, there will still be the question, “why anything at all?” On one side will be the ones who say it must be constructed, and on the other side will be the ones who say it doesn’t have to be, that every time so far we’ve thought it was impenetrable, someone has shown that we can see even deeper. This debate will never cease, and unless some incontrovertible evidence comes along, I don’t think it ever should.

Religions worship Gods, Science worships Math.

Their geographic tests (like how many countries in Europe can you name) are even harder, at least for me.

I got 71 elements. When you try your hand at it, leave a comment with how many you could name, and which one you were pissed that you missed.

extra- (L. outside, 1922-1945)
super- (L. above, 1940-1958)
ultra- (L. beyond, 1979-1984)
mega- (Gk. great, 1984-1993)
hyper- (Gk. beyond, 1994-2000)
meta- (Gk. after, 2001-present)

I bet Lexus-Nexus could run this query, actually.

World of Warcraft: Short Version

World of Warcraft is a lot like Diablo (also made by Blizzard), or really any other single-player first-person point-of-view “role-playing” computer game, except it has a lot more content and over 6 million players. Though you can only see a small fraction of those on the server that you’re locked into, and only a small fraction of those are online at any given time.

Many people talk about how addictive it is, even going as far as likening it to crack cocaine. Here’s why: from almost the first moment you log in, you’re given “quests”, which are menial tasks with clearly defined and eminently achievable goals. When you turn in those quests, you get more quests, and each accomplishment gives you experience and items, and when you get enough experience, you go up a level. Levels and items give you more options, making it easier (and cooler) to achieve those earlier goals, but of course the new goals you get are increasingly difficult. For all the game’s faults–and there are more than a few–Blizzard has created a remarkable balance between difficulty and achievability. It is undeniably fun to achieve goals and quantify progress, no matter how mundane the tasks nor how arbitrary the scale.

Overall I enjoyed the experience, though I was getting a little burnt out after 3 weeks or so. I pushed through and played that 4th week anyway; I really wanted to play a month and be done with it. I met some interesting people, including two serving in the U.S. military (one currently in Iraq). I’m glad I played, and I’m glad it’s over.

If I play another MMOG, I’d like to try EVE Online.

World of Warcraft: Dorky Details

It’s a bit out of character for me to play a pay MMORPG like WoW. I do many things compulsively, and I love to play games, but I’m also cheap when it comes to my entertainment. The privilege of wasting a colossal amount of time in an online world is not worth $15/month to me–I can do that just fine for free, thank you very much. But as long as I had a “free” trial (a friend had bought me a copy of the game two years ago), I was going to get the most out of it.

So after putting off my friend for over two years, I finally set out on a Friday evening a month ago to install it and maybe spend a few hours playing that night. But after installing the initial 5 DVDs from the box, which took the expected 2 hours, the game had to download and install several updates totalling 2GB, which over my 60kb/s cable internet connection took over 8 hours. I actually finished installing all the updates on Saturday evening, and finally started playing.

The first challenge is choosing a name for your “toon” (MMO lingo for “character”). I tried 5 different names, and each was already taken; I finally picked ‘Solly as my moniker. But there’s no “confirm this as your name” step; you have to commit to a name before they’ll tell you if it’s taken. And your first, second, and third choices are all taken. This leads to such names as “Phunkdis” (someone I played with occasionally), which I’m sure was just typed in impatient frustration and wound up sticking.

The game supposedly has 6 million players total, but only a small fraction of those are on any given server (and it costs $25 to move your character from one server to another). There are still too many people to keep track of, so players naturally aggregate into Guilds of 50-100+ players. I was invited early on to join a guild called “Fallen Legends”, with some friendly members who were very helpful.

You notice right away that you spend a lot of time traveling around. An awful lot. This is actually my primary complaint of the game. You run from city to city and from region to region, and it’s just dead time; you can’t automate it, and nothing usually happens. Even when you acquire “flight plans” so you can charter a gryphon around (for a price of course), it can take over 5 minutes, and there’s nothing you can do during that time but watch the scenery go by.

Now, a friend told me that “the real game doesn’t start until level 70″, and of course by that point you have all kinds of special powers and abilities to help you get around more speedily, or friends and guild members with those special powers. But even then, there’s a lot of waiting around for other things, like for 40 people of the right level and skill sets to be online at the same time so you can go on a “raid” (a high-level dungeon instance); or killing umpteen spawns of the same monster, waiting for him to drop the rare but useless item you need so you can complete a quest so you can get the awesome item you need to make your character powerful enough to fight the next level of baddie. It’s all shaving the yak, but I can see how that’s “fun”. The unfun part is noticing the low fun:tedium ratio and watching your actual life slip away.

It’s also kind of a pain-in-the-ass to figure out where you have to go for this quest or that quest. There’s an in-game Quest Log that tracks what the quest-givers tell you to do, and you’re supposed to figure out from the text where you need to go. But while I’m sure there are some brilliantly written quests with clever verbal puzzles to figure out, by and large these descriptions are cranked out by Assistant Game Designers under deadlines and with substantial formulaic constraints, and they wind up being not very rewarding to muddle through.

So around level 20 I got the hot tip about QuestHelper, a plug-in that maintains a huge database of all the quests in the game. It shows you explicitly where you need to go to fulfill whichever batch of quests you and your party happen to be undertaking, and optimizes your path so you spend as little time as possible traveling around. I had a few qualms at first about subverting the natural gameplay that the designers intended, but since I was already looking to maximize the fun:tedium ratio, it quickly became essential. I never installed any other plugins, though I briefly toyed with the idea of dusting off my Lua skills and learning the interface, just to see what it was like.

In the end, I actually played for over 120 hours total, getting Solly the gnomish mage to level 36 and acquiring over 75 gold before my trial unexpectedly expired. This was mostly my fault, as I hadn’t been keeping track of my end date; a “your subscription is ending in N days” message would have been nice. I kinda wanted to say goodbye to some people and give away all my stuff. Ah well. Maybe I’ll check in again when I have a few hundred hours to kill.

A friend of mine, Joe Ardent, believes that the Singularity is nigh upon us, and with it comes the end of resource scarcity. I happen to believe that energy will be a limiting factor for some time to come–I don’t think we will manage to create a viable fusion or antimatter or other essentially “limitless” energy source in my lifetime. That’s not to say it won’t happen ever. The concept of the Singularity emerges naturally from exponential growth, and in time, I suppose all things are possible. But this is a battle of the exponents: just as our technological and production capabilities grow exponentially, so does our population and its consumption (and I’m not even taking into account the emergent problems that come with scaling all new technology).

So I bet this friend a year’s supply of energy (about 300 GJ, or 10kW-years) that before we achieve the Singularity–for the purposes of the bet, defined as a billion people having programmable nano-factories that can make unlimited copies of those same nano-factories–the world will see a huge population reduction, defined by the bet as a 15% population drop (the loss of 1 billion people from today’s world population).

That is a nearly unfathomable number of people–the entire world population in A.D. 1800–and the events that could cause such a massive loss of population are certainly not going to be pleasant. For comparison, the Black Plague killed 100 million people, reducing the world population by 25%.

But let’s put this in perspective: If something does happen in 2012 to knock a billion people off the earth’s roster, that would merely set the world’s population back to 6 billion, which we had just 12 years prior in 2000. Honestly, as a planet and a species, we would scarcely notice such a minor disturbance in the Force.

I of course hold out hope that our awakening superbeing becomes aware of its plight, and takes active steps to limit its population and reverse the last century’s hypergrowth. But this looks like it will take a very long time–the annual growth rate did peak (at 2.2%) in the ’60s, which is good news, but 40 years and 3.5 billion people later, we’re still headed the wrong direction (over 1% annual growth). More developed countries which already have a negative population growth (like Italy), are worried that their particular breed of human will be overrun by a swarm of another particular breed of human, and so they’re encouraging their breed to, well, breed. Which is not a real solution to any real problem.

Effective solutions, like encouraging widespread contraceptive use or offering impoverished parents a few bucks to get their children sterilized, are not widely pursued for so-called “moral” reasons. So it looks like, we humans are going to keep procreating ourselves into an ever-deeper hole, and regardless of technological progress will eventually suffer the same plight as every dominant lifeform before us. Ah well. We all know that it will be the poorest and ugliest who will die first, so assuming we don’t go completely extinct, our descendents will be richer and more beautiful than we are. Maybe they’ll be smarter too, but I’m not going to bet on it.