Christmas posting

Hello, my few faithful followers! (and the more common faithless ones)

I've been spending the last week waiting impatiently on the results of a job interview, checking email and my phone compulsively every few minutes just in case they've contacted me.  I've been sorely tempted to call them up and see if any progress has been made on the decision, but have managed to hold off so far.  I think I'll probably crack and check for news before I leave to spend Christmas with my girlfriend's family on Thursday - I'd rather not spend time stressing over whether I've got the job or not when I should be relaxing.  People seem to be divided on whether checking post-interview is a good idea or not... I suspect it's probably for the best to leave it where possible, as you'd expect to hear about it if you've got the job at least, and checking isn't going to change the result!

Musically, I've been working on new songs lately.  I can't really do anything towards the upcoming EP at the moment as my producer is away on holidays.  However, I have been working on getting some cover art with a very talented artist who just so happens to be the bassist in The Solution, the band I play in!  Expect to see previews of the cover art and music from the EP in the new year.

One thing I will reveal though, is my working title for the EP - I'm thinking of calling it "Windows to the Soul". I hope it doesn't sound like I'm taking myself too seriously, or sounds too emo, or anything like that... simply put, it's the only name that's stuck so far.  So that's most likely what it will be called, unless I get an outpouring of hatred towards the name - of course, the customer is always right ;)

I did a quick Google search just now and found that someone else has also used that title.  However, I don't think anyone's going to confuse my music with contemporary Christian music, so I should be pretty safe!  Oh someone else used it too... a DJ.  Yep, still safe.

Anyway, that's me for 2010 - hope everyone has a fantastic Christmas!

Enjoy this picture of a fluorescent hyperferret.

Metablog

I've only been blogging for a month now but am already getting into the blogger's obsessive mindspace of making it all pretty and readable for people, and making it easy for people to get involved.  On that note, you now don't have to have an account to comment, don't know why I had it set that way in the first place... sorry!

I've even linked it in a couple of places, most notably my facebook page.  I know a few friends have dropped in here from facebook... and wow, I just looked at the stats counter for this site.  76 pageviews yesterday, I'm pretty sure I didn't check in myself that many times...

So don't hesitate to comment, even if it's to tell me that I was completely wrong (I've already had a few interesting disagreements with friends on Ten Things I Wish Were Invented Already), or suggest something actually interesting to write about.  It's easier to comment now, so if you didn't bother before, you can now, with your very own Cloak of Anonymity*!  And it lets me know that people are actually reading this thing.  I admit, I can be an attention-seeker sometimes ;)

Also, kudos to whoever provided the six eight pageviews from Mac users.  Oh and one from an iPhone, well aren't you fancy!

* It gives +2 to potential douchery... just be careful in case I set the Banhammer on your ass!

Music!

As a change of pace from the maths post, and in an attempt to win back people I may have scared off... ;)

I had a gig last night!  It was my third solo gig at Irish, and as usual all the other performers were intimidatingly good.  But I think I'm developing as a performer - the nerves and fear about getting up on stage aren't quite so paralysing as they were a couple of years ago, that's for sure!

I'm doing some recording of the best stuff I've written so far, with good friend Dave acting as producer (and featuring heavily with instruments and backing vocals!).  It's going well enough that I'm thinking of releasing the recordings as an EP, hopefully to be released early next year.

I'm considering at some point putting a track or two on here for people to listen to, as they are churned out. I'm keen on the idea of musicians giving their music away for free, but asking for donations or people buying their solid-format music in return.  I figure if something's popular enough, it'll be pirated in any case (I'm not expecting that to happen with my stuff anyway!).  And having your music spread around is a great way to drum up publicity, and thus people who are likely to actually look out for you, attend your gigs, and buy your stuff!

So what do people think?  Would you like me to put something up?

Pass the Pigs (Part 1)

So it was only a matter of time before maths started appearing in my blog.  But never fear! This shouldn't be too complicated.  If you do get too freaked out, don't worry, you'll be safer in this part of the blog!

A few weeks ago, my better half and I were having dinner with some dear friends, who proceeded to bring out a game called Pass the Pigs (made by Milton Bradley).  Neither of us had ever seen the game before, but we were quickly introduced and proceeded to have a great time playing it.

The idea of the game is that you roll a pair of pigs, and the position the pigs land in determines how many points you get.  You can stop at any time and "pass the pigs" to the next person.  You can also keep rolling and racking up points, but the downside is that if the pigs land in a certain position, you lose all the points you gained that turn.  If the pigs are touching, you lose all the points you have altogether!

The way to win this game is all about knowing when to quit.  As I was playing, I started wondering if people had worked out optimal strategies for winning this game (because I'm a geek).  The answer as I found out later, is of course yes, yes, yes, and yes.

If you can't be bothered reading all of that, the general idea is that stopping when you've scored 23 points (or, obviously, when you've won the game) is a good strategy.  The actual very best strategy, if you're only playing against one other person, depends on what your score and their score is.  This makes sense if you think about it - if you've only got 10 points and your opponent has 99 points (the score needed to win is 100), there's no point stopping after 22 points because you know your opponent is very likely to win next turn unless you go all-out.

I decided to try and replicate the results.  First I compared the experimental results in all the literature I could find - what chance each "roll" has of happening.  Fortunately, they all seemed to agree pretty well - the consistency is pretty surprising considering we're talking about mass-produced plastic pigs.

Position	Percentage
Side (no dot)	34.9%
Side (dot)	30.2%
Razorback	22.4%
Trotter	8.8%
Snouter	3.0%
Leaning Jowler	0.61%

from Kern, JC (2006). "Pig Data and Bayesian Inference on Multinomial Probabilities". Journal of Statistics Education 14 (3).


So then, using these probabilities, I simulated what would happen if people with different strategies played against each other.  I ran a round-robin competition in which every strategy from "stop at 15" up to "stop at 30" played against each other in a one-on-one game 40,000 times, taking turns to be first to play.


I found that for the first person to play, being more bold is an advantage - the "stop at 25" strategy wins most often, winning over 52% of their games when playing first (see below).  Not bad, considering that all of the strategies are pretty reasonable competitors.  The reason that boldness works here is because the first player gets an advantage in that they will always have played either as many or one more turn than their opponent.  This means that they can get away with taking more risks.

For the second person to play, alternatively being more shy is better - the "stop at 17" and "stop at 18" strategies do best here, again winning over 52% of their games.  The "stop at 17" strategy actually does slightly better, but to such a small extent (52.225% vs 52.219%) that it makes no difference.

If we combine both sets of results, we see that playing to 23 is the best of the strategies, which agrees with what others have said.

Of course, the next question is what to do when playing against more than one opponent?  This is something that strangely hasn't been brought up by anyone, and is a problem for next time.

The face of evil?

What with the whole controversy with WikiLeaks and the leaked diplomatic cables, I've seen Julian Assange's face a lot in the media lately.  And apart from whether WikiLeaks is doing the right or wrong thing (or, more likely, both) by releasing all of this sensitive information... I think he looks like a TV villain.

I mean, really.  Look.

He looks like the kind of genuine supervillain who has really scary plans that involve mercilessly killing lots of people for some reason that only he and his many mother issues can discern.  I think it's the hair.

When I pointed this out to my better half, she agreed, but said that she thought Colin Farrell looks more like one.  I'm not sure I see it myself.

What do you think?  To be fair, this is probably one of the nicer Colin Farrell pics, I recommend you use Google Images to find the more evil stuff... I only posted this one because it's on Creative Commons and I'm paranoid about copyright!

I should probably make a post other than random stuff soon.  Stay tuned ;)