I’ve always been a big supporter of AI and think it brings an extra challenge to any game… Mainly because AI is sub-par when it comes to comparison between humans. AI excels in reaction times and memorization, but lacks in things like improvisation, path-mapping, environmental analysis, and dealing with various human factors such as vengeance and irrationality. One of the biggest detriments to AI is a lack of personality… a lack of finnesse.

What am I talking about? Well, let’s take a CounterStrike bot (I know, I know, not the best model of AI out there) named Bob. He won’t realize you hate his guts, and will stop at nothing to destroy him, and only him. Bob will never be found cowering behind a box; he’ll never advance slowly; he’ll never select a sub-par weapon against a weaker opponent just to show off. He doesn’t do little twirls in the air as he jumps off of boxes. He won’t be able to figure out how to carefully navigate a random hallway. Worst of all, Bob won’t teabag your corpse in CounterStrike after a particularly amazing knife kill. Hell, he probably won’t even take out a knife unless he’s forced to - not even if you’re 5 feet away and just started reloading.

Enter the ScrabbleBot. As far as I can see, it doesn’t actually have a name yet. It is in it’s polishing-up code phase, and is being demonstrated all over the place. This bot doesn’t teabag your scrabble-playing corpse with long triple-word-scores, but it does count cards… It predicts what letters you have on your rack based on what words you could have played given the letters you used in your last turn, and cross-referencing it with what letters are currently in play. Then the bastard uses that information to block your potential words while maximizing it’s own points.

It’s the literary equivalent of the knife kill. This bot is badass. I claw my own eyes out when I have a perfect word and my Scrabble opponent sneaks in and steals my kill.. And this bot would do it regularly and consistently. Like a jerk.

Up until now ScrabbleBots just maximize their own score and ignore whatever you’re doing - so this is quite the step up in the AI world. I’ll expect the next-gen video games to have bots with a rich vocabularly and to pwn me both verbally and physically. Don’t let me down, industry!

So I was taken to the theatre again the other day. This time instead of seeing the latest 2% feature on rotten tomatoes, I actually got to see a movie that was getting good reviews…

….but unfortunately starred Beyonce.

Dreamgirls - the movie that was flying with oscar buzz until it failed to receive a best picture nomination. Converted from the stage musical, it’s a story eerily similar to that of Diana Ross and the Supremes. The story follows their rise to stardom, and struggles they have with egos and jealousy.

So how was it?

Well it was a new musical, so it was generally everything you would expect. The first half flew by, with a lot of visual stuff happening, but no real substance. This may have been for pacing - I have to admit, that it never felt dull.

The second half was far more interesting though. As reported by various other (better) reviewers, Jennifer Hudson definitely stole the show. Eddie Murphy was the real surprise though - it was the first time I’d seen him in something serious, and his performance made you forget all about Dr. Doolittle.

Beyonce was just…Beyonce. My movie companion of course praised her all the way out of the film - especially on how her hair improved (got longer) later in the film. I suppose, if it had been a movie about Beyonce and her hair, I would agree. But it wasn’t. Maybe it’s because Beyonce is Beyonce the megastar, playing the role of Beyonce (well…Diana Ross…sort of) in the movie, but..it just doesn’t work.

And that was kind of the theme for the movie for me. It was ok. It didn’t suck. If I liked this genre more, I might even say it was good. But I can’t say that. I know there were a lot of people in this movie, and it was well made - all glitzy and packaged with a big red bow on it.

But was it a great movie? NO! HELL NO! It was a good movie - not a great movie by any means. But why it’s been getting so much cinematic praise is beyond me. Are people just not making good movies anymore? Is there nothing to rave about? OH WAIT - The Departed came out this year as I recall.

Advice of the week: Skip this and go watch The Departed a second time. You haven’t seen it yet? Shame on you!

Damn straight, bitches. As you may have heard, we’re starting a new sub-category all about technology and computers and gadgets and other sweet stuff that might not interest the clear-skinned, washed, tanned, proper-posture-having normals
amongst you. To you I say this: go back to your well-adjusted lives and loved ones, we have ethernet cable to splice.

As I sit here at 5AM in my underwear, my lap covered in cracker crumbs, cotton-mouthed from my fourth can of coke in the last 2 hours, I don’t yet know what format Tehc is going to take, nor what we are even going to do with it, but as in all endeavors, our only goal is awesome.

We’re off to a stupendous start too: this post was supposed to go up on friday but due to a hard disk failure in my home personal computer (and my ensuing laziness to fix the situation), the Debut post for Tehc has ended up coming out two days after the SECOND post which Weasel put up on saturday. Consider the Tehc posts so far to be a FILO queue and then we’ll go back to FIFO starting with the next one…

yours in nerdery,
Foley and Weasel
(and anyone else who wants to step up)