alanschu

Let's try this: Chuck just won a lottery. This lottery has a chance of winning it of 1 in a million. What is the probability that Chuck wins this lottery again?

The gambler's fallacy is nothing compared to the Monty Hall problem. I was considering introducing this problem into the thread earlier. It's a great example of conditional probabilities and the funny part is even when the math indicates otherwise, there are still people that are adamantly against it. It's a shining example of how poor, and stubborn, common sense really can be at times.

I'm not sure I follow here. I just want to make sure we're clear: are you saying that after someone wins the lottery, the chances of them winning another lottery is less than the chances of some other unique individual winning the lottery? My next post depends on your answer.

Given Dagon's comments of: "After that, the chances of one of the double winners winning again twice is 1 in 100 trillion, which is clearly impossible," he's stating that the odds of winning two more lotteries, after winning two previous ones, is somehow lower. What he is basically saying with his statement is that, if you flip 4 coins, if the first two are heads, the probability of the next two being heads are less than what they actually are. In more layman's terms, he stated that the odds of these two coin flips being heads is less than 0.25. I was more addressing Dagon's incorrect statement when I started bringing in some simple conditional probabilities. It was a credibility check, as he makes mistakes that people shouldn't make after taking courses on statistics and/or probabilities. Essentially, if he was top of the class for his probability course, he either was in a very weak class, or is lying behind the anonymity of the internet. As for 0.0625 being the relevant figure, the probability of someone taking a fair coin and flipping it heads 4 times is 0.0625. But I'm just (failing horrible it seems) trying to make it clear that it is not as though the prior success indicate that the next coin flip to have any other probability than 0.5. But as you flip coins as heads, the probability of achieving 4 heads in a row will improve since you've already achieved part of your goal. Even though this woman has won 4 lotteries, her odds of winning a 5th are the same as some other winless lottery player winning their 1st. So if you can acknowledge that this woman has already won 4 lotteries, and feel as though winning 1 lottery is not an impossibility (which Dagon concedes), then it cannot be impossible to win a 5th. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense. It's super late and I'm off to bed now True, but that's not the situation Dagon painted with his statement. Exactly indeed. When you stated your example, you made probably the most common incorrect assumption that people with their first exposure to probabilities and statistics make. You should be more attentive to the issue I was actually addressing in your post. If you wish for me to not talk about aspects of probabilities not relating specifically to the likelihood of someone winning the lottery 4 times, then DO NOT MAKE ELEMENTARY MISTAKES IN OTHER STATEMENTS THAT ARE TANGENTIAL TO THE DISCUSSION THAT DEMONSTRATE YOU HAVE A POOR UNDERSTANDING OF HOW PROBABILITY WORKS. I did no such thing. The odds of someone in the world winning is going to be a function of how many winning tickets there are and how frequently tickets are purchased by everyone. Until now, no one else mentioned anything of the sort.

Did you just take one of the Arts Faculty's probability courses? Because this statement is wrong in any statistics course, even if it's a course from the school that allegedly invented nanotechnology (which school was this again?) Winning a lottery is an independent event of winning future lotteries. The chances of someone winning with a lottery ticket is not affected by whether or not they have previously won a lottery ticket. I think (or at least hope) that we can all agree on this). That is, for any given lottery, the chances any one individual has of winning it is not affected in any way by that person winning a lottery previously. So lets set this up: P( A | B ) A is the probably of winning two more lotteries B is the probably of winning two lotteries in the past. Since A is independent of B, we know that P( A | B ) = P( A ). Assuming the lotteries in A have equivalent chance to win as the past lotteries in B, then the P( A ) = P( B ). Therefore, since the probability of winning two lotteries in the past is "not surprising" (Dagon's words), then the probability of winning two lotteries in the future must be "not surprising." In order to spell it out a little clearer, lets use coin flips. The probability of the first two coin flips being heads is 0.25 [This is pretty trivial: 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25] The probability of having two more coin flips that are heads having already had two coin flips that were heads is, I hope is obvious, also 0.25. Because you've already gotten two heads coin flips, the probability of you getting another 2 is irrelevant of what you got previously. Though straight up, the probability of getting 4 heads in a row is 0.0625. People often assume that because the odds of getting heads 4 times in a row is low, the odds of getting that last heads when you've already gotten three is somehow lower. The thing I find very interesting, is that this very concept was what many second year CompSci students struggled with when they took this course at my University (Stats 221 - In fact, Dr. Kouritzin was my Stats 221 teacher back in 2004... he actually worked for Lockheed Martin for a while too /coolfact). For most of us it was our first exposure to random variables and probability.

I find this exceptionally surprising.

That's not what you stated when you stated that events with exceptionally low probability do not occur in the natural world: "Something that only has 1 in trillions chance of happening shouldn't happen in the natural world." Regardless, I know where this road goes. If you wish to believe that this was due to some sort of supernatural phenomenon, then you are free to believe whatever helps you make sense of the world. I'm off to return to work.

That simply because something has an exceptionally low chance of happening, does not mean that it cannot happen. And your assertion of stating that something with that has ridiculously small odds of happening can't happen in the natural world is an incorrect assertion. I'm refuting (as Deadly Nightshade pointed out) the false dichotomy that you presented.

My analogy most certainly is not incorrect. You just fail to properly understand it. I'm not talking about drawing any sequence of cards. The probably ability of drawing 100 cards of any sequence is 100%. Anyone will always do that. But that's not what I'm stating. Imagine this: I randomly draw from 100 decks of cards. They turn out to all be the ace of spades. You can say that the odds of doing that are (1/52)^100. (note, the order of the sequence obviously matters for this to be true). However, this still applies for any unique sequence of unique cards that you get. Whatever they happen to be, when you draw those 100 cards, the chances of you getting the sequence that you do, is exactly the same as the chances that you get 100 ace of spades. Unless you're implying that getting a specific sequence other than 100 ace of spades is somehow higher....

Take 100 decks of cards. Draw one card from each deck. The statisical likelihood of you drawing those 100 cards is about 2.5*10^-172. Yet you just did it. You had such an extreme unlikely chance of drawing those 100 specific cards, but you did draw them. In Dagon's world, you shouldn't be able to draw those 100 specific cards because it just cannot happen in the natural world because the probability of doing so is too small. Which is an incorrect statement. As for the case, my money would be on confounding variables that are hidden (i.e. not necessarily a scam) that have inadvertently increased the likelihood of her success. In other words, it was probably effectively a weighted system as opposed to a fairly random one.

With proper unit testing and regression, it's not bad coding at all. Adding in additional constraints on a system that is already supposed to work in a particular way is just as likely to introduce bugs that could be difficult to trace. Besides, the bugs would not be difficult to trace as the metrics that exist to affect minigame difficulty appear to be game difficulty, AP points, sabotage skill, and equipment. Occasionally intel provides an additional metric. This is not a lot of variables that can affect this system. Furthermore, constraints clearly do exist, as there are some hacking panels in the end game that are easier than ones in some of the open world hubs. Are people getting bypasses with thousands of nodes in a fraction of a second because they have thousands of AP assigned to them?

A publicly traded company like EA cannot grossly misrepresent their sales numbers. They can make estimates about future sales, but if you ever see stuff like this in a press release you'll always see disclaimers about how the contents of the release contain forward thinking statements and may not actually occur. Having said that, I'm unaware of where Volourn found his number for Mass Effect 2 sales. Obviously I trust my numbers And no, I cannot discuss them as that's outside of my job responsibilities

The fact that they are publicly traded is precisely why they don't confirm it. It looks MUCH worse to confirm it (or to even say you're working on it), only to have it come out later that you're canceling it. That PR commentary is a textbook non-committal response from someone working for a publicly traded company. They most definitely are NOT lying with their statement, regardless of whether or not they are working on a PC version. You took a lot of heat because you used a ton of words when 20 would have worked fine. You also took a lot of heat for inferring a conclusion that 50% should be a median score. But you can come on and toot your horn all you want if you need that type of self-affirmation. It doesn't dispute that your original article was both boring and unimaginative. You said nothing that wasn't already apparent. Might as well have stated the sky was blue.

For us, QA is done in a more agile development, iterating with the programming, art, and design teams incrementally as they complete user stories. Doing QA only at the end of proper quality on release results in bug fixing becoming significantly more expensive because the systems have become much more intertwined, and solutions have been built on top of existing bugs. Assuming the programmer isn't already done the task, and the GUI in a somewhat final state (it looks like it is). Had the decision been made much earlier in development to do this, then you'd be right. Currently the GUI appears to be in a near finished state. It's not as simple as "add one more button" at this stage. You're right. It's most likely that a design doc about item descriptions never actually existed in the first place. I'm not talking in hypotheticals. I am talking from experience. I'm not even sure what you're talking about here. I said that team leads tend to be more managerial. Are you disputing this? I'm not sure if you are or not. As mkreku indicated, that's not what I said at all. As for your "email" response to him, that is still irrelevant. Long gone are the days when a project lead like Richard Garriot places every single tile in his game (Ultima 6 btw). "Generally" indeed. My experience indicates otherwise. We had to do localization translations for every language we shipped in. EFIGS, Russian, Polish, etc. I would be surprised if Bethesda was not also in the same boat. Or does Bethesda not publish games internationally? (I don't see CD-Projekt or Cenega on Poland boxart for Fallout 3 BTW, just Bethesda Softworks). As for the cost, it depends on how much writing is done in the game, as well as user interface screens. And who's fronting the cost. And you're incorrect if you think that it's all done by some "local publisher." Unless you don't think Bethesda will publish the game in EFIGS countries, they are definitely not going English only. I am that grunt. Given that my programming experience has also resulted in me being put into an interim producer position over a programming team for a variety of reasons, I'm seeing it from a management perspective. Not a day goes by that I don't see a new feature request for something small. If I approved all of them, I'd have added a dozen new things (that weren't already planned for!) in the last week alone. Like Sawyer said, a mountain of work is made by many small tasks. Even then, I still do my QA job diligently and without waste. No one benefits if I am wasteful with my time, or other people's time. You can't have a large company of people all making individual requests to programmers for whatever feature they want without approval.

So in your land, you don't do QA until content that is "pertinent to the gamplay" is done? He just has free time to get new tasks assigned to him? This is feature creep. You can't just assign tasks willy nilly. In practice, it's quite possible that what exists in your design docs end up out of date. Especially by the time there you're dealing with content that isn't immediately pertinent to gameplay. Your mileage may vary by company I suppose. What!? Assuming they aren't dealing with bugs, there's just as good a chance that the writers get allocated to a different project altogether. Game development has changed in the past, particularly from a "everyone can work on everything" part. Sid Meier doesn't sit down and work on his games anymore. Team Leads (in my experience anyway) are often more managerial as opposed to hands on. Maybe things haven't changed in your neck of the woods, but they certainly seem to have in mine. The smaller team is exactly why anybody could write it. Developers can't just do whatever they want, with publishers accepting any additional costs incurred. I'm thinking as someone that isn't a bean counter, but a grunt in the trenches.

Just some quick questions. Why would you leave content as a placeholder until it is "ready for QA?" What other tasks is the interface guy working on, that will have to be supplanted in order to accommodate this change request? Who writes the descriptions? You say you want something that isn't generic because you find generic guns lame, so I'm assuming you'd like the descriptions to be something interesting? Who writes the descriptions? You say Chris Taylor as an example from before, but games today are built differently than they were 10 years ago. Someone in upper management is likely too busy doing other stuff (and probably too disconnected from the lore of the game) to have time for this. I'd strongly suggest a writer. What else is he writing? If you want something more than generic ("This is an M60, a light machine gun built by the United States"), some checks and balances to ensure appropriate names are used for the setting, as well as some actual time to put thought into the weapon descriptions. If you want something interesting, you likely can't get any person to do it. And when you get this person to do it, it means that they are not working on something else instead. How many languages is this game going to support? Editing will have to be done to ensure that nothing that seems innocuous to one culture/language group, isn't actually offensive to a different group. There's also localization costs. Assuming this game is not an English only release, Loc will have to make another pass. Especially if you're just keeping a placeholder until it is "ready for QA" (at which point you're probably resubmitting for localization). Feature Creep is also always a concern. How many "lunchbreak" long tasks are you going to add in? After all, they're all easy changes right? Even if there are 100 others with the same considerations. I could go on if you like...

Hades and I bumped heads so many times I lost count. So many times he'd make me say "Argh." To me, he was always Hades. My first introduction to him was as Hades_One, but it was Hades. There were other names, but Hades left his mark. I think as Hades, Michael was able to interact and enjoy life in a way that I don't think he was ever really able to in person. He was a big member of this community, and left an impact on all of us that interacted with him on a regular basis. In spite of our squabbles on the internet, I certainly would never wish ill will upon him. There were times when I was fed up with the board and he's PM with a message saying he didn't want me to leave, because he enjoyed my presence on the board and felt the place would be less fun and a bit emptier without me. I don't post here very much any more, but I can still feel that this place feels emptier without him. I hope you found peace Michael. You'll always be Hades to me... Allan 'alanschu' Schumacher P.S. Hades was in the Navy. The first thing I thought of after posting this was "Taps." :'(

But so far so good! I like the writing, and I love the dialogue system, and the story seems cool so far. I think the graphics look fine (I don't know what qualifies as "absolutely horrible graphics" but if this game is it, then as far as I'm concerned game devs can stop working on improving graphics). There are definitely some clunky issues, but the game is running flawlessly with no technical issues. In the early going (Just got to Saudi Arabia), I'd probably end up giving the game a very solid 8 or 9 score. I stayed up much later than I should have.

http://io9.com/5529877/childs-final-superh...oull-read-today

The Boy Scouts of America stopped receiving government funding in 2005 due to the ACLU's lawsuit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of..._Scouting_units

According to the link you had below, it showed a pre-release box art that didn't have Activision's logo on it. Or things like the ESRB rating and whatnot. If Activision had to reprint "a LOT" of box art because of this, then I have to wonder why Activision bothered printing a lot of box art that was definitely not going to be used. Vince and Jason were **** about this, but Activision is grasping at straws if they felt it hurt their ability to market the game. 4.7 million day one sales. What I see here was a publisher that decided to let members of their wholly owned company get away with stuff like this because they definitely didn't want to risk missing the holiday release, and cashed in significantly because of it. The logo stuff is a red herring. It could have been caught and dealt with much earlier, and should have been dealt with when it was first brought up. Activision didn't. I wonder if they didn't because they were too busy drooling over the anticipated holiday release of what ended up being pretty much the most successful day one launch of any game. To be fair, Activision was in a tough spot and regardless of what they did, they'd have their critics. But opting to release the game and cash in on millions is certainly a lesser morale ground than not releasing it until the logo was added, and Vince and Jason dealt with accordingly.

I will go if my programming application works out the way I want it too!

I would be exceptionally surprised that, if Activision actually cared about the omission of the logo, that they couldn't have had it added. Sure Infinity Ward didn't add it and that makes them ****, but I'd still blame primarily Activision for its omission.

Just thought I'd chime in briefly. Most of these points are towards Calax. There was a point where Infinity Ward wasn't owned by Activision either. They were purchased by Activision after the release of the original Call of Duty. John Carmack was famous for owning multiple Ferrari's, and even giving one of them away to a winner of one of the Quake Tournament winners. I think he even decided if he bought less Ferrari's, he could pursue is other dreams of experimenting in rocketry. There are a LOT of people in the games industry that make a LOT of money. Most people don't, but I assure you I will not be losing sleep over wondering if the heads of big studios (id Software, BioWare, Blizzard, etc. and I would definitely presume, Infinity Ward) are making enough money to be able to flash their cash around. Looking at Kotaku's legal documents posted, I see clearly on the 48th point that they feel they are owed in excess of $36 million (and this is probably related to the other part of the document where they mentioned they were seeking appropriate remuneration for not only themselves, but the staff that worked at Infinity Ward). You do realize that not everyone pays $15 a month for the game. Assuming the 11 million is still accurate (I heard it was slashed in half when they lost access to China... Did they get China back?), the thing is that Chinese subscribers do not pay $15/month for the game. They paid significantly less (I don't know the actual numbers, but GamaSutra mentioned that Activision-Blizzard would make about $140 million annually from China, and that was with an anticipated improved royalty, up from the $55 million per year they were making). IIRC, the lawsuit was written up by a respectable law firm. I did another quick skim of the article, and most of the praise they mention for the Call of Duty and Modern Warfare franchise came from either third party praise, or Bobby Kotick himself. Could you point me to the which article in the lawsuit mentions that they, Jason and Vince, state that Call of Duty and Modern Warfare are the most successful product lines in the industry? NOTE: I see your later post as I go through. The first article does mention it. However, we're not sure what their metric is for "successful." I'd argue that, given its duration and the amount of sales that have occurred early in the release (which is the most important time for sales, there could be a metric that allows them to legitimately post this claim. You talk about games like Diablo 2 and StarCraft, none of which had remotely near the sales that MW2 alone had just months after its release. Selling a lot of games over a long period of time is less successful than selling a lot of games over a short period of time. This is even in the words of Obsidian CEO, Feargus Urqhart. StarCraft 2 is not out yet, and is literally you doing the exact same thing that you accuse West and Zampella of doing. I don't think you understand how this works. Full creative control does not mean that Infinity Ward can do whatever they want. It means they have control over the content. It doesn't guarantee that Activision will fund whatever they want. If Infinity Ward comes to them with your absurd "Modern Warfare: Carebear Edition," and Activision doesn't like it, Activision can still state that they will not fund this project. Infinity Ward is free to come up with other ideas Activision will consider. It does mean that Activision does not have the right to alter game content upon its own volition without consent from the developer itself (something that does happen in video games, and probably other industries). It does not mean that Infinity Ward gets free willy nilly to do whatever they want with Activision's money. The lawsuit itself explicitly states that employees were brought to tears in article 32. You don't know what the metric they are using for successful is. The only real argument you made is World of Warcraft. You have also spat out games that don't even exist yet, as well as other games that are over a decade old that wouldn't have nearly the revenue per unit that a game like Modern Warfare 2 has had. I'll state straight up that, financially speaking, I consider MW2 to be significantly more financially successful than games like Diablo 2 and StarCraft. But when Activision themselves mention that MW2 is one of three primary reasons why Activision was able increase its net revenues from 2008 to 2009. Not bad for a game released at the end of 2009. Activision also boasted that it was the best selling console game in the US and Europe for 2009, despite its November release date.

I'm out of touch for computer components and I need a hand. I'm likely looking at a Phenom II processor. I've always been partial to Asus Mobos, and am not sure if I will go nVidia or ATI. Any mobo recommendations at a variety of price ranges. Thanks Allan