I figured I may as well declare it to the blogosphere: I’m finished with school!

I graduate this coming Monday. Starting on June 1st, I’ll begin a summer internship at the Yale Case Research Team where I’ll be contributing to Web-based business cases. This is a killer internship because I not only get paid and get experience working on business cases, but I also get to look around for a full-time job. I can take days off to interview and if I land something, I can give my notice and leave the internship. Since I’ll be in New Haven, I’ll be hanging out with some of my fellow classmates and playing as much golf as possible!

If anyone would like to play a round on the #1 college golf course in the country, please come and visit.

I swear this is too funny to be real, but it was in the NY Times! I felt like I was reading an Onion article. Here is the article, and here are my favorite quotes:

Tim (12 years old) explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

“We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour (Minister) wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

… Mr. Barbour (also) wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.” … “Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”

Playing Halo is “no different than going on a camping trip,” said Kedrick Kenerly, founder of Christian Gamers Online, an Internet site whose central themes are video games and religion. “It’s a way to fellowship.”

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

Hundreds of churches use Halo games to connect with young people, said Lane Palmer, the youth ministry specialist at the Dare 2 Share Ministry… The organization recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil.

In rural Minnesota, Mr. Drexler said, the church needs something powerful to compete against the lure of less healthy behaviors. “We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex.” His congregation plans to double to eight its number of TVs, which would allow 32 players to compete at one time.

Everyone knows that winning poker involves a lot of luck. What I like so much about it is that there is actually a very complex skill game buried underneath that luck element. The opportunities to see 5 community cards, the opponent’s face, and their betting behavior… plus the ability to cleverly affect your opponent’s decisions… provide enough traction for the game to remain a skill game over the long-term.

Even with that traction, how can I develop a strategy when there is so much randomness clouding my analysis of the game? Developing a strategy necessitates separating my “legitimate” wins from my “lucky” wins, and my “legitimate” losses from my “unlucky” losses. There is no clear line to separate them, it’s more of a blurry gray area. Plus… my strategy must change depending on who my opponents are. There is no universally optimal poker strategy which works against everyone. I thought Go was a tough game to learn… this is a whole different world.

Wesley Autrey is the man who jumped in front of a subway train in order to save a young man who had fallen onto the tracks while having a seizure. It was no foolish move, either. He knew what he was doing and had the confidence to put both himself and the man out of harm’s way.

This was not the case tonight when Wesley Autrey appeared on “Deal or No Deal”. He picked case #7 as his case and then said “no deal” every time he was offered a settlement. Lucky for him, the million dollars remained on the board until there were only three choices left! He refused a deal of about $200,000, and then another for $300,000… at this point, the only options were $25, $10,000, and $1M. Put yourself in his shoes: you have a 1/3 chance of $1M, 1/3 chance of $25, and a 1/3 chance of $10,000. What on Earth was he thinking??? Maybe he really did think he was superman. He went home with $25 and a new Jeep. If he wanted to be as heroic as possible, he should have faced reality, taken the money, and donated it all to charity. Instead, he shows that he is human just like the rest of us. I don’t mean to villify the guy, but think of what that money could have bought!

Lesson: face facts, especially when you know your chances. Winning a gamble requires getting lucky, so when you get lucky… quit while you’re ahead! Also, realize that sometimes you have no control over the situation… don’t try to bend the laws of probability.

One of the most helpful philosophical works I’ve read is The Enchiridion, by Epictatus. The prevailing theme is that you should not attempt to control that which is out of your control. Poker forces the players to find that line and respect it. The thing to realize is that “the line” is not just determined by your cards, it is also influenced by the actions and tendencies of yourself and the other players. Players have a unique style, and if you can determine that style, you can play them accordingly and “bend” that line.

I saw The Go Master at the New York Film Festival yesterday. Beautifully directed by Tian ZhuangZhuang, the film tells the story of Go’s greatest modern player: Go Seigen. Since the movie was catered to an Eastern audience, I found it a bit uneventful for my tastes; even a bit superficial. The scenery and costumes were marvelous, but they were not enough to make the movie particularly memorable or powerful. 2/5 stars.

I had a bit of a series of posts called “Lessons Learned from Go”, but unfortunately I hardly ever play Go at all any more, so there has been a bit of a shortage of those posts. I was puzzled by how poker has taken the country by storm and so I watched a couple of episodes of “World Series of Poker” and I even signed up for a web site (completely free, no money at stake, nothing to download) where I played against other people with fake money and spent several hours on it playing Texas Hold’em. I tried fixed-limit and no-limit and I think it’s hard not to see some parallels to “life” as it were.

I actually wrote this post in January, but I figured I would post it now before it gets too stale. I haven’t played poker in at least a month and a half. These are the basic life-lessons I derived from the game, which seem to apply mostly to economic situations, but could be generalized into any group competition:

* Don’t over-estimate or under-estimate yourself, you are human just like the others.
* Don’t over-estimate or under-estimate the others, they are human just like you.
* Until all the cards are dealt, there’s always a chance (You’ve got to be in it to win it).
* When the stakes are high, be more prudent than when they are low.
* People won’t ignore you when you speak up (i.e. when you bet high).
* The less competition there is, the better your chances of winning.
* More powerful (i.e. richer) competitors can leverage money which they can afford to lose and force others to put everything on the line.
* Don’t take big risks when you’re competing against a lunatic.

The New York Times had an article about Go recently! I hope this exposure encourages more people to play it in this country. As the subject of the article says, America “is the desert of this game”. Nothing proves it more than when I went to the Times Square Toys R Us and asked an employee if they had a Go set. “Sorry, never heard of it,” she said. I tried the other names for it: WeiQi? Baduk? She’d never heard of those names either. I looked near the chess sets, but there was nothing Go-related for sale.

It would be slightly hypocritical of me not to offer some resources for learning the game. Check out the bottom of my links page for some web sites that will get you started.

David Mamet wrote a brilliant op-ed piece in the LA Times, analogizing recent US politics to a poker game:

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-mamet16sep16,1,341798.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

I have only played poker a few times, but I love the analogy. I posted a thought a while back citing democrats as being inherently losers when it comes to the political struggle, and I think this article complements my thoughts nicely. Any game-theorists want to comment?

In Go, once a piece is placed on the board it can never be moved (unless it gets captured, in which case it is removed). This means you must place your stones with the utmost efficiency and effectiveness! Any waste on your part is an opportunity for your opponent to be more productive. There are two terms that apply to the notion of who currently has the initiative in play: sente and gote. Sente means that a player’s move will demand a direct response, so if I make a move “in sente,” that means that if you ignore the move and play at an unrelated area of the board, my follow-up play might be extremely bad for you. Gote means that a player’s move does not demand a direct response. After I play a gote move, you can play wherever you want on your turn because my move does not threaten a follow-up. The notions of sente and gote are somewhat subjective, but, like most things in go, they emerge as an undeniable truth for experienced players.

Clearly, it is in your best interest to maintain sente as often as possible, because that way you essentially control the direction of play, and your opponent will be responding to your moves while you get to place your stones where it works best for you. One of the best concepts I ever learned was that of “making territory while attacking.” This is, in my mind, one of the most important strategies in the game because moves that fit this strategy will both give you profit and maintain your control over the direction of play, allowing you to do the same thing the next turn! This is an extremely productive way to play, and although it is difficult to draw direct analogies between this strategy for the game of go and the game of life, it is a good moral to follow: be productive! Take initiative and you will actually exert influence on others, rather than merely responding to others.

I hope nobody follows this advice literally and attacks other people in the hopes of creating territory for themselves. That sounds like gang warfare! The “direction of play” concept applies to life a lot more than the whole attacking/territory part. A common occurence is a string of sente moves which create some desired shape, followed by a very valuable but gote move which does not demand a reply. The proverb that governs this kind of playing is “Play urgent moves before big moves.” This means: respond to those moves that demand a response, and when the opportunity arises, play that big valuable move you’ve been wanting to play. This proverb applies to the player who is responding to the player who has sente. For the player who has sente, it is important to note that it’s not always appropriate to attack and demand a response. It is sometimes better to play a big gote move rather than an attacking sente move. This judgement is a crucial one, and takes a very long time to refine. Similarly, in life it is important to strike a balance between taking initiative all the time and being passive all the time.

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, so here is installment #1 of my “Life Lessons Learned from Go” series. I have honestly learned a few good strategies for life from learning to play Go, and I thought people would find it interesting. I swear I’m not being pretentious here, as pretentious as this may seem

Being wrong is something everyone hates to admit, whether it means admitting it to oneself or admitting it to others. One of the most important life skills I have learned from playing Go is the value of admitting when I have made a mistake and “cutting my losses” thereafter. It is quite obvious that on the game board, whatever opinion you may have of the condition of your stones has no effect on their actual condition. If you have placed a stone in a foolish manner, the other player can take advantage of that mistake. It is then up to you to decide either to refuse to acknowledge that your move was a mistake (and suffer the contingent consequences of your successive sub-optimal play) or to acknowledge that you messed up, there’s no going back, and making the best of the remaining situation by playing optimally.

The clearest example of this is oiotoshi: “connect and die.” A particular group of your stones (let’s call it group A) is currently in atari (one move from the opponent will remove them from the board), but you can connect them (with one move) to another group of your stones (group B) which is not in atari… however, once you have done so, the resulting group (both groups plus the connecting stone) will be in atari. This is the definition of oiotoshi. In this unfortunate case, it is plain to see that it is best for you not to connect the groups, because you will end up losing more stones than if you simply protect group B and allow your opponent to capture group A.

Oiotoshi is the most obvious situation in which cutting your losses is to your benefit. However, the more subtle situations are much easier to ignore and require more will power to address with honesty. For example, your shape needs to have sufficient space for two eyes in order to survive. If your opponent is closing in around your shape, which does not have any well-defined eyes yet, you can choose to push ahead, attempting to shrink your opponent’s territory, or you may ensure the survival of your group and focus on creating your eyes. This is not as obvious as oiotoshi because it is easy to say “oh, I’ll make two eyes somehow, when the time comes,” but as I’ve learned the hard way many times, your group may already be one move away from death! You must ensure that there really is a way for you to make two eyes before going ahead with your attack, otherwise your entire shape will die, and all those stones that your opponent put on the board defending your attack will serve to strengthen his territory walls. In most cases, when a large group of your stones is killed, you may as well resign.

The overall lesson learned from this: never be too arrogant to doubt yourself, because otherwise you may miss the truth. Once you realize the truth, and it turns out you messed up, you must face it and deal with it. You are usually better off admitting to yourself that you made a mistake than hoping your opponent will not notice it.
[edited 3/20]

After over two months since its completion, I have finally hung my latest painting, Go Fish, up on the wall. The reason it took so long is because it’s been freezing cold outside and I didn’t want to do the sanding/finishing work on the frame until it was warm enough to do it outdoors.

I also put up the web page devoted to it in my paintings page, so check it out! I took a whole bunch of photos documenting the painting process, so you should take a look if you’re curious.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the long-awaited announcement you’ve been waiting for… I finally beat Doom 3! Yes, I know what you’re saying: “Didn’t you start that game like 6 or 7 months ago?” The answer is yes. Why? Well, I was busy, but that’s not the only reason. Read on…

First of all, let me start of with some context. I have been a big fan of id software since the days of Wolfenstein 3D. I beat Wolfenstein, I beat Doom and Doom 2, and I beat Quake several times. One of those times was in nightmare mode (the hardest difficulty). I beat Quake 2, even though I didn’t particularly find it to be as awesome as Quake 1. I played Quake 3 and got up to the last guy, but didn’t bother spending the time to beat him. If you’ve played Q3 you know it’s nothing like the other games, it’s like playing multiplayer against the computer. I played and beat the “Return to Castle Wolfenstein” demo but never played the real game. Hey, it was only developed with help from id, it wasn’t really an id game :-). So I was super-duper psyched for Doom 3!

Anyway, when I started the game I was very very impressed. The storyline is actually very nice to have. It makes everything seem all the more real. Unlike other Doom and Quake games, there are people in the game who aren’t trying to kill you! Furthermore, everyone in the game carries a PDA, which holds their e-mail and access codes. If you find a PDA left behind by a dead person, you can read their e-mail, listen to “audio log entries” and access restricted areas. This plays a crucial role in the gameplay, in that you must get a particular PDA to get past certain areas, but also in the atmosphere. Basically, everyone is creeped out by weird things happening in the base, and in listening to their paranoid audio logs, you can’t help but be creeped out as well. I don’t want to give anything away, but basically the game begins in a safe area, where nobody is trying to kill you, and obviously at a certain point things change for the worse. I’ll just say that the moment at which this occurs is awesome!

After this turning point, the game becomes the most realistic “interactive nightmare” I have ever experienced… and I don’t mean that in a good way. This game is too scary. I think the people at id forgot about the fun factor when they made this game, because there is basically nothing fun about this game. Long gone are the dumb, slow monsters of Doom and Quake. These guys are ferocious, very fast, and very strong. One monster can tear you to pieces in a matter of seconds, even if you are fully armored. To make things fair, there are usually very few monsters in any particular area. However, as you can probably imagine, this means no more opening fire on a pack of 20 monsters! That was fun, this is terrifying! To add to the terror, monsters literally teleport right behind you from out of nowhere; there are sometimes monsters waiting for you immediately behind a door, or hiding right next to the door. If you want to survive, you must expect the worst at all times. Does that sound like fun? If so, then you’ll love this game! I guess I have to take some of the blame since I played with the lights off and surround sound on. I think Doom 3 is the most effective diuretic I’ve ever come across.

So besides the fact that this game is about as fun as walk naked through the South Bronx, how is the production quality? It is absolutely first-rate. This game is a masterpiece, without a doubt. It has been thoroughly planned and polished, and it shows. However, the planning seems to have been myopic in more ways than just the fun-factor. I appreciate that id made this a nice long game, but I desperately wanted more scenery changes. Basically, you play the entire game in the mars complex, which looks pretty much the same throughout. It’s especially a shame because the level design is awe-inspiring. The level of detail is astounding, and it appears that everything around has a purpose of some sort. There are offices full of cubicles, server rooms full of computers, bathrooms with all the facilities, large experimental machinery, etc. Of course you must suspend disbelief a bit when it comes to the layout of everything (a base this large would have some more efficient way of getting from one end to the other), but this is a game after all. When the dull mars base scenery finally does change… holy shit! Prepare to be stunned. There were many artists involved in the design and development of this game, and it shows.

So what’s the bottom line? If you are an id fan, you have no excuse for not buying this game. If you are looking for a fun, action-packed shooter, stay away! If you would like to live your worst nightmare, get this game! If you are looking for an awesome multiplayer game, stay away! Multiplayer mode only supports 6 people per map! Overall, this game was a very memorable experience, and I am glad I went through it. I probably will not play through it again, however. This game is clearly a different kind of game than the earlier Dooms and Quakes, it’s more like a horror movie than an action movie. Somehow Quake 1 still holds as my all-time-favorite shooter. I think the people at id need to spend a few months at Disney Land so they can lighten up a bit and get back to making great games that are also great fun.

[Note: due to excessive comment spam, I’ve disabled comments on THIS post. Most other posts allow comments.]

I finished my latest and greatest painting yesterday, and I photographed it today. After about 26 hours of labor, I am happy to say it’s done and I’m extremely happy with it. I actually signed it and called it done a few days ago, but part of the painting just wasn’t looking good enough so yesterday I went back and really polished it off. I will put up the web page with the whole story behind it whenever I get around to it, but here is a very high res image for you to see it in the meantime.

In short, the painting is called “Go Fish.” It’s kind of a tribute to my favorite game (”go”, not “go fish”). The black and white ‘chips’ are go stones, and the fish are Betta Splendens, or Siamese Fighting Fish. The painting is meant to represent a “ko fight” for those familiar with the term.