theory

good music theory from the past...

Hysterical! :)

This is a sure-to-be-interesting essay on Gamasutra about what those truly difficult games from yesteryear can teach us about game design, and how difficulty in videogames has changed over the years.

It's a long one, but a great topic.

click to play

imagine it this weekend. imagine hard.

One of my first stabs at the Processing language. An animated demo of graph relaxation. Actually kind of entertaining if I do say so myself.

Claude Shannon's groundbreaking paper which attempts to define information and communication mathematically. This is a must read for any evolution theorist, or Intelligent Design Proponent, as many people have a hard time understanding exactly how we conventionally define information in math and physics.

For instance, the argument that mutations in DNA, because they are random, delete information from a genome and decrease the overall informational content of a chromosome is completely and provably wrong, according to Shannon's definition of information, which is the most widely accepted. In reality, a purely random deletion or substitution MUST add information because it is summarily unpredictable and incompressible by any known compression algorithm.

I had never heard of the Travelers dilemma before, but it is an interesting problem.

Quoted: Scenarios of this kind, in which one or more individuals have choices to make and will be rewarded according to those choices, are known as games by the people who study them (game theorists). I crafted this game, "Traveler's Dilemma, in 1994 with several objectives in mind: to contest the narrow view of rational behavior and cognitive processes taken by economists and many political scientists, to challenge the libertarian presumptions of traditional economics and to highlight a logical paradox of rationality.

click to play

A capella math-nerds. How many math terms can you catch in this song?