What's the topic that just doesn't leave you alone?
For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though I am a physicist by training.
For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though I am a physicist by training.
Specifically this question -
Why is soccer more widely played than checkers?
Physical Mastery - repetitive exploration of real world ball physics encourages a sense of mastery. Checkers doesn't have this. I've built a physics sim into the card game to replicate this sense of building mastery through exploring the physics system to win.
Mental Mastery - Both soccer players and checker players make choices that feel fun and meaningful. When trying to dribble around an opponent, they have multiple options they must chose (right or left, fakeout). The player must have a model of what their opponent might do and react based on that. Updating their model is a sense of mental mastery that can be rewarding and contribute to flow.
Real Time - Soccer doesn't have turns. In checkers, waiting for the opponent can break the flow state if you already know your move. The demo allows players to play cards in real time. The catch is - when you run out of cards in hand you loose.
Accessibility - People can just pick up a ball shaped object and ball. I built a demo in WebGL so people can just hop in.
Simplicity of Rules and Depth of Choices - Instead of having a convoluted health system, the amount of cards in your hand are your health. This makes picking up the game easy, there's just one rule to keep in mind. This allows for a variety of fun choices because each card you play lowers your health. This creates a fun risk reward system with no additional rules.
The other idea is to use the existing physics system that players are already familiar with. That way there's no tutorial - players already know how cards handle and drop in real life.
We play soccer with our entire bodies, muscles, heart, legs, lungs get a workout. Not to insult the players but mind and thought processes are somewhat secondary, it is about the "lizard brain": attack and defend with instincts and reflexes.
When you play checkers it is your mind that gets a workout. It is the intellect that gets a workout. The exact opposite of the soccer.
There are almost no similarities between the two! Making it into a physics simulator does not make it a physical excercise...
Beat Saber seems to handle the workout component slightly.
What about a VR version where cards come flying at you and you have to dodge them/block them? That might wake up the lizard/attack/defense part of the brain. That actually sounds pretty fun.
I don't think it was overly critical at all and appreciate the response!
I think you deeply underestimate how much thought and intellect go into playing soccer. It is a game, and applying intelligence to it is necessary to be good at it.
Disclaimer: I don't like football (US: soccer), but I know very smart people that play.
Of late, I'm particularly fascinated by ideas in Cybernetics, but I don't see anyone else being interested in them right now. I think there might be interesting insights into both biological and artificial intelligence (with communication definitely being an important component; consciousness is a word I avoid till I can find a more concrete handle on it), but it's primarily based on interest/taste, rather than motivated goal chasing :-)
(I'm more interested in concrete ideas from Wiener, Ashcroft, etc. rather than the fluff that came later as the word's usage got stretched beyond meaning, as is now happening with "AI")
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2xcyrl/i_a...
Essentially, by modelling therapists' verbal patterns using Transformational Grammar a formal theory of mind was evolved that has lead to sophisticated algorithms for various kinds of psychological change.
Unfortunately, a lot of pseudo-science and "woo" has grown up around it, but please don't let that distract you, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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In re: creating simple machines with intelligence, IMO cybernetics (i.e. what's in "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby; I'm also not interested in fluff) is pretty obviously the way to go. Even the simple centrifugal governor "seems alive" in the words of early witnesses. Purposive behaviour is the domain of living systems, at least according to instinct and experience, eh?
I think one could use cybernetics to inform the design of robotic systems using e.g. the kind of simple controllers David Wyland talks about at the HomeBrew Robotics Club in this video: https://archive.org/details/HBRobotics_Forth
He's not explicitly talking about cybernetics, of course, but I think he's got the right idea and cybernetics shows the way forward.
It’s a lady who is a speech therapist who has taught her dog to communicate with pre-programmed push buttons.
10 years ago I was quite engrossed in automatic layout of UI elements to automatically accommodate e.g. localized text of different size (Apple's iOS UI layout tools at the time were awfully crude, not sure about now). Around the same time I was much very into application state management (same problem solved by flux, but different approach). Having "solved" these two problems for my use case I have since moved on.
Recently I am into mapping business workflows to data structures, visualizing them back, and then providing control over them, e.g. order/invoice/shipping processing in wholesale trade. Nifty stuff, and trickier than the other two things.
Yeah, it's just how the lives of billions are organised, changed, and affected, no big matter...
>I think history shows quite well that once individuals and polities alike start on the path of pursuing/promoting some variety of economic freedom and classical liberal values (often including but not limited to what's known as liberal democracy), safety and stable cooperation become enough of a common interest to make most 'geopolitics' considerations quite irrelevant, and often misleading.
That's the very theory put forward just before 1914, about how a war in Europe was not possible anymore, because of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" promoting "safety and stable cooperation" between countries. The possibility of war was laughed at as "The big delusion". We know how that turned out.
Then there was the same idea, of the "end of history", with the triumph of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" put forward after the USSR collapsed. We also know how that turned out.
Historically, "economic freedom and classical liberal values" have been very good at war and fierce geopolitics.
The very idea of economy is competition.
For example the Iraq war quagmire has lead to Al-Qaida and ISIS (well, forest fires in Russia also caused grain harvests in Russia to suffer, food prices to go up, and the Arab Spring to happen), this has lead to the refugee crisis in Europe, that combined with austerity has lead to the rise of populism in Europe, and Brexit.