Various items!
A very enjoyable bank holiday, including bibliogirl's fun party -- thanks! My first party at which I could (as advised by waistcoatmark) reply to the question "So what have you been up to lately?" with "Don't you read my LJ?"
I found this toy, which is a quiz challenging you to identify from which of your friends' journals excerpts are taken. More difficult than I thought... particularly as friends aren't listed alphabetically, so it takes ages to find the one you want to give as answer. I also thought the vote predictor toy on here was a clever idea -- I might develop some thoughts around that myself. The favourite word analyser badly needs a stopword list though!
Speaking of which, the Election Predictor experiment is entering its last couple of days of usefulness -- go back and revise your prediction, if your opinions have changed at all lately! The current average is 64, although individual predictions range from 4 to 127. Which caused me a worrying moment of checking that I hadn't accidentally set the data type to TINYINT ;-)
I had an idea last night for a new play-by-Web game (tentatively called "Kleptomania"), based on the "ultimatum game" social economics experiment. I'll be posting about it to the UKG forum later today if I get time to write it up. The basic idea is that each player is an incompetent thief, who also moonlights as a corrupt policeman. Each turn they steal a certain value of stuff, but are caught by one of the other players in policeman hat. They must offer the police character a division of the spoils, which the police character can either accept or reject (in which case the stolen goods are confiscated). The trick is to get away with as favourable a division as possible -- but with each player each turn being a thief paired with a random other player, and also a policeman paired with a different random other player, I anticipate that over time a network of trust / perception-of-fairness relations will build up -- which will interact with a desire to trim back the leader, help out people dong badly, and the other traditional multi-player-game dynamics. There are some issues about default orders, new players joining, and so on, but I think there's enough there to make an enjoyable game. I don't know if this particular extension of the experiment has been done before -- any of you economics-trained types?
I found this toy, which is a quiz challenging you to identify from which of your friends' journals excerpts are taken. More difficult than I thought... particularly as friends aren't listed alphabetically, so it takes ages to find the one you want to give as answer. I also thought the vote predictor toy on here was a clever idea -- I might develop some thoughts around that myself. The favourite word analyser badly needs a stopword list though!
Speaking of which, the Election Predictor experiment is entering its last couple of days of usefulness -- go back and revise your prediction, if your opinions have changed at all lately! The current average is 64, although individual predictions range from 4 to 127. Which caused me a worrying moment of checking that I hadn't accidentally set the data type to TINYINT ;-)
I had an idea last night for a new play-by-Web game (tentatively called "Kleptomania"), based on the "ultimatum game" social economics experiment. I'll be posting about it to the UKG forum later today if I get time to write it up. The basic idea is that each player is an incompetent thief, who also moonlights as a corrupt policeman. Each turn they steal a certain value of stuff, but are caught by one of the other players in policeman hat. They must offer the police character a division of the spoils, which the police character can either accept or reject (in which case the stolen goods are confiscated). The trick is to get away with as favourable a division as possible -- but with each player each turn being a thief paired with a random other player, and also a policeman paired with a different random other player, I anticipate that over time a network of trust / perception-of-fairness relations will build up -- which will interact with a desire to trim back the leader, help out people dong badly, and the other traditional multi-player-game dynamics. There are some issues about default orders, new players joining, and so on, but I think there's enough there to make an enjoyable game. I don't know if this particular extension of the experiment has been done before -- any of you economics-trained types?