After digesting James Devlin’s articulate (and still ongoing) series on building a poker bot, an obvious near-term prediction can be made: prepare for a future of bot on bot action. That is, as more knowledge of building software that can play on-line poker masquerading as humans spreads, inevitably the ratio of bots to humans will increase. Far from causing the on-line poker industry to collapse, it will thrive under such conditions, gaining more and more “players”, even as the proportion of actual humans in a virtual seat shrinks. An average of humans-per-table may never hit zero, but it could become vanishingly small. Once it gets lower than 1.0, most on-line poker games will be bots vs. other bots.

A good number of these bots, possibly large subsets of them, will be colluding. Since this requires communication between them in some way, what you will have here are distributed expert systems, programmed for conflict. In short, you’re halfway to Skynet. This, I think, would be a much better story for the Terminator franchise: where Skynet arises out of an intense escalation of poker-bot conflict, and the extermination of the human race is merely the side effect of Skynet’s (successful, though misguided) obliteration of all opposing poker bots.

Devlin’s articles also paint a picture of how disturbingly easy it is to hijack software on the Windows platform. There’s some Skynet potential there as well. For example, it is easy to see how a zombie network could easily become a poker playing powerhouse. Chances are one or more of them already is.

Image from a lego model by robbed.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I just left a comment on samaBlog kvetching about the tenacity of the stupid Imperial measurement system that continues to thrive in the U.S., as well as the U.K., Liberia and Myanmar. (Measurement is completely arbitrary; you might as well choose a system that at least makes some sense internally. How many inches in a furlong again?) Shortly after, I noticed that (in addition to running out of fours for their signs) some gas stations are now selling gas by the half gallon.

This is, apparently, being done because their pumps don’t support prices higher than $3.999, rather than the psychological reasons you might expect. It would be hilarious, however, if this kind of thing conspires with the price of oil to convert American gas pumps to charge by the liter, essentially using greed, bad hardware programming and laziness to force us kicking and screaming into a new metric dawn.

I also fully recommend that any hydrogen stations that open should use liters, as the price will then look ridiculously low compared to gasoline.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The plague of reality television has spawned some unexpected phenomena over its decade-long life. Most interestingly, shows that allowed public voting demonstrated that people had both the desire and the means to organically organize to rig elections on a massive scale. Once again, the internet demonstrates its core competency, connecting strangers in weird ways, in this case through nexus sites like Vote for the Worst.

The question that’s been bugging me this morning: how to harness this ability? Any thoughts?

Popularity: 5% [?]

Although I’ve used Duover for backups until now, I’ve decided to stop using it for two reasons. The first is that it seems to be floundering with the release of Leopard, making backups incredibly slowly, and generally flaking out. As an example, a daily backup from my kitchen machine took about 20 minutes under Tiger but, even with the latest Duover update, was taking over four days under Leopard. Not at all useful. Secondly, Time Machine is just really useful and cool.

So, I’ve just installed a 1TB Time Capsule backup device into my home network. It’s been a real breeze to setup, even for an Apple product. Simply just works. Even though I was pretty sure it would do what I wanted it to, I had a nagging suspicion that my network setup might trip it up, but this turned out to be groundless. My home uses two different wireless networks, one using 802.11g, to serve the older machines, and one using 802.11n to serve the newer machines at the best speed. (Hardware that runs 802.11n can also support 802.11g simultaneously, but doing so really slows down the 802.11n portion.) The additional speed on the 802.11n network makes a huge difference when streaming HD video to the Apple TV (though the g network can handle DVD level video just fine). My setup works basically like this:

I wasn’t 100% sure the kitchen machine (”Nexus”) would be able to see the backup service, but it works fine, just as a good network service should. As long as the machine and the device are on the same LAN, it appears to make no difference how it actually gets there, just as you’d expect. (That initial backup sure is slow, though.)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Once again, I have updated my recommended Mac OS X software page. It’s been over two years since my last update, though much remains the same.

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Another hideously stupid format war that did absolutely nothing to help consumers is over: Blu-ray wins. Oh, it will be a while before HD-DVD figures this out, but it’s done. You’ll find a number of people saying this lately, largely because of the recent defection of Warner Brothers to the Blu-ray format. This, and things like Apple most likely including Blu-ray drives in the next generation of its machines, are important of course, but I’m calling the war for Blu-ray for a different reason: porn.

Early on, I guessed that HD-DVD would win the format war for the same reason that VHS beat the superior Betamax: it better met the needs of porn producers (cheaper to make, longer running lengths, etc.). And, indeed, HD-DVD appears to dominate pornography in the United States. After some exaustive research (link not work safe) on my part, I can confirm that finding porn titles in HD-DVD is much easier than finding them in Blu-ray. For some time, Sony was actively preventing porn from being available on Blu-ray, but not any more, starting with Debbie Does Dallas Again. So, it appears that porn is at least producing in both formats at the moment, even though HD-DVD is still (by far) more common in porn.

This, however, does not matter. Whatever role porn did or didn’t play in the VHS vs. Betamax war, it will turn out not to have much impact on the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray war, which is the main reason I think this war is now over. There are two things that are different this time around that make this so.

First, porn now has many more outlets than it did in the VHS days. Back then, if you wanted porn, your only choices were theaters or videotape. These days, with rule 34 in full effect on the internet, porn is now almost impossible to avoid. Those looking for high-definition porn are much more likely to find it in some downloadable format than either of the DVD formats.

This pales next to the other reason, though. After even more painstaking research, I have now realized the truth: high resolution porn breaks the illusion. The quality is too good, turning porn into a festival of pimples, surgical scars and razor burn. Some companies are adapting to this, but these are likely to be companies that actually care about production quality, which most porn makers do not.

Taking porn out of the equation knocks a big…leg out from under HD-DVD. While it will still take far to long for HD-DVD to die, it’s now safe stick a fork in it for your purchasing choices.

Update: The death spiral is happening faster than I thought it would. Glad to see that companies that care about this war seem to think it is as stupid and useless as I do.

Popularity: 8% [?]

As reported by Fake Steve Jobs, an article recently penned by Jaron Lanier makes an argument in favor of closed source development. This is not necessarily an anti-open source stance, as Lanier claims it has its place, but…

…a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.

Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, ithasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.

A couple of years ago, my friend MV mentioned another, more encapsulated example of how closed source can build better solutions. I haven’t seen it mentioned much, so will repeat it here.

The example comes from the very early days of the graphical user interface. Once you start to build a system that has “windows” that can move around, you have to contend with the idea that these windows overlap. Even if each window is a rectangle, it doesn’t take many windows to make some complicated shapes. Even two windows can do so. Consider this image of an early Mac desktop from the Apple Museum:

The “System Folder” window is easy enough to represent, but how do you describe the shape of the visible portion of the “Mac System Software” window? What about the visible portion of the gray background? It’s just a collection of intersecting rectangles, but think about it for a second: how would you describe such shapes to a computer? Oh, and you only have 128K of Memory and an 8MHz, 16-bit processor. When building a GUI, you have to deal with this issue at some level. For example, something is painting the desktop background; how does it know not to paint over the windows? (For those that know a bit about graphics, double buffering doesn’t help you here, because a) you don’t have the memory and b) it is to slow on chips like this.)

The general concept for describing such shapes became known as “regions”. There are a number of different ways to implement regions. It was clear that Xerox PARC had one when the Apple team famously visited. It wasn’t at all clear what that implementation was, however, as it was closed source. Lacking access to Xerox’ methods, engineer Bill Atkinson took a look at the problem, figured out how they must have done it, and coded his version into the drawing system that would become QuickDraw.

It turns out, however, that Atkinson’s region code wasn’t really anything like Xerox’ code. It was much better. Better, in fact, than most other systems that came along, particularly the implementation used later by Windows. In an anecdote about Atkinson and regions, Andy Hertzfeld says that Apple “considered QuickDraw’s speed and deftness at region handling to be the most significant ‘crown jewel’ in Apple’s entire arsenal.”

This brilliant system (now supplanted by code that takes better advantage of modern hardware, particularly video cards) probably wouldn’t have happened if the Xerox code had been open source. Atkinson most likely would have started with their solution and refined it, and a bit of genius would have never been born.

Popularity: 9% [?]