Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

scrabulous: online scrabble game needs Facebook developers w/experience in load balancing

from the error page at the scrabulous facebook site:

Need another day.

What we did last night did not work, we need another day to get this running.

There's no point in letting everyone try to play and face errors, so we're closing it for some more time. Please check back in tomorrow.

Any programmers with experience in load balancing please email fb.scrabulous@gmail.com . We can do with some support in that area.

Sorry folks ... trying our best to give you the best.

always interesting when facebook apps go down because of heavy loads (and I do miss my scrabble games).

Technorati Tags: scrabble, scrabulous, facebook, load-balancing, scaling, architecture, games

Chess International Master Ben Finegold

International Master Ben Finegold plays chess and blogs about it and lives in Ann Arbor. His regular coffee shop for chess is Portofino on West Stadium - as of November at least there was a Saturday afternoon chess club.

Technorati Tags: blog, chess

Fantasy Fashion League

sairy notes this fun (amusing? practical if your clothing tastes run beyond jeans) fashion site

Enter the Fantasy Fashion League, the fashion watcher's version to the fantasy football league. Each participant chooses a slate of clothing designers, accessory designers, and celebrities who they believe will get press each day, week, month and special event. It runs from the Emmys to the Oscars, starting this year with last night's 58th Annual Emmy Awards. ...

Instead, each game "card" allows you to choose which celeb you think will amass more points and give that person a higher multiplier. Points are accrued through coverage in major fashion magazines, TV event coverage, and web sites like Women's Wear Daily's wwd.com and elle.com.

If bird watchers, trainspotters, walkers, baseball fans and World Cup devotees can compete virtually, why not fashion lovers?

Technorati Tags: fashion, sairy

Eli is a rock star.

Just saying.

Subway shuffle

From the web site:

Subway Shuffle is a collection of puzzles set in a subway system. You have boarded a car on the Red Line, and your task is to reach your destination. The problem is, there are other subway cars in your way! Each subway car can move only on its own color line: the red cars on the Red Line, the blue cars on the Blue Line, etc. Can you shuffle the cars from station to station, eventually moving your own car to your exit station?

for Mac OS X, from Robert Hearn.

Technorati Tags: subway

In-game surveillance

Bruce Schneier notes this example of in-game surveillance in World of Warcraft. You can see the project blog from the PARC PlayOn ("Exploring the social dimensions of virtual worlds") project to read about guild churn, how much time elite players are spending in raids, and how WoW level 60 (top) players are different from their less experienced counterparts. Lots of online sociology here, mostly conducted without IRBs and player consent into being watched and studied.

I'm on the lookout for comprehensive in-game transaction and economic analysis as well.

Thanks to Jose Nazario for this pointer (and thanks for lunch Jose, I owe you one).

Technorati Tags: WoW, mmorpg

Positive feedback loops and numerical indicators of progress

There are a number of online systems that incorporate feedback systems to give you an unambiguous numerical indicator to measure reputation or value in a system that might otherwise be very tough to quantify. Amazon provides book rankings and review statistics, eBay has an elaborate reputation engine, and games like Second Life have in-game currencies that reward players for successful play.

When you are designing such systems, take note that there can be at least as much or more incentive for people to get status and approval in the system than any kind of monetary rewards. You don't need to provide explicit monetary feedback to generate interest, because the market will in some cases provide its own feedback to reward people who have behaved well in your game. Sellers with good reputations can command higher prices for their auction goods, as only one example.

Systems with a lot of opportunities for positive feedback are also just a lot more fun. Consider the varieties of pedometers that you can use to measure step counts. Some just tell you how many steps you have gone; others go so far as letting you compete in national walking leagues or let you tend to a virtual pet that likes to be exercised. BJ Fogg calls this Persuasive Technology and notes that computers can motivate you to do all sorts of things, for good or for ill.

UPDATE 5/06: Think "unambiguous numerical indicators of progress", and contemplate for a moment multiplayer games where different players are playing different games and thus there is ambiguity in the scoring systems.

Technorati Tags: ebay, feedback, flood, pedometer, reputation

every successful internet activity is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game

What's more, the most interesting part of the game are the initial phases: deciding which game you are going to play, building the team to play it, and building the world in which other people play in.

Successful internet activities have some kind of scoring mechanism, so that you can see who is playing the game and how well they are doing. Usenet had a "top 1000 sites" map that showed which Usenet admins were playing the game the best - my site "mailrus" at the University of Michigan was #1 one month when I cranked up all of the Usenet daemons to run their batches once a minute instead of once an hour. The load average went to 7 but the news was delivered much more quickly.

Why sudoku is popular with newspapers

It's easily as addictive as a crossword puzzle, but in a pinch you can generate your own unique puzzles with a computer, hence lower labor costs in keeping your readers freshly supplied.

The puzzles don't go out of date.

You can generate puzzles with Sudoku Generator and Solver for Mac OS X, which is a packaged tcl/tk application.

Fierce UK competition for newspapers printing Sudokus yields syndicated work of high quality, e.g. The Daily SuDoku.

It appeals to the algorithm seeking nature of your inner geek, who now has another system to try to beat, now that Rubik's Cubes are out of style.

Learning to play checkers with Saul

We were at the Ann Arbor District Library downtown today on our normal Sunday walk through town after visiting Cafe Ambrosia. After playing a shape-drawing game on the library computers, Saul sat down to "play checkers" with another kid a little bit older who was there in the kids room.

He has a few ideas of the world of all possible checkers-like games down pat, including the idea of jumping, taking pieces of the board, and (mostly) putting the checkers down on all the black squares. But there was a bit of confusion with card games of turn-taking putting down the checkers for their initial board placement (the two kids took turns populating the board with checkers).

It made me think about all the other games you could play on a checkerboard with checkers that would turn out to be OK games. When I was a kid I was an avid reader of Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American, man I wish I had a big website full of all of those years and years of columns to browse through. Off to update Wikipedia with more memories.