Magicka - A Rave Review

I steered clear of this game for a while, mostly because of the fantasy setting gave connotations of WoW to mind, but I was totally wrong, and it's an EXCELLENT game, the most fun I've had for years!

Embark on an adventure to prevent the world from changing... Forever!

Magicka's fictional land of Midgård was conceived of by a bunch of Swedish Uni students to be vaguely Norse Mythological. But is dominated by computer game influences and popular geek culture references, from Return of the Jedi to Disc World via Monty Python and the internet. The fixed view, walk-towards-mouse-pointer format is most reminiscent of Diablo, but there's zero grind in sight; one's success in battle is determined almost entirely by raw ability and knowledge of spell combinations.

It's a game that uses boring legacy PC peripherals like a Guitar Hero controller of pure awesome: with each 'chord' one blasts out a volley of ice shards, a massive fire ball, a freezing electric death beam or random healing bombs that throw you right across the screen. [Tangential Note 1]

In terms of cultural significance, I would say it's the "Scott Pilgrim" of the games industry. The myriad hat tips to geekishness past and present are sandwiched in a satirical narrative that pokes fun at (for example) the ridiculous contrivances necessary to string such a notable story of adventure and battles together.

The overnight success of this £8 Steam wonder is probably largely to do with the multiplayer element. The trailer gave me the impression that combat would be an impenetrable clutter of mayhem; Streets of Rage and Golden Axe played concurrently in a rastafarian laundry explosion. Throw a bunch of rookie Magickians together and it's worst still. Ferment this in an alcohol fuelled LAN party for ultimate LOLZ! (And thank god for 'Revive': the first and most used multiplayer 'Magick'.)

However, multiplayer is up to 4 player co-op only, no official PvP (yet), squabbles and frequent accidents discounted. There are 2 bonus "Challenge Arenas”, but inevitably you end up only playing the campaign part multiplayer. While we're on the negatives, it has a hideous tendency not to connect. Then if you figure out a work around there were/are more bizarre coding bugs during game play than there are giant spiders, with a roughly zero percent chance you'll make it to the end of the campaign without the game fully crashing out.

Bioshock 2

In one sentence: the Bioshock 2 single player campaign has a worth while story, but the difficulty arc is very iffy.

Summary in more that one sentence:

Game play wise, innovation is comparable to Halo 2 verses it's predecessor, mostly just adding 'dual wield'. There are the same gruesome aesthetics one will have habituated to in the first title, and again they are juxtaposed with the cheery 50/60s style infomercials for deadly plasmid powers. However, the alternative game play section towards the end impressed me in that it genuinely shocked my sensibilities in a very artistic manner. I have not played, and am not commenting on, the multiplayer aspect. The ridiculous protection and Games for Windows Live situation I shall leave alone too.

"All good girls gather"...

Criticism:

Early in the game I found it very tough to successfully defend a little sister from splicers, while she harvested Adam, even on medium difficulty and after careful preparation of traps/defences. I was all out of money, heath packs, eve and trap ammo. But having struggled through, a few upgrades and various weapon acquisitions later, the same situations were far easier. Then the number and difficulty of enemies dropped right off before mid game, making my main problem having so much ammo and money I could rarely pick any up.

Rough Rebuttal to a Kurzweil Critic

This is very much an 'off the top of my head' response to a blog post by my friend, found here: http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/FlawWithTheFuture

A) Nit picking - I guess you are probably just simplifying matters for the sake of a concise introduction paragraph there but:

Vinge popularised the term 'singularity' in this context in 1983, but Stanislaw Ulam talked to von Neumann privately of singularity well before (1958), and Turing spoke of machine thinking taking over (1951). [1]

More significantly, Vinge's expectations for singularity are distinct from Kurzwiel's in that he expects the more sci-fi friendly course of events, with an AI spontaneously boot strapping itself towards super intelligence. He also estimates an early to mid 2030s time scale.

Kurzweil's vision, on the other hand, needs no Skynet (Terminator) type event. He sees little/no distinction between us and our machines. Our computers already form a kind of inseparable hybrid intelligence with our biological selves, and the level of integration will only increase in future (no clear machine/human divide). Kurzweils brand of future fantastic is about as boringly down to earth as his speaking style.

Also, I believe Kurzweil expects human level AI well before 2045 (as you stated), he in fact estimates that one could acquire (for $1000) computing power equivalent to all the brains of all the humans currently alive Earth by that date.


B) Given that the graph of his that you included goes back 10^11 years (most the way to the beginning of the universe) you can't really get away with saying we could be at the * beginning* of the growth curve! ;op  Also, remember that curves are mathematical structures that approximate the real world, not the other way around. Reality is not pootling along trajectories inscribed by God or gods. The 'laws' of the universe emerge from it's increasing complexity, they do not exist outside/before it's existence.

Physical Interweb Pipes for Produce; "FoodTubes"

* From this article on ilookforwardto.com.

Initially this reminded me of a system I envisioned a few years ago. That was more for of a local loop thing: store to household delivery of groceries, post & small parcels or restaurant food. Self powered bogies, the size of supermarket home delivery crates/boxes, that run through rectangular cross-sectioned conduits under roads/pavements, finding their destination by being forwarded like packets of data on the internet.

[ XKCD - http://xkcd.com/827/ ]

I thought my idea would be unlikely to make wide scale implementation, given the massive investment required merely for wiring up households with new data/communications lines. It seems more likely that automated intelligence will solve the problem by utilising existing infrastructure: an extension of driverless cars. Either the recipient of a delivery walks out to collect the package from said robot car (that would not complain about unsociable hours) or, some years later, properly smart humanoid delivery bots could be deployed from the cars for the last 10 meters.

* However, this FoodTubes concept has more fundamental benefits:
+ Energy efficiency - "1/5th of current freight prices" when HGVs/vans/trains use 92% of their energy to move purely the vehicle.
  - These are based on current scenariors, which is fine for now, and as long as the scheme can recoupe it's cos before the advent of 100% electric lorries, charged of solar PV, AI drivers.

+ Food security (independent of roads and severe congestion or temporary fuel shortages).
     - Though (with a single main loop) I would worry about it's reliability (resistance to natural structure failures, capsule collisions, or even sabotage) and repairability (possible methods to clear out or even replace tunnels that where bored underground.

+ Boon for car drivers; fewer HGVs means:
     - Less getting stuck behind slow or overtaking lorries.
     - Significantly less wear on the roads.

[ Top - Capsule (2m long, 1m diameter). Bellow - conduit construction illustration. ]

* Will it happen?
The FoodTubes website looks very 90s at the moment, and designs are all vague concepts, so a 10 year minimum time-frame might be par. It's basically a set of case study documents that did well in this "St Andrews Prize" competition (ideas for reducing environmental impact or something). Although, there are some pretty high brow members of the team (professors, industry experts, prominent layers). Not sure what type of company would be able to spawn a division capable of this flavour of (inter)national scale undertaking...

As an 'internet for goods' there needs to be common standards, like the shipping container system currently used worldwide on ocean vessels and lorries. Island UK could get away with a bespoke system, but Europe would require more consensus, for example. Having cylindrical capsules rules out direct compatibility with containers, and possibly even pallets, so massive repacking operations will be necessary at ports or other distribution centres.

With China looking set to use our currency from their trade surplus to finance rail links to us, this kind of scheme would make even more sense: as the last leg of a faster, more reliable (than ships and lorries) delivery system for manufactured goods,  which will be increasingly customised, in smaller batches, with ever more desire for shorter lead in times from manufacture to receipt.

Vince Cable produces fallacious mitigations for further science funding cuts

... is what the title of this BBC article should read. [1]

Waving a banner of necessary austerity to reduce public services and support for the lower paid majority of society is borderline morally corrupt, but cutting science funding is outright stupid. It's the equivalent of trying to buoy up a sinking hot air balloon by throwing fuel canisters overboard. But I can't say my dismay is a surprise, even when stimulated by the words of a prominent member of a political party I recently supported as our best hope.

Vince Cable and David Cameron in India (from the Dailymail.co.uk)

UK science is already under too much financial pressure, and has been for some time. Short term (2-4 year) projects are favoured too heavily over those that are more long term ('speculative'). Also, efforts I've heard of to commercialise the information products of university science have only left the universities out of pocket while lining those of layers and other middle men.

It is highly likely that the route to technological advancement is computationally irreducible, i.e. it is impossible to predict which research routes will yield important advances. Viewed from a great height scientific research is a process of memetic evolution. Evolution is not just (or rather rarely) about making gradual improvements to an organism, it mostly involves creating increasingly greater complexity by expanding into and creating as many new niches as possible, spreading tendrils out to every direction of phase space.

Adonna Khare -"Goldfish with Legs" (2008)

If mother nature were incarnate, and on a tight budget for biological evolution, would she have given the go ahead for fish with hydro-dynamically goofy protrusions, unable to know that these whimsical contrivances would eventually be used as the fist ever legs, spawning a vast new evolutionary tree of mammals. Please don't get caught up on my inadequate metaphor here, what I am trying to say is that limiting resources to the 'most promising' could create detriment well beyond a linear contraction in output.

In a previous post [2] I speculated that financial bubbles might be a boon for better businesses/technology, fostering evolutionary explosions after mass extinctions. But these austerity measures are non cyclical: a more gradual squeezing. What is more, the survival criterion are arbitrarily biased away from the most beneficial break throughs, towards short term money spinners and well entrenched "internationally excellent research".

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11225197
[2] http://lewyland.blogspot.com/2010/04/utility-of-green-energy-bubble.html

Victims of memetic selection: Pee Lady and the Purrminator

Whilst writing a condensed summary of Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" is still a future aspiration I have nonetheless mentioned some of it's ideas ('memes' if you like) in passing, where they apply to otherwise unrelated blog entries. This quick piece, however, is purely a rumination on memetics in contemporary culture.

In an evolutionary anthropological discussion of the origin of memes, over 2 million years ago in our hominid ancestors of the time, Blackmore considers that it would have been very difficult to know what memes to select for, from a point of view of the (selfish) genes. Once imitation of ideas (i.e. memes) existed in a population, they would spread and change host behaviour at a rate orders of magnitude more rapid than genes could hope to (through survival of the fittest individuals). Hence human genes only provide vague heuristics for meme selection (i.e. what things humans find intrinsically interesting/captivating). Here are some of apparently inbuilt selection criterion:

• Copy the most obvious memes (simplest, most fully understandable, least likely to be miss-copied).
• Copy the most popular memes (others finding it worthwhile indicates memetic usefulness, best not to be left out just in case).
• Copy memes for: sex, food, winning battles, gossip (each has strong genetic survival advantages for our social hominids).

Fashion sense, joke telling/humour, altruism, and religiousness are largely products of run-away sexual selection for mates that are good at spreading memes in general. This is due to the selection pressure applied by memes on genes, and appears to have had the same effect on hominid brain size as Peahen's sexual selection has had on Peacock's tails. But I digress; the point is that humans have these built in hot topics with universal appeal.

+ 'Pee Lady' (AKA Wendy Lewis): recently gained notoriety for urinating on a World War II memorial [1,2].

[From the Telegraph.co.uk]

This non-event only got so much media coverage because there was CCTV footage of the (frankly inadvertently) sinister act (perfect for TV news and article photographs. Also, the helpful camera operators called down a rapid response police team that caught her in the heinous act of fellating some bloke. Add to this her 'colourful' past that made her a perfect instant target for hate from the oldest generation, and her having to attend a court hearing to face charges.

Why SETI is stupid!

Many minds have pondered the tired, old 'Fermi Paradox' (the conspicuous lack of alien buddies out there in our humongous universe).

[XKCD]

+ Susan Blackmore's solution to the Fermi paradox (see her TED lecture): the necessary paradigm shifts to each kind of replicator (genes, memes, temes) are apocalyptically dangerous. Each (necessary) transition reduces the chances of a fertile planet bearing space-faring life forms; each adds an extra constant to the Drake Equation. She speculated in "The Meme Machine" that meme's evolutionary force driving bigger brains may have overstretched the physiology of our hominid peers, driving Neanderthals extinct. Mems have also, through humans, have wiped out more genetic diversity than a mass extinction, fostered luming terrors are nuclear annihilation, or terminator style runaway AI. I'm more optimistic, seeing only the risk of delay, not unrecoverable oblivion.

[TED (2008) - http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html]

[The (standard) Drake Equation]

+ In the BBC news article (that triggered this blog article): "Alien hunters 'should look for artificial intelligence'", Seth Shostak is interviewed as saying we should look for AI aliens, rather than flesh and bones. e.g. not just concentrating observations on biologically 'habitable' planets, but areas richest in mass and energy where only machines could exist.

[BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449 ]

So it seems the realisation may be approaching mainstream consciousness: ogling the skies for alien peers is quite clearly pointless. Not because (the conditions for) life is necessarily rare (or because of any literal religious truth), but because life (e.g. humanity) will pass through this (SETI) phase in gynaecological evolution so rapidly...

Self Congratulatory Celebrations!

To celebrate me finding the settings option for the new (much improved) Blogger post editor, I've created an "about" page for this blog.

I've long been thinking of writing down an explanation of my core beliefs, and also making a brief guide to the future. This will have to suffice for now.

I've also meant to make a post featuring the artwork I made specifically to customise the blog: this flying-cyber-brain thing (which I consider the main logo), and the human evolution meme variation (which is used as the separator between posts and 'gadgets'.

The "Mass Effect" 1 & 2 (full brain-dump)

* Introduction (for those living under a rock):

Mass Effect is a sci-fi space opera presented in the form of a single player, action role playing game (RPG) for XBox 360 and PC. The first instalment was released in November 2007, and May 2008 respectively (XBOX then PC), to much critical acclaim. Ridiculous overreactions to the brief (and tasteful by TV standards) sex cut-scene raised the game's media profile (and spawned the "Alien side-boob" internet meme).

Mass Effect 1 (ME1) incorporated a high quality, non-linear story line into a detailed universe with plenty of 3rd person shooter action. While plenty of first person shooters (FPSs) can claim better action, Mass Effect is somewhat unusual in that two AI controlled characters assist the player during every shooting segment. This is bold given that AI co-op has historically been a recipe for disaster.

It also brings in the option of 6 different main character classes (with different abilities in combat), male/female appearance (with facial customisations) and levelling up of various traits/skills as the game progresses, including those of the 6 squad mates you pick up. The contrasting personalities of the supporting characters ensure something for everyone, letting you chose your favourite 2 to take on missions, which one of 2 possibles to sweet talk, and even which die (permanently).

Equipment management (weapons, armour, ammunition modifiers) is a major part of ME1, as is driving around the surface of planets in an APC (the "Mako"). Both are dropped for the inevitable big budget sequel (ME2), released January 2010. ME2's increased focus on combat (with various tweaks and reduced distractions) seems to have helped it achieve an even better reception, with many perfect review scores. ME3 is now a certainty, with many fans (like myself) hoping it comes sooner rather than later.

I read somewhere that Bioware's development team had twice as many artists as programmers. At any rate, with such high artistic value, this franchise may, in future, be referred to as the turning point when single player computer games really came of age: truly occupying the same level of entertainment territory previously monopolised by TV series, movies and novels. I have

* Navigation:

If you have not played these games yet, but there is a good chance you will, I strongly suggest stopping reading here, for now, and coming back later. However, I have marked certain sub sections with {!Spoiler!} warnings to help minimise damage.

All in game screen shots were taken by me. Click pictures to view full resolution.

Given that this review turned into a 10'000 word dissertation, I have provided an mini-index:

• Introduction (for those living under a rock)
• Navigation
• Overview (praise)
• General Gripes
• A Fix too Far? (Mechanistic Changes from ME1 to ME2)
• Interlectualisation (Deeper Discussions)
• Summary

[Navigating plot through conversation options (ME1)]

Forty Eight Percent...

Seems that 2010 is a crossover time for both genetically modified laboratory animals (vs regular) and PC game distribution (downloads equal other sources). Personally, I'm no advocate of animal suffering, but continued increases in the volume of testing is only to be expected as the rate of scientific progress accelerates.

Links:

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10774409

[2] http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/07/21/whee-downloads-now-48-of-pc-game-sales/

On Christopher Nolan's "Inception"

Despite the glaring synopsis similarities, “Inception” was more like “Ocean's Eleven” than “Paprika” (2006 - recommended). The film has some promise, real world insight wise, and artistically: there are some small sparks of imagination, but they are doused as Christopher Nolan cements the plot into a simple, audience friendly concept.

+ First Thoughts (simulations, memes and strange loops):

It has rigid levels of dreams within dreams: 5 minutes of real world time dilates to an hour in dream, with the same factor applying to a dream within a dream, and so on down. This doesn't ring true: yes, I've dreamt I've woken up, while still asleep, but that is because any known concept can appear in dreams, it does not literally imply the existence of another level of (un)consciousness.

Tesla and Toyota Join Forces

From Ecogeek: http://www.ecogeek.org/component/content/article/3172

These two automotive companies from opposite extremes of manufacturing scale are starting a 'joint project' to build electric cars together. Somewhat like the Geely/vovlo/PML merger I blogged; upcoming new-tech companies being assimilated or formally backed by the powerful existing market leaders.

Toyota-Tesla should have a sizeable lead over Geely et al, with the Prius already dominating the hybrid market, not to mention Geely currently produce less than 4% as many cars as Toyota (the world leading manufacture). However, looking at it from another angle: Geely's vehicle sales shot up 59% in 2009, outstripping their own targets during a global recession. Also, they are China based. China overtook the US to be the country producing the 2nd most road vehicles in 2008. By the end of 2009 they had almost doubled Japan's yearly figure; that's more than the US and Japan combined.

I don't see as much raw technology innovation within Tesla (as with PML's drive system), and the Prius still has fairly modest capabilities. My prediction is that the Toyota-Tesla partnership will either:

- Come up with some equally advanced electric drive train advances.

- Loose market share, perhaps even market dominance, in the longer term.

Of course, pretty much every car manufacturer has *something* electric due out in the next few years: Plug-In Vehicle Tracker: What’s Coming, When

+ Of the worlds most fecund manufacturers:

- GM's volt is due out this year. It has offerings for Israel and Denmark too, which is significant because they are trial locations for ubiquitous electric car infrastructure rollout. Renault and Nissan are partnered up for that already. See YouTube video explanation, or Shai Agassi's inspirational TED speech.

- Nissan's "Leaf" has sold out in for 2010 (though no production until 2012/2013).

- VW has good solid diesel cars, which are going to be more environmentally friendly over for some time, but the company could get left out if their 'halo' electric concept cars don't start rolling of production lines too.

- Honda has hybrids out, right now, that presumably square up to Toyota's. However, no plug-ins with release dates, and they've wasted a lot of effort on hydrogen powered research.

+ Source for Automotive Industry figures (with pretty graphs): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry