Click Nothing

Happiness is...

Learning that your last game has been selected to be made available for download as an XBox Live Original. Thanks Major. I'm super proud to be a part of such an illustrious line-up, and I can't wait to play it again. And I think much of the team - at least the ones I spoke to today about it - were all very happy to hear the news.

It's been a couple years now since I fired it up. If you ever decide to give Acheivement Points for XLO titles, and you need someone to design them - hey, I could make time for that.

Here's lookin' at you - algorithm...

Two interesting links floated around work in the last couple days. Both related to visualizations of information or information processes.

One was this beautiful work being done by Alex Dragulescu at MIT Media Lab where he is feeding patterns from software viruses into 3D software to create visual representations of what they 'look like'... and I have to say they are very... viroid... be sure to look at the full size images.

The other was this cool web-based chess program that shows you what the computer is thinking. Go play a game. At first you might think 'so what - this doesn't enlighten me much, it's just pretty...' but play a WHOLE game. These screenshots show how the patterns of chess evolve over the course of a single game. It's fascinating actually seeing how the huge complex patterns break up somewhat quickly into overlapping patterns of lines of attack, and then devolve into tight defensive rids and huge sweeping lines for the losing and winning sides respectively.

What I wonder is if this information would be useful in teaching certain kinds of people - people with certain ways of thinking - how to play better chess. It certainly offers an alternate abstraction of the information that we get from observing a chess board. One feature I would like is for the creator to allow you to set up any board position you like - or even to feed entire games to the brain and see the patterns for each board position. This might allow a rich and interesting analysis of classic chess games and might offer interesting insights into how and why certain strategies work. Maybe I should fire a mail off to the ChessMaster team and get them to hire this guy and integrate this. That would be cool.

Anyway - beautiful stuff - these two things made my day.

Powers of Ten

So this post marks two awesome simultaneous events.

First it is my 100th post on Click Nothing in just over 3 years. That puts me at not-terribly-respectable-but-not-terrible average of about one post every 10 days. When I started I had hoped to post minimum once a week, and there's no denying that I have enough data to say I have failed that objective. However, aside from a couple of specific windows where I didn't post for an entire month or so, I have been pretty close to once a week. Not bad. Maybe I can turn it up a bit and try to log my next 100 posts in a 2 year window... especially given the number of emails I send myself from work saying 'something to post' and then never get around to it.

So a good start... and room for improvement.

The other power-of-ten landmark to note today is that I hit the 10,000 Achievement Point mark on my X360. I landed it while doing co-op missions on GRAW2, so I'll thank my comrades in arms for covering my back while I racked up the points...

Alpha Team
Final1Option - Gunner
XL Burrito - Marksman

Bravo Team
Chuck Gagarin - Grenadier
MagnumPY - Rifleman
gregvw - Rifleman

I haven't had my 360 for quite as long as my blog - only 2 years and 5 months, minus about 2 months of downtime with the two RROD's, which is about 27 months. That's a measley 370 points a month - or just over 10/day. There is another ratio I need to improve. New target - 500 per month. That would be a significant 35% improvement, but I think I should be able to do it. It might be tricky as we move into the last half of this year with all the huge open world games I am expecting to play - Mercenaries 2, Fallout 3 and GTA IV... those games take a lot of time to harvest - I'll have to try and get a head start before I get sidetracked to all of those huge games.