Cakeland – the Beauty War
Cakeland LA “The Beauty War” by Scott Hove is like taking a surreal adventure inside a multi-layer wedding cake…
Cakeland LA “The Beauty War” by Scott Hove is like taking a surreal adventure inside a multi-layer wedding cake…
Reminds me of that Eagle’s song. Due to some recent, (but not well thought out) traffic control changes to make things more bike/bus friendly, there is now a Parisian intersection you can enter – but never leave.
View this beautiful location full of red circles here:
Bloomlight by VOUW Studio is a series of lanterns that senses your presence and starts bending towards you while the lantern opens.
Nick Berry, president of DataGenetics, meticulously analyzes different strategies to play the classic board game Battleship (he also has done Chutes & Ladders, Candyland and Risk)
It’s a great example of how computer scientists often work. He explores a host of techniques and analyzes the results by calculating how often you’ll get a perfect game, median number of guesses, and how bad it gets in the worst case.
He examines 4 major strategies:
His fourth approach is the most fascinating. The system calculates every possible configuration of the remaining ships, and then sums up the probability of a ship on each square. At the beginning, all the squares are basically equally probable, but as more and more guesses are made, the number of possible configurations decreases. If you continually calculate the sum of these possibilities, pick the square with the highest probability and repeat this process, you get significantly better results.
How much better? Purely random guessing gives you a median of 97 moves. Using parity with the hunt+target method averages 64 moves. But using the probability density function increases that to a staggering 42 moves on average.
Turns out, I discussed the use of this kind of probability density function by speedrunners who used the same technique to beat the splosh-kaboom minigame in the Legend of Zelda Wind Waker.
Algorithm of the day: Rapidly exploring random trees (RRT) is an algorithm designed to efficiently search non-convex spaces by randomly building a space-filling tree. The tree is constructed incrementally from samples drawn randomly from the search space and is inherently biased to grow towards large unsearched areas of the problem. They easily handle problems with obstacles and differential constraints and have been widely used in autonomous robotic motion planning.
A decent little collection of graphical code snippets, samples, and tools for graphics developers. Some of which were written by friends of mine – or even myself in a few cases. 🙂
Uncanny valley describes objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings and provoke uncanny or eeriness in observers.
We need another word that describes things that actually horrify you. Perhaps the terror trough?
There is no end of guides for game developers and entrepreneurs trying to get their start. For those looking to get some solid tips, this video is pretty representative of the kinds of things you should expect and be ready to talk about when pitching your game idea.
I love a good spooky story. With covid locking us all down, folks making scary experiences have gotten creative.
Psycho Clan – a group that creates immersive theatrical events – is making some interesting horror audio experiences in which you blindfold some friends, set up some simple props, and then guide them through the auditory experience. Looks like it could be some good fun!
Inspired by the classic ghost story “The Toll House” by W. W. Jacobs, you play Sam, a member of an intrepid group of friends who stubbornly insists on testing whether a house, notoriously known to be haunted, truly is… by spending the night in it!
Herbert Solow was the vice president of Desilu Studios and executive in charge of the production of the Star Trek series. Robert Justman was the associate producer and co-producer that was responsible for all the pre-production, production, and post-production. Gene Roddenberry reported to and worked hand in hand with these two men.
As an attempt to record all of what happened now that Roddenberry has died, these two remaining fathers of the series tell the amazing story behind Star Trek’s production. Definitely worth a listen.