This is an addendum to this post where I was try­ing to make NHL ’94 more challenging.

I’ve all but given up on try­ing to give the com­puter an extra use­ful player in shootout mode. Giv­ing the com­puter an extra player who stands and does noth­ing is trivial. Unfor­tu­nately, the “AI” for shootout mode is — maybe not sur­pris­ingly — hard-​​coded — it doesn’t even take into con­sid­er­a­tion the pos­i­tion of the goalie — and rewrit­ing the AI in 65C816 assembly is bey­ond the scope of my free time. This is easy to show by watch­ing the dif­fer­ing beha­viour between when the com­puter gets a break­away (in reg­u­lar mode) com­pared to how it behaves in shootout mode.

So I play in reg­u­lar mode with a 3-​​man han­di­cap. E.g., we play 5-​​on-​​2. If you watched the first video from my last post, you’ll notice that han­di­cap­ping your­self makes the game beep con­stantly. It’s very very irrit­at­ing. Fix­ing this is actu­ally not com­pletely trivial. For those that are impa­tient, here are the memory addresses I’m using:

Using the val­ues above will stop the incess­ant beeping.

I haven’t had time to fully explore the implic­a­tions of 7E18BA. Just from obser­va­tion, it seems that that the 7E1860 – 7E18C0 range is an array of player state and 7E18BA is an off­set into that array which per­tains to the pen­alty. By set­ting 7E18BA to 0x12, it seems, you indic­ate which ele­ment of the array from which to draw penalty-​​time-​​remaining inform­a­tion. I only use the value of 0x12 and the asso­ci­ated address 7E1864 because those are what came up for me dur­ing debug­ging (Mike Gart­ner, if you’re curi­ous). I haven’t found any rhyme or reason to the num­ber 0x12 yet, but I don’t really care too much at this point.

As a side note, someone really needs to come up with a bet­ter tool for “RAM cheat­ing”. For those unfa­mil­iar, the gen­eral pro­ced­ure for this style of black-​​box debug­ging — usu­ally used for cheat­ing, though in my case I guess it’s anti-​​cheating — is to snap­shot RAM at vari­ous stages of play. You then com­pare the RAM images accord­ing to what state you’re look­ing for. E.g., if you want to know where the num­bers of play­ers on the ice is stored in RAM, you snap­shot when you have 6 play­ers on the ice a few times and again when you have 5 play­ers on the ice and look for the num­bers “6” and “5” to con­sist­ently appear in RAM.

If you have a hacker men­tal­ity, this way of doing things can be pro­duct­ive, but it’s pretty crude. Gen­er­ally the tools avail­able don’t allow you to com­pare bit-​​values, only byte-​​values, and com­par­ison oper­at­ors are pretty lim­ited. After half-​​heartedly try­ing to fol­low along with Jasna’s AI assign­ments, I’d be sur­prised if this prob­lem hasn’t been solved gen­er­ally and prop­erly in the AI aca­demic com­munity. Oh well.

This is an addendum to this post where I was trying to make NHL '94 more challenging. I've all but given up on trying to give the computer an extra useful player in shootout mode. Giving the computer an extra player who stands and does nothing is trivial. Unfortunately, the "AI" for shootout mode is---maybe ...

For the past year or so, I’ve been tim­ing how long it takes for me to go through the check­outs at our gro­cery store to see which is faster.

The meth­od­o­logy is quite simple. Once I’ve got all my gro­cer­ies, I go to the same spot near the check­outs. To avoid bias­ing myself, I check my cell phone to determ­ine whether to go through the self check­outs or the nor­mal check­outs. Because my cell phone lacks a ran­dom num­ber gen­er­ator, I check the last digit of the time: an even digit means I go through the nor­mal check­out and an odd digit means I go through self check­out. I then start the stop­watch and time how long it takes for me to go through the check­out and leave the store.

I’ve got 31 data points and have finally decided that if one type of check­out is faster than the other, the dif­fer­ence is small enough to not really mat­ter. Here’s the scat­ter­plot:

A sample size of 31 is unim­press­ive, to be sure, but it’s large enough that I can finally rest easy know­ing it would be a waste of time to col­lect more data. Try­ing to get out of the gro­cery store in the fast­est way pos­sible seems to have more import­ant factors, such as the num­ber of jerks ahead of you in line.

As a side note on how that scat­ter­plot is presen­ted, it prob­ably would have made a lot more sense to meas­ure the time taken as a func­tion of how many items I bought, rather than the cash value of the items I bought. I’m far too lazy to count things, though.

So, from now on I’ll be decid­ing on self check­out versus nor­mal check­out based on how social I’m feel­ing. I sus­pect that means I’ll be using the self check­out a lot.

For the past year or so, I've been timing how long it takes for me to go through the checkouts at our grocery store to see which is faster. The methodology is quite simple. Once I've got all my groceries, I go to the same spot near the checkouts. To avoid biasing myself, I check ...

As any­one born around 1980 would know, gam­ing reached abso­lute per­fec­tion with the release of NHL ’94. It’s great if you want a 10-​​minute diver­sion and I’ve been play­ing a few minutes of here and there for the past few months.

There’s one ser­i­ous prob­lem with NHL ’94, how­ever: the AI is abso­lutely ter­rible. Play­ing in single-​​player mode is way too easy. Play­ing as the worst team (either Flor­ida Pan­thers or Ott­awa Sen­at­ors) against the best team (All Stars East) I can win 5 – 0 without much effort.

In shootout mode the AI is even worse. If you put the goalie on auto­matic mode (the com­puter con­trols your goalie) then the oppos­ing team does alright, but it’s no fun. If you put the goalie on manual mode (you con­trol your goalie) I’m not con­vinced it’s actu­ally phys­ic­ally pos­sible for the com­puter to score on you.

I had the bril­liant idea that maybe the game would be more fun if the human player were han­di­capped. Maybe shootout mode would be more fun if the com­puter had 2 play­ers instead of just 1? I have my doubts, but it got me thinking.

So one idea was to dis­as­semble NHL ’94, add in some 2-​​on-​​1 shootout code and reas­semble it. For­tu­nately there are people out there who take hack­ing the Super Nin­tendo more ser­i­ously than any sane per­son should, so there are some tools avail­able. Learn­ing 65C816 assembly code, dis­as­sembling the game and then tra­cing through and debug­ging soun­ded like the sort of thing that one does after they’ve fin­ished writ­ing their thesis, so I filed that under “plan B”.

Plan A became to track down where cer­tain deli­cious global vari­ables, such as the num­ber of play­ers on the ice, were being stored in memory and modify them as the game was being played. After about 20 minutes of toy­ing around, I got some­thing to work.

Here’s me in reg­u­lar hockey mode, but with only 1 skater instead of 5:

The con­stant beep­ing (sorry) is due to NHL ’94 fool­ishly think­ing that since I’m down 4 men, the other team is on a power play which is end­ing soon, in 0 seconds to be exact. Note the game mis­takenly gives credit for the goal to Zhit­nik and Hrudey of the LA Kings instead of Schneider and Roy of the Montreal Canadiens. Weird.

Here’s me in shootout mode:

Unfor­tu­nately I acci­dent­ally gave myself an extra player instead of the com­puter, but it still demon­strates that my idea won’t work without a lot more fid­dling. The extra player just stands there doing noth­ing. Sigh.

As anyone born around 1980 would know, gaming reached absolute perfection with the release of NHL '94. It's great if you want a 10-minute diversion and I've been playing a few minutes of here and there for the past few months. There's one serious problem with NHL '94, however: the AI is absolutely terrible. Playing ...

I think I’ll work a bit more on the novel today, some­thing I haven’t done in prob­ably a couple months. I always kind of knew, but it’s become increas­ingly obvi­ous that the core of the novel isn’t so much a story as an explor­a­tion of human­ity, the defin­i­tion of human­ity and espe­cially the rela­tion­ship between human­ity and lan­guage. In a nut­shell, it’s a story thread­ing a col­lec­tion of things humans do. I hope it works.

One thing that’s always bothered me about human­ity, and in par­tic­u­lar lan­guage, is the nature of love. Poetry, and art in gen­eral, deal­ing with love tends to be pretty unin­ter­est­ing in my view, more an exer­cise in one-​​upmanship to describe the intens­it­ies of love, focus­ing more on the effects of love than the bare mech­an­isms. There are excep­tions, of course, but rare. We have an embar­rass­ment of words avail­able to use to describe shades of the col­our red but have an awk­ward strait­jacket when it comes to some­thing more com­plex and import­ant, like love. It’s not just Eng­lish that’s the prob­lem, either.

Enter Alizée. She’s not a fant­astic musi­cian and, as one red­dit com­menter so elo­quently put it: “I wish my teeth were as white as her dance moves.” The lyr­ics are fairly asin­ine and for once I’m grate­ful that my French is bad enough that I can only pick out a few bits and pieces of it. For those who are curi­ous, as best I’ve been able to garner, the entirety of the song is about tak­ing a bubble­bath, describ­ing the bubble­bath and how it relates to the exper­i­ence of tak­ing bubble­baths and being lazy.

None of that really mat­ters, though. It’s some­what fit­ting that she’s French as she strikes me as a modern-​​day Nana come to life. Well, except­ing that Alizée’s not a whore. Another extremely, in my opin­ion, insight­ful red­dit com­ment on the topic of how hot Alizée is:

Not just fap hot either. This is exactly what would make me lose in /b/‘s “You fall in love you lose” threads.

That pretty much sums her up. It doesn’t mat­ter what she’s doing oth­er­wise or what she’s singing. Once the spot­light is on her, all it takes is one know­ing smile and a cock of her head and before you’ve even regained cog­niz­ance you’ve fallen in love with her.

It’s not love, of course; I don’t know what it is. I can’t bring myself to call it “love at first sight” since that describes some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent to me. The effect doesn’t dimin­ish know­ing it’s just a per­form­ance, but it’s not lust either. But it’s a real exper­i­ence; it’s a spell in a very real sense. The last time I watched one of Alizée’s songs — she’s def­in­itely the sort of musi­cian you watch, not listen to — I think she was all of about fif­teen years old and even at that young age she had the abil­ity to com­mand an entire audi­ence. It seems she’s only become more power­ful since then.

The crown jewel of Nana, in my opin­ion, is the open­ing chapter where she’s first per­form­ing in the opera and where she first wins her ador­a­tion. Even when I was first read­ing it I wished the entire novel could have been the first chapter or two. The destruc­tion of the men around her dom­in­ated the rest of the novel, but the secret of her magic was never really revealed in any sub­stan­tial detail.

The spells of Nana and Alizée are cast every day and I sup­pose it can be taken as noth­ing spe­cial, but that doesn’t sat­isfy me. I’ve never found a nice reduc­tion­ist explor­a­tion of the phenomenon.

I’ve got a bit of a back­log of oddit­ies to write about so I don’t know if I’ll get to it today, but there’ll prob­ably end up being at least a chapter about this.

I think I'll work a bit more on the novel today, something I haven't done in probably a couple months. I always kind of knew, but it's become increasingly obvious that the core of the novel isn't so much a story as an exploration of humanity, the definition of humanity and especially the relationship ...

I had this crazy idea to start up a new web­site today, spe­cific­ally a wiki.

Jasna’s veget­arian and I’m semi-​​vegetarian (“flex­it­arian”, Wiki­pe­dia informs me), only because I’m a picky eater and the veget­arian options out­side of what we pre­pare at home often aren’t great.

Envir­on­mental reas­ons are cer­tainly the primary reas­ons for both of us. Meat is inher­ently inef­fi­cient: for most anim­als humans eat, it takes some­where around 10 Cal­or­ies of plant mat­ter to make 1 Cal­orie of animal mat­ter and it would make a lot of sense envir­on­ment­ally — and prob­ably eco­nom­ic­ally as well — to cut out the middle man and just eat the 10 Cal­or­ies of plant mat­ter. That inef­fi­ciency leads to increase land usage, water usage, soil erosion, etc. There are other envir­on­mental prob­lems, such as sewage and meth­ane emissions.

Well today I was lament­ing to myself that there really is no resource for find­ing out exactly what the envir­on­mental costs of foods are! To be sure, draw­ing the line at meat is a little arbit­rary. Veget­arian food, espe­cially meat altern­at­ives like TVP, can go through a lot of pro­cessing and, for all I know in my ignor­ance, end up being just as bad as meat. On the other side, for all I know, also in my ignor­ance, there are some meats out there that really aren’t a big prob­lem at all.

So I have a vis­ion: what if there were a wiki that allowed con­sol­id­at­ing inform­a­tion and maybe even ori­ginal research into what the envir­on­mental costs of foods are?

I don’t know if it’s prac­tical at all. To gauge interest I did my best at ask­ing an unbiased sur­vey while keep­ing an eye on the “Envir­on­mental dam­age from hus­bandry” option. My biggest fear is I’d just be cre­at­ing a web­site for myself that no one else will ever read; I already have one of those.

The closest thing I’ve found to what I’m look­ing for is food­ori­gins but it’s not really aim­ing at the same thing.

I don’t know. I’ll mull it over for a while longer. At stake is $10 for a domain regis­tra­tion and how­ever long it takes to set up a wiki these days.

I had this crazy idea to start up a new website today, specifically a wiki. Jasna's vegetarian and I'm semi-vegetarian ("flexitarian", Wikipedia informs me), only because I'm a picky eater and the vegetarian options outside of what we prepare at home often aren't great. Environmental reasons are certainly the primary reasons for both of us. Meat ...

After yesterday’s fail­ure I brought a bit of extra duct tape and super glue and got the car back in work­ing order with the cam­era affixed to it nicely. I took it out again this after­noon to see if I could get the cam­era to sur­vive some small jumps off some staircases.

The good news is my duct tap­ing and super glu­ing worked. The cam­era didn’t move an iota — though sadly I had to tilt it a bit to the left to get it seated prop­erly — and the servo con­trol­ler stayed where it was sup­posed to.

Before I get into the down­sides maybe I’ll just show the video.

So the first down­side is that the video ends about five minutes earlier than it should have. When I rolled the car it rolled onto the shut­ter but­ton, unbe­knownst to me. It’s too bad since the crazier/​more abus­ive stuff came after that.

The second down­side is that both the cam­era and car took more abuse than they have before. The metal cas­ing on the cam­era got scraped off on one corner. One of the front shocks on the car came apart, which is espe­cially bad con­sid­er­ing it’s an oil-​​filled shock absorber. I haven’t decided what I’ll do about that.

The third down­side is that since I had to run the car without a body in order to get the cam­era on, it got more water dam­age than usual. Cur­rently it only goes in reverse. I’ll take another look at it after it dries out.

I think I’m going to put this short-​​lived remote con­trolled car video­graphy pro­ject aside until I fig­ure out a way to get things to sur­vive better.

After yesterday's failure I brought a bit of extra duct tape and super glue and got the car back in working order with the camera affixed to it nicely. I took it out again this afternoon to see if I could get the camera to survive some small jumps off some staircases. The good news ...

The last time I attached a cam­era to my remote con­trolled car the major prob­lem, from my per­spect­ive, was that it was too bumpy, to the point of not being able to see any­thing, really. The solu­tion to this is two-​​fold:

1. Do it on pave­ment instead of snow.
2. Attach the cam­era more securely.

Since it’s been crazy nice lately — 4º for the past couple days — we’ve had a lot of dry pave­ment com­ing out, so I took the camera/​car com­bin­a­tion out again today. I attached the cam­era dir­ectly to the chassis with the help of a styro­foam shim, rather than to the body like I did last time.

It star­ted off prom­ising! Up until the last ten seconds I think it counts as a mod­est suc­cess! There’s not so much boun­cing and you can actu­ally see what’s going on.

Sadly, those last ten seconds…yeah, I turned left when I should have turned right. It not only knocked the cam­era off, but it knocked the con­trol­ler off the chassis. The design of the car is rather stu­pid in this regard: the con­trol­ler is just can­ti­levered, held in by adhes­ive, in my case super glue. I’ll re – super glue it and see if I can’t try again tomorrow.

My ulti­mate plan was to take it off some sweet jumps. Now I’m won­der­ing if the cam­era will sur­vive the trip: it was just held in place by the afore­men­tioned styro­foam shim and some duct tape. I’ll try it with more duct tape and see if I can’t get it to sur­vive a jump tomorrow.

The last time I attached a camera to my remote controlled car the major problem, from my perspective, was that it was too bumpy, to the point of not being able to see anything, really. The solution to this is two-fold:Do it on pavement instead of snow.Attach the camera more securely.Since it's been crazy ...