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December 15th, 2011

10:44 pm - Journey South Meg and I have enjoyed a recent trip to the South to stay with malachan for three nights, headlined by a very enjoyable and successful party (where I got to see people who I hadn't seen for far too long!) to warm his new house. The trip also featured a diversion even further still to stay overnight with frayer and radinden in Brighton. The standard of hospitality throughout was tremendous and we are very grateful to our friends for their kindness. I am slightly disappointed, as a proud Northerner, to learn just how much I liked Brighton. It's definitely a bluff Northern sense of cultivated ignorance that led me to be completely unaware of the Royal Pavilion; while this is not a proper Pavilion, like that of Thornaby, it's a stately home well worth a visit. Brighton may have the single most interesting town centre I have yet visited, with road after road of distinct, distinctive sole traders. Now many of the boutique stores were full of wares more of interest to my wife than to me, but nevertheless they made enjoyable window-shopping, well away from the chain stores, all present and correct at the other end of town. Sure, I bet (for instance) Manchester and Birmingham have at least as many, but they do not have a single cohesive town centre in quite the same way. Perhaps it's the difference between a focused town centre and the dispersion of a city centre; it's Whitby on a much bigger scale, Blackpool on a classier scale. The town does give me the impression of being a somewhat impractical place to live, unless you have many other things going in your favour already, but I liked the atmosphere and look forward to returning, not least to see the many parts of it which I have not yet seen. Thumbs up, too, to the uninspiredly-named El Mexicano; not every starter for our party of five was a huge hit, but I really enjoyed both the Quesadillas and Tacos on the lunch set menu. London was great fun, as ever, and a tremendous time sink. One particularly enjoyable day was filled with transport geekery that I had been looking forward to for a long, long time. A quick journey down to Lambeth saw me try some fusion Indian-Mexican street food - pretty good, but firmly at the Indian end of the spectrum, not so good as to obviate more straightforward Mexican and I have a strong suspicion that I was diddled of 50p in my confusion, which is why the cart gets neither an outright recommendation nor a link. After that, I took a Boris Bike from Lambeth North, followed a few cycle routes, and decided that I had probably had close to my legs' tolerance, if maybe not my free half hour, by the time I reached somewhere between Blackfriars and Temple, so about a mile and a half away. I note firmly that credit for the scheme should go to previous mayor Ken Livingstone, if to any mayor at all, but Boris Bike is an inherently euphonious name and far better than the current official, corporate-sponsored name. Boris Johnson himself suggested that the scheme would feature "the Rolls-Royce of bikes"; the comparison is apt, though only in an unflattering way, by virtue of the bikes' considerable mass. Additionally, my bike had a tendency to slip out of first gear, though it was remarkably good at unslipping in order to find second again. I'm not sure of the overall transport benefits of the scheme but the fun benefits are high and the stealth exercise benefits likewise. In conclusion: hurrah, and fingers crossed that the scheme may flourish in the years to come. After that, I took the Tube down to Heathrow Terminal 5 to have a mosey around the new terminal. Oddly enough, it looks like an airport terminal, with little of particular interest to commend the landside. If it turns out that the relationship between uninteresting landside and interesting airside matches that of LHR's Terminal 4, it'll certainly do the trick. Lovely big, sweeping lifts, but otherwise the architecture didn't particularly catch the eye. However, Heathrow Terminal 5 does have its own Personal Rapid Transit system. Driverless cabs, holding no more than 4-6 people, shuttle between the terminal and your choice of two remote stations at a business car park. If the saying runs "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", these are Hogwarts' Horseless Carriages powered by electricity, not Thestrals. (I assume.) The ride is smoother than that of a bus, but still a shade shaky; the constraints of the airport location force a surprisingly convoluted (curvy and gradient-y) route, which is dealt with very easily. The safety of the London system looks tremendous; you would have to work hard if you wanted to get hurt by it. People have been talking about such personal systems for decades; a small system in West Virginia has been decades ahead of its time for longer than I have lived, and Heathrow's system is not even the first of the current generation with family-scale, rather than group-scale, vehicles. I have been following the progress of the business for about six years and am delighted to have got to try an application of the system for real. Heathrow's system (effectively a long, thin isosceles triangle) so far attempts only a very small task at quite considerable expense but the infrastructure is in place for considerable expansion. Compare with plans for High Speed 2 in the UK; a system that cuts the Birmingham-to-London time by a third is of limited use, though a system that serves Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and maybe the East Midlands and/or Liverpool is a much more attractive proposition, even before we start expanding up this way or as far as Scotland. Only time will tell whether the economics of the system really do work in practice and whether this has a a future outside the highest-end airports and cities. A good sign is that the system's manufacturers have convinced Amritsar, India to invest in a serious urban system; it may be that conurbations with the least well-developed ratios of population to effective transit, mass or otherwise, turn out to be the best fits. I recommend this old-school blog for following the industry. At one level, this is as close as we get in fact to a roller-coaster with an interactive route. At another level, it is one of several parallel early steps towards putting the entirely respectable, though decades-old, career of driver out of business. The interactivity, personalisation and lack of direct human involvement feel really futuristic, but also feel really ordinary, which may be the most impressive trick of all. I gave the system a one-person standing ovation after I concluded my journeys. Well worth a visit; possibly better sooner rather than later before it becomes more branded than the IPL. Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: excited

October 7th, 2011

07:12 pm - *vaguely waves* For a long time, there's a a post I've been meaning to make. Sometimes tunes just hang around and you sort of know what they are, or know where they have come from, without knowing where they originally came from. I've been meaning to post to try to find out what they were, possibly even with a LiveJournal phone post in which I attempt to recreate the tunes in a possible attempt to help convey what they are. Serendipitously, I have been able to resolve three out of the four tunes that have been bugging me, at the rate of one every three or four months. "The music from the M&S commercials" turns out to be "At the River" by Groove Armada, "some tune we were humming at work" turns out to be the end of "A.M. 180" by Grandaddy (I think I've got the band and song name the right way round) and "the music from the Sports Review of the Year that they used to use as a tribute for the remembrances" turns out to be the quiet bit of "the Olympic Fanfare and Theme for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Summer Games" by John Williams, or somesuch. Three down, one to go; inevitably, this probably will be the most difficult one. Can anyone provide an identification for, or a recording of, "the theme tune for UK commercial television channel ITV's gymnastics broadcasts from about 1981"? This may be tricky, as it may well have been specially commissioned for the broadcast and thus not known by any other name. More likely, it's a piece of library music, which might be identified. I'm secretly hoping that it, too, was another light classical tune that might be known under some other guise. I know, mhp-chat is that way, but asking here is more fun. Here are some book reviews. These were going to be short, but they grew. I've not been feeling in much of a communicative mood recently, explaining the radio silence. Dave Gorman vs. The Rest Of The World: one day, last July, British author/comedian Dave Gorman tweeted "Does anyone play any games? Real life, not computer games. Would you like a game?" Plenty of people respond yes; Dave travels the country, learning and playing lots of new games, and eventually he decides to turn some of the stories into a book. As is usual, Dave's work is really more about the people he meets rather than the adventures on offer, and the balance is fairly firmly further away from the games than would suit my personal preference. Accordingly, there is a tendency to focus on games played against big characters, or against public figures. He's strongest at writing about the games with which he's most familiar, particularly poker.( Read more... ) However, I choose to believe, based on the body of evidence of his life's work, that Dave is very firmly on the side of the angels; he likes people in general and I enjoy his chatty style. I'm not sure that he has written more than one really satisfactory ending in his four books, but endings are difficult to write; while this one is a miss, it's not a disaster. Certainly the book is a very entertaining read, generating a handful of snorts of laughter, but it describes a pretty identifiably smaller adventure than as described in his previous books, and proves a much slighter success as a result. I'm not sure I would go so far as to recommend the book to someone who was a fan of neither Dave Gorman's previous work nor writing about games, but if you like the thought of reading about "a nice bloke playing lots of different games and writing entertainingly about them" then you'll probably enjoy it at least as much as I did. For Richer, For Poorer, Victoria Coren's poker memoir, is a tremendous hit that I have thoroughly enjoyed devouring in full twice in as many days. The book makes no secret that the book's eventual destination is the 2006 European Poker Tour event in London at which Coren wins £500,000, but the journey is a fascinating one, and the motif interlacing details of that final table - with thought patterns in full, which might be considered an (independently reinvented) analogue for the way The Master Game covered chess - with Coren's near-twenty-year journey to get there. The narrative is roughly chronological, so skips between different strands. There's an element which just considers Coren's development of her poker skills over time, playing in bigger and bigger games with more and more success, a pleasingly "get rich very slowly" story. There's an element which concerns journalistic observations, either professional (for instance, when she has a reason to sell a story about poker to a newspaper, or when her journalistic credentials have qualified her as a celebrity) or when the rest of her life has taken her to where the action is. Lastly, there's an element that concerns her private life, turning this into a true memoir. The book's subtitle, "a love affair with poker". has more than one meaning.( Read more... ) It's definitely the more successful book of the two; it's probably the book I've enjoyed most (though it's competing against fairly shamefully slim pickings here) over the past year or two. Again, I'm not sure I would go so far as to recommend the book to someone who was a fan of neither the author's previous work nor writing about poker, but if you think you'll be well-disposed towards the book in theory, then you're very likely to love it in practice. More, please, Ms. Coren; I look forward to the behind-the-scenes story of Only Connect some day! Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: tired

September 9th, 2011

10:30 pm - Some sad news A sad note arrived on my Facebook feed earlier today; a friend had recently attended the funeral of Doug Massie. I have happy memories of playing games with Doug at plenty of games cons over the years; Doug was a thoroughly enjoyable, entertaining and well-mannered opponent, but also a heckuva player. Doug won the Diplomacy tournament at OxCon in both 2004 and 2005, finishing first out of 28 players both years, the first (and only?) ever player to repeat - and, more recently, he finished first out of 58 in the all-games tournament at the UK Games Expo in 2008. One happy memory that leaps straight to mind was having inveigled him into his first ever game of The Chairman's Game (at which he made a remarkably gallant attempt to work his way through the madness and picked things up at a very sporting pace) he took his lead from The League Of Gentlemen and made the remarkably reasonable leap of logic that in the context of the very, er, particular utterances and procedure of the game, some particular card or other was worth a "Go, Johnny, go, go, go, go". Not right at that point in time, but definitely good. I fear that all Mao-related anecodates pretty inherently score massively on the "You had to be there at the time" scale, but I can remember being absolutely slayed laughing by this at the time. *takes card* I'll miss Doug, and I know scores of others who will do too. My condolences to his friends and family. Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you!

August 6th, 2011

01:44 pm - Someone else's prediction game How are you doing? I am doing *international rotating-hand gesture for "so-so"*; Meg has gone to London this weekend to see some lovely people and it is a filthy, grey day here. Another friend is on a London-to-Edinburgh train and is probably within thirty miles of here but has been delayed due to lightning strikes. There's a storm brewin'. In late 2008 I organised a multi-stage long-shot prediction game on LiveJournal which was adequately diverting. It might be time to bring it back out of its box, with some modifications, in 2012. However, if your memories of it were fond then a prediction tournament held by the Good Judgment team, may be relevant to your interests with the potential to be paid a token honorarium for participating in a longer-term study into forecasting, its methods and conclusions. "Over the course of each year, forecasters will have an opportunity to respond to 100 questions, each requiring a separate prediction, such as “How many countries in the Euro zone will default on bonds in 2011?” or “Will Southern Sudan become an independent country in 2011?” Researchers from the Good Judgment Project will look for the best ways to combine these individual forecasts to yield the most accurate “collective wisdom” results. Participants also will receive feedback on their individual results." I don't have any particular oonnection to the contest myself - suspect it may be restricted to those with university degrees, not sure if there are unspoken residence/nationality requirements - but it has an interesting background and looks sufficiently legit and interesting to be worth a plug. Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: blah

July 7th, 2011

09:14 pm - Kay Dekker, 1959-2011 Kay, who blogged at mhw, sadly passed away recently. It's testament to how many people's lives he touched for the better that several people in barely-connected circles are sharing their happy memories of him. I most immediately remember rubbing noses with him at MacT00bage, a house party held by John far too long ago, which was most assuredly all about the Spotted Dick; I had conversations with him of a type I had not had before, and learnt a great deal from him. He lived a full life with class, grace and above all kindness and is already being missed hard. Condolences to his partner, and to everyone else lucky enough to know him.

June 26th, 2011

12:56 am - UK Puzzle Championship this weekend This weekend sees the UK Puzzle Championship. Take part online at no charge from wherever you are in the world; pick a starting time of your choice between, er, yesterday and 23:30 UK time on Sunday 26th, and solve as many points' worth of puzzles as you can in 2½ hours. Top UK solver jumps the queue and advances directly to the UK team for the World Puzzle Championship in Hungary. If you have the sort of passing interest in puzzles that suggests you might be happy to do puzzles once per year, this is a fine opportunity. The proportion of what might be considered standard puzzle types is relatively low (...or if you disagree, then chances are you know about the UKPC already...) and the proportion of puzzles that might be considered original, or at least moderately unusual variants of standard types, is correspondingly high; however, the puzzles are not desperately difficult examples of the genre. This maximises the chance of there being those fun occasions where you think "I have no chance of being able to solve this"... and then you prove yourself wrong by actually solving it. I had the happy experience of trying eight different puzzles and completing all eight within the time limit, even though at least two of them were of types with which I habitually feel unconfident; after that, I made the wrong tactical choice to prefer to start an interesting-looking high-value puzzle instead of a quick low-value one and didn't complete it. Furthermore, I emphasise that I am not a particularly accomplished puzzle solver, being 13th out of 15 in the UK rankings at this moment in time. There's plenty of reasonably accessible stuff, even if no complete cakewalks to get things started. An excellent test if time permits; if not, there's always the US Puzzle Championship, probably to be expected in August. Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: excited

June 9th, 2011

10:32 pm - Board games are great, video games are great, the new Wii U just might be awesome (Huh! My old steam-powered LiveJournal turned nine years old today. You get shorter sentences for arson... than some of the ones I've written in that time.) Some people like board games. Some people like video games. Some people like both. The last video game - and I'm subsuming the term "computer game" into "video game" here - that I really got into was Civilization IV, and even that was for a few weeks, a good few years after release. Nevertheless, I remain interested in them, and their potential, as a genre. In practice I'm at least as happy to watch them being played well as to play them badly myself - the Let's Play archive is great in this regard - which I suppose makes me the male equivalent of a "video game girlfriend"... and I'm not referring to the SAL9000 - Nene Anegasaki sort of girlfriend. ( Why board games are great, why video games are great and what they both do well. ) This is not to say that one game medium is good and others are bad. Instead, I'm interested in the interaction between them, why we don't see more of it and what different media can learn - and, skipping to the end, just might have learnt - from each other. ( The interaction between the two. ) Jumping back to the main thread, Nintendo announced their new Wii U console, set to be released at some point in 2012, a couple of days ago. As was the case with the original Wii, they have designed a console around an interesting new controller which might engender interesting new gameplay experiences. As displayed in the trailer video, after an annoying advert, the Wii U will feature a controller with its own integrated touchscreen. Accordingly, the console can display on a TV, whether high or standard definition, and also on the touchscreen. About eight or nine tech demos were available at the E3 conference, as described at the Guardian. The most interesting-sounding one, "Mii Chase", revolves around the concept of one player hiding in a maze, displaying their location covertly on the touchscreen controller, whereas the four other players run around the same maze using regular Wii controllers, displayed on the TV. The reason why this is particularly brilliant is that it threatens to bring the "concealed information" advantage of board games to the video game experience; if every player can have their own touchscreen controller then they can have their own information, with additional information common to all players displayed on the TV. In board game terms, this is equivalent to each player being the only player to see their hand of cards, but all players being able to see the board displayed on the TV. I delight to think what the best game designers might do with this facility in the context of a video game. There is precedent for this. At one level, the Sega Dreamcast controller tried something similar with its cheeky little VMU that slotted into the main body of the controller; however, you can't get much interesting information into a 48x32 LCD. (Then again, that was not much smaller than roughly the graphical resolution of a ZX81, and that had 3D Monster Maze, or Quake fifteen years early.) At another level, the Pokertek automated poker tables give people little screens showing their hole cards and permit them to play poker tournaments. Again, this might seem a retrograde step to some when so much of the appeal of poker is tactile and poker chips are so lovely to play with, but these automated poker tables may go towards counteracting some forms of malpractice and some forms of dealer error, as well as avoiding the cost of employing a dealer. In terms of action games, another precedent is Atari's 1989 arcade game Cyberball, a sort of robotic gridiron football; two players, or two teams of two players, each faced their own monitor and made their own play selections. Accordingly, you can't see the plays that your opponent has selected, and just have to react to the way they have lined their players up. I don't know whether or not there's an issue in high-level Mario Kart with players not just looking at their own view, in their own corner of the screen, but at other players' views as well; it's easy to conceive players looking at their own first-person views on their personal tablets, with nobody else being able to look at their own view, but the central TV showing a third-person view of the race as a whole. Doubtless there are analogies for every sort of action game. At worst, it's a way to bring the thrill of one-person Internet gaming against unseen opponents into a room where you can see all your opponents, but everyone has their own view. Now, that said, it is not absolutely clear that the Wii U will support more than one of these touchscreen controllers; GamePro suggests that the current plan is only one touchscreen controller per Wii U, and Kotaku's report suggests Nintendo are only "looking into" games that support more than one of these new controllers. It's certainly relevant that these touchscreen controllers aren't going to be cheap; people may well baulk at paying a triple-digit price for the console, then another triple-digit price on top for each new controller, regardless of its ability as a hand-held console standing alone. I can't imagine that Nintendo would want their unique new game experience to look radically more expensive than the current generation of consoles. However, I'm very bullish that hidden-information multi-screen gaming will be at least a sizeable minority interest in the world of video games by, perhaps, 2017 to 2019. If Nintendo don't do it - and I dearly hope they do, not least because I trust them to have a better chance of doing it interestingly first time - then someone else will, and not necessarily Sony or Microsoft's Xbox. If you want to get a jump on programming for multi-screen video gaming, it's capable with current technology; imagine several players with their own iPhone, privy to the information it holds, all sitting around an iPad which displays information common to all players, all the devices connected to each other by - say - Bluetooth. (Android equivalents are possible, of course.) And that's all before we start getting into the interesting possibilities of placing recognisable, distinct game pieces directly onto touchscreens! Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: excited

June 4th, 2011

09:34 pm - One Man Mindzine: the rather unfocused puzzles, poker, festivals and chess edition Huh, looks like I didn't formally do an issue of the One Man Mindzine in 2010, though there are certainly posts which could retroactively be given the title. There definitely was a 2009 edition, though. June is a very interesting month for puzzle contests. Taking place this weekend at Logic Masters India is Fillomino-Filia, a two-hour contest where all the puzzles are Fillominos or Fillomino variants. If you're a puzzle fan in general and not wildly opposed to Fillominoes, I give it a very strong recommendation. In fact, I would say that I probably enjoyed the test more than any puzzle test that I can remember; over the two hours, I attempted nine out of the eighteen puzzles and completed all nine. Under other circumstances, I might have been quicker still and tried some of the good-looking other puzzles that I didn't have the time to try. It's a bit of a joke to say that logic puzzles contain "imperceptible witticisms", but one of the puzzles was particularly outstanding; it would be a spoiler to say which one before the test is over, but it comes as close to "ridiculous to the point of hilarity" as puzzles get - and still solves smoothly, surprisingly and satisfyingly. Of course, this all relies on a passing familiarity with the Fillomino format to begin with; it's not the most familiar type in the world, but it's very quick to learn. Fill in squares in a grid with numbers so that all the 1s are in blocks of 1, all the 2s are in blocks of 2, all the 3s are in blocks of 3, all the 4s are in blocks of 4 (like Tetris pieces), all the 5s are in blocks of 5 and so on. It's probably best learnt by doing; A Puzzle Zone has some pretty examples, some of which are very easy, Puzzle Picnic has lots of examples, so does Vegard Hanssen's site, so does janko.at (listed from leicht to schwer - and the latter ones really are hard enough to make you do so). I enjoy Fillomino, though I'm not great at them; one of the nice things about croco-puzzle is that you can get rated puzzle type by puzzle type. I'm 1145 at croco-puzzle Fillomino, which translates to "not bad, but nothing special". This test is definitely accessible to general puzzle fans without great practice in the genre, though the variants are enough to keep the experts interested. The test closes at midnight UTC on Sunday/Monday - so 1 a.m. BST on Monday in the UK, 8 p.m. EST on Sunday, 5 p.m. PST on Sunday. That's not all the puzzle news, though. The test works well on its own merits, but it also forms part of one of the routes to qualification for the UK team. If you haven't been following the monthly tests, then you can zoom straight past them onto the 'plane to this year's World Puzzle and Sudoku Championships in Eger, Hungary by picking up the single place on offer to the winner of the UK Puzzle Championship, on the weekend of 25-26 June, or the place that goes to the winner of the US Puzzle Championship, expected Real Soon Now. As we don't have a date for the latter, there may be time to practice with the Puzzle Cruise on 18-19 June, exactly in the USPC/UKPC style - and, before then, there's the UK Sudoku Championship next weekend. Lots to see, lots to do. In other news, the latest World Series of Poker has started, and people are talking about... well, not about this year's poker, yet. There has already been the eye-catching announcement of a tournament scheduled for the 2012 World Series with a buy-in of a cool one meeeeeellion dollars; global water charities are set to finish in third place in the tournament, earning a payout of one-ninth of all buy-in fees. Negative Eee Vee, sure, but there have been fifteen sign-ups for it already! The last few years have seen a trend for bigger and bigger buy-in tournaments as well as the proliferation of smaller buy-in ones as well at the World Series, with the biggest tournament so far being a near-impromptu Australian $250,000 buy-in event when three juicy-looking Chinese businessmen stumped up the big bucks and seventeen sharks descended upon the value provided by the three apparent fish. This impromptu supertournament caused debate about what should be eligible for the all-time tournament winnings chart - which is just a bit of fun, anyway, as nobody computes an all-time tournament losings chart to put the L into players' P and L accounts. At least there's plenty of warning, and lots of time to think of a good name for it. (I like "Über High Roller".) Five years ago there was talk of a not-very-high-profile poker site inspiring a $10,000,000 buy-in tournament, with the winner of the six taking all, but that never came to fruition. This looks more plausible. People are also talking about Phil Ivey having announced that he won't be playing that he won't be playing at this year's World Series. He also has announced (on Facebook, which is the way that you do it these days) that he has filed lawsuit against one of the companies behind the Full Tilt Poker web site, a site of which Ivey is considered a part-owner, because Full Tilt have been so slow at paying US online poker players the funds that they had stored there after Black Friday, the day on which the US Dept. of Justice charged principles of three of the poker sites with most US players with bank fraud, illegal gambling and money-laundering charges. Certainly turning up with a Full Tilt sponsorship patch is seen as a faux pas at best. (Poker Stars started to pay their US-based players within about five or six days, so are in the populace's good graces.) It has also been suggested that Ivey would have skipped the WSoP anyway, even risking rumoured millions he stands to have to pay out betting on himself to win events there. And what of the poker that people aren't talking about? Well, there has only been one big event so far; 128 players each plunked down US$25,000 for a seven-round single-elimination heads-up contest in no-limit Texas Hold 'Em. The only player to go 7-0 was one Jake Cody, already a contender for the most accomplished sportsman to hail from sleepy little Rochdale in Lancashire. In the space of 18 months Cody has won substantial six- (and one seven-) digit prizes by winning tournaments on the European Poker Tour, the World Poker Tour and now at the World Series of Poker, thus being only the third player to compete the Triple Crown, and doing so in about a third of the time of either of the other two. Hurrah for prize money flowing to British bankrolls, especially to that of someone about whom I am yet to read a single bad word. That said, I fear that even if Cody were to win all his championship bracelets and other poker finery, he'd still get carded when he tried to buy a drink; he may be a veteran at an age of mearly 23, but I've seen older, rougher-looking thirteen-year olds. In other news: still no news from the International Mind Sports Association regarding a possible 2012 World Mind Sports Games, though the same source who reported initial contracts had been signed for August 2012 in Manchester now suggests that "Proposals from various locations, including the city of Manchester, were currently being considered"; Manchester has been considered as recently May to be "the leading candidate to host". I'm fairly bullish about the event happening in some shape or form; the World Bridge Federation probably have the most to lose ever since they bundled their World Team Olympiad into the WMSG, and they have not yet shown any signs of bundling them back out of there again. SportAccord's World Mind Games are now scheduled for 8-17 December, and their Facebook page suggests they're headed for Beijing, China, with another report putting them at the Beijing Conference Centre. FIDE has quite a bit more detail: 16 chess players rated 2700+, and 16 more female chess players rated 2450+, will be invited to participate in rapid, blitz and either pairs or blindfold events, so this should be something pretty special. (On the other hand, it'll clash with the 3rd London Chess Classic. D'oh.) Open event participants are guaranteed US$4k and female event participants are guaranteed US$2k; a total prize fund of US$320k is claimed, but I'm not sure whether that's for chess alone or for the whole shebang. FIDE also have the schedule for the whole event; looks like they'll have the same five mind sports as at the first WMSG: chess, bridge, go, draughts and home banker xiangqi. No sign of poker breaking in yet, whether duplicate or otherwise. This does take us rather full circle; if online poker sites can't legally run real-money cash games with players from the US, will it be worth their money to keep sponsoring other events in the US? No sign of the PokerStars banner being taken down from the US Chess League site; I have a feeling (more a gussied-up hope, really) that the USCL would continue to run without PokerStars' support, noting that some other teams have managed to get their own sponsorship. However, it would become rapidly obvious which players were in it for the love, and which ones saw the green as a major part of the incentive. No developments on the USCL site at all recently, so odds must be against any expansion for 2011. Still, only a couple of months until we'll know for sure! Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: excited

June 2nd, 2011

10:00 pm - Bitcoins: bubble rather than boom... surely? Very interesting article on Gawker the other day about shopping for hard drugs online, using a digital currency called Bitcoins. These bitcoins can be exchanged for other real-world currencies at a number of different exchanges, albeit almost all of them with very little liquidity. Over April and the first half of May, the US$-to-Bitcoin exchange rate increased tenfold; since the story to which I linked came out, the exchange rate has gone up by well over 10% in a day. The first live number I can remember seeing when I started to look into this yesterday was about US$8.9 per BTC, and the current live number is about US$10.4 per BTC. Blog posts are not financial advice, of course. This seems to have a lot in common with well-known, long-established scams, but certainly has enough new twists on it to make it interesting. Besides, scams rely on having interesting premises in the first place, and this one has a lovely one. If anyone out there has mad money that they want to throw away - because the risk of ruin on any investment you make must be immense - then this looks like it would be likely to give you a more interesting run for your money than a lottery ticket, or a Ponzi scheme. Despite any vaguely encouraging tone in this post, I would regard this as about as speculative an investment as a penny stock tipped by someone you don't know. The brilliance of the Bitcoin thing is the sheer number of buzzwords that it manages to trigger in its discussion. ( Read more... ) My intention is to regard BitCoins as an interesting curiosity, rather than a sensible investment opportunity for me. If it turns out that I am being the Internet equivalent of the Decca record label turning down the Beatles, or - to bring the analogy up to date - one of the twelve publishing houses that supposedly turned the first Harry Potter down, well, it's still fun to blog about, and I spotted it first when the exchange rate was just under US$9 per BitCoin. (See BitCoin watch or BitCoin charts to follow the exchanges.) Perhaps there's nothing new under the sun after all, and you can't cheat an honest human. Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: fascinated, amused, sceptical

May 22nd, 2011

07:09 pm - Wanderlust So today I browsed The Man In Seat Sixty-One, the marvellous web site about international train travel from the UK and epic train journeys around the world. It's making me feel a little itchy; I don't have a destination in mind, more itchy for an interesting journey. I really enjoyed reading about, for instance, the possibility of coast-to-coast across the United States for under US$200, and the California Zephyr sounds wonderful. I'm tempted to believe that the far-reclining seats are as comfortable for a multi-night journey as claimed, too. That said, the cheap fares only provide access to communal bathrooms without showers, so it would certainly be a crunchy way to do it. Nevertheless, in 1996 I took a 48-hour Greyhound coach from Los Angeles to Atlanta and that was completely fine, so the train journey sounds, well, really appealing. More prosaically, I was very impressed by the sound of SailRail to Ireland, by train and ferry, at a very attractive-looking price. Admittedly the last-but-one sea journey I took went badly, though it was on a bouncy hovercraft (Sorrento-to-Capri) rather than a nice ferry, and the journey back on the big, gentle ferry was completely uneventful. (I slept through it.) A single journey from anywhere on the British mainland train network to Dublin can cost as little as £33 - and journeys to other locations on the island of Ireland not much more. Impressive! It would be a long day's travel, but a fun one, and it's a tempting concept. Most interestingly, these cheap tickets can even be booked on the day of travel. Turns out that it's cheaper for me to travel by train, tomorrow, to the capital of Ireland than it is for me to travel to the capital of England, Wales or Scotland. Admittedly there's a train to London that costs just £3 more, but it will get me to London at almost half past one in the morning. Northern Ireland comes next, then Scotland, then Wales. It also offers the silly, and technically prohibited, hypothetical option of buying a ticket to Ireland and getting off before I got there, if the ticket to Dublin were cheaper than the ticket to the intermediate destination - which, considering the Dublin price, is quite plausible. Such a tactic is well-known. In US air travel, it's referred to as "throwaway ticketing"; in UK rail travel, it's called "travelling short". Happily, I'm far from the first person to think of it; if you got caught, and most of the larger mainland train stations where you might want to use this tactic to alight will have exit barriers to check your ticket even if the inspectors do not, you can expect to face a considerable surcharge pertinent to the journey you have taken even if it is not the one you paid for. So I suppose I'm almost looking for an excuse to travel; my personal discretionary travel and leisure budget is basically zero, which makes me rather embarrassed to be unlikely to be able to see lots of lovely people who are travelling from the US to the UK in coming months. I am hoping to go to a board games con this year, as it has been some time since the last time I did so, though this too may be outwith the budget in practice. It occurs to me that it may actually be cheaper for me to get to one in Dublin than to one in the UK; if convention attendance, food and accommodation match up then perhaps this might be an unusual and interesting option. Trouble is, I'm not sure there really are board games conventions in Ireland in quite the same way there are in the UK. Irishgaming.com has a lovely overview of the big events; it's a simplification, but not to an extent where I feel ashamed to make it (though I probably should be!) to say that they tend to be RPG, war games and CCG cons first and foremost, though they do have board game events as well. (My restriction in interest to board game events is purely self-imposed, and evidently to my own cost under circumstances like these.) It's probably pretty telling that the Ireland forum on boardgamegeek.com is pretty quiet and a quick perusal of the conventions forum seems fairly light on Irish material. That said, LepreCon at least has tournaments in Settlers of Catan, Dominion and Diplomacy, which is a strong sign that its heart is in the right place. A shade further afield - Northern Ireland rather than the Republic, but still accessible through the SailRail system, sees Q-Con in Belfast, which might be more interesting still. Now back in 2006 and 2007 Q-Con hosted Qnightmare, a recreation (perhaps more accurately, emulation) of the Knightmare kids' game show of legend; highly relevant to my interests, but sadly no more. Lots to think about, but so much I don't know! Have any readers been to any of these events and can you tell more? Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you!

May 20th, 2011

10:08 pm - Sport-like game of the day: Battlestorm Someone called Margaret, possibly this one, posted to BoingBoing about a new physical sport-like team game, Battlestorm, that sees its public debut tomorrow. The event will take place in Biloxi, MS in the USA, a town badly ravaged by many Gulf Coast hurricanes over the years, not least Hurricane Katrina. The game is very loosely didactic, based around the theme of teaching hurricane preparedness to children. Two teams play on an indoor, basketball-like court, and alternate between roles of offence and defence. The team on offence take the role of "the Town" going about their business; the team on defence take the role of "the Storm", frustrating the members of the town as they go about their business. The business in question is the business of transferring balls from a basket at one end of the court to a scoring receptacle at the other end; however, there are colour-coordinated baskets and balls at both ends, so a player might pick up an orange ball and ferry it to the orange target at the far end, then pick up a blue ball and return it to the blue target at the near end, ready to pick up another orange ball and recur. Balls can be transported freely by running or passing. However, the defensive team, "the Storm", can attempt to freeze the members of "the Town", by gently tagging them while they are in the field of play and outside one of the designated safe zones ("shelters") - or can attempt to lower the offensive team's score by making distant shots (think free throws) using balls that have hit the ground during play and thus become dead. Members of "the Town" frozen in this way can be unfrozen either by being tagged by other members of "the Town", or by being passed a live ball. Keep transporting balls until time expires, then count up points for successfully transported balls, deduct points for the Storm's acheivements, swap roles around and let the defensive team have a go on offence. Higher score wins. The game's devisors claim that the game has elements of "basketball, capture-the-flag, handball, team handball, and freeze tag". Certainly true, but I think it pays rather closer homage to a tag version of Powerball (from the Gladiators global franchise) with more than a bit of live-action Quidditch tossed in. Nevertheless, I think it's fundamentally a really solid, sound, properly balanced piece of design in a way that Quidditch so obviously wasn't. It's too involved for pick-up games, but is clearly imaginitive enough to liven up a gym class when it's too wet outside for even the most sadistic of gym teach... oh. Now the really neat part is that the game has been designed both to be a bit of schoolyard fun as described above but also to be adaptable for tomorrow's public spectacle. The Tournament Mode of the game sees five local Boys And Girls Club field their teams, who play the Town role only, with a house team of athletically superior participants, "the Hurricanes", playing the Storm role against each set of challengers in turn. As it happens, the Hurricanes are going to be drawn on this occasion from the construction division of the US Navy. Yep, very Gladiators, but that's just fun. To even the odds slightly, each team is given a number of tokens which can be used to buy transient advantages; the goals might be moved closer, the number of balls might be increased, the number of players on each team might be altered favourably, and these advantages all are loosely themed around items that might be found in a hurricane preparedness kit. In the social media stylee, teams have earnt these tokens by persuading their friends to post pictures to the Internet of real-life hurricane preparedness kits that they may have made. There are other minor tweaks to the game format for tomorrow's big event, not least that increasing intensities of storm are emulated by changing the number of players and safe zones ("shelters") slightly over time, making the Town's role harder as the game progresses. In short, I'm impressed; I'm impressed enough to go out and tell you about it, despite the fact that I'm not sure that the game really has a future beyond this one event. The theming is cute yet effective and it feels like it's going to be an appropriate and sensitive way to raise a locally sensitive subject to the young. The game does have a very modern feel to it, with obvious use of video game devices (power-ups and ascending difficulty over time), the "nag your friends" aspect of modern social media games (earning tokens to buy these power-ups) and the game show element of featuring a consistent house team as opposition (the Hurricanes). It reads like it would be fun both to play and to watch. I hadn't heard of the game's devisors before, but a tip of the hat to them. Now if I'm going to be negative, I would point out that the game's devisors are - under another guise - a local branch of another famous modern games company whose business model I happen not to like. However, I admit that that's being churlish; I am somewhat of a pinko in this regard, as in so many others, and note that the games companies whose business models I happen not to like tend to be considerably more commercially successful than those whose business models I do happen to like. (Evidently my sense of taste does not align with the masses here.) Hats off to Area/Code, whose principals' track records are illustrious and whose hearts are clearly in the right place. (As a sidenote, Area/Code are also responsible for Budgetball, another constructed sport; this one is largely Ultimate with basketball trimmings and a "public deficit" budgetary theme implemented through power-ups that teams might go into fictional debt to accrue, and pay interest on this debt, paying back the fictional debt by accepting power-downs and/or score penalties. Cute, but doesn't chime with me nearly so well.) Pretty neat stuff. I hope that Battlestorm has a future and that history judges it kindly. Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: impressed

May 2nd, 2011

02:48 pm - A spectacularly great word game that you probably haven't played I was delighted to stumble across the exciting news that the 1973 board game Montage is being reprinted. It's being reprinted as a Kickstarter project; the project has met its funding goal, but will not be funded until Saturday 7th May, or Sunday 8th May in some time zones, so it's definitely going ahead, but you can still contribute to the funding before the deadline and take advantage of the funding gifts, which look very attractive. I hold the designer in high regard, I know some of the people involved in the reprint and hold them in high regard and I hold the other supporters in high regard. Kickstarter projects are always inherently partly speculative, but this looks a safe enough bet that I am prepared to bring it to people's attention and risk the consequences. Specifically, a donation of US$30 gets you a copy of the game plus free shipping in the continental US. (A small print run will be made, and the game is expected to sell at perhaps $45 or $50, potentially plus shipping. Shipping outside the continental US is an extra US$20.) A donation of US$100 gets two copies of the game, one of them hand-signed, a copy of a related game by the same author, some mention as being a funding sponsor and shipping is included worldwide. This last way looks like being the best way of doing it if you're outside the US. Is there anyone outside the US who would be interested in going in on a US$100 donation with me? We would sort out who gets what and how shipping costs would be allocated between us; splitting things with someone else in the UK would be ideal for the purposes of minimising domestic shipping costs (or, ideally, making the transfer in person). I suppose I had better tell you about the game now! It's a word game played on a board between, strictly, two partnerships of two, taking about 1-1½ hours to play. It is played on a crossword-like grid with rotational symmetry and some squares blacked out. ( Read more... ) Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: excited

April 24th, 2011

10:30 pm - UK politics: please consider voting YES on Thursday 5th May In the UK, a referendum is being held on Thursday 5th May, at the same time as council elections in some parts of the country, on potential reform to the way MPs at Westminster are being elected. Only one alternative to the current "first past the post" system is being offered, the Alternative Vote. If you can vote in the election, particularly if you were neutral on the topic, please consider voting YES on Thursday 5th May for change. All voting systems have their flaws. The Alternative Vote, while far from my favourite voting system, has flaws that are considerably more to my taste than the system we have at the moment. At heart, it attempts to reflect that people can, and do, like more than one option in a list, and really do have degrees of preference. Life is based on grey scales rather than absolute black-and-white decisions; so should be our politics. If you like exactly one political party and dislike all other parties equally, the current system is fine. If you recognise that all candidates - and all parties - have pros and cons to differing extents, the proposed AV system is better. If you want to be able to express a preference for your favourite party above all others, but also express a preference for your second least favourite party over your least favourite party, by far the best way to make the change happen is to vote YES on Thursday 5th May. Please take the time and effort to go out and do so. ( Reflections on the campaign. ) Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: excited

April 11th, 2011

12:07 am - Puzzles: a good day to start If anyone likes the idea of the puzzle things that I'm talking about but has a gut fear that they're all going to be horribly difficult, the daily Ue-ratsel puzzles for 11th April (German time, i.e. now as I type and for the next 22+ hours) are reasonably friendly examples of their designs and are a good way to get started. Open my walk-through and create an account and be sure that the Highscoretabelle box is ticked so that you can play today's daily puzzles and have your performances rated. The Ue-ratsel puzzles for today are a Doppelstern and an ABCD-Ratsel. Doppelstern puzzles require you to put 18 stars in a 9x9 grid, such that (a) every row has exactly two stars, (b) every column has exactly two stars, (c) every outlined-in-black shape has exactly two stars and (d) no stars touch each other, even diagonally. There are quite a few Doppelstern puzzles in the Preisratsel archives, but I'd start with this one, starting with the smallest shapes and working from there. Today's Ue-ratsel is little or no harder; practice with the ones in the Preisratsel archives until you're confident. ABCD-Ratsel puzzles require you to fill a square grid with the letters A, B, C and D so that each letter appears in each row or column a certain number of times and no identical letters border each other, though they can touch diagonally. There are quite a few ABCD puzzles in the Preisratsel archives, but I'd start with this one, starting with the rows and columns with more than half of their letters being a certain type and working from there. Today's Ue-ratsel is larger, but not much harder; the ones in the Preisratsel archives aren't too friendly, in general, but practice with the ones in the janko.at archives until you're confident. If the principle appeals at all, today's puzzles will probably please in practice! Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you!

April 7th, 2011

09:28 pm - The state of the sport of puzzles This is a sequel, to some extent, to a counterpart post I made just over five months ago. In the past, I've long enjoyed reading about the world of the World Puzzle Championships, and have been lucky enough to take part in the finals three times (twice as a UK team member, and once as UK team captain) in the first half of the previous decade, in the face of relatively weak competition. The sport of culture-free logic puzzles has developed radically over time so that (a) competition in the UK is rather stronger than once it was and (b) this is much less important than it used to be; even if you are a relatively casual or new puzzle solver, like me, then there are satisfying opportunities which will let you take a sporting approach to your puzzle participation even at a fairly modest level of attainment. My biggest obsession at the moment is the German-language Croco-Puzzle site which is so addictive that I am starting to consider it to be Cracko-Puzzle. Last year I wrote up a walkthrough of the croco-puzzle web site, with a focus on the Überraschungsrätsel daily puzzle meta-game. (It's slightly out of date, but should get you through.) It's certainly more fun and less frustrating the better you are at the puzzles, but even when I started playing the site for the first time and struggled with the puzzles it was still rewarding. There are enough people on the very enjoyable UK Puzzle Forum who play it that I have started a Croco-Puzzle ladder for UK solvers. In part, it's a suitable venue to try out this ladder competition format that I devised (or rediscovered) a few years back, and people seem to be enjoying it. There's always room for new entrants if the concept appeals, and I am considering running counterpart ladders for solvers in other countries at some point if there is demand - and once any bugs have shown up and been squashed. The UK Puzzle Association has also announced how the UK Puzzle team (and the UK Sudoku team) will be determined this year. In the past, the results from the US Puzzle Championship have been used for selection. It's been a great contest for years and it will still continue to be used to generate one member for the UK team - but no longer is it a case that if you try the USPC and don't make the grade then your puzzle season is over for another year. There has been promised to be a counterpart UK Puzzle Championship, probably the week after the US Puzzle Championship, which will determine a second place; if the UKPC can be as good a contest as the USPC, then the puzzle world will benefit considerably. The remaining two places in the UK team will be determined by cumulative performance over a series of four tests; your best three performances in the upcoming four monthly puzzle contests held by the consistently excellent Logic Masters India web site will determine who gets to go. The LMI tests differ from the USPC and UKPC tests in that you have freedom to choose the starting-point of the test within a two-day window, so you can solve the tests at a time that suits you. The first of the four tests takes place this weekend. Meg and I are looking forward to quintus_marcius coming to visit this weekend, but I am glad that I can both pay full attention to being a host when he's there and still have time to solve puzzles in order to take part once he has gone. This self-timed puzzle competition route potentially offers the theoretical risk that someone might cheat their way into a UK team place, but I am confident that this risk is theoretical rather than practical; two of the four places are still to be determined by performance in competitions where there is (practically?) no chance that the contestants will have seen the puzzles in advance, and it's not as if that is a sufficient tool to eliminate cheating by itself. Perhaps the most cheating-resistant method would be a suitably proctored face-to-face competition, with the italicised side-note being a passing nod to a single participant taking an unusual route to a minor prize in a competition in the past. Such competitions pose considerable logistical challenges for both host and participants, though the Times newspaper has been sponsoring crossword and Sudoku contests in the UK for years. In other news, next month sees a big-money Sudoku championship in Beijing, and it'll be interesting to see whether that has an impact on the world stage. If you can't afford to fund yourself on a trip to China - I can't! - then there are plenty of opportunities for remote contest participation; the Diogen puzzle club of Russia host contests with time limits measured in days rather than hours from time to time, PuzzleFountain has a contest every weekend, several of which I have enjoyed, and enough independents host their own contests from time to time that the best ways to keep up are the janko.at puzzle event calendar and the UK Puzzle Forum's puzzle competitions board. Hurrah! Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you!

January 22nd, 2011

09:11 pm - UK Puzzlers' Convention and more 1) Next month sees the first UK Puzzlers' Convention! The organisers are starting small: a conference room for the afternoon of Saturday 19th February, at the National Motorcycle Museum, not far from Birmingham International Airport. (I want to say I've been there once, years ago, for a postal games convention.) We can all dream rather larger for future years, though. Even between now and then, there's the mid-to-high-teensth (depending on what you count) annual OxCon board games convention, taking place at The Mitre pub in Oxford on Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th January, or "next weekend" as it might be referred to for a few more fleeting hours. Tournaments in The Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, lots of non-tournament games and a good chance of a good curry. For some reason there isn't really a proper web site for it any more; a short ad on the last page of the Queen's Lane Advertiser (.pdf) is pretty official and there's a Facebook page, shudder. Both of these promise to be somewhere between "pretty good" and "spectacular". I probably can't really afford to go to either, but this doesn't necessarily mean that I can't be swayed into going to one of them. We shall see. 2) Last weekend saw the thirty-first annual MIT Mystery Hunt, which started with a wedding and finished with a happy ending (a very cute .mp4 file - spoilers, obv.). It was completed in about 42 hours, which is definitely on the "not outstaying its welcome" side as Hunts go, and I get the impression that history may well judge this to have been among the best of them. This year's hunt was won by an evolution of the Codex team with whom I hunted seven years ago - and they weren't a new team then. (I haven't had any involvement with them since.) Congratulations, prettydaisies and others! You win the booby prize; setting next year's hunt. it's the prize that keeps on giving! The mystery_hunt community has more information. 3) Weekly, rather than annually, PuzzleFountain is a web site that holds contests in Nikoli/WPC-style culture-free logic puzzles. They're a mixture of solve-using-the-online-Java-applets contests and print-out-the-.pdf contests. The Java applets take a little getting used to, but are fine. So far all the contests have used fairly standard puzzle types, though there's certainly the prospect of variations from time to time, at least in the printed contests. The contests have time limits (normally 90 minutes); I managed ten correct puzzles in the contest two weekends ago and six correct puzzles in the contest this weekend, and I'm not a particularly accomplished puzzler; anyone who's ever taken part in a WPC qualification test, or has played around with Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzles, or just done a few like-Sudoku-but-not-quite puzzles in magazines or newspapers, would find fun there. 4) OK, the latest computer game music remix that I'm really into is this remix of Nemesis the Warlock for the Commodore 64 by a remixer affecting the pseudonym O2 (or o2 or O2 or maybe even o2 - I don't know, I haven't seen it written down). I've never (to the best of my knowledge) played the game, I've never (similarly, TTBOMK) even read the comic strip which inspired the game. The music is a real grower though, with a really elegant progression of the sort that gets me every time. I wasn't sure how long the tune was, so I timed it, and my guess to its length would have been about a third or a half of its actual length, which has to be a remarkable testament to how it makes the time fly. If this is the sort of thing you like... Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you!

December 26th, 2010

07:17 pm - Scratchcards and friends We had a quiet Christmas, but it was lots of fun. While Meg and I chose not to exchange gifts, we baked cookies, played games (Can't Stop and Dominoes), watched TV, talked to family and Meg made a brilliant roast beef dinner. A gentle Christmas, but just what we wanted. I hope your day was at least as happy as ours, but it'll have to go some way to match it. I've been thinking about scratchcards recently. Someone at work won £50 on a £2 Scrabble-themed scratchcard, then (the excellent) Shift Run Stop's Leila pointed to this long web page. The first half contains information about a marketing company's work for Shell, and other clients, mostly over the late '70s and early '80s. It's fascinating. The second half of the page contains links to ongoing legal action and criticism of the company, allegedly inspired by a dispute over one particular campaign. It's less to my taste, but there's enough in the first half to get me thinking. ( Read more... ) Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you!

December 12th, 2010

06:21 pm - Gamesvision Some interesting developments: * The second London Chess Classic is in progress at the moment, featuring past world champion Vladimir Kramnik, current world champion Vishy Anand and potential future world champions Magnus Carlsen (of Small Talk fame) and Hikaru Nakamura in a round-robin also featuring the UK's four best players, Michael Adams, Nigel Short, Luke McShane and David Howell. Five rounds in, McShane is doing remarkably well, joint-leading with Anand, with wins over Carlsen (!) and Short as well as three draws and a relatively gentle run-in over the last two rounds. I mention it particularly because of the live video and audio stream from the commentary room, which is best of breed for a live chess Internet broadcast in my experience. The players come in and share their post-mortem with the viewers, at a grandmaster rate that is difficult to follow, but when it's just the commentators, it all proceeds at quite a reasonable pace and is kept fairly bright and breezy; it's fun to let it all wash over you, at the very least. The graphics and live vision mixing are pleasantly sophisticated and the overall production is really not far off, say, BBC 4 live broadcast quality, probably on a fairly tight budget. There are well over three thousand viewers for a live stream on the Internet, which is not bad at all. Sadly there are no broadcasts tomorrow for it is a rest day, but the last two rounds start at 2pm GMT on Tuesday and at noon GMT on Wednesday. Commentators Danny King and Jonathan Rowson are always good value, though I wonder if Julian Hodgson is available? * If chess isn't your game, I thoroughly enjoyed the recorded celebrity game of Dungeons and Dragons from the Penny Arcade Expo, featuring three web comic artists and Wil Wheaton as players. You really don't need to understand the game to follow, not least because the players aren't taking the game desperately seriously, which should probably be of reassurance to hack'n'slash campaign DMs of every age everywhere as reassurance that it's OK not to take the game too seriously, even at what would appear to be quite a high level; there are tons of stray pop culture references, mostly very geeky ones, which are very funny in context, and occasional bursts of interactivity for the fans in the audience. In fact, there are plenty of (fourth-edition?) specifics that I am years behind the times to appreciate, but again it's fun just to let it all wash over you in the background, not least because everyone is very clearly having a blast. More, please! * Also quite exciting is the Pandanet Go European Team Championship, an online go competition between national teams from across Europe. There are three divisions of ten nations, each nation featuring a squad of twelve players and picking four of them to play in each match. The leagues are then played as single round-robins, one match every three weeks or so, with the top division featuring an additional play-off in person between the top players. The UK team are in the middle division, lost 3-1 to Poland in their first match but take on Belgium on Tuesday. The enterprise looks well-organised and has potential to grow into something quite special over the years, though the slow pace may detract from the excitement. (Would holding the divisions in alternate weeks, so there's always one division or another playing each week, make the league more fun to follow?) Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Mood: excited Tags: games

November 28th, 2010

09:58 pm - Ain't no party like a mind sports party I found a very interesting link the other day, from a source I consider credible, suggesting that initial contracts have been signed to host a second installment of the World Mind Sports Games in Manchester in August 2012, starting on the day that a certain physical games event concludes in London. The governing body, the International Mind Sports Association (IMSA), have nothing official one way or the other on the matter, yet, but these minutes of the meeting of congress of the World Bridge Federation (WBF), a month previously, suggested in section 7, on page 4, that "hopefully the 2012 World Mind Sports Games would be held in Manchester". I don't regard this as cast iron confirmation, but these are definitely the right noises that I would hope to hear if this were true. The first edition of the World Mind Sports Games were held in Beijing in October 2008. I made passing mention of them at the time, but felt at the time that they bore the hallmarks of being one-and-done. I'll believe it when I see it, but I would be delighted to be proved wrong, especially if mind sports truly were coming home. (Or, at least, near my home.) ( The background, the supporting data, the principles and the future. ) Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you!

November 19th, 2010

09:31 pm - Let's get ready to Ruy Lopez It's November, which makes it chess season! I post about chess about once a year or so; you can see last year's post or previous years' posts for comparison. ( In world chess news... ) ( Chess in Britain is on rather an upswing at the moment... ) The main reason I'm making this post now is that we're getting to crunch time in one of my other slow-burning obsessions, the ground-breaking online United States Chess League. Now six seasons old, commissioner Greg Shahade has done a remarkable job at sticking with his original vision and bringing it to life, very ably assisted by Arun Sharma. They have achieved a considerable deal of what they set out to do to - heck, just keeping the show on the road and not burning out is success enough - and ( keep achieving to a more and more spectacular extent... ) Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you! Current Location: spectatorland! Current Mood: excited Tags: chess, uscl