Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

The prototyping for our “intelligent suitcase” (it optimizes your packing for trips) is progressing nicely. One of our members whipped up a cat-oriented error message.

The basic idea is that said suitcase would take a few inputs:

Then the system takes all of this information, processes it (the fun part of this assignment), and gives you back:

(this poses some interesting problems)

To do this, we need to equip the system with a knowledge base of sorts. It should (at the very least) know the following:

We’re also considering a speech engine, as it was brought up that a system that could verbalize packing instructions would be quite useful. The biggest problem is adapting what one should wear based on changing weather conditions. The system needs to work with the clean clothes you have left, etc.

It also needs to be able to prevent cats from being packed into the suitcase…

Every year, the Independent Games Festival holds a competition to “reward innovation in independent games,” giving recognition to titles developed by single people or small groups. In particular, the IGF focuses on games that break from the standard genres; the titles that usually win bring something new to the table. Today, I’ll be looking at the grand prize winner for 2008: a title recently picked up on the Steam distribution service called Audiosurf.

A fusion of racing, puzzle, and music games, Audiosurf is unique in that it builds its tracks based on music files on your computer. While there are a variety of game modes, the basic gist of Audiosurf is to create clusters of blocks of the same color by running them over. The more you string together, the more points you get. “Hot” colors like red and orange grant more points than “cool” colors like blue or white. The shape and intensity of each track is determined by analyzing a song; fast, hectic tunes lead to downsloping, block-laden tracks while slow, mellow songs slope upward and have fewer blocks. All of this has to be accomplished while avoiding grey blocks; hit too many and you’ll lose a slew of points when your futuristic “car” explodes. Since the song the track is based on plays through to the end, any time your car explodes it will automatically “reconstruct” itself after a set period of time. However, you won’t be able to pick up colored blocks in the interim, so be careful!

There are fourteen different game modes available in Audiosurf, although only six of them are unique. The other eight are permutations of the six main game modes, offering increased difficulty for players looking for a challenge. For a relaxing time, try Mono mode which only has two colors of blocks to contend with. Looking for a challenge? Try Double V mode where you have two cars to control at once. More competitive individuals will be thrilled to hear that there are high-score boards for each game mode and song title, so you can track your performance against others from across the globe.

There’s enough variety in the gameplay to hold your attention, but combined with a huge music library Audiosurf should remain a part of your gaming library for months to come. Anyone who is looking for a quirky alternative to the cookie-cutter titles plaguing the gaming market should consider Audiosurf as a refreshing alternative.

I’ve been doing some research for my latest Information Visualization paper on decision-making up here in the library, and I’m finding that the decision making process is influenced heavily by a number of cognitive biases, which are basically faults in the way we process information. While not all of them apply directly to the decision making process, anything that distorts or alters our information storage/retrieval/processing capabilities is also affecting our evaluations of various options. It seems like being able to effectively make decisions is as much about acknowledging and circumventing those biases as it is about managing attention and minimizing load on working memory.

The actual biases are really interesting to read about. While I don’t recommend relying on Wikipedia for your research papers, you can run some of cited names from these articles through Google Scholar and tap into a plethora of research.

Something else that’s really cool: if you happen to be at a college or university (like Bentley!), Google Scholar actually picks up on your IP range and points you towards full-text articles available at your school library. Nifty!