links of the day

On the Strange Transcendence of Flappy Bird

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Curious to find out what the big deal was, I downloaded a game called Flappy Bird on my iPhone. I’ve been playing the game for a total of about two hours or so, and yes, it is very addicting (and difficult!). In a great piece for The Atlantic, video game critic Ian Bogost explains why Flappy Bird is popular, difficult, and addicting:

Flappy Bird is a perversely, oppressively difficult game. Scoring even a single point takes most players a considerable number of runs. After an hour, I’d managed a high score of two. Many, many hours of play later, my high score is 32, a feat that has earned me the game’s gold medal (whatever that means).

There is a tradition of such super-difficult games, sometimes called masocoreamong the videogame-savvy. Masocore games are normally characterized by trial-and-error gameplay, but split up into levels or areas to create a sense of overall progress. Commercial blockbusters like Mega Man inaugurated the category (even if the term “masocore” appeared long after Capcom first released that title in 1987), and more recent independent titles like I Wanna Be The Guyand Super Meat Boy have further explored the idea of intense difficulty as a primary aesthetic. Combined with repetition and progression, the intense difficulty of masocore games often produces a feeling of profound accomplishment, an underdog’s victory in the dorky medium of underdogs themselves, 2d platformer videogames.

flappy

On what makes Flappy Bird so difficult:

Contemporary design practice surely would recommend an “easy” first pipe sequence to get the player started, perhaps a few pipes positioned at the bird’s initial position, or with wider openings for easier passage. More difficult maneuvers, such as quick shifts from high to low pipe openings, would be reserved for later in the game, with difficulty ramping up as the player demonstrates increased expertise.

But Flappy Bird offers no such scaffolding. Instead, every pipe and every point is completely identical: randomly positioned but uniform in every other way. A game of Flappy Bird is a series of identical maneuvers, one after the other. All you have to do is keep responding to them, a task made possible by the game’s predictable and utterly reasonable interactions. Just keep flapping.

This is a very introspective analysis:

What we appreciate aboutFlappy Bird is not the details of its design, but the fact that it embodies them with such unflappable nonchalance. The best games cease to be for us (or for anyone) and instead strive to be what they are as much as possible. From this indifference emanates a strange squalor that we can appreciate as beauty.

And then Bogost gets transcendental:

Flappy Bird is not amateurish nor sociopathic. Instead, it is something more unusual. It is earnest. It is exactly what it is, and it is unapologetic. Not even unapologetic—stoic, aloof. Impervious. Like a meteorite that crashed through a desert motel lobby, hot and small and unaware.

I flap, therefore I am.

Happy 10th Birthday, Facebook

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Today is the 10th anniversary of the founding of Facebook. The social network has come a long way, and in a blog post, Mark Zuckerberg reflects on its trajectory from a Harvard-only network to the worldwide use of it today:

When I reflect on the last 10 years, one question I ask myself is: why were we the ones to build this? We were just students. We had way fewer resources than big companies. If they had focused on this problem, they could have done it. 

The only answer I can think of is: we just cared more. 

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. 

We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

That last sentence? I believe it was true at the time, but it’s no longer as applicable. Today, as a public corporation, the customers/users are less important that the big shareholders. The biggest evidence I see of this is the repeated pronouncements by users who say their content is viewed/shared less after Facebook tweaked its algorithms. But, if you are willing to pay a few dollars, Facebook will make sure to show your posts in your fans’ news feed. That’s a far cry from really caring about caring to connect the world, if what I have to share/say with my friends/fans literally comes at a price.

 

Before Laika: the Soviet Space Dogs

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This is a very interesting post on Medium about the dogs the Soviets sent into space in the 1950s:

While the US test rocket programme used monkeys, about two thirds of whom died, dogs were chosen by the Soviets for their ability to withstand long periods of inactivity, and were trained extensively before they flew. Only stray female dogs were used because it was thought they’d be better able to cope with the extreme stress of spaceflight, and the bubble-helmeted spacesuits designed for the programme were equipped with a device to collect feces and urine that only worked with females.

Training included standing still for long periods, wearing the spacesuits, being confined in increasingly small boxes for 15-20 days at a time, riding in centrifuges to simulate the high acceleration of launch, and being placed in machines that simulated the vibrations and loud noises of a rocket.

The first pair of dogs to travel to space were Dezik and Tsygan (“Gypsy”), who made it to 110km on 22 July 1951 and were recovered, unharmed by their ordeal, the next day. Dezik returned to space in September 1951 with a dog named Lisa, but neither survived the journey. After Dezik’s death, Tsygan was adopted by Anatoli Blagronravov, a physician who later worked closely with the United States at the height of the Cold War to promote international cooperation on spaceflight.

They were followed by Smelaya (“Brave”), who defied her name by running away the day before her launch was scheduled. She was found the next morning, however, and made a successful flight with Malyshka (“Babe”). Another runaway was Bolik, who successfully escaped a few days before her flight in September 1951. Her replacement was ignomoniously named ZIB — the Russian acronym for “Substitute for Missing Bolik”, and was a street dog found running around the barracks where the tests were being conducted. Despite being untrained for the mission, he made a successful flight and returned to Earth unharmed.

A good piece of trivia from the piece: Laika wasn’t the original name for the most famous of Russian space dogs; it was named Kudryavka (Russian: Кудрявка, meaning Little Curly) before its name was changed.

Can You Tickle Yourself If You Swap Bodies With Someone?

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The short answer is no. According to latest research, summarized here:

A popular, long-standing theory posits that the self-tickle failure occurs because of the way that the brain cancels out sensations caused by its own movements. To do this, so the theory states, the brain uses the motor command underlying a given action to make a prediction of the likely sensory consequences of that action. When incoming sensory information matches the prediction, it’s recognised as self-generated and cancelled.

If this explanation is true, then any situations that confuse the brain’s ability to predict the sensory consequences of its own actions should scupper the sensory cancellation process, thereby making self-tickling a possibility. George Van Doorn and his colleagues have put this principle to the test in dramatic fashion. They measured the potential for self-tickling in 23 participants who underwent a body-swap illusion.

The experimental set-up involved each participant sitting opposite the experimenter. The participant wore a pair of goggles that displayed a video feed from a camera that was either placed forward-facing on the participant’s own head (giving them a conventional first-person perspective), or was positioned forward-facing on the experimenter’s head, thus giving the participant a view from the experimenter’s perspective and provoking a body-swap illusion.

During both of these camera arrangements, the participant and experimenter each held one end of a wooden rod with foam at each end. The participant either moved the rod rhythmically with their right hand, causing the foam to rub against their own left palm (potentially causing self-tickling), and the experimenter’s left palm. Or, the experimenter was the one who moved the rod, causing the foam to rub against’s participant’s left palm (i.e. potential for tickling by another person) and his own left palm.

During the body-swap illusion, the participants said they felt the sensation of the foam, not where their real hand was located, but at the position of the experimenter’s hand. Given the illusion, they perceived this to be their own hand, even though it looked like someone else’s. Crucially, even in this strange situation, the participants were still unable to tickle themselves if they were the ones moving the rod (they felt the foam, but it didn’t tickle). They felt much more of tickling sensation when it was the experimenter who moved the rod.

The classic theory for why we can’t tickle ourselves is unable to explain why tickling is still not possible even in such extreme illusory contexts when the brain’s ability to predict the sensory outcomes of its actions is thrown into disarray. Moreover, self-tickling was still not experienced even in variations of the experimental setup, in which the body-swap illusion was combined with the “rubber hand illusion” and the movement of the foam was felt in a baseball bat viewed from the experimenter’s perspective!

 

RIP, Phillip Seymour Hoffman

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The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are reporting that Phillip Seymour Hoffman has died, reportedly from a drug overdose. What a sad day, a giant loss, one of the best actors of his generations.

Worth reading today, this 2008 profile of the actor in New York Times Magazine “A Higher Calling”:

From his first roles in movies like “Scent of a Woman,” in which he played a villainous prep-school student, to the lovesick Scotty J. in “Boogie Nights,” to the passionate and ornery rock critic Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous,” Hoffman has imbued all his characters with a combination of the familiar and the unique. It’s not easy; it’s the sort of acting that requires enormous range, as well as a kind of stubborn determination and a profound lack of vanity. In the theater, Hoffman finds refuge in being part of a community. Theater presents considerable difficulties — Hoffman said his most challenging role for the stage was as Jamie Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” on Broadway (“That nearly killed me”). But when he speaks about his work in films, Hoffman’s struggles sound lonelier: his childhood dream was to be on the stage, and the fulfillment of that fantasy seems to mitigate some of the strain Hoffman experiences when he is acting.

“In my mid-20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

For all of his struggles, Hoffman works a lot — he’s a very active co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, a multicultural collective in New York that specializes in new American plays. LAB mounted five productions last year, thanks in large part to Hoffman’s diligent involvement with every aspect of the process, from fund-raising to directing to acting. “I’ve seen him tear tickets and seat people at LAB productions,” said John Patrick Shanley, the writer and director of “Doubt” and himself a LAB company member. In his 17-year-long career, Hoffman has also made more than 40 films, including “Doubt,” for which he has been nominated for a Golden Globe as best supporting actor, and “Synecdoche, New York,” which was also released this year. “Synecdoche,” which was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, is a hugely ambitious film that deals with death and art and how they come to inform one another. Hoffman plays a theater director, Caden Cotard, who wins a MacArthur and uses the prize money to begin an autobiographical play so enormous that it swallows his actual life. The movie is, as Manohla Dargis wrote in her glowing review in The Times, “about . . . the search for an authentic self in an unauthentic world.” The plot may get murky and the worlds within worlds (within worlds) are often confusing, but the film lingers in your memory, largely because of Hoffman’s performance. As he grows old, disintegrates, misses romantic connections and suffers loss after loss in pursuit of his artistic vision, Hoffman remains the emotional center of the film.

A torturous soul, he reflected on the art of acting being the same:

But that deep kind of love comes at a price: for me, acting is torturous, and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great — well, that’s absolutely torturous.

RIP, Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

The One Interview Question That Truly Matters

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According to Lou Adler, the following interview question is the most important one to ask in order to gain insight about a candidate. According to Adler, it took more than ten years of trial and error to reach this consensus:

What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?

And the explanation:

To see why this simple question is so powerful, imagine you’re the candidate and I’ve just asked you this question. What accomplishment would you select?

Then imagine that over the course of the next 15-20 minutes I asked you the following follow-up questions. How would you respond?

  • Can you give me a detailed overview of the accomplishment?
  • Tell me about the company, your title, your position, your role, and the team involved.
  • What were the actual results achieved?
  • When did it take place and how long did the project take?
  • Why were you chosen?
  • What were the 3-4 biggest challenges you faced and how did you deal with them?
  • Where did you go the extra mile or take the initiative?
  • Walk me through the plan, how you managed it, and its measured success.
  • Describe the environment and resources.
  • Explain your manager’s style and whether you liked it.
  • What were the technical skills needed to accomplish the objective and how were they used?
  • What were some of the biggest mistakes you made?
  • What aspects of the project did you truly enjoy?
  • What aspects did you not especially care about and how did you handle them?
  • Give examples of how you managed and influenced others.
  • How did you change and grow as a person?
  • What you would do differently if you could do it again?
  • What type of formal recognition did your receive?

With an accomplishment big enough, and answers detailed enough to fill 20 minutes, this one line of questioning can tell an interviewer everything he or she needs to know about a candidate. The insight gained is remarkable. But the real secret ingredient is not the question; that’s just a setup. The most important elements are the details underlying the accomplishment. This is what real interviewing is about — delving into the details.

My favorite question when I do interviews: what have you built? Describe it.

Marc Andreessen on the Future of Bitcoin

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Marc Andreessen, writing in The New York Times, has a very good piece titled “Why Bitcoin Matters” explaining Bitcoin and its potential. You have to remember that Mr. Andreessen has skin in the game (to quote Nassim Taleb), because he will do very well if Bitcoin succeeds. However, it is still worth the read.

What’s the future of Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a classic network effect, a positive feedback loop. The more people who use Bitcoin, the more valuable Bitcoin is for everyone who uses it, and the higher the incentive for the next user to start using the technology. Bitcoin shares this network effect property with the telephone system, the web, and popular Internet services like eBay and Facebook.

In fact, Bitcoin is a four-sided network effect. There are four constituencies that participate in expanding the value of Bitcoin as a consequence of their own self-interested participation. Those constituencies are (1) consumers who pay with Bitcoin, (2) merchants who accept Bitcoin, (3) “miners” who run the computers that process and validate all the transactions and enable the distributed trust network to exist, and (4) developers and entrepreneurs who are building new products and services with and on top of Bitcoin.

All four sides of the network effect are playing a valuable part in expanding the value of the overall system, but the fourth is particularly important.

All over Silicon Valley and around the world, many thousands of programmers are using Bitcoin as a building block for a kaleidoscope of new product and service ideas that were not possible before. And at our venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, we are seeing a rapidly increasing number of outstanding entrepreneurs – not a few with highly respected track records in the financial industry – building companies on top of Bitcoin.

For this reason alone, new challengers to Bitcoin face a hard uphill battle. If something is to displace Bitcoin now, it will have to have sizable improvements and it will have to happen quickly. Otherwise, this network effect will carry Bitcoin to dominance.

One immediately obvious and enormous area for Bitcoin-based innovation is international remittance. Every day, hundreds of millions of low-income people go to work in hard jobs in foreign countries to make money to send back to their families in their home countries – over $400 billion in total annually, according to the World Bank. Every day, banks and payment companies extract mind-boggling fees, up to 10 percent and sometimes even higher, to send this money.

Switching to Bitcoin, which charges no or very low fees, for these remittance payments will therefore raise the quality of life of migrant workers and their families significantly. In fact, it is hard to think of any one thing that would have a faster and more positive effect on so many people in the world’s poorest countries.

Moreover, Bitcoin generally can be a powerful force to bring a much larger number of people around the world into the modern economic system. Only about 20 countries around the world have what we would consider to be fully modern banking and payment systems; the other roughly 175 have a long way to go. As a result, many people in many countries are excluded from products and services that we in the West take for granted. Even Netflix, a completely virtual service, is only available in about 40 countries. Bitcoin, as a global payment system anyone can use from anywhere at any time, can be a powerful catalyst to extend the benefits of the modern economic system to virtually everyone on the planet.

And even here in the United States, a long-recognized problem is the extremely high fees that the “unbanked” — people without conventional bank accounts – pay for even basic financial services. Bitcoin can be used to go straight at that problem, by making it easy to offer extremely low-fee services to people outside of the traditional financial system.

A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. Micropayments have never been feasible, despite 20 years of attempts, because it is not cost effective to run small payments (think $1 and below, down to pennies or fractions of a penny) through the existing credit/debit and banking systems. The fee structure of those systems makes that nonviable.

All of a sudden, with Bitcoin, that’s trivially easy. Bitcoins have the nifty property of infinite divisibility: currently down to eight decimal places after the dot, but more in the future. So you can specify an arbitrarily small amount of money, like a thousandth of a penny, and send it to anyone in the world for free or near-free.

I think this is the most interesting/compelling use of Bitcoin to me:

Think about content monetization, for example. One reason media businesses such as newspapers struggle to charge for content is because they need to charge either all (pay the entire subscription fee for all the content) or nothing (which then results in all those terrible banner ads everywhere on the web). All of a sudden, with Bitcoin, there is an economically viable way to charge arbitrarily small amounts of money per article, or per section, or per hour, or per video play, or per archive access, or per news alert.

For example, I don’t want to pay the monthly subscription to The New York Times, because while I read a lot on the site, I don’t see the benefit of paying for a subscription when I can get to the articles for free via social media channels. But if the cost was something small, say $0.05 per article, then I would be more inclined to browse from the homepage directly.

The Most Visited Content at The New York Times in 2013

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I’ve blogged a few of the selections below, but this is what The New York Times claims were the most visited pieces of content at its site in 2013:

1. How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk: http://nyti.ms/19ACHVs

2. Blasts at Boston Marathon Kill 3 and Injure 100: http://nyti.ms/1dfCCl4

3. 2nd Bombing Suspect Caught After Frenzied Hunt Paralyzes Boston: http://nyti.ms/1dDrTp8

4. My Medical Choice, by Angelina Jolie: http://nyti.ms/KnYJyJ

5. A Plea for Caution from Russia, by Vladimir Putin: http://nyti.ms/1jbLTTf

6. The Scientific 7-Minute Workout: http://nyti.ms/1b8HmsW

7. Site of the Explosions at the Boston Marathon: http://nyti.ms/1jaKhGX

8. Invisible Child: http://nyti.ms/1dZ8g7i

9. The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food: http://nyti.ms/1mieYwu

10. Cardinals Pick Bergoglio, Who Will Be Pope Francis: http://nyti.ms/1gWRzwC

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(via @nytimes FB page)

Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It

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In a newly filed patent, Amazon wants to ship a package to your door before you click “buy.” The Wall Street Journal has the scoop:

In deciding what to ship, Amazon said it may consider previous orders, product searches, wish lists, shopping-cart contents, returns and even how long an Internet user’s cursor hovers over an item.

Today, Amazon receives an order, then labels packages with addresses at its warehouses and loads them onto waiting UPS, USPS or other trucks, which may take them directly to customers’ homes or load them onto other trucks for final delivery.

It has been working to cut delivery times, expanding its warehouse network to begin overnight and same-day deliveries. Last year, Amazon said it is working on unmanned flying vehicles that could take small packages to homes directly from its warehouses.

In the patent, Amazon does not estimate how much the technique will reduce delivery times.

As for me, I’m looking forward to Amazon drones delivering my packages that I didn’t even order.

Consciousness as a State of Matter Like Liquid, Solid, or Gas

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I’ve stumbled upon a fascinating new paper recently titled “Consciousness as a State of Matter” (PDF link), authored by physicist Max Tegmark at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I confess to have only read the first few pages of the paper, but the abstract (and introductory sections) intrigued me deeply:

We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, “perceptronium”, with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids and gases: the information, integration, independence, dynamics and utility principles. If such principles can identify conscious entities, then they can help solve the quantum factorization problem: why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say), and more generally, why do we perceive the world around us as a dynamic hierarchy of objects that are strongly integrated and relatively independent? Tensor factorization of matrices is found to play a central role, and our technical results include a theorem about Hamiltonian separability (defined using Hilbert-Schmidt superoperators) being maximized in the energy eigenbasis. Our approach generalizes Giulio Tononi’s integrated information framework for neural-network-based consciousness to arbitrary quantum systems, and we find interesting links to error-correcting codes, condensed matter criticality, and the Quantum Darwinism program, as well as an interesting connection between the emergence of consciousness and the emergence of time.

In the paper, Tegmark discusses the importance of characterizing consciousness as a state of matter like a solid, liquid, or gas:

What are the corresponding physical parameters that can help us identify conscious matter, and what are the key physical features that characterize it? If such parameters can be identi ed, understood and measured, this will help us identify (or at least rule out) consciousness from the outside”, without access to subjective introspection. This could be important for reaching consensus on many currently controversial topics, ranging from the future of arti cial intelligence to determining when an animal, fetus or unresponsive patient can feel pain. If would also be important for fundamental theoretical physics, by allowing us to identify conscious observers in our universe by using the equations of physics…

He then goes on to describe concepts of memory, Computronium (“the most general substance that can process information as a computer”), and Perceptronium (“the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware”). A good summary of the paper is found in this post on Medium:

Tegmark uses this new way of thinking about consciousness as a lens through which to study one of the fundamental problems of quantum mechanics known as the quantum factorisation problem.

This arises because quantum mechanics describes the entire universe using three mathematical entities: an object known as a Hamiltonian that describes the total energy of the system; a density matrix that describes the relationship between all the quantum states in the system; and Schrodinger’s equation which describes how these things change with time.

The problem is that when the entire universe is described in these terms, there are an infinite number of mathematical solutions that include all possible quantum mechanical outcomes and many other even more exotic possibilities.

The entire paper, for those brave enough, would make for excellent bedside reading. Consciousness is one of those topics that I think a lot about (first having encountered it at Caltech via Kristof Koch’s book, The Quest for Consciousness).