FOB

The attached paper describes optimal play for the Netrunner card Social Engineering. Netrunner is a Collectible Card Game that has been out of print for around 10 years. Remarkably, there is still an active community of people playing the game and creating new cards.

This analysis has been sitting on my hard drive since my grad student days in 1997. This weekend I finally wrote some code to solve two-player hidden information games, and used it to check my work from back then. I was surprised to find that I had gotten everything substantially right, as near as I can tell. (Corrections welcome.)

The paper is in PDF format produced from LaTeX: it's a pain to do math in HTML.

One of the great joys of my life was playing Netrunner with my brother. I showed him this back when I wrote it, but I wish he could have seen the final version. I hope someone will find it amusing, instructive, or even useful.

Ryan North has perfectly captured my feelings about Monopoly™. I haven't laughed so hard for a long time.

Just sayin'.

There was a nice Discover Magazine article Monday on the IBM Jeopardy-playing computer Watson. The author was kind enough to interview me and quote me extensively and accurately on the topic; I thought the piece as a whole was quite well written and extremely informative. (I also got a silly one-sentence quote in an AP piece that was carried widely today.)

I thought maybe I'd post a few comments on Watson and the just-concluded Jeopardy match (spoiler alert) here…

Here's the deal—I've trusted Blizzard Entertainment. Enough trust to invest $15/month of my money, and more recently $30/month, for a year. More importantly, enough to invest many, many hours of my time. Blizzard, meanwhile, hasn't done a single thing that I've noticed to earn that trust. It's time for me to stop now…

I got involved in a Facebook conversation with a friend from HS about jigsaw puzzle solving. I hate to post long comments on Facebook where I'll never find them again, so here's my take on this. Enjoy…

My friend T.J. told me that there were Xbox 360 Hand held videos on Youtube. So I checked it out and some people think Microsoft is coming out with, Xbox 360 Hand held. I checked the Xbox website, didn't say a thing. If you google "Xbox 360 Hand held" you will see that there are so many websites with rumors about the Xbox 360 Hand held!! If you know anything please comment what you know about the Xbox 360 Hand held.

I won a poker tournament last night. It wasn't a big tournament: 20 people playing at an American Legion Hall in North Portland, with the rake mostly going to charity. $20 buy-in, with payouts of $225/$125/$75. By the time I bought a round of drinks and threw in some charity money, I came home with about $150…

Here's the answers to antonyms:

1. antonym :: synonym
2. arcane :: mundane
3. aristocratic :: plebian
4. coerce :: entreat
5. embrace :: abjure
6. exacerbate :: ameliorate
7. exotic :: quotidian
8. sostenuto :: staccato
9. reduce :: oxidize
10. materialize :: dematerialize

Explanations available on request.

I keep wanting to blog about my latest tiny piece of software, but I keep having one more bug or feature.

So instead, I've cooked up this little word game. Tell me what you think of it…

Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary posted a pointer to the Ad Astra pencil-and-paper roleplaying game Minimus today. The schtick of Minimus is that it attempt to define a complete, playable RPG on one side of one sheet of paper. The game is being sold as $2 voluntary donation-ware.