Review of the book "The Signal and the Noise"
Nate Silver — the author of "The Signal and the Noise" — is widely known for his successful forecasts, such as the US elections. It is not surprising that the book became a bestseller.
As you might guess, the book is about forecasts. More precisely, it is about approaches to forecasting, complexities, errors, misconceptions, and so on.
As usual, I expected a more theoretical approach, in the spirit of Scale [ru], but the author chose a different path and presented his ideas through the analysis of practical cases: one case per chapter. Each chapter describes a significant task, such as weather forecasting, and provides several prisms for looking at building forecasts. This certainly makes the material more accessible, but personally, I would like more systematics and theory.
Because of the case studies approach, it isn't easy to make a brief summary of the book. It is possible, and it would even be interesting to try, but the amount of work is too large — the author did not intend to provide a coherent system or a short set of basic theses.
Therefore, I will review the book as a whole, provide an approximate list of prisms, and list some cool facts.
Concept document for a space exploration MMO
The expected poster for the game. (c) DALL-E
As a hobby, I write concept documents for games. This is first in English. I have a few more in Russian and will eventually translate them.
One more concept for The Tale 2.0.
Title
Lords Captains MMO
Yep, it's a rip-off from Warhammer 40k and Rogue Trader, but it will do for the concept.
One-liner
Explore the infinite universe on a starship with millions of souls on board, unite and develop abandoned worlds.
Platforms
Browsers, mobile.
Genre
Exploration-driven trade-political MMO PVE sandbox.
Closest analogs
EVE, Sim City, Crusader Kings, 4X games, Rogue Trader.
About the book "Piranesi"
Cover of the book "Piranesi"
"Piranesi" is both a continuation of the magical stories of Susanna Clarke and an independent book.
The book has no direct connection with the world of English magic [ru] from "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell". If desired, one can find a connection and even say that the worlds are the same, only at different times: the events of "Piranesi" take place in the early 2000s. However, the author did not give any hints on this. Therefore, I consider the worlds to be different for now.
Susanna continues to persistently and effectively dig not even in the direction of animism as the basis of world perception but in the direction of extremely holistic view of the world, in contrast to the currently dominant reductionism.
The latter blows my mind. As an engineer, I'm an intuitive reductionist due to professional deformation. Reading "Jonathan Strange" and "Piranesi", I felt how Clarke, like Peter the Great, cuts a window in my brain to another picture of the world, a different world perception. And it's wonderful.
By the way, don't confuse holism with, say, an engineering view of the world, a-la systems engineering [ru] or even science. The latter is about decomposing reality into isolated parts with clear boundaries and synthesizing "pure" models of the world [ru], while in holism, the parts have no clear boundaries and penetrate each other.
But it is my interpretation, there are interpretations when holism is just an alternative name for a systems thinking/view — it's hard to find literature on this topic now, so it's hard for me to say where the truth is.
So, "Piranesi"
Dungeon generation — from simple to complex
What we should get.
This is a translation of a post from 2020
This is a step-by-step guide to generating dungeons in Python. If you are not a programmer, you may be interested in reading how to design a dungeon [ru].
I spent a few evenings testing the idea of generating space bases.. The space base didn't work out, but the result looks like a good dungeon. Since I went from simple to complex and didn't use rocket science, I converted the code into a tutorial on generating dungeons in Python.
By the end of this tutorial, we will have a dungeon generator with the following features:
- The rooms will be connected by corridors.
- The dungeon will have the shape of a tree. Adding cycles will be elementary, but I'll leave it as homework.
- The number of rooms, their size, and the "branching level" will be configurable.
- The dungeon will be placed on a grid and consist of square cells.
The entire code can be found on github.
There won't be any code in the post — all the approaches used can be easily described in words. At least, I think so.
Each development stage has a corresponding tag in the repository, containing the code at the end of the stage.
The aim of this tutorial is not only to teach how to generate dungeons but to demonstrate that seemingly complex tasks can be simple when properly broken down into subtasks.
«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative
My favorite version of the Princess.
It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.
But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.
I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.
ATTENTION: SPOILERS!
If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.