penny July 2nd, 2008
I sported a very bad headache this afternoon. I had meant to meet with an academic today, but by some fate issue (don’t ask me what I mean, I know I’m cryptic, I’ve been told many times) we ended up in two different suburbs. So anyway, the headache. It literally felt like my head was a tree trunk with two axe blades wedged on it. I spent some time walking in Parramatta streets to get some air. I ended up spending a lot of time in a shop called JB Hifi.
It’s mostly an electronics shop with all the merch I can look and handle all day. Today I hovered over PSP games, DVDs, CDs, earphones, headphones, desktops and laptops.
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- Audio , Computers , DVD , Gadgets , Gaming , Geeky , Hobbies , Movies , Music , Random , Raves , Sydney
AJ Jorge March 11th, 2008
It’s been a long time that I am really into playing my PSP. I have been playing Puzzle Quest since forever. Then I tried Patapon a week before God of War is to be released and when I got a copy of God of War, Patapon was pushed back again. (Patapon is a good game though. I’ll play it again once I get tired of Kratos).
Been playing two straight nights before I go to bed.
These are my screenshots. Notice Patapon and Puzzle Quest in the background
Kratos!
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penny November 12th, 2007
Addicting… Join Facebook and you can also play ’til you can’t play anymore…
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penny November 3rd, 2007
Two players.
Players take turns removing matches of any number. These matches must all come from any one row.
The objective is to be the last person to pick up ONE match.
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This game I first played with my father, who showed it to me in a book called “Oddities”. [I can't find this book online... but that's another matter.] I remembered it when I read in an article somewhere about the game Nim, which is a similar two-player game where players take turns removing elements from piles. It is analysed mathematically here.
One thing peculiar, and potentially interesting, about this game is that, the winning objective can be achieved way before the state of winning is attained. After playing the matchsticks game 7-5-3 several times you will realise what I mean.
But on a totally tangential rant, how come I can’t apply this same thinking to Chess? Essentially, chess players talk about how they are able to think far ahead, and can predict that they are in a winning state long before it is easily noticed by a novice opponent. I can do that with the card games Hearts and Bridge… but chess… eeeeh, nani?
Chess masters are gods.
penny April 7th, 2007
Theoretical physicist Clement Sire is soon to publish his paper on poker tournaments, in particular the dynamics of the game Texas Hold ‘Em.
I first had a view of this game when I watched the World Series of Poker that Ajay was watching. It’s different from the classic poker game where all cards are held by players, since in Texas Hold ‘Em some cards are laid on the table.
Anyhow, back to Sire. Using intuition and clever statistics, he formulated a model that predicted the maximum stack (earnings) a leading player will hold as well as an estimate of how long a tournament will last. Both of these he says are functions of how many initial players there are and some behavioral aspects of players that he quantifies.
How cool is that?
What is also interesting is that organisers of these tournaments figured out that the minimum bets should be made to increase exponentially as the game progresses. Sire’s model explains this perfectly. Like he says, it is amazing intuition, even sans the math approach, that the organisers are able to figure this out. Fundamental observations pay off it looks like?
The techniques he uses are typical of analysis used in evolutionary dynamics used in biology.
Amazing.
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