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Wired is that prestigious magazine of the technological elites, its finger firmly on the cutting edge of all things geeky and zeitgeisty, right?

Apparently there's a new boardgame called Settlers of Catan, which is "poised" to become popular in the US. "Along the way, it's teaching Americans that board games don't have to be either predictable fluff aimed at kids or competitive, hyperintellectual pastimes for eggheads. Through the complex, artful dance of algorithms and probabilities lurking at its core, Settlers manages to be effortlessly fun, intuitively enjoyable, and still intellectually rewarding, a potent combination that's changing the American idea of what a board game can be."

Who'd have thought it? Why have none of us ever heard of this game before -- why have the Germans been keeping it secret for the fourteen years since its launch? What will those fiendish foreigners come up with next?

Date: 2009-04-08 11:22 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bateleur.livejournal.com
I'd have thought a self-teaching neural net was far easier to set up

<cries>

Neural nets! Why do people love their neural nets so much? Is it just the name?!

(Neural nets suck at learning most things. Don't use them unless you're really sure they're suitable. Any halfway decent genetic algorithm is almost always better.)

Date: 2009-04-08 11:23 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] wimble.livejournal.com
You're right, Tony's version is actually a genetic algorithm. It's my bad: I learned "Neural net" as meaning "an evolving system" way back when, and I've never really unlearned it.

Date: 2009-04-08 11:35 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bateleur.livejournal.com
Tony Mitton wrote a genetic algorithm in Excel?! That's either impressively geeky or worst platform choice ever, I'm not quite sure which!

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