vagary's New Writeups

Axis and Allies (idea)

2003-10-28T20:36:01Z

Axis and Allies Strategy

In typical games of Axis and Allies, victory hinges on Moscow. The US and UK require overwhelming force to attack due to the ease of island defense. This overwhelming force is not available without considerable economic resources, such as all of Eurasia. Therefore, the Axis typically employ a Russia-first strategy.

The game is challenging because each country must balance their resources between a number of theatres:

Rossiya (Russia): Karelia must be defended to keep the Wehrmacht's supply lines long while preventing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from becoming too prosperous.
Deutschland (Germany): Can Moscow be taken with the resources available or is the economic potential of Africa needed first? And how much can be spared to destroy British offensive capability and protect European beachheads?
The Commonwealth (United Kingdom): Forces must be

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T-O map (idea)

2003-10-28T17:20:54Z

For those (such as myself) with poor visualization abilities who have trouble following teleny's excellent writeup, may I present an ASCII sketch:

              _.-"-._
            .'       `.
           /  A S I A  \
          |             |
Black Sea +------J------+ Red Sea
          |  EUR | AFR  |
           \ OPE | ICA /
            `._  |  _.'
               `-+-'
                 M
                 e
                 d
                 i
                 t
                 e
                 r
                 r
                 a
                 n
                 e
                 a
                 n

(Where the J in the centre is Jerusalem.)

T-O maps are interesting because they demonstrate how much the design of contemporary maps is arbitrary:

Firstly, as geographic information decreased proportionally to the distance from the (Arabian) mapmakers, it was natural to put the most important local city,…

Shame vs Guilt Culture (idea)

2003-10-28T00:05:48Z

It has been noted that much of the difference between Western and Eastern cultural stems from their ethical philosophies. Societies founded on Judeo-Christian principles use Guilt to keep people working towards the common good. Most other societies (the most advanced examples currently being Eastern) instead use Shame. In other words, most citizens in Western cultures are at Stage 4 of Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development while most citizens in Eastern cultures are at Stage 3.

Consider a (non-psychopathic) citizen who is considering theft, they are normally discouraged by one of two thought processes:

Shame: if I steal and am caught, people will dislike me.
Guilt: if I steal, I will dislike myself.

Both of these ethical philosophies are obviously imperfect. In Shame Cultures, being perceived as having done some wrong is all that matters, not whether the wrong was actually committed. In Guilt…

Gettier problem (idea)

2003-04-17T03:10:57Z

The Gettier Problem essentially boils down to this: false beliefs (through the magic of deductive reasoning) can be used to justify true beliefs, which are therefore knowledge. This is bad because if the deducer had known that their original belief was false, they would not have been able to justify their new belief. In turn, this demonstrates that the concept of justification was much weaker and less intuitive than epistemologists had previously believed.

So the obvious next step was to slap a bandaid on JTB to get JTB+: knowledge is a true belief that is justified by true beliefs (or without reference to false beliefs). However, this turns out to suffer from problems when a belief is justified insufficiently but happens to be true by chance. For example:

Say you're watching a magic show and the magician puts a rabbit into his hat. Based on your true observations, you conclude "there's a

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Clock cycle (idea)

2003-04-16T22:36:59Z

A discrete unit of measurement of execution duration on sequential computer processors. Each clock cycle includes the atomic execution of one step* of an assembly language instruction, and, in pipelining systems, complementary steps of adjacent instructions. The speed of a processor is usually expressed as cycles per second or hertz although FLOPs are preferred for very fast or very parallel architectures.

The execution speed of actual programs is expressed in clock cycles whereas the speed of algorithms is expressed using complexity bounds (the most popular being big-O). Moore's Law ensures that clock cycles remain more accurate than flat seconds for benchmarking and profiling on code which is even slightly portable. This presents a friction in real-time systems where the engineer is expected to fulfill a requirement specified in seconds using an algorithm given in complexity running on a machine at some number of clock cycles.

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GUI Performance (idea)

2003-04-16T22:06:57Z

As XCthulhu mentions, early versions of OS/X were less than usable on simultaneously available G3 processors. So when one of my friends decided he wanted a laptop, he was heisitant to blindly run out and buy an iBook. Now you'd think that if you were very specific about processor speed and OS version, you could get an impression in forums and Usenet what kind of snappiness to expect, however it turns out that GUI performance is both poorly-defined and ineffable. So I figured if I used my secret Computer Science training for good, I could tell him what causes desirable qualia and how to test for it.

GUI Performance is primarily dependent on three things:

The operating system's ability to preemptively multitask. It's much more noticable if the pointer movement takes an extra half-second than if your thirty minute render does (in VR lag makes you throw up); so it's important that

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