Life and NetHack

I guess that likening living to NetHack is what people call the "ultimate-geekery" think to do. But this philosophical thought came to me as while I was lying on my bed, motor skills clumsy as an infant, desire to move that of an elderly, arm over a pillow over my face in an attempt to shield my fragile eyes and even more delicate, groggy mind from the washed-out colors of the morning. That ain't exactly compelling. Enough of my physical state of being then.

Now, as to my mental state of being, I was doing what I loved best when unable to move. Making weird connections. Y'know, some scientists (psychologists? Behaviorists?) theorize that when people dream, they are making connections between their experiences, running through the branching film roll of scenarios that we call our intellect. Cool, then. But weirdly, I was thinking about how I really wanted some sincere friends who were constantly available. I was feeling bitter.

On to NetHack. In life, you start off an infant, unfamiliar with the world; in NetHack, it's the same; you start off knowing the ? button; you later discover the yubnhjkl, q for quaff, the #force and #loot, ^D for kick, e for eat, put, wear, pay shopkeeper, wield, &c.

You start off with nothing. Not even the knowledge of now to navigate your world, let along survive the obstacles and denizens lurking within. All you have are your friends to teach you the controls, or the in-game manual that will be able to teach you the basics of the game; the advanced stuff you'll still have to learn yourself or through discussion. Think parents.

As you progress, you come across items that you may benefit you, or that may harm you. Each item has a special method of effect, that may be good in some situations, bad in others and without effect in still more. Think of your opportunities in life. You can try them out blindly, but that will lead you to disaster. You can wait till some time later to try them, but your limited luggage means that you will have to leave some of them behind.

As you descend, the creatures get stronger. You can stay behind and venture slowly, but your character's Hunger dictates that you try to kill as many monsters as possible. Curiosity leads you out to try new things, but you notice that what curiosity leads you to do ultimately benefits you.

As you play the game, and die several times, you learn new paradigms, and you hear of paradigms in discussions. In this way, the knowledge you acquire is like the knowledge and advice around you in. Some are useful, some are malicious, some are dumb. But in NetHack you can learn through repetition, while in life you can only learn from the failed attempts of others.

And, what differentiates NetHack from contemporary games is that hoarding is not good in NetHack. Crises come fast and brutal, and that is when your best items will save you. Crises aren't epic or anything. Usually, a crisis is a dumb accident that would have been prevented if you were more careful, or did your research. And sometimes, they can't be prevented at all. And usually, they take either your soul, or some of the most ingenious thinking you've ever done, along with some of your most precious items. There is hardly a way to solve a crisis simply by waiting it out or just using your sword. There's nothing epic to anything to be proud about it. Your precious items are useless without an accident that requires their use. But without preparation, you are dead.

Dead.

notice


PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.


SHACKS

I'm thinking of founding a club/association. It will be callled SHACKS.

SHACKS stands for Singapore Hackers' Association for Computing Knowledge: SHACKS.

Now, this SHACKS at the end stands for something else. It stands for Singapore Hackers' Association for Cultural Knowledge: SHACKS.

Now, this SHACKS at the end stands for something else. It stands for Suzumiya Haruhi's Association for Contemporary Kids: SHACKS.

Now, this SHACKS at the end stands for something else. It stands for Singapore Hackers' Association for Computing Knowledge: SHACKS.

Now, SHACKS has goals.

1. To accumulate a library of literary classics, cultural tomes, papers and textbooks. No droll and boring stuff allowed. Computer manuals have a priority.
   
2. To fund laptops for all the members. Members must strictly use Linux, preferably Debian. Excessive use of Windows will not be tolerated. People who evangalize Windows will be banned. Minor usage of Windows for gaming purposes is acceptable, but chronic gamers will be expelled. Homebrew gaming is encouraged. Commercial games are to be hated. Games with interesting and innovative marketing strategies like Guild Wars are an exception.
   
3. To have a community where members discuss and give each other presentations on topics relevant to the contemporary hacker. Namely, Intellectual Property, Self-organization & Self-teaching, Programming, Computer Science, Applicatons of Computer Science, Linguistics, Languages, and the History of Cultures. Once again, presentations about Droll and Boring are banned.
4. To encourage people to stop debating endlessly on the ethics of helping people and Just Fucking Contribute.
5. To have a pyramid model of proselytizers to conquer the world for SHACKS.
   

Perl and Python: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War analogy

• Perl: The Orks. There's More Than One Way To Do Something. Insanely buffed infantry and head-scratching kludged-together technology salvaged from shell-scripting, awk, C and sed. An extremely idiomatic tribe. There're the Sluggas, the Shootas, the Stormboyz, the Tankbustaz and what have you in one swarm of green. And they don't get along well together.
  
• Python: The Imperial Guard. The one obvious way of doing things. Heavy Artillery built on the workhorse Guardsman-Commissar-Grenade Launchers (i.e. tuples, lists).
• I'll write about Lisp once I try it out. I'll probably parallel it to the Eldars

Even in practice. Perl is fine for small projects and scripts, while Python manages to perform for greater projects despite its awfully slow interpretation. (Think Guardsmen in early game.)

The Hacker Crackdown

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm

I was trying out the SDF

[01] WHAT IS SDF? (QUICK SUMMARY)

Welcome to the only all 64bit public access supercomputing center!

The Super Dimension Fortress is a networked community of free software
authors, teachers, students, researchers, hobbyists, enthusiasts and
the blind. It is operated as a federally recognised non-profit 501(c)7
and is supported by its members.

Our mission is to provide remotely accessible computing facilities for
the advancement of public education, cultural enrichment, scientific
research and recreation. Members can interact electronically with each
other regardless of their location using passive or interactive forums.
Further purposes include the recreational exchange of information
concerning the Liberal and Fine Arts.

Members have access to games, email, usenet, chat, bboard, gopherspace,
webspace, programming utilities, archivers, browsers, and more. The SDF
community is made up of caring, highly skilled people who operate behind
the scenes and in the underground to maintain a non-commercial INTERNET.

What can I say? This is super.

This Slashdot Post

This Slashdot post made me swing from pro-designer-children to anti-designer-children

Random vs Heuristic (Score:4, Interesting)

by ObsessiveMathsFreak (773371) Alter Relationship <`obsessivemathsfreak' `at' `eircom.net'> on Wednesday June 17, @12:54AM (#28349483) Homepage Journal

It seems to me possible that if people select their offspring intentionally based on genetic information, then we will tend to have less diversity of outcomes, which will impact evolution,

CORRECTAMUNDO!!!

Evolution is defined as natural selection of random mutations. It's surprising just how many geeks, who should be very familiar with what "random" means, will still advocate the idea of genetic selection and manipulation of offspring. I personally think it's from reading too many sci-fi novels in which "genetic manipulation" results in supermen or the like.

Once our society begins selecting and/or rejecting offspring based on their genes, or we begin manipulating our genetic codes, evolution stops. We won't have moved into another kind of evolution. We won't be make our evolution more efficient. We'll have stopped evolving altogether, at least in the only way we understand the evolution of organism.

In technical terms, we will have moved humanity from a local random search to a heuristics based local search. The difference cannot be emphasized enough. Here we have a local random search for better organisms that has delivered incredible(literally to some) results over millions of years. Yet people are proposing replacing that system with heuristics that have no other qualification other than certain people think they will lead to improvement. Genetic manipulation advocates fail Optimisation 101.

Some will argue that parents have the right to procreate in any way they choose. But as I've advocated before, rights do not scale up. Just because it seems right that one person should be able to do something, you cannot just inductively apply that logic to the entire population. And when you grant a right, that's exactly who you grant it to. Everybody.

I'd liken genetic manipulation to interbreeding. Some people think it should be moral to marry your cousin or even sibling. They can even make a good case for why they should be entitled to do so. But if you scaled that right up to the entire populations, we'd all end up inbred, sickly and probably mentally retarded within a hundred or so years. Genetic selection promises much the same outcome, except genetic homogeneity will occur on a population wide scale.

Inductively scaling procreation rights up can easily lead us to a tall, trim, blue eyed, blond haired, heap of flu-ridden corpses. The very fact that this clinic offered such frivolities as eye and hair colour screening shows that this is exactly what will happen if we replace proven randomness with such vapid heuristics.

--
May the Maths Be with you!