I read with great delight Kevin Kelly’s recent post over at the Technium, "The Google Way of Science".

Mr. Kelly is a big fan of intellectual broadsides - technological Zen koans, and this one is a doozie.

The elevator pitch is this: As we accumulate more and more data, petabytes of the stuff, scientists can knock of the difficult and time consuming process of coming up with, then testing, peer reviewing, then repeatedly testing a hypothesis, and simply look with special tools (petascopes?) through these vast pools of data for previously undiscovered correlations, which with enough data points become as good as natural law.

Imagine you had a database with a vast number of entries detailing how long it took objects to fall to the ground from varying heights.

Using the field of Correlative Analytics, you could simple query the database asking how long it takes for an object to fall 25 meters. With enough data points, you could get answers as accurate as if you actually had a theory of gravitation, though the database and related search software have no implicit theory of gravity built in to them.

As it turns out, this is much the way Google language translation services work. They have no theory of French, English, or Chinese, the simply have very large amounts of bilingual translations they can use to look for correlations. It is science by Bayesian filter.

Except that it isn’t.
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Prototyping gameplay can be a quick and dirty* way of answering design questions. The big  ones, like: is it any fun?

Here’s a Flash/ActionScript prototype I did for my last game, a Wii title called "Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed."

There’s a more detailed discussion of it over here.

* If you do it right.

Here’s a little verse I wrote years ago to settle an argument about non-euclidean geometry.

Yes, seriously. What?

Hey, Euclid!

Parallel lines in geometry
go side-by-side to infinity.

But any fool with his own two eyes on
know railroad tracks meet at the horizon.

Nothing too sexy here, unless you find Socket Servers sexy.

Don’t go there. Thank you.

Scoot on over to the Downloads page, and you will find a new link for Palabre Modules.

Therein you will find modules for telling if certain entities like nicknames and room names exist on the server, and a very handy (at least until the next release) module for pre-processing messages sent to the server.

To all six of you who find this useful and exciting, hats off to you! (And see you on the forums).

For those of you who are a bit fuzzy on the whole ’socket server’ thing, and read this with a kind of a ‘who cares’ vibe, Palabre is a open-source project that allows you to build multi-user or, dare I say, multi-player apps built in Flash.

WARNING: What follows is a game only a Geek can truly appreciate.

Also, I strongly suggest you start here:

DD37: Schrödinger’s Pawn

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A while ago, I posted a design for a chess variant, that eventually became known as Eigen Chess, aka Schrödinger’s Pawn.  It turns out to have been a very popular idea, that has generated much comment.

The success of Eigen Chess has prompted my to ponder more mashups of common games and exotic physics concepts. It is from this proud line that springs forth today’s design: Einstein-Rosen Bridge. For those who need a refresher, the Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a theoretical construct predicted by the general theory of relativity. Einstein you know, Nathan Rosen was collaborator with the Big E, and they published a paper in 1935, outlining the eponymous Bridge.

Those without a strong grounding in general relativity, or worse, without access to Wikipedia, will probably be familiar with the more common popular conception of the ERB, a science fiction trope called the wormhole.

A wormhole  is a twist in the shorts of space-time that allows instantaneous travel between two points in our universe, or more likely, two points in parallel universes.

Bridge is a card game for four players, played with one or two standard decks, and it’s rules are more difficult to comprehend than the 1935 Einstein-Rosen paper that spawned this post.

Let’s get on with it, after the jump.
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Hah! It’s only been nine months since my last post, so all of you who bet on a year between posts, pay up!

So much to talk about, but for now you’ll have to live with this little teaser.

I’m building a multi-user Flash application, and having lots of fun doing it. The guts of the enterprise is a open source Flash Socket Server called Palabre, written and maintained by Conort Célio.

This has required a number of things of me, not the least of which is brushing up on my Object-Orient programming in both Python and Flash, and becoming my own little mini-ISP, of sorts, to run the socket server.

It also means I’ve started to extend the server software by writing add-on modules. At some point, there may be an archive for them, but for now, I post them here for your enjoyment.

existsQueries.zip

This module is exceedingly simple. The client sends a user nickname, or a room name, and the modules tells the client if it exists.

I’ll be moving this site over to the new server soon. If all goes well, you won’t feel a thing.

Wow. My friends are really kicking ass this week. Rich and Tina launched their new show, and now Gareth grabs a little national media attention.

You go!

I’ve talked about my friend Gareth Hinds here once before, when he signed a deal to publish with Candlewick Press. While King Lear is still working it’s way to the shelves, Candlewick has released a magnificent hardcover edition of an earlier work, a graphic novel adaptation of the old English epic poem, Beowulf.

I was thrilled to hear from Gareth that Beowulf was getting a review in today’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. The review compares three adaptations of the work, and they lead with Gareth’s new edition.

While I am enough of a geek to cringe when they call a graphic novel a comic-book, I can’t grouse too much, as they give the book a very

nice review. Here’s snippet:

It’s a fantastic book, much (all?) of which was hand painted on wood, which gives a subtle and beautiful sense of weight and age. You really should go buy it right now.