Looking Out To Sea

Several years ago I bought some stuff in HMV and was given a free sampler CD to promote a number of artists’ new releases. This CD has turned out to be a fantastic resource and I’ve not yet mined all of the possibilities.

The disc included Death Cab for Cutie, Skin and Bell X1 — I now have at least one album by all of these artists. OK Go were also there, and they’ve since become heavily played on YouTube for their great music videos. I intend to look more into their music too.

More things to look into: Ladyfuzz, Nightmare of You, Stellastar, Josh Rouse. The lesson learned is that if HMV give you a sampler CD you really should take it. It will probably be incredibly well curated and highlight a whole bunch of interesting artists. It worked for me.

Severely snowed out today so SICP study group was cancelled. I’m using the time in the house to make stock with the bag full of lamb bones and bits that have been sitting in the freezer for many months. I think I will make some kind of soup with it later, preferably one with lots of chunky vegetables and other interesting bits. I’ve also got a bunch of beetroot in the fridge which I intend to make into beetroot and chocolate cake, because it was so tasty last time I made it. (And I want to do it in a cooler oven since 190°C blackened the outside without cooking through when I made it before. That was the only occasion when the skewer test has been useful to me.)

Back to the topic of the study group. Reading SICP is deceptively easy at times. Each step is a simple progression from the last, such that each idea seems obvious and trivial. Then suddenly some trivial new concept makes no sense at all and you find yourself backtracking through pages of explanation to find some firm handhold from which to start moving forward again. Most of the time I feel that I’m not learning anything but I realised today that some things which were not intuitive in the past are now familiar and natural. I was reading The Arrow Calculus and realised that I could understand all of the notation and type rules for lambda calculus and arrows given. It was the environment stuff in particular that felt “obvious” in the way that it wouldn’t have in the past, and I’ve been doing a lot of interpreter writing and environment-jigging in recent weeks with SICP. It’s all coming together.

US-made film and television use the 555 telephone prefix for fake telephone numbers. According to the IMDb trivia page for Fight Club:

Marla Singer’s phone number, 555-0134, is the same as Teddy’s number in Memento (2000). It is also the same as the Hong Kong Restaurant in Harriet the Spy (1996), Eddie Alden’s in Animal Attraction (2001) and a Mental institution in an episode of “Millennium” (1996/I).

In fact there are only a hundred telephone numbers sanctioned for fictional use in this way — 555-0100 to 555-0199. There must be an awful lot of overlap. So which are the most common fictional telephone numbers? Which ones have never been used? Well, this is the internet so someone has compiled a list of numbers and the films they appear in, for your personal delight and instruction.

It’s about this time of the month when I finish whatever book that I picked up from book group and decide to write about it. Then when the next meeting comes around I’ve forgotten what I said at the time and just blabber incoherently about some vague ideas I had. Or is that what I do here?

Just finished Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (first book I’ve read by him). Probably most neatly described as “fantasy steampunk” since it gathers in all of the elements you’d expect from these genres: a land of strange beasts and many sapient species, real magic, mechanical calculating machines and steam-driven engines in an early industrial society.

The book is quite hefty and nothing definite happens until halfway. Then it got very compelling and I raced through the second half in much shorter time. Initially I found the descriptive language quite ponderous and found myself rereading paragraphs more often than normal because I couldn’t wring sense out of it. (I was also reading quite late at night, which doesn’t help.) The language didn’t get any more direct the further I read, but I got used to it and it was easier when I was more engaged.

It was hard to take some of the creatures in the story seriously for a long time. They’re the kind of bad scifi/fantasy that really bugs me about Dr Who — sentient walking cactus people? (They have to file down their spines so they can hold stuff properly.) A species that has human female bodies but the entire body of a scarab beetle as a head? Of course these are entirely logical evolutionary outcomes for any world…

Once you’re over the absurdity of what you’re reading it’s an enjoyable book. One of the later characters, the Weaver, is a brilliant trickster — a kind of Ungoliant character with the personality of the Cheshire cat — a huge, dangerous spider that hums nonsense verse to itself while flitting through the world to fix things for its own aesthetic purposes.

For all that, I have come to the conclusion that the story doesn’t really hang together. The threat to be defeated is a natural one, but one which is almost-invincible and has an insatiable appetite for people. I fully understand that invading predators can be an incredible threat to an ecosystem, but normally they fit somewhere into their own environment. But it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that magical, soul-sucking, hypnotising eight-metre dragons which can taste conscious thought on the wind… would be a localised phenomenon wherever they live.

So while I did enjoy the book, it’s not one you want to think about — in fact, it helps if you think about it less than a traditional “high fantasy” novel.

It’s been a quiet week on the programming front but I’ve made steady changes to Thud since committing the initial code to BitBucket ten days ago.

I’ve added some unit tests, which was a simple thing to do but not very easy to get right. Unit tests are a bit like Cluedo, in that you have to convince yourself of something very complicated with a few well-chosen questions. And it’s easy to forget your assumptions and miss something vital.

Just today I spotted something by playing with the game. I realised it was possible to hurl or shove a piece over another to reach the enemy on the far side. The logic only checked that the target was within reach but not that it was within proper line of sight. (This goes back to the original implementation too, so it’s not just a feature of my mucking about with the code that deals with the game rules and breaking something.) The rules are silent on whether this is even allowed (I suspect not) so I’ve disallowed it for now.

This is not the kind of bug I would have caught with unit tests because it would never have occurred to me to check for it. Of course the butler didn’t commit the murder, that’s preposterous! I only spotted it during play because I was purposely lining up foes next to each other in order to manually test their capture capabilities and realised that I could hurl a dwarf further than necessary… and the game allowed it.

So I’ve been repeatedly rewriting the file that deals with game rules so that scenarios like this become more obvious. I’m getting to the point where I’m happy with this small segment so I need to push on to other things.

As I mentioned on another post it’s nice having an issue tracker for the code so I can write down any ideas that occur to me, whether they’re short-term or long-term concerns. I think it’s time to look at some of the more medium-term goals now, such as network interaction, otherwise I’ll spend the rest of my days endlessly fiddling with the game rules.

Had a go at Nick’s brand new copy of Arkham Horror last night. It’s a co-operative board game based around HP Lovercraft’s Cthulhu mythos, set in the New England town of Massachusetts and connected alien worlds.

I arrived at about 3pm. They’d already started laying out the board, sorting the pieces (more than 700…) and identifying the main game elements. We didn’t get started properly until Mat arrived which might have been about half an hour later. The same game was still going at 10.30 when I had to leave to catch the bus home. I learned on Facebook when I got home that the Ancient Ones had been defeated while I rode the bus home. So on a first attempt it appears the game took 6–7 hours to play.

Now I think you understand the scale and scope of the undertaking, we should look in more detail at how it works.

Interdimensional gates between Arkham and horrific other worlds open up at various spots around town. It’s your job to investigate these worlds by diving into the gates, and coming back to close the gates behind you. Oh yes, and killing all the monsters that flood through onto the streets of Arkham every time a gate opens.

This game plays like a regimented role-playing game, particularly battling monsters. Most things you do involve examining your own stats, examining the stats of your enemy, rolling dice for the numerical difference and seeing if you won/lost that bout. It’s quite a fast process to do when you get the hang of it, but because everything is stats-based it can be hard to remember which number gets subtracted from which number at each point.

(A detailed example. You are travelling the streets of Arkham and come across a monster. You’re on an errand and don’t want to dally so you attempt to sneak past. Roll N dice, where N is the difference between your Sneak and the monster’s Awareness. You’re aiming to throw a 5 or 6 to win. N will be large if you have a high Sneak value and your monster has a low Awareness, and the higher N is the more likely you’ll throw at least one 5 or 6. If you win, you can continue on your way. If you lose, receive damage for being caught unprepared while sneaking past, then proceed to do battle with the monster. First, test your mental fortitude: is this monster so horrific you go mad at the sight of it? As above, roll N dice where N is the difference between your Will and the monster’s Horror. Receive damage to your sanity if you lose. If you still retain your sanity, roll N dice where N is the difference between your Fight and its Combat rating. Many monsters have a toughness rating greater than one, and that’s the number of successful rolls you need to throw in order to kill it. If the number of dice you can throw is less than its toughness rating there is no way you can win this fight. Run away!)

The basic mechanism is quite straight-forward but the number of modifiers, special-cases and special adapted rules quickly spirals out of control.

The complexity of the rules is made so much worse by the awful manual which describes them. It’s 24 pages long and is terrible. It introduces terms which it makes no reasonable attempt to define, has an incomplete index, introduces descriptions out of order and sometimes omits them altogether. Sometimes whole paragraphs are devoted to making simple scenarios more complex, less transparent and altogether harder to follow. We wasted so much time hunting backwards and forwards through the book looking for “what to do in event of…” and eventually gave up. We probably accidentally omitted about 20% of the rules just because they’re not introduced in any sensible order. It seems altogether unlikely that we would win the game on the first attempt, doesn’t it?

But for all my complaints — and there are many — the game itself seemed powerful and worth investing time in. Once the rules are internalised (or easy to research: there are manuals written by fans available online) it should be easier to gather some momentum. In the last hour or so of play we seemed to move through the steps faster and with more fluidity, although there’s a good chance that’s because we all wanted the damn thing to finish.

If anyone does sit down for a game of this I have a couple recommendations: start earlier than you’re thinking and get more table space than you think you’ll need.

On Sunday night we were invited to a Hallowe’en party (and very nice it was too) with horror movies. When we arrived a film was on but the sound was down and there was music playing instead. We spent the rest of the evening watching a series of films without any sound, which was remarkable fun. To be clear, these were black-and-white horror B-movies such as The Killer Shrews (in the long tradition of horror movies it used dogs dressed in hairy coats to simulate the giant shrews, ineffectually). Guessing the plot and laughing at the effects was much more fun than following the story was ever going to be. I’ll have to remember that trick for future occasions.

The evening’s party playlist was also interesting because it seemed more-or-less random apart from the titles being each related in some way to horror. It’s great that we now have the technology to create random playlists by entering keywords into the computer, and get out the eclectic variety of Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), Born as Ghosts, the Rocky Horror Show soundtrack, Monster Mash and the Cranberries’ Zombie.

It was Helen’s birthday two weeks ago and one of the surprise hits was a board game I bought on a whim, because the gaming style intrigued me. I haven’t been able to track down the original discussion again, but somewhere on Reddit there was a thread about Monopoly and a commenter suggested that (paraphrasing) “competitive board games are old, you need to get into co-operative gaming”. Into what?

The game recommended as a good example of this style was Pandemic, which I bought and I’m happy to say it’s brilliant. The rules seem very complex on initial read-through but they are very quick to internalise — everything makes sense and there were only a couple of occasions on our first game where we consulted the rules for clarification.

So what is it? The idea, contrary to most board games, is that the human players are working as one team, against “the game”. It’s still a turn-based game, but each person co-ordinates their behaviour with their fellow players. You play the game on a map of the world, showing a network of cities joined by air and road links. At the start of the game a selection of random cities are “infected” with four diseases (coloured cubes). The aim of the game is to discover a cure for these diseases before a critical proportion of the world is infected.

You discover cures by gathering resources together in one place, much like building houses and hotels in Monopoly. In order to stave off disaster you must travel the world treating disease victims until you have enough resources to find a cure — but every time you travel somewhere or treat a disease, you’re wasting time that might have been better spent on researching a cure.

And while all this is happening the diseases don’t stand still. Each time a player’s turn ends there is an infection stage where all the diseases that have taken hold will spread further. Every so often (more often if you’re playing by the difficult rules) an “epidemic” hits, which basically ramps up the danger level and reinfects all the cities you thought you’d treated.

The night after Helen’s birthday we invited Mat round for tea and then we made a valiant attempt at this game for the first time. We played three games that night with the “easy” rules and lost all three games. In the final game Helen had the resources ready for a cure, and it was my turn directly before her “winning” hand could be played. And I pulled an epidemic card which totally wiped us out. That was the closest we had come and the intensity of knowing how close we were to a cure was incredible. The feeling of co-operating against a stack of playing cards is a strange one but the rules are beautifully defined to simulate the ebb, flow and violent resurgence of infection counts so you quickly get immersed in the reality of the game.

I don’t know how much other co-operative games hit the mark but this one certainly does and I am really looking forward to getting another crack at it. It seems like there are a million games out there which don’t get the publicity of Monopoly, Risk and Cluedo but which are maybe more fun. I remember with great fondness the games of Settlers of Catan we used to have in the flat when I was in university. Then there is Mille Bornes, the 1000-mile imaginary race which is like a card-based version of Mario Kart. What crazy games have you come across that should be more widely known?

PS. I just came across this board game recommendation site which lets you enter games you like and one you dislike, and matches you up to user preferences on BoardGameGeek.com to select some likely interesting titles. I found out about it through this post by the developer, telling its history.

PPS. The line of the game for me was when Helen turned to Mat and said: “Are you Green? I’ll meet you in Cairo!”. It’s like being a jet-setting heroic scientist in your own living room.

This month’s book group find was A Close Run Thing, the adventures of Cornet Matthew Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons during the events of the Napoleonic War(s), particularly Waterloo. Hervey comes across as a nice person, what Sharpe would refer to as a killing officer, not a murdering officer.

It bears a lot of comparison to Sharpe, except Hervey is a proper bastard officer rather than a soldier raised from the ranks. Hervey is the most junior officer in his regiment, but as is customary for this type of novel he excels himself and is frequently highlighted to the senior commanders for promotion. But since Hervey is the son of a country vicar, and therefore not very rich compared to many of the other officers, a lot of the book is concerned with the commission system, and being able to afford a promotion that is offered.

He also dwells a lot on duty, especially in his brief stint in Ireland where his role appears to be military muscle to allow factors to throw people off the land. He gets in a bit of trouble for being a gentleman rather than a thug, though it all works out in the end. He’s a quick lad though somewhat dim when it comes to affairs of the heart.

The story was fairly easy to follow though the occasional deep-dive into horse terminology left me a bit lost. Still, as long as you basically know what a horse is you can follow along reasonably well. It’s not a very action-packed story, as it basically spans the last battle before Napoleon is exiled to Elba, and the battle at Waterloo after his return, and the period of peace-time in the middle. So the middle chunk is Matthew Hervey in England and Ireland, not officially at war. I’ve not read Sharpe or Hornblower, only seen the TV adaptations, but I get the impression that they tend to be more action-packed than this, or at least more intriguing.

It was Helen’s birthday last week and, as per tradition, she took cakes to work her tutorial group at university.

She was too busy studying so I made the cakes (this was okay, as in recent years she has ended up making cakes for me to take to work on my birthday, so this was repaying the favour), and had a bit of fun with them.

I had been following one person’s escapades with baking cakes inside cakes, such as brownie inside muffins (really) and thought I would take a first foray in that direction. I made some fairly plain cupcakes but buried some chocolate balls (slightly larger than a malteser) inside each one. The chocolate balls were Hallowe’en treats that each came individually wrapped in “eyeball” tin foil. Then when I was trying to work out how to ice them Helen suggested using icing pens to write on them. Then she went to bed and I sat down to work some words out.

My first thought was to take Word of the Day for Helen’s birthday for the last ten years (I had ten cakes to decorate) but I couldn’t easily find a list going back that far. The easily-searched sites (like wiktionary) weren’t established long enough to have ten years of archives!

My second thought was nonsense words, and this was even harder. I would have to look through the published works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in order to find some really good ones. Good nonsense words, ones with a nice feel and pleasing sound, are harder to find than you might think.

In the end I settled on cake words. What I actually did was search the installed dictionary for some nice cake words, and then fill in a few more from memory. (I didn’t like griddlecake or coffeecake and thought the latter should probably be two words.)

$ grep cake$ /usr/share/dict/words
cake
cheesecake
coffeecake
cupcake
fruitcake
griddlecake
hotcake
pancake
shortcake

Once I had my words I removed the cake part and iced the remaining prefix/suffix onto each bun. So I had a bunch of cakes with the words “pan”, “beef”, “short” and so on.

Now Helen tells me that when she opened the tin on the following day no-one could understand what these words meant. They sat and thought and came to no good conclusions, until someone finally said:

Well, I’m going to have the “beef” cake — oh

I was glad to have provided a little bit of mystery. :-)