>SUPERVERBOSE, Page 21

What is “the future”?

On February 20, 2011

That post about the art of the trivia question is still brewing, but I got sidetracked this week by another event in the trivia world. You may have heard about it. Watson, an IBM supercomputer, played two games of Jeopardy! against that show’s most famous champions, and thoroughly trounced the both of them.

A number of friends who watched the match complained that it was boring. If what you were looking for was a tense, movie-like contest with the drama of close scores or a come-from-behind victory, I can certainly see why you’d be disappointed. It had all the drama of the 49ers annihilating the Broncos 55-10 in Super Bowl XXIV. On the other hand, if what you were looking for was a glimpse of the world to come, in the form of a breathtaking technical achievement, this match absolutely delivered the goods.

See, some people tend to think computers are smart, and that of course a computer could beat a human at Jeopardy!, given a sufficiently broad knowledge base for its answers. But really, that’s a case of misplaced signifiers. Many human brains find rapid mental arithmetic of large or complex numbers difficult, and therefore associate it with intelligence. Computers happen to be fantastic at this kind of thing. The chess club is full of smart kids, and therefore chess must be a smart person’s game. Knowing that a computer could defeat the chess world champion must mean that computers are smart, right?

Here’s the thing, though. Computers are great at one thing: computing. Arithmetic is computation. Chess, at a sufficient level of abstraction, is also computation. The further away from numbers you move, the dumber computers become, meaning that for the vast majority of tasks our brains do each day, computers are extremely stupid. “Natural language”, aka the way we humans talk to each other, is an enormous challenge for a computer to deal with, as anyone playing interactive fiction for the first time could tell you. (Though the idea that better parsing of natural language will automatically make for better IF is another case of misplaced signifiers — better understanding of language is great and everything, but the more important part of IF is its model world. Advancing the parser just means the model world’s seams show more quickly.) Because computers lack human experience, they are stunningly bad at dealing with linguistic context, and are therefore capable of spectacular misunderstandings when faced with any language outside the very limited domains for which they’re programmed.

Watson is no exception to this, but it has a few advantages that other machines lack. For one thing, there’s an enormous amount of processing power behind it: some 90 servers, over 21 terabytes of data, 15 terabytes of RAM, and 80 teraflops of throughput. More important, though, are a couple of its conceptual approaches to knowledge.

First, through a paradigm called machine learning, Watson learns by example, getting better and better at the game as he sees more and more Jeopardy [leaving the exclamation point off from here on out] clues and their correct answers. It would be ridiculously impractical to try to construct a set of rules that would allow a computer to recognize every possible Jeopardy question, so instead Watson’s creators gave it a framework for recognizing associations between question words, answer words, and source texts, then fed it tens of thousands of Jeopardy clues as examples. This technique enabled Watson to make a huge leap in its Jeopardy prowess.

The other key aspect of Watson is its embrace of uncertainty. Watson doesn’t deal in right answers and wrong answers. It deals in answers that are more likely to be right vs. less likely to be right. Thus, when faced with the clue, “The parents of this 52nd governor of New York immigrated to the United States from Salerno, Italy,” we see its top three answers thus:

Three responses in a vertical list, each one with a confidence score and a bar indicating the score. Mario Cuomo is listed first, with 98% confidence and a nearly full green bar. Motorcycle club and Marine Corps are the next two answers listed, each with 8% confidence and a mostly empty bar with some red at the left edge.

Watson was quite certain that “Mario Cuomo” was the correct answer, but hadn’t entirely ruled out the far crazier answers “motorcycle club” and “Marine Corps.” Indeed, if what you’re seeking is comedy, look no further than Watson’s runner-up answers.

Laughs aside, though, it’s this uncertainty which makes Watson so formidable. In a frequently-cited example, Watson can look at the name “Alice Cooper” and weigh the evidence that Alice is a woman’s name against the evidence that Alice Cooper is a man, give each pile of evidence a score, and come to its own conclusion. A strictly rule-bound computer would have to be given a specific exception to handle this case. Watson can generate its own exception, thereby improving its knowledge base. As a co-worker of mine pointed out, isn’t this a hallmark of intelligence? The capacity to allow for the possibility that we may not know everything or fully understand the world is an incredibly powerful tool in the search for truth.

So as a computer, Watson rocks. But Jeopardy is an entertainment program, not a science program. Is it fun to watch Watson play Jeopardy? George Doro, my teammate in the Anti-Social Network, called it “more fascinating than exciting,” and that’s right on target. IBM branded the hell out of this show, and it would have been a black eye for them had Watson lost. Consequently, a few gameplay decisions were made which helped Watson win, but made the show a little less fun.

First off, Watson was allowed to be lightning-fast on the buzzer. People think of Jeopardy as a purely mental game, but unlike chess, there’s a physical component of Jeopardy. People (and computers) with faster reflexes do far better on the show — it doesn’t matter if you know 100% of the answers when you’re getting outbuzzed 80% of the time. Trying to play buzzer-beaters against a computer is like running a 500-yard dash against a car. Watson didn’t have to be this quick — just subtract a little of that processing power until the computer’s average buzz-in time equals the average human’s buzz-in time (or even Ken Jennings’ average) and you’ve got a fairer battle, but instead, when Watson was certain enough of its answer, no human thumb could possibly outrace its mechanical plunger. (There were a few exceptions, but overall it was clear that Watson’s buzzing speed was what allowed it to dominate the match.)

Secondly, there’s the fact that each human had not only Watson to contend with, but also another top-notch Jeopardy player! Consequently, anytime Watson doesn’t pick up a clue in time, the two humans tended to split the points between them. I know Jeopardy is traditionally played by three contestants, but there was plenty about this match that was non-traditional. I would be very interested to see how Jennings would do against Watson by himself, especially if the buzzer advantage were corrected. As he put it in an NPR interview: “It’s the worst of both worlds, you know? The ideal scenario would be to have a human versus a computer, or maybe a computer versus a very good human and a lousy ‘Jeopardy!‘ player. I don’t know if you saw Wolf Blitzer on the show, but I’d like to have Wolf back.”

That’s not to say that Watson was flawless. One of its major weaknesses was its inability to see or hear. Instead of listening to Alex Trebek read the clue, Watson was fed the clue via (essentially) a text message, so it saw and started processing the clue at the same time as Ken and Brad saw it. The show neutralized the most obvious disadvantage of this blindness and deafness by eliminating the audio or visual clues it often features. Jeopardy has made this sort of accommodation before, to serve disabled human players, and while it’s certainly true that Ken and Brad could have whomped the computer on those clues, that’s really not what Watson was built to do, so it would rather miss the point. A more pertinent disadvantage was that it could not hear what the other contestants were answering. It was told whether its own answer was correct, and told the correct answers provided by humans, but was not told of wrong answers, leading to this exchange:

Ken: “‘Name That Decade’ for a thousand.”
Alex: “The first modern crossword puzzle is published & Oreo cookies are introduced.” [Ken buzzes in] “Ken?”
Ken: “What are the ’20s?”
Alex: “No.” [Watson buzzes in] “Watson?”
Watson: “What is 1920s?”
Alex: “No. Ken said that.”

[The correct answer was “The 1910s.”] Trebek’s schoolmarmish correction of a machine that had just that moment proven it can’t hear him was amusing, and perhaps reflexive. Watson’s error was the kind of mistake that humans rarely make, though it’s not unheard of. When a human does it, though, it’s a sign of frazzled nerves. With Watson, it’s an Achilles heel. Well, maybe an Achilles toenail.

Another major weakness Watson displayed was its difficulty leveraging the category title to come up with the answer. Humans completely dominated that “Name The Decade” category — Watson was having trouble processing quickly enough to outbuzz them, and at one point its top guess for one of the clues was “2002,” even though it did come up with decades for the others. Most famously, in the Final Jeopardy round of the first game, it encountered the category “U.S. Cities,” and the clue, “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle,” which it answered thus:

An image of Watson, showing the answer, "What is Toronto?????"

(This inspired the funniest Watson joke I’ve yet seen: “Me: Hey Doc, I’ve got this pain in my left arm and an awful headache. Doc: What is Toronto?????”) The answer was in fact “Chicago,” but even if a human didn’t know the answer, he very likely would have guessed an actual U.S. city based on the category, rather than a Canadian city.

As some of the IBM guys pointed out, Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy are a tough area for Watson, because it has to guess something, and therefore risk looking stupid. When it’s not sure about its answers on a regular clue, it can just refrain from buzzing in. Watching the show, I thought perhaps that Watson’s creators forced it to simply focus on the question, more or less ignoring the category. Turns out this isn’t quite true. In fact, it considers the category in its approach, but it’s learned from its thousands of Jeopardy clues that category is often only weakly tied to the answer. For instance, that Chicago question could have been reworded, “Chicago’s O’Hare airport is named after a World War II hero; this airport, its second largest, was named after a World War II battle.” The question still would have fit the category, but the answer would have been an airport, not a city. Watson has seen that scenario play out many times, and is thus wary of assuming that the answer in a “U.S. Cities” category will always be a U.S. city.

In the end, Watson defeated the humans soundly, with a score of $77,147 to Jennings’ $24,000 and Rutter’s $21,600. A lot of the press coverage has focused on the “man vs. machine” angle, and of course the match was set up to emphasize that. In fact, it was rather poignant to see Watson beat one of its human practice match opponents on the clue, “This African-American folklore laborer: ‘Before I let that steam drill beat me down I’ll die with my hammer in my hand.'” I guess there’s this sort of pastoral vs. industrial thing that gets set up when machines attempt a traditionally human activity, even though people holding buzzers and answering trivia questions doesn’t exactly fit neatly into the pastoral mold.

I don’t feel much solidarity with the OMG SKYNET IS HERE!!!!! response. As somebody who works in IT, I’m fascinated by the achievement. I think about how satisfying it must have been to have worked on the team that created this. Those people just finished a massive four-year project, and the result was an incredible leap forward in information processing, with a world-famous, historic, televised, wildly successful debut. I just finished my time as a team member on a three-year project, and the result is a shakily implemented student system whose portal is currently driving everyone crazy with how incomplete and slow it is. I’m sure there is mental, emotional, and physical damage associated with both project teams, but wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have been on the one whose final product worked so well?

In his Final Jeopardy answer, Ken Jennings wrote, “(I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.)” It’s a reference to a hilarious moment on The Simpsons. And interestingly, it may not have been one Jennings thought of himself. Here’s an excerpt from his NPR interview with Neal Conan:

Mr. JENNINGS: Maybe it’s just my own ego, but yeah, I feel like I’ve somehow, through some weird coincidence, been elected as the champion of carbon-based life on Earth against, you know, our new future oppressor.
CONAN: Silicon, yeah.
Mr. JENNINGS: And I would like to strike a blow while I have the chance.
CONAN: I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.
Mr. JENNINGS: You may have no choice, Neal.

Then again, it’s quite possible that this interview was taped after the Jeopardy challenge was taped, so who knows? But whether Jennings was lifting a joke or simply making a reference, isn’t this the skill for which we celebrate him? He gathers knowledge from various sources, and retrieves it quickly, using it when it can make the most impact. His graciousness and humor in that final moment certainly set him apart from his predecessor in IBM challenge history, Garry Kasparov, who famously stalked away in an enormous huff after being beaten by Deep Blue. But in that graciousness and humor, he also subtly made the point that for all Watson’s skill and speed at information retrieval, humans can still wield that information with a precision and effect that Watson could never hope to achieve.

Trivial Matters With a Vengeance

By paulobrian

On January 27, 2011

In Uncategorized

Okay, so some of this is covered in my review of Wordplay, but here it is from a slightly different angle. But before we go there, answers to the last entry’s questions:

Following in the footsteps of Anthony Michael Hall and Jason Lively, he played Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. More famously, he appeared as David Healey, Darlene’s boyfriend and eventual husband, in 92 episodes of Roseanne. Name this actor who currently stars as Dr. Leonard Hofstader on The Big Bang Theory.
Answer: Johnny Galecki

In the 1960s, Marvel Comics loved to liven up its titles by throwing in an extra adjective. I’ll give you a comic book title, you fill in the missing adjective, for five points each.
1. The Incredible Hulk
2. The Amazing Spider-Man
3. The Invincible Iron Man
4. The Uncanny X-Men
5. The Mighty Thor
6. The Astonishing Ant-Man

During CU‘s 2001 revival of the Trivia Bowl, I heard rumors of this thing called a “Basement Bowl.” I gathered it was some kind of trivia-oriented deal held in somebody’s basement. As you may recall, I had the epiphany in 2001 in which I realized that these are my people, so I wanted in on this Basement Bowl thingy. Sadly for me, it’s not easy to invite yourself to somebody else’s event, at least not for me it isn’t. So I asked around about it, discreetly, and got vague answers that sure, the Bowl’s always looking for new blood, and I’ll pass your name on.

I never heard back.

The next year (the final year of the revival), the same scenario played out. This time, I was more direct, asked more people, and was once again assured that my name would be given to Leonard, which I learned was the name of the guy in charge of the Bowl. I even went so far as to send email to Jason Katzman, who I knew as the film critic from CU’s unofficial newspaper, the Colorado Daily, during my student tenure. He’s part of the trivia crowd, and has a day job at the CU Bookstore, meaning that we sort-of-kind-of share an employer. I had briefly talked with him at the Bowl, and sent a follow-up email saying how much I love the trivia thing and how I’d love to be a part of any other trivia events he knows about.

I never heard back.

A couple of years later, the much much smaller-scale bowl began. That year, I once again participated, and made a connection with a guy named Dave Gatch. Dave is a wonderful guy, extremely bright and very funny, like a lot of trivia people. He’s also interested in reaching out to relative outsiders such as myself, and so that year he started taking me under his wing. In the summer of 2006, he invited me to attend the Basement Bowl at last.

And now, a bit of background. Leonard Fahrni is one of the true characters of the trivia world. Like Gatch (like all of them, really), he’s quite intelligent — he has four undergraduate degrees [3 of these simultaneously, from a triple-major] and three master’s degrees. I dunno, maybe four by now. Going to school is kind of his hobby. He teaches math at Metro State College. Plays trumpet in the National Guard’s 101st Army Band. (Actually, I know he retired from the military recently, so this may no longer be true.) He can be acid-tongued and caustic, but he can also be amazingly hospitable and generous. Oh, and he lives in his parents’ basement.

This basement is the home of the Basement Bowl. Leonard is a longtime fan of the trivia bowl, and during its heyday he watched for several years before forming his own team. When he did, they got blown out. He decided that practice was needed, and inaugurated a habit of getting some like-minded people together to write trivia questions for each other as practice for the yearly Bowl. He even got some mad scientist friend to build a buzzer set, just like the real thing.

In time, the habit morphed from practice into just a friendly event, a chance for friends to get together and do something they love. Basically, a bunch of trivia geeks descend (literally) on the place, bringing packets of toss-ups and bonuses with which to quiz others. If someone is moved to create one, there can also be multimedia quizzes, with sound clips and video clips and so forth. It’s not required that you create a game to come to the party — it’s just that most of the time at the party is spent playing these games, so the more games, the more fun.

Leonard sets up the buzzer system, but there are no set teams — everybody just sits down kind of free-form at the beginning of each new game, and a general social etiquette makes sure that everybody gets a chance to play some. Whoever wrote the game moderates it, and people just sit themselves down on sides, 4 to a team. It is very casual and non-competitive. It starts around 1:00, and goes until the questions run out. Leonard serves lasagna and salad around dinnertime, and guests generally bring drinks and snacky stuff for everybody to munch.

And OH MY GOD IT IS SO MUCH FUN.

My first time there I felt a bit overawed by the whole thing. These were people who had known each other, many of them, for upwards of 30 years. They are very tight and very bright. Some of them have actually won life-changing amounts of money on game shows. I brought a game to my first Basement Bowl and acquitted myself reasonably well, but boy was I blown away at the speed and knowledge of the people in that room. It was amazing.

Well, I must have done something right, because I got invited back. And last Saturday, I attended my 10th one. Laura is always awesome about these, taking on Dante for the day. I try to pay her back in various ways, like when she wants to climb a 14er or attend a meditation seminar or something, but I definitely appreciate how supportive she is of my fun.

For my part, I’ve tried to keep improving in the material I create for the Bowl. I’ve created at least one regular game each time, as well as some other stuff — a music game and a geek game (covering stuff like D&D, Buffy, Internet memes, etc.) I print out sheets with visual clues for bonuses, like TV screengrabs, film stills, album covers, etc. I’ve done all-audio games, like a disc of 55 song clips from one-hit-wonders. Games like that are played as an all toss-up round, often with the top scorers getting some sort of prize. I’ve also branched into video, thanks to the wonderful DownloadHelper, and integrated quite a bit of multimedia into my regular games.

And that, three blog entries later, is what “Basement Bowl” means. Now to start writing the entry I intended to write in the first place. But first: The Geek Bowl!

Trivial Matters 2: Electric Boogaloo

By paulobrian

On January 25, 2011

In Uncategorized

In my last entry, I explained the structure of the trivia bowl, and talked about its history at CU. Before I continue, let me provide some answers to the questions I posed there:

Q: James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot were the writers behind what song medley, which won Record Of The Year, topped the charts for six weeks in 1969, and was the biggest hit in the 5th Dimension’s career?
Answer: “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”

I’ll name a fictional computer from a movie, you name the movie, for ten points each.
1. MU-TH-R 182 model 2, the ship-board computer on the space ship Nostromo, known by the crew as ‘mother.’
Answer: Alien
2. Deep Thought, a computer created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings who look to us exactly like white mice.
Answer: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
3. EMERAC, a room-sized computer recently acquired by the Federal Broadcasting Network, whose worth is advocated by inventor Richard Sumner and doubted by reference librarian Bunny Watson.
Answer: Desk Set
4. WOPR, or War Operations Plan Response, a military simulator housed at NORAD.
Answer: Wargames

Now for my trivia autobiography (a redundant phrase, perhaps.) I grew up loving music, movies, and to a lesser extent, TV, as well as comics, theater, and the other sorts of topics that show up in the trivia bowl… except for sports. I was always a casual Bronco fan, but never somebody who could quote statistics or even name all the players. I enjoy seeing the games, but I never mind missing them either. I had a fling with baseball fandom for a couple of years, but then they went on strike and I got thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing.

As for basketball, hockey, NASCAR, golf, etc… don’t care. Never cared. I don’t mind watching tennis, and a bit of Olympics, but I only know the most surface facts about any of this stuff, if that. I do know a little about the WNBA and women’s soccer, thanks to Laura, but now that we have the Dante Distraction, soccer has left the limelight, and many of the WNBA games have moved over to some silly premium cable channel, so even that knowledge is pretty patchy.

Anyway, when I came to CU, I was only dimly aware of the trivia bowl, pretty much as “that thing that sounds kind of interesting but that I’m way too busy to do.” Finally, in 1993 my friend Robby told me that he knew a couple of teachers from our high school who wanted to field a team for the bowl, and asked me if I’d be interested. Robby was/is a total sports guy, as well as music and movies. Our mutual friend James covered TV, as well as some knowledge in all the other areas, and one of the teachers, Ron Hoover, was an absolute monster on old movies. So I said sure, and when we played our first game, wow. I still remember a visceral thrill from buzzing in on toss-ups before the question was finished, because I had such a strong feeling about the answer:

HOST: “Enya has had multiplatinum success with albums like Watermark, but before she–”
ME: BUZZ! “Clannad.”
HOST: “Clannad is correct.”

Whoo! Man, it was exciting. The other thing I remember is the fun of guessing on answers after the question had been read, if nobody else was buzzing in. Sometimes it even worked out:

HOST: “Who has the record for most guest appearances on The Love Boat?”
ME: [After a long pause in which it becomes clear that nobody is going to attempt this.] BUZZ. “Uh… Charo?”
HOST: “Yes, it is Charo!”

Our team actually won a game or two, but got blown out in the later rounds by more experienced and knowledgeable teams. There was a ceremony after the final game, and I was named Rookie Of The Year! Sadly, I had to work, so wasn’t able to accept in person. Even more sadly, 1993 was the final year of the trivia bowl. It is really a bummer to be Rookie Of The Year in the final year of something.

The whole event was dormant for a number of years, but when the CU Program Council brought it back in 2001, I knew I wanted to play. I got together a team of me, Robby, our mutual friend May from high school, and my friend Trish from work. Again, we did well in the early rounds and got stomped later, but that year I had an epiphany: these are my people. I attended every game I could (which was a lot — the tournament went all week, starting with 64 teams and narrowing down to two) and soaked the whole thing in. That was the year I officially fell in love with the trivia bowl.

Unfortunately, I was in the minority. The revival lasted one more year, in which our loss came to the team who went on to win the whole thing… a team led by Ed Toutant, the second biggest winner in the history of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. But attendance was anemic, and while the whole thing was super DUPER fun for me, it was a losing proposition for the Program Council, who pulled the plug in 2002.

After that, the event was held for a number of years in a much, much more scaled down form every fall. It was little conference rooms rather than the Glenn Miller Ballroom, with maybe 6-10 teams competing, no audio/video questions, and a more regimented quiz-bowly format which values strategy over entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — I made sure to play every year, and it was one of my favorite things, but it was a far cry from the heyday of it all. Now even that is gone, or at least it hasn’t been held for the last couple of years.

That smaller scale, though, enabled me to forge some relationships with trivia bowl “royalty” — the various Hall Of Famers who now moderate games and form a coterie whose history stretches back 30 or 40 years. One of these people, David Gatch, sort of took me under his wing a few years ago and got me invited to a very kooky event called the “Basement Bowl.”

…and that’s where part 3 will begin. But just to keep the trivia power flowing, here’s another toss-up and bonus.

Following in the footsteps of Anthony Michael Hall and Jason Lively, he played Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. More famously, he appeared as David Healey, Darlene’s boyfriend and eventual husband, in 92 episodes of Roseanne. Name this actor who currently stars as Dr. Leonard Hofstader on The Big Bang Theory.

In the 1960s, Marvel Comics loved to liven up its titles by throwing in an extra adjective. I’ll give you a comic book title, you fill in the missing adjective, for five points each.
1. The _____ Hulk
2. The _____ Spider-Man
3. The _____ Iron Man
4. The _____ X-Men
5. The _____ Thor
6. The _____ Ant-Man

Trivial Matters

By paulobrian

On January 23, 2011

In Uncategorized

Having just been to another Basement Bowl, I’ve been ruminating on a blog entry about what makes a good trivia question. And I do want to write that, but first I’d like to address those of you who may be saying, “another Basment Wha?”

Let me say: this is going to be long. Consequently, I’m breaking it up into a series of posts. This first one is the big lump of backstory that’s required to understand my personal trivia history. Your eyes may glaze over. This is normal.

I can go back quite a ways with my connection to trivia — I remember having books like Fred L. Worth’s Trivia Encyclopedia sitting around the house as a kid, and playing Trivial Pursuit with my family. (My dad dominated, though really he was only competing with one other adult.)

Meanwhile, the University of Colorado, my alma mater two times over and now my employer, started hosting an official Trivia Bowl in 1968, sponsored by a professor who’d just led a CU team to victory in the GE College Bowl. The difference was that while the College Bowl focused on various academic areas, the Trivia Bowl was dedicated solely to pop-cultural ephemera: music, movies, TV, sports, and “garbage”, which encompasses things like comic strips, theater, radio, etc.

The games follow a standard “quiz bowl” format. Two teams of four array against each other. Each team member has a buzzer. The moderator reads a “toss-up” question worth 10 points. At any point during the reading of the question, an individual may buzz in with the answer. If she interrupts with a wrong answer, her team incurs a 5-point penalty and the other team can listen to the entire question. A wrong answer that doesn’t interrupt incurs no penalty. No conferencing or teamwork is allowed on toss-up questions — if the judges see a conference, that team is automatically disqualified for that question, and the other team has a chance to buzz in.

A correct answer on a toss-up earns the right to a “bonus question”, worth anywhere from 20 to 40 points, and on these, teamwork IS allowed. (It’s usually essential, in fact.) These are usually multi-part questions, often with some kind of theme tying them together.

Example of a toss-up question:

James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot were the writers behind what song medley, which won Record Of The Year, topped the charts for six weeks in 1969, and was the biggest hit in the 5th Dimension’s career?

Example of a bonus question:

I’ll name a fictional computer from a movie, you name the movie, for ten points each.
1. MU-TH-R 182 model 2, the ship-board computer on the space ship Nostromo, known by the crew as ‘mother.’
2. Deep Thought, a computer created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings who look to us exactly like white mice.
3. EMERAC, a room-sized computer recently acquired by the Federal Broadcasting Network, whose worth is advocated by inventor Richard Sumner and doubted by reference librarian Bunny Watson.
4. WOPR, or War Operations Plan Response, a military simulator housed at NORAD.

Teams compete against each other in a long tournament — at the height of the trivia bowl, it started with 64 teams and narrowed down to two. The game consists of two ten-minute halves, though later in the tournament these periods are sometimes longer. There’s multimedia fun too — audio and video for both the tossups and bonuses.

The Trivia Bowl got quite popular, playing to packed houses in the Glenn Miller Ballroom throughout the 70s. A version of it was broadcast on ABC’s Wide World Of Sports at one point. Teams tried to outdo each other with silly, funny names (e.g. “Children Of A Lesser Godzilla”, “Bill Clinton Sings ‘Devil With A Blue Dress On'”), and the level of competition was impressive — there are people out there with some frighteningly encyclopedic knowledge about pop culture. The matches lasted through the week, and on the Friday before the finals there’d be a concert by some oldies act — Del Shannon, The Guess Who, Bo Diddley, etc.

The Bowl’s popularity endured a slow decline through the eighties, and by the early 90s attendance was sparse indeed. CU finally pulled the plug on the event in 1993, with a brief revival from 2001-2002. The year after that, a guy named Paul Bailey continued the Bowl in diminished form — people gathering in small conference rooms to answer questions, no audio or video, and no audience. But still fun.

Okay, that’s all for now. Next post will explain my personal history with all this, and give answers to the questions in this post. If you don’t want to wait that long, I will be happy to confirm or deny any answers that appear in the comments.

Game As Life, Life As Game

By paulobrian

On December 22, 2010

In Uncategorized

Something Dante loves is to find some little Flash game on JayIsGames and play it with me. At this point, he’s got a repertoire of them in his head, and he calls them out for me from time to time like requests at a piano bar. “I want to play Electric Box 2!” “I want to play Meeblings!” “I want to play FireBoy and WaterGirl!” “Let’s play Shape Switcher!”

Some of these games have level editors, which fascinate him. He delights in putting together nonsensical levels and watching them go. I can relate to this feeling, but when he asks me to make my own level, I always demur. I just have no interest in constructing a puzzle off the cuff, partly because I am terrible at it, and partly because I don’t get much pleasure from it. So one night last week, as usual, he said something to me like “Now you make a level!”, and I said, “No, that’s not the kind of game I like to make.”

“Well, what kind of game do you like to make?” he asked, quite sensibly. Heh. So I told him that I like to make text games, and he asked what those are. It’s come up before, but he’s a little older now (he turned 5 in June), which made it feel like even more of a Talking To Your Kids About Star Wars moment. So I explained the basics to him, and asked if he wanted to see one. He did.

So we played Zork 1 together for about 45 minutes. Oh my, the cuteness. Rockhound that he is, he got very interested in the description of the canyon. He laughed at the response to COUNT LEAVES. He called out suggestions and had fun seeing the responses. However, the response to WHAT IS A GRUE made him so nervous that he refused to enter the trapdoor after we’d found it. He was up for everything but that, which is a pretty funny way to play Zork.

Then it was time for him to clean up his dinner dishes, so I asked him to do that, and he said:

“WALK TO TABLE”
“GET DISH”
“PUT DISH ON COUNTER”

He’d speak the command, and then execute the action. I loved it. Then he asked me, “Do you ever pretend that your life is an interactive fiction game?”

Oh man. YES. I have a memory from 18 years[!] ago, still vivid, of walking around the CU campus in the morning after having stayed up most of the night playing A Mind Forever Voyaging for the first time. My brain was getting the usual input from my senses — colors, sounds, temperature, and so on — but alongside that, it was generating a stream of text, describing my experience in the world as if I were Perry Simm walking through a simulated Rockvil campus. It was genuinely psychedelic, one of the few times I’ve felt like my mind had been affected on a fundamental level by a piece of art.

Part of that brain alteration was to look at life through the lens of IF. When I do that, a few things get reframed in my head. I no longer have problems — I have puzzles. They seem a lot more solvable when I think of them that way. (Pity about the lack of Invisiclues, though.) The routine I rely on becomes suspect. What new areas of exploration might I be ignoring by choosing to go the same places, do the same things every day? My naturally introverted nature grows more interested in hearing what other people might say if I ASK them about various topics. IF is based on a world model, with certain assumptions embedded within it. So is the brain, though the model is far more sophisticated, and the assumptions probably aren’t the same. Replacing the brain’s typical model with the IF model can prove surprisingly illuminating.

Now, in my typically tardy way, I’ve begun playing The Sims, a game whose whole point is to create a world model for daily life. Inevitably, some of its world model has begun to creep into my head. Why am I feeling depressed? Oh, maybe I need to eat. Or sleep. Or call a friend. The game’s demands, while they can be rather prosaic and irritating, also feel like validation to me, confirming my view that yes indeed, much of life is actually rather prosaic and irritating. There really is a relentlessness to the way we must all keep meeting our physical needs for rest and food, for bodily upkeep, domestic upkeep, and financial stability. Relationships really do require maintenance, even when doing so contravenes our need for rest or “introvert time.” So many competing needs, so little time to fulfill them, and all while trying to succeed at work and as a family member. It’s compelling, but I’m not sure I could call it fun.

But wait. Yes, there is something seductive, at least to me, about seeing daily life as a set of needs to be balanced via time management and careful attention. Seductive, but also reductive. It’s an oppressively left-brained, mechanistic view of reality, not to mention overwhelmingly consumerist. There’s no pleasure in cooking or eating, just the discomfort of standing up and the relief of filling one’s belly. There’s no pleasure in work, just the opportunity to keep getting better stuff and expanding our space. Listening to music, reading, creating, interacting with others — they don’t feed the soul. They just keep us mindlessly having fun, making friends for career advancement, or setting up separate streams of income. I have no doubt that for some people, in some circumstances, any of these things could be true. Some of them are true for me sometimes, which is where the seductive part comes from. And yeah, it can be a useful tool to challenge routinized thoughts and unconscious actions. But if it were sufficient and true, I wouldn’t be writing this now. The pleasure I get from analysis, the satisfaction of sharing it with the world, doesn’t fit into The Sims‘ world, but it’s crucial in mine.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the net

By paulobrian

On September 24, 2010

In Uncategorized

On the very occasional occasions when I write some stuff on other sites, I try to mention it here. So…

I’ve just written a couple of Amazon reviews: one for the new Melissa Etheridge album, and one for an out-of-print book of quotations. Writing a review of an out-of-print book may be the very definition of pointless.

Also, while I’m much more of a Facebooker than a Tweeter, there was a meme on Twitter recently I just couldn’t resist. The game was called “#rockretractions” — basically, the voice of a song revising what it originally said. I tried my hand.

My favorite one that I wish I’d written was, “On the other hand, I may be right and you may be crazy.” Also, while I’m quoting things that made me laugh, another recent meme on Twitter was, for some reason, “#namesfortinywhales.” Perhaps it was just localized to a few people I follow. Anyway, my friend Iain wrote “wee frilly”, and it’s been periodically cracking me up ever since.

Domestic Adventure: Behind The Silver Door

By paulobrian

On September 6, 2010

In Uncategorized

Ah, the storage unit. A cozy, indoor, air-conditioned home for all the things you can’t fit into your actual home anymore. Now that you’re in the process of packing for a move, you’ve been making regular trips out here. You’ve learned the routine. You’re a pro. Pull up to the building doors, grab a handtruck, fill it up with boxes, wheel it inside… and so on.

BEHIND THE SILVER DOOR
A non-interactive Domestic Adventure by Paul O’Brian

Storage Building Foyer
Everything here gleams in sterile silver and white, colors chosen to assure you that this place is clean, secure, and well-kept. The east wall features a locked door as well as two different elevators — call them Left Elevator and Right Elevator. Or don’t bother, because Right Elevator is the one that always opens. A call button adorns the wall between the two elevators. Mounted on the wall to the right of Right Elevator is a security keypad. Automatic doors provide an exit to the west.

Your handtruck is here, loaded with boxes and waiting paitently in front of Right Elevator.

> EXAMINE HANDTRUCK
[You can abbreviate EXAMINE to X, if you like.]
It’s a large, wheeled platform, with a handle at one end. The storage place is nice enough to keep a supply of these in the foyer. It’s a quality piece of equipment, albeit a bit slow and cumbersome when laden with boxes like it is now.

> X BOXES
Oh, you know. Books. Decorations. Photo Albums. Books. Journals. Random electronics components. Also, books.

> X ELEVATOR
Which do you mean, Left Elevator or Right… well, actually, it doesn’t matter. They’re identical. Silver elevator doors, closed.

> X AUTOMATIC DOORS
They’re the doors you’ll walk out of once you’ve deposited all your stuff in the storage locker.

> X CALL BUTTON
Its upward-pointing arrow is currently unlit.

> X KEYPAD
Yeah, the keypad is part of the rather high-tech setup here at this storage building. You’ve got to enter your code at a different keypad just to get admitted to the storage complex at all, but once you get to this foyer, you must enter it again here to activate the elevators. Frequent trips here have taught you not to dawdle — there’s a pretty short timeout window from the time you enter your code, and if you don’t call an elevator, get into it, and hit the key for your floor before that timeout occurs, you’ve got to start all over.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Left Elevator doors open. This is the first time in your many trips here that you have ever seen the Left Elevator doors open.

> ENTER LEFT ELEVATOR
What, without your stuff?

> PUSH HANDTRUCK INTO LEFT ELEVATOR
You get behind the handtruck and heave. It’s a slow beast to turn around, especially in the somewhat cramped conditions of the foyer. Precious seconds tick by as you wrestle the handtruck out of its position in front of Right Elevator, wrench it around, and get it into…

Left Elevator
More sterile silver walls greet you from the inside of the elevator. As elevators go, it’s a pretty roomy one — no surprise, really, given some of the things people probably have to haul into it. There’s a panel of buttons on the wall next to the door leading west.

> X PANEL
One, Two, Three, Open Doors, Close Doors. Emergency Stop. Solemn weight limit warning. Earnest maintenance chart. Nothing you haven’t seen many times before. Your floor is Three.

> PRESS THREE
You press the button, which lights up, then goes dim again as soon as you release it. Damn. The security timeout expired. Now you’ve got to go back and enter your code again.

> OUT
You step out of the silver elevator.

Storage Building Foyer
Everything here gleams in sterile silver and white, colors chosen to assure you that this place is clean, secure, and well-kept. The east wall features a locked door as well as two different elevators — call them Left Elevator and Right Elevator, a distinction apparently far more important than you realized. A call button adorns the wall between the two elevators. Mounted on the wall to the right of Right Elevator is a security keypad. Automatic doors provide an exit to the west.

The Right Elevator doors open. A guy walks out of them and continues through the automatic doors, into the sunshine beyond. He smiles at you as he leaves.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

The Right Elevator doors close. The Left Elevator doors close.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Right Elevator doors open. Which is great and everything, except for the fact that the handtruck full of your stuff is in the Left Elevator. Apparently Left gets pressed into service whenever Right is busy, which is almost never. Today you just happened to land in that shadowy space between “almost never” and “actually never.”

> WAIT
[You can abbreviate WAIT to Z, if you like.]
Time passes.

The Right Elevator doors close.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Right Elevator doors open. Your stuff remains trapped in the Left Elevator.

> THINK
What a good idea.

The Right Elevator Doors close.

> Z.Z.Z.

Time passes.

Time passes. Nobody’s going to happen to come along and solve this problem for you, if that’s what you were hoping for.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Right Elevator doors open. Your stuff remains trapped in the Left Elevator.

> ENTER RIGHT ELEVATOR
Right Elevator
It’s absolutely identical to the Left Elevator. Same stainless walls, same panel of buttons.

> PRESS THREE
The Three button glows steadily.

> OUT
You step out of the silver elevator.

Storage Building Foyer
Everything here gleams in sterile silver and white, colors chosen to assure you that this place is clean, secure, and well-kept. The east wall features a locked door as well as two different elevators — call them Left Elevator and Right Elevator, a distinction apparently far more important than you realized. A call button adorns the wall between the two elevators. Mounted on the wall to the right of Right Elevator is a security keypad. Automatic doors provide an exit to the west.

The Right Elevator doors close, and you can hear it begin its empty journey to the third floor.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Left Elevator doors open, revealing your handtruck and boxes!

> ENTER LEFT ELEVATOR
You happily rejoin your abandoned possessions.

> PRESS THREE
The button glows steadily, and the elevator hums.

> Z
The silver doors close, and the familiar lurch sends you gliding upward, your errand back on track at last. Whew!

*** You have won ***

Your score is 100 out of 100, giving you the rank of Elevator Evader.

You have: A lamp (providing illumination)

By paulobrian

On August 21, 2010

In Uncategorized

I’ve written before about GET LAMP, the text adventure documentary. Back in March, I got to watch an hour-long mix of it at PAX East. Now, the full film is available on DVD, so I get to write about it again. Let me get right to the point: if you love text games, or you want to know more about them, you should watch this movie. Stephen Granade called it “funny, affecting, and informative, which isn’t a bad trifecta to hit.” I can’t think of a better description, though of course that won’t stop me from spending the next few paragraphs trying.

True, it’s pricey ($40 plus $5 shipping domestically, $9 internationally.) Director Jason Scott released the movie under a Creative Commons license, so it’s not illegal to torrent it, but of course, buying it is the more right thing to do. There’s no studio backing Jason — he produced this movie as a labor of love, and both the labor and the love shine through luminously. More about that in a bit. In order to make the DVD package attractive, he’s packed it with all sorts of fun goodies: nifty art, tons of featurettes, a DVD-ROM full of text games, three different commentary tracks, and a gorgeous individually numbered collectible coin. It’s a remarkably well-wrought product, especially considering that, again, this is the output of one guy. Plus, I’m in it, so, y’know, what’s not to love? 🙂

GET LAMP is very clearly a loving tribute to text games. Because I am passionate about the form myself, and because of my personal involvement with the film, I cannot judge it objectively. In any case, I’ve already written about what makes the movie good according to me, and all that still holds true. In fact, it’s better than the movie I saw at PAX — not only is it fuller, but the pieces I didn’t like in the hour-long mix have either been excised or fixed.

So this isn’t a review, but rather an appreciation, a recommendation, and a gleeful celebration of this cool thing that now exists in the world. There are a lot of fun layers to the whole thing. For instance, in the spirit of the “Have you tried…?” section that often appears at the end of text game hint manuals, there’s a whole game to be played with the movie itself: almost every shot has a lamp in it; collect them all like trophies. Even cooler, the movie itself is interactive. After the initial 25 minutes or so, you are presented with a menu of options for what piece of the movie you want to view next. Fair warning, though: if your DVD player is sorta lame like mine, you may be better served by just watching the non-interactive version. In fact, even in that one I keep getting kicked out to the top menu, and have to make my way through the film via clever use of the chapter forward button on my DVD remote. Hey, it’s a movie that’s also a puzzle!

I’m surprised how little that glitch bothers me. I think I know the reason why: every time I see this movie, or any piece of it, I come away feeling energized and inspired. That’s a big payoff, well worth a little remote-fiddling. I love GET LAMP, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. In fact, Laura and I have a date to watch it this weekend, so she can learn more about this crazy text adventure thing that has taken so much of her husband’s time over the last 15 years. That alone is a wonderful gift. The obsessive viewing of each commentary track, though — that’s just for me.

Paul vs. Comcast

By paulobrian

On August 3, 2010

In Uncategorized

I dunno, maybe this makes me look like a jerk. I hate to be Rude To The Waiter Guy. But this Comcast interaction really pushed my buttons, and not just because of the numerous grammar errors. (Though those do bring out my inner Strong Bad.)

The prelude is that we’re moving. (Hooray!) So I went to Comcast’s site to figure out how to switch my service to my new address. I found their moving page, filled out their form, and got an error message, because I didn’t fill in “Salutation” (Mr. or Mrs.) So then I filled it in, clicked submit, and got a “We’re sorry, something broke, please try again” message. So then I went back, filled out the form again, and was told that I needed to do a live chat to complete the transaction.

The Beatles — Love

By paulobrian

On July 9, 2010

In Uncategorized

I have to confess, the whole Love thing completely passed me by. I vaguely heard, four years ago or so, that Cirque du Soleil was doing some Beatles tribute show. Because I’ve never seen a Cirque show, and because my imagination has been stunted by television and video games, all I can picture is a bunch of guys in tights, swinging from trapezes, forming human pyramids, and so forth. To Beatles music. I yawn, and move on.

Then my friend Trrish made a special trip to Las Vegas to see the show, and told me a bit more about the way the music worked, and I was intrigued enough to pick up the album. And now that I’ve listened to it ten times in a row and had my mind completely BLOWN, I have to write about it, and I have to evangelize it to everybody I know who loves the Beatles. So I will gladly acknowledge the gooniness of gushing over an album 4 years after it comes out, just because it happened to take me that long to get around to it. It’s like writing a bunch of breathless blog posts about Buffy The Vampire Slayer in 2006, 3 years after it was cancelled. Which, y’know, I also did. So I guess this sort of thing is really my stock in trade nowadays.

If you’re way out of the loop like me, let me tell you a little about this album. It’s the soundtrack to the Cirque show, yes. But more importantly, it’s an exquisite, loving collage of Beatles sounds, made by people who have the music in their DNA: George Martin and his son Giles. They take the songs and pull apart their elements, mixing them together ingeniously, so that a solo from one song might float through the intro of another, fading smoothly into a third. Every sound on the record (with one exception, which I’ll discuss later) is from a Beatles recording. Sometimes the songs stand on their own for a while, sometimes the mixtures are subtle, and sometimes they jump out and grab you by the throat.

The sound is uniformly fantastic. I’ve never heard the songs sound better, even (or, perhaps, especially) when they’re not mixed up. Listening to this CD is an enormously thrilling experience if you have the music deeply engraved in your brain like I do. Seriously, if you love the Beatles, and you haven’t heard this album, stop reading right now, buy it, listen to it, and then come back. I’ll be here. You probably want to experience it fresh. I recommend headphones.

And just so you know, if you’re sensitive to this kind of thing in an album review: