Nice to see some recognition of the 25th birthday of Tetris:
- Time Magazine: 25 Years of Tetris: From Russia With Fun
- Kotaku: Tetris Creator Wants To Turn Puzzler Into Sport
- Joystiq: Interview with Alexey Pajitnov
25 Years Of Tetris
June 14, 2009
No Comments » | 
games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, games, Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Tetris | 
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Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Books and more books and no time to read
May 23, 2009Moving your household provides many opportunities, one of them is the opportunity to sort through your belongings and get rid of some of them. Due to time constraints, I was unable to do much sorting during the packing phase. Thus, I find myself sorting items during the unpacking.
No Comments » | books, music | Tagged: books, Graham Greene, music | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Datamining “Where’s George?”
May 5, 2009The New York Times had an interesting article on Sunday regarding computer modeling of the swine flu epidemic.
The article highlights two university teams that are doing computer models of the spread of the virus. Some of the data being used is obvious: air traffic and commuter traffic data. One data source is not so obvious: the Where’s George? site that lets people track US dollar bills via serial number. I think this is interesting and it apparently provided useful data.
A couple of thoughts:
No Comments » | datamining | Tagged: BookCrossing, datamining, dollar bill, epidemic, flu, money, the self-selection problem, Where's George? | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
BizTalk Server 2009 Released
May 3, 2009If you were watching for it, some recent press confirms that BizTalk Server 2009 is now available.
No Comments » | AI, Microsoft, rules | Tagged: AI, BizTalk, BizTalk BRE, expert systems, Microsoft, Microsoft BRE, rete, rules, Ship-It | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
This Is Your Brain On Tetris
April 25, 2009We’ve all seen the findings showing that Tetris has effects upon cerebral glucose metabolic rates (GMRs). Well, the game is back in the news with more brain research…
No Comments » | brain science, games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, brain, brain science, games, PTSD, Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Videogames | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
To Remember And To Forget
April 22, 2009Newsweek seems to be doing a series on memory this week and just published two interesting articles.
No Comments » | brain science | Tagged: brain, brain science, forgetfulness, memory, PTSD, remindlessness, sleep | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Tracking Used Video Game Prices Over Time
April 21, 2009I wasn’t previously aware of VideoGamePriceCharts.com, but I learned about them recently through Kotaku. The site tracks the prices of used video games. Of particular interest is their recent article tracking prices of series games when a new installment is released.
The article shows historical data for series games such as Resident Evil, Pokemon and Call of Duty that shows spikes in prices for used copies of the older series installments surrounding the release of the newer installments. This is not entirely surprising, but I’ve never seen real data laid out to support the idea. They also have a posting from last year that shows the release of GTA IV causing a spike in prices for the earlier GTA games.
This has a few interesting implications:
No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: capitalism, datamining, economics, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Blog Moved
April 21, 2009I have changed providers for all the hosting of this blog in the last few days. Performance and availability should be improved. If I have configured everything correctly, all the page names and links should be preserved.
If you see any problems or issues, please drop me a line.
Comments Off on Blog Moved | metablog | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Portable Video Games
March 31, 2009No, I’m not talking about handheld games. I’m talking about games that get ported to a variety of hardware platforms.
Code portability is a topic of interest to me, and some video games allow an opportunity to study code that is ported across multiple hardware platforms and multiple operating systems. And sometimes, it is just a pleasure to see a good game move to another platform.
There are actually several categories here, so I’ll take a quick moment to sketch out how I divide them.
No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, Atari 2600, Dallas Gaming Mafia, Doom, emulation, first person shooter, FPS, id Software, portability, Quake, Tetris, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Datamining Everquest
March 28, 2009A group of academic researchers have obtained the complete server logs for the Everquest 2 MMORPG. It’s four years of data for over 400,000 players – the resulting dataset is nearly 60TB. That’s right, terabytes. Combined with some demographic surveys there is interesting datamining potential here.
This is also interesting because apparently the standard tools don’t quite scale to the task of analyzing this data:
Regardless of format, many one-pass, exhaustive algorithms simply choke on a dataset this large, which is forcing his group to use some incremental analysis methods or to work with subsets of the data.
Some items in the results that I found interesting:
No Comments » | datamining, games, video games | Tagged: Amazon.com, datamining, Everquest, MMORPG, Sony, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
