dfan

29 ms·

301.
by dfan 14y ago
Also known as Centaur Chess.
302.
by dfan 14y ago
Yeah, I was actually going to use en passant, but I figured more people would understand the comment if I used castling.
303.
by dfan 14y ago
The answer everyone always gives is oversaturation, but I dunno about that. Personally I think that the novelty of the experience just wore off, and given the investment that people had to make, not just in plastic instruments but in living
304.
by dfan 14y ago
Sorry, they're part of the game. It's like getting offended at a chess player for castling.
305.
by dfan 14y ago
Well, we knew it was a lot of fun; it was just a question of convincing everyone else. Plus the high price (because of the peripheral) made for an even higher barrier to entry. It's easy in retrospect to say "Everyone wants to be a rock sta
306.
by dfan 14y ago
"More broadly, I think Valett can provide the foundation for answering other interesting questions in word games, such as how to quantify the difficulty of Boggle boards." Well, you can already quantify the difficulty of Boggle boards prett
307.
by dfan 14y ago
I was one of the primary developers on Guitar Hero. It is hard to explain just how weird it was that that game became a massive hit. We had already made a couple of music games that only sold modestly, and expecting people to buy this toy p
308.
by dfan 14y ago
The way I learn math and physics is to write out every equation. I can nod at something I don't fully understand and move on, but I have great difficulty writing something I don't understand and moving on.
309.
by dfan 14y ago
I wonder if the 5/4 meter of the XTC song "English Roundabout" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akrD84P_zxU (they're from Swindon and the Wikipedia page mentions that the song is a tribute) is a reference to the 5 external roundabouts.
310.
by dfan 14y ago
I really like that map with overlaid discs representing the number of EV for each state. I think it's much clearer than the usual method of distorting the map to make each state's area proportional to its number of EV.
311.
by dfan 14y ago
If you want to read more about the simulation argument, the place to start is Nick Bostrom's page on it: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
312.
by dfan 14y ago
Agreed, this is definitely not surprising. In fact, one of the biggest broad distinctions between the harmonic rules of classical music and pop music is that classical music tends to use authentic cadences (V -> I) and pop music tends t
313.
by dfan 14y ago
He's doing stuff at a way way lower of musical theory (just saying things like "what chords occur the most?") than Schenkerian analysis. He's certainly not looking at the shape of a song as a whole. Schenkerian analysis is a ton of fun, alt
314.
by dfan 14y ago
(Tuning down a 1/2 step is not uncommon among heavier rock/heavy metal bands. I'm not entirely sure why though.) You answered your own question; it sounds heavier.
315.
by dfan 14y ago
Yeah, if you went by novice guitar player easiness, the keys of G and D would be at the top, not C. Also, barre chords enable you to play in any key you want, so it's not like playing in C# is particularly harder than playing in C.
316.
by dfan 14y ago
The chord stuff is all perfectly reasonable (in pop music, that is; in a classical piece in the key of C you would have an Em going to an Am way more than to F, for example, and you'd see way more D chords). I don't buy that Eb/Cm is the th
317.
by dfan 14y ago
The question is inherently crippled, because there have to be objective probabilities, otherwise quantum mechanics wouldn't work. I guess the question really is "if the universe operated according to classical principles, would there be obj
318.
by dfan 14y ago
I don't understand how the fact that Inform 7 syntax looks like natural language means that "you don't write any code at all." It's actually a really interesting domain-specific language, though I don't know how well its lessons generalize.
319.
by dfan 14y ago
According to Jiri Novotny, 'As popularized by Tim Ferris, according to Josh Waitzkin, “A study at The British Institute of Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment 10
320.
by dfan 15y ago
I did some moderately serious dual n-backing a year or so back in an effort to improve my chess game. Of course it wasn't a remotely scientific experiment so I can't tell if it really helped, but I did feel that my ability to concentrate in
321.
by dfan 15y ago
His self-imposed slavery is to logic, not to The Rules.
322.
by dfan 15y ago
I still have my grandfather's 1911 set, which I am trying to still cherish after recently discovering that the whole thing is now on the internet. My affection for physical objects like books and CDs (and I have acquired a LOT of them) has
323.
by dfan 15y ago
(Following on from the last paragraph) I guess the thing to do is to have a little DSL declaring how to prettyize any sort of block (which I assume already exists for this project to work at all), and then allow the user to customize it to
324.
by dfan 15y ago
It is odd that in the third screenshot there is no visual differentiation between the true and false blocks of an if statement. That's one place where I still kind of regret the genericness of Lisp syntax. Perhaps place a green outline arou
325.
by dfan 15y ago
Programming Pearls was the book I came here to recommend. (Assuming that the original poster really meant "programmer" rather than "computer scientist".)
326.
by dfan 15y ago
Yes, but we didn't require it. (To be honest, I just found the system requirements by looking them up online now; I don't remember them myself, and my personal copy of the game is at work. I'll come back here and correct it if I was wrong.)
327.
by dfan 15y ago
We cut megabyte after megabyte, and after a few days of frantic activity, we reached a point where we felt there was nothing else we could do. Unless we cut some major content, there was no way we could free up any more memory. Exhausted,
328.
by dfan 15y ago
Here too. I started relearning a lot of my old calculus techniques recently and Wolfram Alpha was superb for checking my solutions and plotting functions.
329.
by dfan 15y ago
That's pretty brilliant. I do wish I could edit the generated LaTeX in place to give it hints when it's gotten something slightly wrong. I wonder if it has any contextual smarts (e.g., sees a partial derivative sign in a numerator, knows it
330.
by dfan 15y ago
"Has given", then.

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