Updated xkcd style graphing tool

After a few years (8? really??) I decided to patch up and update a tool I used while doing my Master’s degree.

You can use it here or look at the source code here.

What is it? It’s a tool for making quick and sketchy looking graphs of functions. It’s a bit like wolfram alpha, but it makes the graphs look.. sketchy. Which is important, if you want people to know, intuitively “this isn’t real data”. When might you want that? When hypothesizing, when designing, or when learning are all good times. It also just looks quite fun.

I was hosting it on a site, but that didn’t pan out due to various underlying changes. Now it’s a github page, which is much less hassle and should prevent it from decaying, and it keeps it close to its code’s home.

Originally, this was it’s main function – interpreting a narrow range of functions and plotting them with nice colors and style. Way back, I did a bunch of tweaks, like enabling you to choose your own color for lines, and allowing some not-strictly mathematical behavior to still “kinda work ok” rather than erroring out.

But most of all I gave it the ability to plot any javascript you want. I’ve not really really tested this, but as it’s taking a function it should… do… anything?

Why on earth might you need this? Well, for my masters thesis, I needed to plot game design balance – and shockingly, that’s not very mathematically pure. Now, if you want to see var a = 1; var b = 2; var c =3; var d = 4; if(x <a) {Math.pow(x, 2)} else {if(x<b) {Math.pow(a, 2)} else{ if(x<c) {Math.pow(x-(b-a),2)}else{if(x<d) {Math.pow(c-(b-a),2)}else{Math.pow(x-((b-a)+(c-b)),2)}}} } plotted against var sellPrice = (-x)+7; var buyPrice = 0.2*x+1; Math.pow((sellPrice-buyPrice),(x-1.3)*1.7) and then composite them together to see what happens with var sellPrice = (-x)+7; var buyPrice = 0.2 * x+1; var t = Math.pow((sellPrice-buyPrice),(x-1.3) * 1.7); var a = t; var b = 2; var c =3; var d = 4; if(x <a) {Math.pow(x, 2)} else {if(x<b) {Math.pow(a, 2)} else{ if(x<c) {Math.pow(x-(b-a),2)}else{if(x<d) {Math.pow(c-(b-a),2)}else{Math.pow(x-((b-a)+(c-b)),2)}}} }, then you can absolutely do that

Doesn’t mean it’ll make any sense – but you can play with much more fun things to see how they might look – like quickly superimposing signals on tops of each other to see how they look – sin(x), sin(x*4) and sin(x)+sin(x*4).

So, anything javascript…? How far can you stretch it? Give it a try and let me know if you produce something fun, or if it breaks unexpectedly. https://bomadeno.github.io/xkcdgraphs/

A two year success story

About two years ago, I began working at Psyon Games, a Finnish startup company making waves with its promise of games that could make a real difference in global healthcare and biology education. The product to do this was a bleeding edge combination of technology, psychology and biology in the form of Antidote, a casual strategy game where you defend the stem cell from bacteria and viruses.

When I saw the concept, a dream was immediately born: finally, an opportunity to order the production of a human sized cholera bacteria costume. This week, the hottest May on record in Finland since records began, the dream came true.

On a sunny day, the 16th of month, our budget rental van rounded the corner of an apartment block in an unsupposing suburb of fair Jyväskylä, our eyes fell upon a sight most beautiful. It’s glossy gym-ball sized eye reflecting then blazing sun, Ollie cholera sat nestled on the grass, jiggling gently with its flickering tongue.

This wonder was a gift that just kept giving. Without any warning, Ollie rose in an undignified squelching motion and walked toward me. The dream had come true: cholera was cuddleable.

With some difficulty, we assisted the hulking antihero in through the back doors of our van, and secured it inside. A tight fit, but we made it. The journey to SciFest 2018 would be Ollie’s maiden voyage.

If you want to read more, and witness a glorious video of the suit in action, check out the company blog post here.

Chocolate coated hazelnut toffee

I’ve been experimenting in candymaking, and this is the first “worth sharing”. It’s a fairly hard candy wrapped around hazelnuts and covered in delicious chocolate.

Ingredients

100g light/golden syrup
A generous handful of hazelnuts (or other nuts)
Chocolate. How much? How much do you like chocolate! I used a lot. I like chocolate.

Instructions

Chop up hazelnuts (or whatever nuts you fancy). I got bored chopping and used a blender.
Layer the hazelnuts on greaseproof/baking paper in a heatproof dish with cork pads or spare tea towels under it (to protect your surfaces). Spread the hazelnuts fairly evenly. The area of the dish will affect the thickness of the candy (big dish = thing candy)
Put 100g of light/golden syrup and 200g of sugar in a pan (ideally a small radius pan with a thick base, and I don’t use non stick pans because sugar washes off easily if you don’t burn it)
Use a sugar thermometer! Unless you’re already a candy master, getting consistent results is near impossible otherwise. Set it up in the pan (don’t let it touch the bottom, but make sure the bulb is immersed)
Turn the heat on! KEEP IT LOW. I cannot overstate this. Do not rush. Burned sugar is not your friend. On a hob with 6 heat settings, 3 tends to work ok, but if you want to be safe, start with 2.
Wait patiently for the temperature to reach 149C, meanwhile microwave the chocolate in a heatproof dish with a spout (use a low power setting, 10-20 second bursts with stirring in between). You want it to be -just- melted, not totally molten
As soon as the sugar mix reaches 149C, pour it across the nuts. Wait for a little bit for it to get a bit cooler (I waited about 40 seconds) then slowly drizzle the molten chocolate all over it.
Wait. And wait. And wait. This is torture, seriously. Oh, and while you wait, wash the pan.

Once it’s cool you might want to put it in the fridge to set the chocolate. Once it’s full set, you can do what you want with it! I strongly suggest eating it. As a side note, it’s actually better the following day – when the brittle candy has had a little time to soften and not shatter your teeth.

If you have any questions ask in the comments!

How to make enjoyable educational games?

For my masters thesis, I tackled the problem of educational games. Why are educational games a problem? Because the mass image of them is simply “quiz+rewards” – what has been referred to as “chocolate coated broccoli”. This analogy is particularly touching to me, because even though I like broccoli normally, the idea of coating it with chocolate repulses me. Similarly, the idea of smothering learning with patronizing encouragement and “rewards” makes the joy of learning less palatable.

In my thesis, I try to put into words some principles for producing games for learning, games that are enjoyable yet impart knowledge that is valued in the real world. Roughly, this ends up with me suggesting that games should be built by simulating a subject area, tightly coupled with structures to support both game driven and free playing experiences. In detail, I provide a list of stuff you can do to up your educational game, with a wide range of examples from mainstream games that you’ve no doubt heard of, and likely have played – summarized in the graphic below.

A summary of my pragmatic thesis findings — Simulations, a system for goals and hints, coaching and enjoyable difficulty all contribute to enjoyable, educational games

Whether you’re curious or horrified, I encourage you to read the full thesis! I hope that it sparks topics for discussion, and leads to more awesome games with a serious experience at heart.

Quiet YouTube when steam “donks”?

I’ve been noticing steam messages seem to seriously reduce the audio of my music player and youtube videos and what not. It was a bit frustrating, so I searched for it and found a typical tech thread here. This didn’t help at all, so I carried on hunting and found the answer burief in steam’s forums, it’s a Windows setting which makes other things quiet when you’re “in a voice call” (which.. well, steam messages don’t really fall into that category). Anyway, file a bug report with steam if this irritates you, and find a workaround/fix here:

http://makingwindowseasy.com/2011/04/30/change-windows-volume-during-phone-calls/

It fixes the issue, and I’m pretty happy to mute my music when I skype or whatnot…

How can we evaluate the quality of learning experiences?

Among other things, Bloom’s taxonomy allows us to categorize learning experiences. Bloom’s work was revised somewhat by Anderson a bit later, and it’s that revised edition I’ll describe here.

A taxonomy is a way of arranging things, and the revised Bloom’s taxonomy has two dimensions for categorization, the knowledge dimension and the cognitive dimension. Here they are in tables with examples.

Knowledge Dimension

Level	Example
Factual knowledge	Crude oil can be made into gasoline
Conceptual knowledge	Crude oil is a mixture of many different hydrocarbons including gasoline.
Procedural knowledge	Mixtures of chemicals in general can be separated through distillation, including gasoline from crude oil.
Metacognitive knowledge	Determining if a chemical mixture can be separated with distillation is possible through internet searches or experimentation with different temperatures.

Cognitive Dimension

Level	Example
Remember	Crude oil can be made into gasoline
Understand	Draw diagram showing how gasoline is extracted from gasoline
Apply	Set up alcohol distillation in test tubes
Analyze	Given a set of 20 liquids, determine which are mixtures separable by distillation
Evaluate	Compare your methods to those of your classmates
Create	Try to make brandy by distilling wine (not quite kid friendly.. :D)

International government spending on education

I was playing around with statistics from UNESCO to see if there were any trends in education spending over the past few years. Here’s a box plot showing the average international % of GDP spent on education in the last 14 or so years. The 2013 data seemed a bit sparse, so it might be wise to ignore it. Seems like there is a trend of decreasing spending in the past 4 years, but not a huge change over the past 10 years. Enjoy!

DSR – Cooking?

Here’s my own image of DSR as an analogy to learning how to cook something 😀

(updated to include real needs as well as real users)

Cafeteria Nipponica Recipes – A progression tree

I’ve been playing Cafeteria Nipponica on my phone recently, and found myself regularly checking Happy Enna’s Recipe Reference to work out how to do the things I “remember” from last playthrough in the best order. The information there is invaluable but spreadsheets hurt my eyes. So, I created these flow charts!

All dishes come from a “root” dish, you can find out how to get them here.

Colors indicate the max * ranking, keys on each image. I wonder why rice and soba are so lame?

Rice

Udon

Ice cream

Sauteed Chicken

Grilled Fish

Soba

Introduction to AI for game programming students

I was recently invited to give a talk on “AI in games” to Jyväskylä’s AMK game programming students. The lecture could have gone better if I had prepared more material for it, but the catch was that I didn’t know what to prepare. These notes act as a guide for “next time”. I won’t go into any depth on the subjects here.

Briefly introduce scientific AI, point out useful libraries [A*, speech recognition, opencv] then waft it away
Focus on architecture of players, representation of game state and move logic
Establish the simplest AI player for tic-tac-toe, then develop it to a perfect player [“smart as possible AI”]
Make the tic tac toe player more fun to play against
Consider expanding it to more complex games (chess, civilization) and optimizations
Human behavior simulation – know the limits of senses, program them in. FPS/Stealth AI is a good example. [“dumb as a human AI”]
Planning and decision making architecture
Techniques for more realistic behavior

Additionally…

Examples of AI in video games: planner in fear, neural networks aren’t used much in industry (notable exception, Supreme Commander 2) and only for decisions, Quake 3 doesn’t have neural net bots
Data structures and algorithms are ever useful
Observe nature and mimic behaviour