Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) by Susanna Clarke.

In brief: In the height of the Napoleonic Wars, two magicians appear in England and strive to restore its long-lost tradition of wonders, but disagree on whether fairies have any role to play. On one thing we can all agree: this epic love letter to England herself is fantastic, and shouldn’t be missed.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, keep reading below.)

Continued »

This week’s selection: Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007) by Ben Ratliff.

In brief: Ratliff’s carefully organized history of John Coltrane’s diverse musical stylings and its legacy in post-1960s jazz is a concise work of criticism that wisely puts the musical evidence front and centre. Its great success is its insistence on establishing Coltrane’s monumental importance instead of merely asserting it as the truth.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Coltrane, keep reading below.)

Continued »

This week’s selection: On Beauty (2005) by Zadie Smith.

In brief: Smith’s comedy of intellectual warfare in a New England college town dazzles with its ventriloquial feats of dialogue. Yet the novel is more insightful as a study of personal aesthetics, and how artistic principles motivate individual actions, than of American politics, which here seem oddly transplanted from a British sensibility.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on On Beauty, keep reading below.)

Continued »

Book blogging will resume this Wednesday. This is a promise, and without such a visibly dangling promise I would likely put it off for another week, then another. This does suggest that I should resume reading—not that I ever stopped, although my recent attentions have been disproportionately fixed on the screen rather than the printed page—and that, given how it is currently Monday, calling on the 600-page gorilla that’s been rehearsing its Ruthian slugging in the on-deck circle of my to-be-read stack for weeks now is simply asking for trouble.

In the meantime, I feel a certain duty to direct everyone’s attention to a blog that I am certain nobody follows, but which has resurfaced in a burst of desperate collaborative inspiration, and lived to tell my RSS hotline the tale. (Speaking of which, I highly recommend that you bookmark my RSS feed in your favourite aggregator if you haven’t already. My online presence is known to disappear from time to time, and I don’t expect anyone to like this place enough to reload it in their web browser day after day, wondering if I yet liveth.)

For a number of years now, Steve Smith has coordinated a displaced edition of National Novel Writing Month for those of us who have far too many excuses to be neglectful of the whole shebang in November, when the event typically occurs. Our summer edition has hitherto occurred in May. I have participated three times. I have failed three times.

This year, it is in June. I am not sure this changes anything. And while a pace of 50,000 words a month is probably advisable if I want to have any hope of finishing the project of my current fancy before I depart for my new commitment in the fall, I will not be participating in this edition of the contest.

That shouldn’t stop anyone else, of course—which brings me at long last to the point of my highlighting the U of A NaNoWriMo blog at all: the successful participants of previous years are recounting their experiences and dispensing their advice. I make especial note of Chris Samuel’s story, which never did receive adequate exposure outside the extremities of its Facebook impact zone, and almost—almost—makes up for the ten dollars he didn’t pay me for not fulfilling his fifty-kiloword quota. For fulfil it he did, oh yes. It was written, as the Saracens say.

I highly recommend trying this at least once in your life; if not in June, then in November. I look back now at my prior misfires, all aborted at around the 7,000-word mark because I didn’t feel sufficiently mature or well researched to finish them, and I see them as training wheels rather than wastes of my time. The kind of training wheels that unscrew themselves in a jumble of bolts and hang your knees up for the pavement to flay—but that’s called Building Character.

From Andrew Curry and Wired comes this comprehensive article on Settlers of Catan, a superb piece of board game journalism if I’ve ever seen one, and a must-read for players of all levels. It’s got a bit of everything: a look at why Settlers fit the market like a glove, a little about designer Klaus Teuber, an overview of the “German style” of board game design of which Settlers is the most prominent ambassador, and a peek into the complexity underlying the game’s infamously balanced mechanics.

This caught my attention:

In 2006, Brian Reynolds, a founder of Maryland software company Big Huge Games and the programmer who developed the AI behind the addictive computer classic Sid Meier’s Civilization II, set out to make an Xbox 360 version of Settlers. To help programmers develop the game’s AI, Teuber spent months exploring the mathematics of his most famous creation, charting the probability of every event in the game. The odds of a six or eight being rolled are almost 1 in 3 for example, while the chance of a four being rolled is 1 in 12. There is a 2-in-25 chance of drawing a Year of Plenty development card. Teuber created elaborate logic chains and probability matrices in a complex Excel spreadsheet so the videogame developers could see how every possible move and roll of the dice—from the impact of the Robber to the odds of getting wheat in a given scenario—compared. The end result was a sort of blueprint for the game that gave Big Huge Games a head start and showed just how complex the underlying math was. “It was the biggest, gnarliest spreadsheet I had ever seen,” Reynolds says.

I want to see this.

One of the best things that happened to the Civilization series was how in Civilization IV, lead designer Soren Johnson laid the mathematics and AI bare for everyone to see, expanding on a series tradition in the Sid Meier games to make all the data easily accessible (and therefore modifiable).

Settlers is elegant enough that I’m sure people have already figured out the math through a spot of reverse engineering; it’s really not that hard. But I’d love to see Teuber’s spreadsheet for its immense historical value as a design document alone. Surely there was a calculated rationale to everything from the fifteen-road limit to the assignment of three ore/brick hexes instead of four—and I often wonder if the perpetual endgame glut of sheep is here as an intentional crimp.