July 10 2002 RussCon Report

food

News
Game Results
Meta Party Game Results
Evening's Soundtrack
Ratings
Links
20 of us played 15 games.
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Comicollage: daily ongoing comic jam with 7 artists and no planning ahead! There's a russ strip every Tuesday.
I make exquisite corpses at deepmachines.

News

Thanks to various folks who sent me test suites or implementations for the Triangle Classification problem (posted to the mailing list recently). So far there have been about 10 RussCon participants and only 2 from my office. Which makes me happy about RussCon people and sad about my coworkers. I'll write up a report of the results; there were a few interesting lessons to be learned! Stay tuned. Someone (I think Dudley) suggested I might make a semiregular software exercise like that, which sounds like a potentially fun idea. I already have some ideas for future events.

I also noticed that there is such a thing on Kuro5hin, with the current one (an interesting little compression problem) moderated by Thad (with whom I've played email go). The deadline for that has been extended to Monday July 15, should you wish to participate.

I've been restoring my computer this week after wiping the drive to replace Win98 with Win2K. What a long tedious hassle! I'm keeping better notes this time of what all I installed and where it came from and any nonobvious info needed to install it. We'll see how long that process lasts...


Game Results

MammaMia5Daniel 4 Dan 2 William -1 Allen -1 Dudley -4
Cosmic4Dudley 2 Allen 2 JonathanC -1 William -3
TrainsportSwitzerland5JeffF 4 RussW 2 MarkH 0 Steve -2 JP -4
Carcassonne5Daniel 4 Clayton 2 Fred 0 Dan -2 MarkY -4
Settlers4Clayton 3 MarkY 1 Dan -1 JimG -3
Tichu2( Daniel Fred ) 1 ( Whindy Deborah ) -1
Drakon2JonathanC 1 Dudley -1
Cosmic6Dudley 3 RussD 3 PJ 3 JonathanC -3 Allen -3 William -3
Exxtra4Allen 3 PJ 1 RussD -1 William -3
Carcassonne4JP 3 RussW 1 MarkH -1 Steve -3
Samarkand5Deborah 4 Daniel 2 Whindy 0 Fina -2 Fred -4
Tichu2( Dan JimG ) 1 ( MarkY JeffF ) -1
Babel2Allen 1 Deborah -1
WebOfPower4Steve 3 PJ 1 RussW -1 Fina -3
Ra3JonathanC 2 Dudley 0 JP -2

It had been a while since I'd played Trainsport. Early on I think I did too many turns of building more than 2 tracks (which costs more money), and worried I was going to finish with less money than I started and end up in last place (as used to happen to me all the time in Trainsport). However, JeffF espoused a theory that whoever's balance reaches the lowest point deserves to win (some kind of rebound effect, or you have to spend money to make money)... as it happens, JeffF and I both managed to hit $0 at one point, and we finished 1st and 2nd. Coincidence? You be the judge.

I see 2-player Drakon happened again. I want to do more of that; it was fun. And another game of Babel... 2-player games are on a roll lately!


Meta Party Game

Dudley was the Meta Devil. Here is the Meta Party Game he mailed out:
Food
(Math is hard! Lets Eat)

The rules for this metagame are simple and fun. You get:
  • 1 point every time you eat some food.
  • 2 points if you bring food.
  • 3 points every time you loudly proclaim, "Damn! That's some tasty food!"
  • 4 points if you play a game that has food in it.
  • 5 points for each food item* you bring to share.
  • 7 points for each homemade food item* you bring to share.
* An item is one dish or bag of food. So a bag of chips is one item (not 1287 items).

You have to keep track of your own score, and write it in the book when you leave. Any rules that are ambiguous you can consider them to be in your favor. Ties will be broken by whoever makes the neatest entry in the book as decided by Russ. The entry should look similar to the following example:

Food Metagame
------------------------
Dudley 30

Attached is a handy little card you can print out to keep track of your score.

Enjoy,
dwf

Here was the handy little card Dudley made:
Action Number of times Points Score
Eat Food   x 1  
Bring Food   x 2  
Loudly proclaim   x 3  
Game With Food   x 4  
Bring Food to Share   x 5  
Homemade Food to Share   x 7  
Total Score  
Daniel brought a variety of foods including cupcakes. JimG prepared some tasty oven-melted cheese and tortillas, and I made some guacamole. Various other foods were supplied and consumed as well. Due to his food and his superior loud proclaiming, Daniel earned a whopping 85 meta points and easily achieved Meta Devilhood. So Daniel will design next week's Meta Game!

Evening's Soundtrack

Antietam, Burgoo
King Crimson, Larks' Tongues in Aspic
Lard, Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Red Hot Chili Peppers, One Hot Minute
The Smiths, Meat is Murder

It's another of those pesky meta soundtracks!


Ratings

New Multiplicative Rank Ratings:
 4.6052 100.0000 Daniel (4 games played)  
 2.0794 8.0000 Clayton (2)
 1.7918 6.0000 Allen (5)
 1.5041 4.5000 PJ (3)
 0.9163 2.5000 JeffF (2)
 0.6931 2.0000 JonathanC (4)
 0.6931 2.0000 RussW (3)
 0.2877 1.3333 Dan (4)
 0.2877 1.3333 RussD (2)
 0.2231 1.2500 Deborah (3)
-0.4055 0.6667 MarkH (2)
-0.6931 0.5000 JimG (2)
-0.6931 0.5000 Steve (3)
-0.6931 0.5000 Whindy (2)
-0.9163 0.4000 Dudley (5)
-0.9163 0.4000 Fred (3)
-1.3218 0.2667 JP (3)
-1.8971 0.1500 MarkY (3)
-2.0794 0.1250 Fina (2)
-3.7534 0.0234 William (4)
New Multiplicative Win Ratings:
 3.6889 40.0000 Daniel won 3 of 4
 1.8563 6.4000 Allen won 3 of 5
 1.1632 3.2000 Clayton won 1 of 2
 0.9163 2.5000 JeffF won 1 of 2
 0.8755 2.4000 Steve won 1 of 3
 0.7577 2.1333 JP won 1 of 3
 0.4055 1.5000 JimG won 1 of 2
 0.4055 1.5000 JonathanC won 2 of 4
 0.4055 1.5000 RussD won 1 of 2
 0.2469 1.2800 Fred won 1 of 3
 0.2231 1.2500 Deborah won 1 of 3
 0.1178 1.1250 PJ won 1 of 3
 0.0645 1.0667 Dudley won 2 of 5
-0.0408 0.9600 Dan won 1 of 4
-0.5108 0.6000 Fina won 0 of 2
-0.5108 0.6000 MarkH won 0 of 2
-0.7985 0.4500 RussW won 0 of 3
-0.9163 0.4000 Whindy won 0 of 2
-1.2040 0.3000 MarkY won 0 of 3
-1.8971 0.1500 William won 0 of 4
These are the new multiplicative ratings (see last issue for details). As many of you know I recently wiped my hard drive and installed Win2K (to replace the ever-crashing Win98). I had a bit of a fright as I couldn't find the RussCon stats directory on my backup CDs for a little while, but luckily it was there.

Daniel is the Devil! Allen is Vice-Devil. Clayton is Vice-Vice-Devil. William is the Generous Angel.

For those curious about overall game stats, here are the current most-played RussCon games over the last 4.5 years:

10   58 Brawl
 9   71 Euphrates
 8   71 Vampire
 7   87 Can'tStop
 6   90 Guillotine
 5   94 ZirkusFlohcati
 4   117 Settlers
 3   122 Tichu
 2   150 Carcassonne
 1   180 Bluff

Links

My beans are famous!

Kuro5hin article about go

SUPREME COURT RULES EARNINGS SHOULD BE PROTECTED AS "ART"

90 MB mpeg: German forklift training video is more interesting than you think.

Blind Psychic Gropes Buttocks to See Future

The Big Book of Sign Language


food glorious food

Russ