Back to the Monday

Today was Monday. I didn't really do much, but I guess that is kind of par for the course. A lot of people here seem to not come in to work unless they have something specific to do at the office. I go in to study a bit, but I had office hours today, which meant I had to be there to do very little since very few people come in this early in the year, so I studied then. I don't know.

One thing I did do was play some Back to the Future for the NES, which is just as terrible as I remember it. It is such a grating game for a few reasons, which I think I will talk about for lack of anything else to say.

A lot of NES games suffer from horrible controls, which render them basically unplayable, and therefore forgettable. You try them once and give up. Back to the Future actually controls just like it is supposed to, so you are constantly under the illusion that you can succeed when you really can't, leading to much frustration.

The problems result from a few enemies/stages. The first is the bees. Why does it have to be bees? You are attacked numerous times each level by bees that are unfairly allowed to essentially home in on you, which is really unfair in what is basically a forced scrolling shooter because you can't move in a reasonable way while they can.

The next problem is the non-running stages. When I played the game almost every day on the actual NES, I managed to get past the first special stage through sheer devotion, but since then I've never been able to get past it. The perspective switches to a sideways shooter where you throw something at bullies who run at you. It looks like you are throwing sandwiches, but I can't tell. The problem is that there's no real visual indication which "slot" the enemies are in, so you sort of have to get very used to slight visual differences just to hit them, and the requirement for success is so absurdly high that only the most dedicated players will beat the stage, and it is only about 1/4 of the way through the game.

I'm not even going to bother mentioning that none of the game makes sense or has anything to do with Back to the Future in anything but the most tenuous sense. Try it on virtualnes.com if you want to see what I am talking about.

Weekend

Eric came up this weekend from D.C. and we had some fun. I don't have pictures of anything, sadly, so I'll just make a short, incomplete list.

-Saw some sort of festival in chinatown.

-Ate Peking duck.

-Drank birch beer, which is like root beer.

-Ate a cheesesteak, with Whiz, of course.

-Various general fun things.

Ambiguous Pronoun Reference

One of the drawbacks of being part of a culture instead of just on its fringes is that you are constantly exposed to it, which can become grating very quickly. What I mean is that I think the words "if you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it" will never find their way out of my brain. I keep imagining what that could mean out of the intended (but not specified) context. What kind of rings would need to exist to obey this rule in every case? How does one put a ring on abstract concepts?

Monday

I have my first official office hours today. Other than that there's not much going on. There are some welcome events which I think are aimed at undergrads but I might try to get some free food out of one later. Alright, that's it.

Hairpiece

Can someone please point me to something with Kristen Wiig in which she is funny? I have only seen a few things featuring her, and she is always the weakest part. I just saw an imitation of Madonna she did and it was painfully unfunny. I have seen her in a few things that were funny, but not the parts that she did. Her main skill seems to be saying/doing something awkward and staring at the camera or otherwise holding up what we'd like to see from happening. Yet, she is being heralded as the new Tina Fey. What am I missing?

Orientation Day 4

Today was by far the most useful, and also gave me not only a free lunch, but the opportunity at another free lunch later. Today we finally got put into our departments and did some practice teaching, which I think I did pretty well at. I also found out a bit more about the class I am TA'ing for. My hotel card key stopped working today, but they did something to it and it started working again. I guess they are designed to stop working after so long, but I don't know. Seems weird to me.

Orientation Day 3

Today is basically a day off. Apparently it is commuter orientation day, so there are a bunch of local noobs running around, I guess. I had to go in to campus to talk to financial aid about why they sent a letter outlining a different package to me. It turns out that everything is cool, it's just that some stuff is run through the department or doesn't count as financial aid so much as a salary, so once they figured out what it all meant, nothing really had to be done. Other than that, I spent some time reading about eigenvectors and listening to some new freshmen (I guess) talk about the health care reform "debate." Now I'm back enjoying the wonderful hospitality of the microtel. There is a bed-like thing right under/beside the window. I am not sure if it is actually a bed, but it seems designed for people to lie on it. I'm not clear why this is included unless these rooms can be used by three people cramming in here. It is a mystery!

Update: I may be TA'ing for an upper-level stats class now? That could be bad as I only took stats one time, four years ago, and it was both my weakest and least favorite math class. We shall see, I guess.

Orientation Day 2

My, or rather Microtel's, alarm clock didn't go off today, so I didn't wake up till 8:50, as I'm still on central standard time. There was a free breakfast today for TA orientation 8:30-9:00, but obviously that is optional. The real stuff didn't start until 9:00, and even that was only introduction. The real talks started at 9:35, but since the earliest train I could take in was at 9:17 and takes about 12 minutes to get to the station nearest to campus, I was a couple minutes late, still.

I came in a little after they had started talking about being prepared to teach classes, etc., which doesn't really matter too much to me since A)I have three years of experience as a TA B)I'm not actually teaching a class C)I have actually taught a ton of classes for the last two years, albeit to little kids and mostly in Japanese and D)teaching isn't really that complex, anyway.

Anyway, I craftily got myself a nametag off the table, wrote my name on it, and turned it in with everyone else at the end, so I was there for the purposes of attendance. The talks (classes?) weren't terrible but were fairly general. There was a chemistry professor who now runs some sort of office dealing with student retention, and she actually talked about trends that are somewhat interesting. Other than that, it was mostly stuff that should be common sense, like being prepared and explaining things in different ways.

We got done around noon, and since nobody contacted me from the math department about there being anything else, I just walked around, even around the math building, which was mostly empty, until I got bored and I was close enough to the train station that it was convenient to take the next train back to the hotel.

I'd like to do some math or at least some teaching, and I'd also like it if the university would figure out what financial aid they offered and I accepted, instead of sending letters home about me being approved for loans I never asked for. Anyway, tomorrow is a day off (why is it scheduled like this?), so I will probably go talk to them then.

Orientation Day 1

I am writing this on day two of orientation for convenience, but I will split it up into two posts unless I just give up after one day.

All the info I had about orientation was wrong, probably from the wrong year, but I don't know for sure. I wandered around campus trying to figure out where to go and what to do for a while, then I went back to the hotel to get some documents which it turned out were (A) wrong and (B) unnecessary. I got an ID card, which only took a couple minutes. Then I just wandered into the building that had a bunch of people in it. You would think there would be signs all over telling you where to go, but no such luck. Also, other people on campus seemed to not know where to go.

Anyway, I got registered for the thing. I wasn't late, but I was one of the last people to arrive, I think, and so the few people that talked to me probably think I am stupid or something. The only bad part is that I think some organization was giving out bags because a lot of people had them, but I couldn't find it, so I think they probably ran out or left.

After a while there were some talks that basically amounted to "be professional and proactive," but took a few hours. Nobody ever accused academics of efficiency. They weren't terrible, but they also weren't particularly interesting. I met a dude from China. There seem to be a lot of new Chinese students, so maybe I should have studied Mandarin, or maybe Cantonese. I don't know where in China they are from, I was just reading their nametags, except for this one guy I already mentioned.

After all was said and done, there was a picnic-like thing for the new students, so I got some free food and Yuengling beer, which is at least a third-tier beer as I see it, so I was happy. Also one of the dudes working gave me an extra can toward the end of the night and he seemed cool. I hung out with some public health students and an electrical engineer and they seemed pretty alright. Fascinating day...

Microtel

I'm in a microtel, a small hotel whose name is derived from microphone and Rotel, the name of a Japanese electronics company based in the UK. Look it up.

Actually it isn't that small and it's ok, so I put up a couple pictures for your viewing pleasure. The part that sucks is that I have to live here for a week and commute into the city even though my apartment is basically on campus because they won't let me move in for basically no reason at all.

Budget Host

Chillin' in the same Budget Host in western Pennsylvania as on the last trip out to Philly. I see they fixed the Pepsi machine, though, which on the last visit was emblazoned with a sign, now made immortal in my phone, reading

"Pepsi machine is out of ordered. Would you please stop by office for pepsi?"

Good times.

Last Night in Town

Went up to the LCC. Nothing much was happening, spent fifty cents not getting cake. Good times.

Link to the Future

I put a link in the link section to another blog of interest. Mostly it is just that links are free and I like the graph to have a higher connectivity.

More Boring Risk Commentary

I mentioned the other day that I played a game of Risk with some rule variations and got some abnormal patterns, so I'm going to expand on that. Actually it was only one rule variation. There is a list of rule variations for "advanced" play towards the back of the instructions, and sometimes I play with those. In this case, it was one which altered the value of the sets of cards. If you aren't aware, in Risk, you get one card at the end of each turn on which you have taken at least one territory. Each card has either a soldier, a cannon, or a mounted soldier, in addition to a territory. You get a set of cards if you have three of a kind or one of each kind, and a set can be turned in at the start of a turn for a number of armies that increases as sets are turned in (by anyone). There are also two wild cards, which can be used as any of the three types, and all the cards but the wild card have a territory on them as well. The territory is largely irrelevant except when used as a selection method for initial territories. The only other effect the territories have is that if you have one of the territories on a card in a set that you turn in, you get an additional two armies on that territory.

The value of the sets turned in usually goes 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, and so on by 5's. The variant rule reduces the number of armies to 4, 5, 6, and so on.

Since the cards are awarded to players who take a territory, they can be seen as an incentive to be aggressive, and we would expect players that are aggressive enough to get sets to do better than those who aren't. Any good RISK player can probably attest to the trend of sets becoming massively important, especially later on in the game, as the value of the set surpasses the value of any territory or even continent rather quickly. To point this out, let's look at the other methods of gaining armies, via territories and via continents.

A player is awarded armies every turn for the number of territories he (forgive my gendered pronouns) has, t. The number of armies awarded is t/3, which is rounded down to the nearest whole number. However, even if he should be awarded fewer armies by this rule, he automatically receives 3 armies at the start of each turn. An interesting result of this minimum adjustment to the rule is that the value of territories drops significantly for players with few territories, that is, players who are probably not doing well.

It is difficult to state exactly this army-value of a territory precisely because the armies aren't awarded until the beginning of the turn, so if a player takes a territory and subsequently loses it before his next turn, it was of no (actually negative) army-value to do so. Also, since territories make up continents, we would have to factor in the value of continents. Overall, this is leading us to an equation for finding the expected value of moves in a given situation, which we could then hopefully use to generalize to good overall strategies.

Regardless, it is safe to say that the value of any given territory (as long as it does not lead to taking a continent) is very little. There are only 42 territories total, so even if you have all the territories, at which point you would have already won, you would only receive 14 armies the next round based on territories alone. Let's say for example that you control half the territories on the board, 21. At this point, you are probably nearly assured victory in any game with more than two players. However, the territories alone only yield 7 armies. Considering that even an opponent controlling only one territory would receive 3 armies, it is fairly clear that territories themselves are not particularly valuable in terms of armies. We draw from this that a strategy of merely taking territories quickly is probably not a good one, which we could expound on further, but is pretty clear.

So, anyway, let's expound. For reasons I will maybe get to later, experienced Risk players often shy away from Asia early in the game despite its high army-value, which often leads to many Asian territories being left with the minimum one army early in the game, so we have at least one real-game scenario in which there are numerous easily taken territories around. If it is our plan take these easily gained territories for the purpose of amassing armies, then we could look at the expected value. Assuming that we have enough armies that we can roll three dice to a defender's one, we have a 95/144 (I have computed this but maybe it is wrong) chance of winning on the first roll in each territory we take.

In a six-player game, every player will start with seven territories. Seven territories yields only 2 armies by the t/3 rule, so we would be awarded three armies at the start of each turn. Since 7=1 (mod 3), we need to take two more territories to step up a rank in territories. However, even if we do so, we will only have 9 territories, which would yield again 3 armies, so we would actually have to take 2+3=5 territories to see any gain in armies. Taking five territories, even if they only have one army defending them, we only have (95/144)^5 likelihood of doing that without losing any armies. I'm not going to do the full calculations here, but it is pretty clear, then, that we are likely to lose at least one army in the process of taking these five territories. So, overall, the expected value of taking these territories is negative. Does this mean that we are better off just sitting and not attacking? No, but that analysis will be much more complicated. That's it for now

Law & Order continues its hamfisted social commentary in an episode with Samwise Gamgee as a nutbar pastor running a Christian war training camp. This show is way better than it should be, what with its predictability despite the lack of plausibility in the cases and its hemming and hawing to give lip service to any "valid" viewpoint. Also Olivet is back swinging for the prosecution despite being Cutter'd yesterday. Amazing.

In unrelated news, I played one of the craziest games of Risk ever yesterday. It went on for so long that I had to just give up before there was even a sign of which side would win. I'm not going to post about it now, but I think it shows some interesting patterns which I may get to later.