Weekly Links #105
Hello, everyone. I had yet another week of writing and editing, with
more editing and art coming, not to mention other things. So yeah,
still not much attention span to spare here. But the news are no less
worth it.
The big one this week was that a computer had beaten a world-class GO
champion. Which is incredibly meaningful, because it's not
the kind of problem you can solve with more processing power (unlike
the time when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov at chess). You have to build
genuine intelligence into your code -- and somebody did. It's part
of the same trend as self-driving cars; funny how fast AI has advanced
once we gave up on trying to blithely imitate people, and just treated
it like another tool in the box.
Anyway, in unrelated news, it turns out that procedural generation of
text predates computers by centuries. Which makes perfect
sense, because the concept of computation has been around for much
longer than the idea of an universal computer, and indeed doesn't
depend on it. In fact, there is a staggering variety of natural
processes that can perform computation — one of them, DNA
self-duplication, gave birth to us. That people thought of it (in a
very meta way it turns out) so long ago is a lesson worth learning.
In the way of actual game development, one of my favorite people in
gaming interviews the creators of 80 Days, and while it's
not exactly new information, the way it's put together makes it fresh
again, so give it a read. Last but not least, another story that made
waves this week: in a lengthy blog post, an indie game developer
explains why they had to fire most of the crew after a successful
game launch. And you know, I can understand just fine why
someone would make the kind of mistakes described in the article,
having seen very similar stories play out before (from the perspective
of an employee who had to be laid out). But I wish people would figure
out already that:
- ambition is bad;
- you shouldn't put all your eggs in a single basket;
- ambition is bad;
- Steam is not your friend;
- ambition is bad.
No, seriously. I'm sick and tired of hearing how you'd supposedly
never have started anything without ambition. I seem to start — and
finish — a whole lot of different things, and while none of them has
reached epic size or widespread success yet, I have a lot more to show
for my efforts right now than my friends who rushed to build a
dream castle before they had a solid foundation, and it all crumbled
to rubble one day.
Until next week, consider the virtues of patient work.