As I’m leaving from Japan pretty soon as well, and I’m a bit burned by 4E, I’ve decided to create a short campaign, focused on a single scenario, using advanced characters for the players. Basically the campaign centers around the player’s mission to save Platonia, a city ran by a council of wizards in the mystical “Astral Plane” - the place which separate different realities and dimensions.

In the first two game sessions, the players had found out that a former mage of the city council (”O Leitor”) wanted revenge from his expulsion, and was assembling a large army to lay waste to Platonia. They saved a desertor from the army, which gave them information about their invasion plans. They ordered some defense preparations for the city, and decided to apply a decapitation strike by going against the leader of the army. On the way they were ambushed by assassins from the Leitor, and while they managed to survive the ambush, the last game ended with the group hurtling down the endless mists of the Astral Plane on a broken ship.

For this Friday’s game, I had spent the week preparing a strange “planet” the group would crash on and explore, which would turn out to be a living entity that they could try to recruit to the city’s defense. However, as players characters usually wont, once my group crashed into the mysterious cavern with he sinking ground, the strong psionic presence, and the tunnel emanating evil, they promptly decided to get the hell out of there in some flimsy magic items they had on themselves. Always count on players smashing your carefully laid plans.

So the group decided that they would head back to the place where they were ambushed, and from there continue on their initial mission. On the way, they found out about another assassin that was sent to make sure they had died in the ship crash. It was a Githyanki (a kind of astral humanoid) on a dragon, with a scort of two “Brains in a Jars” - magical constructs.

When the group detected the assassins, they started to flee in another direction, and the Githyanki with the dragon followed them, breaking away from the Brains, which were much slower. From past experience, the group knew that fighting in their magic flying items would result in their items being destroyed pretty quickly, so they decided to look for somewhere to land and fight. When they found such a place (a small crystal formation floating in space), the Githyanki knight decided to keep at a distance from them until the Brains caught up.

At this time, the players for some reason decided to forget their previous experience, and charged at the knight with their magical mounts - what followed was an exiting air combat, where the Minotaur paladin charged at the Githyanki knight and jumped on the dragon — just to have the dragon teleport away from his feet towards the fragile Eladrin crossbowwoman in the ground! Not to be undone, the minotaur grabbed the mount of his nearby elven friend, and free falled into the knight and the Dragon again, pushing the knight out of his mount — but the knight managed to use his magics to return to his dragon.

The Brains finally managed to reach the fighting area, and started to move towards the group - at that time, everyone tried to crowd the knight and his dragon, trying to put him down before reinforcements arrived. That mostly worked, excepted that it triggered a counter attack from the dragon, who belched fire and destroyed the flying mounts of everyone - who fell hard into the crystal structure. All but the Paladin Minotaur, who was still clinging to the Dragon. Seeing the entire group go to the ground, the minotaur decided to grab onto the knight and JUMP, trusting that the fall would hurt him less than it hurt the Githyanki, and that is what just happened.

Separated from his mount, the knight was not so powerful, and the Eladrin crosbowwoman put him out of his misery quickly. However now the group was without any means of flight, and being attacked by three flying enemies, who were quite content to pelt the players from a height. The brains had this nasty ability to try and turn the players against each other using psychic powers, but the group managed to resist that, and protect the Eladrin while she pelted them with more crossbow bolts. At one time, one of the brains got a bit too close and the Elven avenger (a kind of holy warrior), used his short range teleportation power to deal a crippling blow to that brain. Eventually the group dispatched their enemies and decided that stayin on the crystal island would be too dangerous, so they returned to the place where they were first ambushed, and tried to find some cover there to spend the night and recuperate.

The next day, the group decided to resume their mission to find and kill the Leitor, in order to make his army “headless”. They travelled into a region of the astral which looked like a giant, abandoned stone city. In the middle of the city they saw the large Githyanki ship approaching, and decided that the Leitor should be there, so they would spring an ambush of their own. They hid in one of the buildings, and as the ship approached, so did the large army fielded by the Leitor, composed of hundred of those mechanical brains and worse beasties; a second, smaller githyanki ship, two large dragons, and a committee of ogre-magi mounted on wyverns.

The group changed their plans, and decided to try and hijack the small ship and ram it against the big one - it was a brave, but completely insane plan (never mind the fact that they never confirmed if their target was REALLY in any of those ships). They waited until the small ship was just over them, and rushed into it, managing to land before the enemy had time to react.

But then all the hell broke loose. They fought against the small group of githyanki defending their ship, and while they weren’t able to defeat the players, they bought enough time that by the time the group took total control of the ship, the Dragons, Wyverns and some of the flying brains were already in combat range. The large ship had taken some distance and started firing fireballs at the smaller one. In the end the group decided to go with a retreat on the smaller, nimbler ship and, with a lot of luck and bravery, managed to flee from the army on the flaming ship, two large dragons hot on their tails… Nothing like a session which ends on a similar tone as it had began!

=====================

This was an interesting game, and not because it went in the complete opposite direction where I had planned to go. The two fights we had — the aerial fight over the crystal island and the pursuit on the airship against dragons and wyvern-mounting ogres, largely satisfied my quest for the “bizarre”, which was one of the two things that I was aiming at in this mini-campaign. To try and use 4E in what it is supposedly best: to create flashy and over powered combat scenes in super-fantastical scenarios.

The combats were pretty epic, with the Minotaur Palading doing his aerial charges, the Warlord keeping the group healed through waves and waves of area blasts, the Avenger and the Rogue dealing the brunt of the damage to the opponents, and while the Dwarf Battlemind didn’t fulfill any particular memorable scene during combat, since he was the only psionic character in a mostly psionic based session, he dominated the non-combat skills and challenges, and thus everyone had their role during the game.

The second combat - charge against the army, is one of those WTF moments where as a GM you can’t really understand what is going through your player’s collective heads. Even after I described in details just how many people there were in that army, the dragons, the super ship and the dozens of Brains that had put the players into so much trouble recently, they just seemed even more intent into trying it. At least I think I managed to convince them into trying a “stealth” approach instead of a simple head on attack.

I had all the intent of creating a TPK in this scene, limiting my self only by what I had listed beforehand as the available forces, but throwing all of them at the same time with no regards to encounter balance - the fact that they still managed to survive all that denounces the fact of how 4e characters are pretty much unkillable - and that I needed to sort out ship combat rules beforehand.

Now next session is the big showdown - the army will come to the doors of the city, and the players will see what their incursions and (few) preparations paid for. That is, if they don’t come up with some new weird idea After that I’m probably shelving 4E for good - preparing games for this system is just not that fun anymore - I can barely start to wade through the magic items, and while imagining situations for set piece encounters is nice, the actuall act of going through dozen of monsters to pick the right ones with the right combination of powers/etc is kinda off-puting. Added to the fact that the best scenes of this game - the jumping through the air and the airship “mental fight” between the battlemind and the enemy crew members - were stuff not covered by 4E rules, I’m pretty confident that it is time to finish that megadungeon I started writing and put it to good gaming.

This is not only a jerk move from the part of Shazam, but it is also a very sad example of how companies use the murky idea of “IP” (Intellectual Property) to try and enforce rights that they DO NOT HAVE.

Recently “Intellectual Property” has been used to put together three very different kinds of laws, whose only thing in common is that they deal with ideas: Copyright Law, Patent Law and Trademark Law. Put very simply, Copyright law describes who has the right to copy a creative work; Patent law describes who has the right to implement and use a certain technical idea; and Trademark Law describes who has the right to use a Brand on a certain service or product.

Now, these laws give very different rights and duties, for very different situations. For example, patent law, which is described here, says that if you have a technical idea (like, how to make a machine), you can give the government a very detailed description of how your idea works, and the government will give you a monopoly of the use of your idea in exchange of explaining to everyone how your idea works. It makes sense, if the working of your patent is not public, how will someone know if they are infringing it or not?

Copyright is almost the opposite - you register your copyright work with the government, and you get a monopoly on copying/distributing your work, in exchange of letting everyone copy/distribute your work for free after a certain time has passed. (And big media companies are trying to cheat us and extend this time indefinitely, but that is another discussion).

Now, what happened in the case of Landmark Digital Services/Shazam is that they are trying to enforce “copyright” rights into their patents. “We have a patent on this idea, so you can’t discuss this idea, or show this idea to anyone!”. If they were alleging that copyright rights were infringed, they would have a case, but the whole point of patents is that everyone is supposed to know, discuss and understand how the given patent work. You can only infringe a patent if you are actually using the patented idea, not talking about it.

This is what happen when we put together all these laws under the same term. We start to think of them as the same. And unethical people will try to rob us of our rights by using this confusion.

* Some more discussion about why “Intellectual Property” should not be used can be seen here.

Cool, huh? Monkeys also like to watch other monkeys and stuff on TV.

Well, too bad that the study doesn’t actually say anything like that. I decided to hunt the article to read more details about the methodology used. The news articled linked from Slashdot mentions the Journal name, but not the authors name, or the name of the article! But I managed to find it on the Journal’s webpage, and since it was Open Access, I managed to even take a look at it myself :-). (By the way, I found it funny that the name of the reviewers were also listed in the article, is this common in the biosciences?)

Well, the article, while probably interesting to neuroscientists, doesn’t actually say anything about whether monkeys like TV or not. It seems that its main focus is to test a new instrument to measure brainwaves, and it lists the results obtained when using the device on a monkey tied to a chair in a dark room, being showed a video from time to time. The article itself says that the results exclude any period where the monkey was not looking at the video (apparently, it was 60% of the trials). If anything, what I can conclude from reading the article is that a monkey tied to a chair in a dark room is 60% more likely NOT to watch a video of animals being showed to him.

So much for Animal Planet

This is Muhammad, in the desert. I gave him a flying carpet, because I thought it was appropriate! At least he is not a zombie!

Show me yours doodle!

With some luck, I might even manage to bring up the subject of Post-Doc positions *g* — BTW, I finally got my first serious proposals these days, but it is top secret, don’t bother asking :-).

Logistically, the trip is all set up. I’ll leave tomorrow and return on the 24th — not that it will make a big difference for the pacing of this blog. Recently I have been mostly posting personal stuff to Facebook, and news/research stuff to twitter. I’ll be staying at two couchsurfer’s place — hope the karma pays off :-), and I have printed a small list of Geocaches I want to find during the trip, time permitting. The only part which is a bit uncertain is how I will get from the airport to Ann Arbour — it seems that A2 does not have an international airport (or even a big local one), so I have to get off in Detroit and, this being the US, I can’t take a bus/train from the airport to the city - I need to book a shuttle in advance (which I couldn’t do, since most shuttles only take reservation by phone, none answered my e-mails), or pay 50 dollars for a cab - five times what I would pay for an express train Narita-Tokyo, which is about double the distance. So who said Japan is expensive again?

And don’t get me started on the medieval flight security in US airports…

As an aside, I have finally finished all the experiments and most of the analysis required for the “final” revision of my thesis. I kinda hesitate to use final (hence the “”), since there is a lot of stuff which I’m not satisfied with and would like more time to work on, but it should be enough data to satisfy the defense committee (based on their review of my first defense). So in the next 23 days until the deadline, all I gotta do is edit this data into new sections and improve some of the old ones.

Have you ever noticed how many packages for animal-based foods, or restaurants which specialize in a kind of animal, often sport images of such animal in a happy or cartoonish way? Like the pork restaurant with a cute pig with a chef hat in the billboard, or the fried squid tents in Japan with a happy squid preparing the fried squid balls. Now, while I don’t object in any way to eating meat, these kind of illustrations are just creepy to me. I mean, the animals probably wouldn’t be too happy about being eaten, and certainly would not be preparing the food themselves. Really, it is just WRONG.

When my RPG player blood is strong, I often enjoy imagining counterpart scenarios, like festivals made by trolls and orcs where images of cute little boys or smiling women illustrate the tent where they sell snacks made of unlucky adventurers…

By the way, the Kangaroo meat was not that good, if you were wondering.

There is a holiday in Japan for the birthday of the emperor. Currently, this day falls on December 23rd. However, during the previous emperor’s reign, of course, the holiday was in a different day. After that emperor died, however, that date remained as a holiday, and it’s name was changed to “Green Day” or “Nature’s day” (and if you never knew where “midori no hi” came from, now you know).

Now, when she was a kid, this friend thought that, since the former emperor’s birthday was still a holiday, eventually, after a number of emperors had passed, most of the year would be made of holidays! So, in her kid mind, she wanted the emperors to die as quickly as possible, so she could have more days off school.

I found this pretty amusing

When I went back to sleep, however, I actually started thinking about Sleeping. Sleeping is a fascinating function of most higher animals that we still don’t understand fully - what exactly is its function, how much sleep do we need, how it works. The second question in particular was grabbing my mind at the time.

How much sleep do we need? The common answer is about 8 hours of sleep per night for an adult. Some people live on 6 hours sleep routines (I did for a while). Yesterday, I went to bed around 1 in the morning, and, having woken up at 5, that puts me at 4 hours. Since I had no reason to stay awake, I decided to “fill my quota”, by sleeping another 2 or 3 hours before waking up for good.

But is it okay if we sleep 4 hours, stay awake 2, and then sleep another four? What about 4 hours sleeping, 4 awake, 4 sleep? What about breaking it in small intervals? Or one big 6 hour interval and three 1 hour intervals? I was thinking about that. I remembered a story about a famous scientist (was it Newton? or DaVinci?) who was said to live in a “sleep one hour, stay 3 awake” schedule (XKCD has a different suggestion). At these times I wish I had been a neurologist…

Eventually I went back to sleep, but now with the late spring sun rising early in the morning, I was up again by eight. Well, all the better for me to get to work, but now I must start taking care not to sleep too late if I want a full night of rest before the sun wakes me up

Usage: $ average.sh “filename.*” > filename.avg

sum=`ls -l $1 | wc -l`
tf=`ls $1 | tail -n 1`
fld=`tail -n 1 $tf | wc -w`

count=1
while [ $count -lt $(($fld + 1)) ]; do
paste -d” ” $1 | nawk -v s=”$sum”\
-v fld=”$fld” -v f=”$count” ‘{
for(i=0;i< =s-1;i++)
{
ta=f + i*fld
tta=tta+$ta
}
print tta/s
tta=0
}' >> tmp$count
count=$(($count + 1))
done
paste -d” ” tmp*
rm tmp*

Bonus points for anyone who can make the above code simpler.

UPDATE: Thanks Pat for the bugfix. Whups.

One of the research topics addressed in my laboratory is the use of Evolutionary Computation to assist in music composition. Basically, a EC algorithm generates multiple small pieces of music, which are evaluated by the human composer, and those evaluation scores are sent back to the computer, which try to generate a new generation of pieces similar to those which received a high score. This particular framework of evolutionary computation is called “Interactive Evolutionary Computation” (IEC) [1], because the fitness function is a human operator, and not a algorithmic function.

A big issue IEC is “user burden”. Evolutionary computation is based on scoring multiple candidate solutions, many times - when this evaluation is done by a human, instead of a computer program, the user may get tired after scoring too many individuals. To avoid that, it is important to either use the least amount of evaluations as possible, or make the evaluation as quick and painless to the user as possible - a lot of research has been done in both areas.

Now, the idea - how about using the concept of crowd sourcing to IEC? Instead of having one user evaluating the songs, we would have multiple users evaluating them in a asynchronous manner. The example we thought up would be a website where, say, mobile ring tones are generated by EC, with downloads and user evaluation being used as scores. Every few days(?), these values would be used to generate new tones, which would replace the old ones. This could not only generate more interesting tones, but also be able to “track” or “follow” fashions or memes of users.

A quick google search on the above keywords seemed to reveal that this is still a new idea (nothing relevant shows up on the first page for “crowd-sourcing IEC” and “crowd-sourcing composition” only show non-EC approaches [2]). Try it while it is fresh. Brainstorming in the comments is welcome

Links
[1] IEC on Wikipedia
[2] Crowdsourcing Composition