Tim Wintle's Blog

Game Baker 0.1.2

Game Baker, the Game Maker for Linux (and all other operating systems including Windows, OSX etc.) has released version 0.1.2 . This version introduces a couple of new features, and a debian package for simple installation on Ubuntu.

I have been too busy to put aside serious time to work on the project, but luckly the other members have been busy. John Gunderman has done some cleaning of some of my (rather messy) code, making it much easier for us all to continue work, fixing bugs, and documentation, while Victoria Wang has done some amazing work creating graphics, as you can see from the character below (which is our new icon).

This version now allows you to run code as soon as your game starts, allowing you to import modules at the global level (try importing a large python module every itteration and you'll see what I mean). You can also pick a sprite for game objects straight from the GUI, which means less code to write.

This version is definately still an alpha version - our eventual goal is to remove the need to write any code, but you can start getting to grips with the software now.

To install Game Baker under Ubuntu, click to download the Debian package, and open it with your package manager. For other operating systems (Windows, Mac etc), head over to the download page and download the .zip, then follow the instructions in the readme file.

If you are interested in helping with the development of Game Baker then head over to the Developer Group and request a membership - we're very friendly, and everyone can help, by testing out the latest versions and pointing out (normally my) mistakes, creating graphics for demo games, tutorials on using the system, or by helping to code the engine or GUI.

Looking at Linear A

Linear A is a language discovered around 1900 by Arthur Evans, and thought to have been used in ancient Crete over three and a half thousand years ago, before the invasion of the Myceneans. Although a similar form of writing (Linear B) was deciphered in 1952, what makes Linear A so interesting is that nobody has yet been able to discover exactly what language is being spoken (although various people have made suggestions).

I first came across Linear A through my classics teacher at school, but having re-read Simon Singh's "The Code Book" (a great read for a wide range of people), I eventually got around to having a closer look at it.

Now, I'm no linguistical expert (I only just passed my Classical Greek GCSE), but I have got some experience in various techniques related to computational linguistics, so I thought I would see what I could make of it. Not exactly having an abundant amount of free time, I haven't had a really close look yet, but I thought I would still post this as I find it remarkably interesting (which is something considering I dropped every language I had studied at school as soon as I started my A-levels)

I soon came across John Younger's wonderful online source of Linear A texts, and copied them into a format that I could run though my own software to analyse easily. I soon found several problems, though:

There are very few repeated (complete) words
There are over 63 common letters (each letter corresponds to a syllable), which means you need far more text to perform statistics on than you would in English, with only 26
Most of the surviving texts are in the form of accounting documents, consisting of a person's name, a symbol representing a type of good, and a number - so little regular language use.

So far I have focused on trying to extend the known texts with a couple of letters either side (where the text is missing, or cannot be read with certainty). Initially I worked out the most common letters (unigrams). Here is the list of the number of times I have counted each letter in the text I have analysed (I only looked at texts that had more than one letter together):

Count	Letter (using the notation of J. Younger)
166	A
147	JA
141	NA
137	KU
132	I
123	TA
121	SA
114	SI
112	DA
104	MA
102	KA
101	RE
100	RA
96	TI
96	KI
91	DI
88	TE

A standard way to continue when you find a letter in the origional text that cannot be read with certainty, may be to work down the list of letters and pick the most commonly used letter that seems possible, however this is a very basic way to approach the task.

It would then seem to make sense to look at bigrams, and to see (given the previous or next letter) what is the most commonly occuring letter, however you can instantly see a potential problem with this. With only 166 occurences of the most common letter, each pair of letters would only be expected to occur twice even if every letter was equally likely to follow the common letter. Another problem is shown by looking at the most common pair of letters. I found that the most common pair of letters was "KU-RO" - occuring 39 times - but it turns out that KU-RO is believed to be a word that translates as "Total", so this turns out to be an ineffective way of looking at the text.

Having said all of this, I have found that looking at Linear A is a highly addictive hobby, and I expect I will spend many more days looking at it over the coming years - and since new texts are still being found, the stats we can get from looking at the text will keep getting better.

You Can Be Too Green - the Living Water Jug

(Video Further down the page, but read this first)

In the UK today Google has turned the entire homepage black to remind people about "earth hour" - when the public are encouraged to switch all their lights off for an hour. It's a great idea, and I hope it will work better than the E-Day did.

E-Day was a day when the British public were encouraged to switch off their lights and electronic equipment, to see how much effect it could have on the electricity usage. Unfortunately for them, when the day came energy usage increased by 0.1 percent

Google's message today did remind me of some adverts I had seen a couple of months ago that I just thought were taking "Green' a little too far, I've been meaning to post them, so here is the first one:

This ad for a "living water vortex jug" offers to "make living water at home to improve your health"

In Case you cannot read this, this text says:

The Living Water Vortex Jug
Make Living Water at home and improve your Health!
Viktor Schauberger's
technology transforms tap, filtered or bottled water into biologically active living water, replicating the self cleansing spirals and vortices of a lively mountain stream.
�59.50[+p and p] free brochure

Great!

First, let's go back over why we treat water to begin with. The idea is that we take river water, which is full of living things and poisons, filter it to remove contaminates such as traces of metals from the rocks, excess nitrogen etc. and kill all living organisms within the water (normally by using Ultra-Violet).

Why do we kill all the living organisms? We're not talking about fish here, we're talking about bacteria, fungus, parasites and viruses. The organisms commonly found in river water are known to cause Amoebiasis, Cryptosporidiosis, Cyclosporiasis, Giardiasis, and in some cases Aids.

The idea of the "Living Water Vortex Jug", though, is to take this filtered, safe water from your tap and to encourage these organisms to grow in it again. This is not only pointless, and a waste of power, but It's highly dangerous.

While writing up this post, I looked into this product more to check that I wasn't missing anything, and it seems I was - but not in a good way. Not only are they actually encouraging you to increase the amount of potentially deadly organisms you eat in the name of increasing your health, but companies selling this product make other claims.

Here is a video I found showing you how to use the Living water Vortex Jug - notice the suggested importance of playing the correct music to the water in order to give the water nice memories ;-). I don't know if this is all that you do, or if you leave it for a long time to allow organisms to grow, but please don't encourage your children to drink anything that you have inserted contaminate into.

Here is a great quote from a site that sells these:

"Typically, ...[water is] recycled as many as 20 times. Even if the physical contaminants have been removed, their vibrations "imprint" is still carried in the water in it's memory according to researchers such as Jacques Beneveniste [sic] and others*, no matter how many times it is recycles. ... [the vibrations] can transmit negative or destructive imprints that can cause disharmony or disease."

Firstly I would like to point out that, to my knowledge, there was only ever one study performed that is in any way related to their claims, and this was in fact performed under the supervision of Jacques Benveniste. However, this study was found to be completely unscientific, inconclusive, and possibly falsified, and it resulted in Jacques Benveniste being fired from his position at France's research body (Institut National de la Sant� et de la Recherche M�dicale) in 1990. ( Ref).

You see, on an molecular scale there are only two kinds of water - H2O (two hydrogen atoms, and one Oxygen), and 'Heavy Water' - where one of the Hydrogen atoms is replaced with a Deuterium atom - which is used in nuclear reactors. There is absolutely no way in which these molecules could possibly "remember" anything or have a "memory".

On a sub-atomic scale (within the atoms), people often get confused. At this scale, the atoms' energy is in the form of "vibrations" (a wave property). However, a process called Decoherence ensures that this form is lost as an atom interacts with other atoms (and in a single gram of water there are about 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms). This is a fact that is shown thousands of times each day in research labs over the world.

All in all, I seem to have gone off on a bit of a rant on this one - but I know from experience that the kind of people who believe in this always say there is something else to explain it, and I wanted to close off my argument as much as possible. (Although if you do have any kind of argument that you think justifies wasting this much power and putting yourself at risk to have a drink of water then feel free to comment - but please justify any comments with provable facts)

Memories

Well it is almost time for elections over in the US, so I thought I would post this (I didn't post the video, I'm just embedding it) - It brings back memories of when I was a teenager, when I saw NOFX sing this at Reading festival.

I don't want to get all political, but I think it is a sign that there is truly some freedom in a country when songs like this can become popular.

What is the Viral Ad Network?

So I've been talking about the viral ad network a lot recently (e.g. Viral Videos, Banner Blindness and Listening to myself speak), and about the work I have been doing working on some of the research into Average YouTube Views that I have been doing as a part of it, but I realised that I have not really explained what it is (actually I realised this when my mum called me the other night and asked me).

Here's the overview:
For a few years now the standard method of getting paid from advertising online has been Google AdSense. This was all fine in 2002, but it's five years later now and people are suffering banner blindness, they're just not clicking on traditional adverts as much any more. (in fact they're not even seeing them).

What is worse - running too many banners and AdSense blocks on your site can put your users off.

Most websites don't know about it yet, but there is another way. Advertisers are beginning to create adverts that are specifically designed to be entertaining. These adverts may be videos, games or mini websites, but they are all designed to spread virally (i.e. so that visitors find them so entertaining that they email them to a friend, who emails them to other friends, who email it to other friends.

Where You come into this
When a viral is first put on the web nobody knows about it, and to start off the "viral" growth, the ad companies need to do something called Viral Seeding, which is basically getting the first few thousand people to have a look at the game, movie, or whatever, hoping that they will send it around to their friends.

This is where website publishers come into it. By becoming a Viral Ad Publisher, you help the companies get the first few thousand views, and the Viral Ad Network gives you money for it.

I hope that helps to explain a little more about what the viral ad network is, if you're interested go over to the site and sign up, or if you just want to search for viral videos then head over to viralsauce.com - another site I have been working on recently.