31–40 of 57 posts
I can so relate to this guy. I'm "only" in my 50s now, but I am in my 50s now. For a couple of decades I've had this grand vision about how to build the perfect algorithmic trading system. The practical expression of this has come in fits and starts. During the Pandemic, I finally devoted some time to building a bespoke server and hosting it co-located facility near a high-quality market data provider. I chose to do…
I can so relate to this guy. I'm "only" in my 50s now, but I am in my 50s now. For a couple of decades I've had this grand vision about how to build the perfect algorithmic trading system. The practical expression of this has come in fits and starts. During the Pandemic, I finally devoted some time to building a bespoke server and hosting it co-located facility near a high-quality market data provider. I chose to do…
Did you ever try to make it trade with a few thousand dollars?
The broker API I plan to use features the ability to "paper trade" in a simulated account. So I'm not so worried about switching the thing on one day and immediately blowing my account.
I do trade manually in a broker account but as fun and instructive as that is, it doesn't represent the kinds of high-speed analysis and execution my system would make once it was completed.
I first attended CGDC in 1994. It was two years after his Dragon Speech (which I knew nothing about), but the highlight of the conference was his talk about the challenges of story-based games. The part I remember is how he modeled stories as branching trees with fan-out, foldback, tree-of-death, etc (he covers this in the "Architecture" chapter of this book "The Art of Interactive Design"). I didn't really follow Crawford's work on Erasmatron or later, but by the late 90's it sounded like his story model had changed from a tree to a graph network structure, like a finite state machine. While it was an improvement, I was a bit skeptical that this model was enough. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem. You see, he'd already infected me with his dream of interactive storytelling.
By the time I moved to California and took a job at EA/Maxis on The Sims 2.0 team, I had decided that true interactive storytelling (as I saw it) was not possible until game AI was sophisticated enough to enable autonomous NPC chatbots. So I put that dream aside while I pursued a career in software development.
Here we are, over a quarter of a century later, and that AI technology is here now. For those of us who have been waiting for this moment, it is almost miraculous. It might be the end of an era for Chris Crawford, but it is just the beginning of the AI-based interactive storytelling era.
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That quote about JavaScript is... huh. I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest programs without errors" when obviously, JavaScript (which I do not like, by the way) is productively used on a large scale (even back then), and constantly under scrutiny from programmers, computer scientists, language designers... it's jus…
Other languages have problems, but before some basic libraries (jQuery/Underscore) and language enhancements (Typescript/Coffeescript), it was arguably quite simplistic, and parts of the language were straight up anachronistic. If you've ever been unfortunate enough to have to wrangle a VB script routine, it was (less bad) like that. If not, I would go find some assembly code and teach it yourself, and then imagine t…
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Ah, okay. Maybe it’s more obvious in context, or maybe my hyperbole detector is broken.
I can imagine grumpy an old man frustrated by a different paradigm shouting at his computer. We all become that eventually, hopefully we can all be as poetic and humble (and honest) about it.
But apparently I didn’t get the hyperbole.
Crawford's work that I'm most familiar with is a game called Balance of Power - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game) I played it as a cold war kid and was fascinated by it. Mid 80's, post War-Games, this game blew my mind. It simulated the world . The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was not zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There were (in this game) no wi…
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it's not clear to me how this describes something obviously non-zero sum. Independent losses can have different values in a zero-sum hand game; what matters is whether each win is proportional to the corresponding loss. If the USSR winning in West Germany was only a small win, that would demonstrate it was non-zero sum due to the size of the loss there for the US, but I don't think the magnitude of the outcome in Indonesia would relate to that at all.
I have watched the dragon speech multiple times, and it makes me feel like you should put everything in what you are doing, as everything is your magnum opus. I have huge respect for artists and artisans that work like that. It is really difficult, and often not economically viable, but there are people that just `see` something and they want it to exist.
I often think about the dragon speech, when I am doing the same 'pick up 10 things' quest in World of Warcraft that I have been doing since 2005. Thousands of times.. I have picked up hundreds of thousands of things :) and I wonder, what game would WoW be had he succeeded.
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I can imagine grumpy an old man frustrated by a different paradigm shouting at his computer. We all become that eventually, hopefully we can all be as poetic and humble (and honest) about it.
Sure, but “JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest programs without errors” is a bit much. I find it hard to believe that even when I’m completely out of touch, I’d say that about a language that people are obviously productive in (as much as I hate JS myself). But apparently I didn’t get the hyperbole.
Only to then realize (after reading the walkthrough) that there was indeed a way.
I think it's human nature to find (rather search) blame not only in yourself but everywhere else... anyhow, since the author is reflective we should be forgiving as well.
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People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time. In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc. Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not able to d…
> People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time. That sounds no different from comming up with narratives on a playground. That's not a designed narrative, that's people making up a narrative where none exists. Hey, the jungle gym in our secret base! The swings are space ship! The ground is lava! I think we can all imagine what he wanted to b…
I've been in too many conversations where this topic comes up, and it's very disheartening to me. Gamers insist there are plenty of great narrative games, and every example they give is basically a branching story with bunch of flags that gate which branches can be taken. If I give the Holodeck as a counter-example, well that's just too pie-in-the-sky.
These conversations remind me a lot of Paul Graham's Blub Paradox: "Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub." Current SotA narrative games are good enough for most gamers, because all they've played are branching story games.