On-line movie recommendation systems (such as those at Amazon, Netflix, etc) are pretty good at guessing what movies you might like based on your movie history. Improvements to these systems are constantly being made, using ever more sophisticated algorithms. But how good are they compared to the wisdom of actual people? That’s what my friends Jay and Andy are trying to figure out. And they need your help.

Jay and Andy have created a game called Video Store Clerk in which you play a video store clerk. You are told how a real customer has rated previous movie rentals, and then you are shown another movie title that the person also rented. Can you guess how the customer rated that movie?

They are collecting all the user-generated data and comparing it to the real customers’ ratings. A computer has already played the game with millions of customers, and we know how well it did. The question is whether or not the wisdom of crowds can beat the computer. To gather enough data for an accurate comparison, they need a lot of people to play. So please, pass the link around. Digg it. Blog it. They tell me their server can handle the load.

The experiment’s findings will ultimately go toward building a better movie recommendation system. Hopefully you’ll find the game fun to play, too. And if you have any ideas about improving the game, you can leave a comment here or use the contact link on their site.

Link: Video Store Clerk

Posted by David at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Filed under: Entertainment | Games | Science | Technology

Wikipedia lists dozens of variations on Tetris. I’ve played several of them, and still like the original version best. But I recently thought of a variation I haven’t seen before. It’s like a cross between Tetris and “Bubble Breaker” style games.

In this version of Tetris, which I call “Montris,” there are no falling tetrominoes (the shapes made up of 4 bricks that you’re familiar with in Tetris), and there is nothing to rotate. The shapes just drop one brick at a time, and it’s up to you to create tetrominoes when they land. When you create a tetromino, it disappears. Your goal isn’t to clear entire rows of bricks. You just clear tetrominoes. When you clear one and the bricks above it fall, this may create other tetrominoes that clear creating a chain-reaction. So thinking ahead is important.

If you drop a brick where it could potentially create more than one tetromino, you have to decide which tetromino to clear. See the animated example above for an illustration of how this could work.

Dropping one brick at a time means the well would take a long time to fill up, so there should be some other variation that keeps the game exciting. Maybe it’s as simple as a narrowing the playing field to only 5 or 6 bricks wide? Or maybe gameplay speeds up very quickly. Or maybe the next brick starts dropping when the current one is only half-way down.

One of these days, I’m going to learn enough about programming to be able to actually try my ideas.

(I call it “Montris” because it combines “mono” and “tetris.” Also, the word “montris” in Esperanto means “to show” in the past tense. That’s not really relevant, but now you know a word in Esperanto.)

Posted by David at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)
Filed under: Games | Ideas

Note:I wrote this article in 2001. At the time, Nintendo had a camera add-on product for the Game Boy that took low-quality black and white pictures. Small, cheap, color digital cameras were not nearly as prevalent as they are now. I originally posted this on my photography website. There has been a link to the article from Ironic Sans in the sidebar on the front page, but I’ve decided to integrate it as a regular Ironic Sans entry and remove the sidebar link.

Background

All colors of the visible spectrum can be broken down into combinations of just three colors: Red, Green, and Blue. In fact, if you look at your computer screen under a magnifying glass, you will see that it is made up of tiny red, green, and blue lights that are varied in combinations to create all the colors you see on your screen.

Every color picture can be broken down into three separate black-and-white pictures which represent the amounts of red, green, and blue that are used to make up that picture, as in this example:

The Theory

If a color picture can be made from three black and white pictures, I could use the Game Boy Camera to take three separate black and white pictures (using filters to capture the red, green, and blue values of a scene) and then use the computer to combine them into a single RGB image. A more elaborate version of this process is commonly used in high-end digital cameras used by large photo studios, so I saw no reason why it wouldn’t also work with the Game Boy Camera. [*note: three-pass digital cameras aren’t really used as often now in 2007 but they were at the time I wrote this]

The Process

I picked a location in my apartment where I could make sure the Game Boy could sit absolutely still (so I could take three identically-posed pictures) and picked a small colorful object to photograph. One of the first objects I tried photographing was a Snapple bottle, Kiwi-Strawberry flavored, with a colorful green and pink label.

To capture only the red light reflecting off the Snapple bottle, I was going to need a red filter that I could place in front of the Game Boy Camera, so that only red light would reach the lens. I went to a local photo-supply store and obtained a free book of filter samples, containing dozens of various colored filters. I picked a red filter and held it in front of the lens and took a picture. I repeated the process with a green filter, and then a blue filter, careful not to move the camera or the bottle in between shots.

Using the Game Boy Camera PC Link from Mad Catz, Inc., [no longer available in 2007] I transferred the images to my computer, where I ended up with these three images:

I thought I had done everything right, but when I pulled the images into Photoshop to create my RGB composite from these three images, I came up with a picture that looked like this:

Problems

Obviously, I didn’t have the full color photograph I had anticipated, although there was a hint of color in the image. If my theory was correct, though, it should have worked. A little bit of research on the internet brought me to the cause of the problem. It turns out, the light-sensitive chip inside the Game Boy Camera (it’s called a Mitsubishi M64282FP chip) is sensitive to infrared light, which isn’t visible to the human eye. While I was succesfully filtering out red, green, and blue light, infrared light was still reaching the lens of the camera.

This was easily provable by pointing my Game Boy Camera at my TV remote control and pushing a button on the remote. Even though nothing seemed to happen that I could see with my eyes, I could see the front of the remote light up on the Game Boy screen! I would have to filter out the infrared light reaching the Game Boy Camera in order to get my full color photograph.

Solutions

Apparantly, most digital cameras are sensitive to infrared light, but contain a built in “hot mirror” filter, which blocks infrared (something I learned through a little research on-line). So I went to my local camera shop and bought a hot mirror filter (which was more expensive than I thought it would be, but I was now determined to take color photos with my Game Boy Camera, so I bought it anyway). I held it in front of the Game Boy Camera and repeated the remote control test, and could no longer see the light of the remote light up. I had a good feeling about this. I attached the hot mirror filter to the front of the Game Boy Camera using masking tape, and picked a new test subject to photograph: a Garfield Pez Dispenser.

Repeating the three-pass process of photographing an object with the red, green, and blue filters, I came up with these images:

Already I had a good feeling, as these images were more in line with what I was expecting than with the previous tests.  So I again transferred them to Photoshop, created a composite RGB image, and this was the result:

The World’s First color photograph taken with the Game Boy Camera!

More Pictures

October 31, 2001 - Okay, I know that they are not the most exciting subjects, but the following photos (plus the Pez Dispenser above) are the World’s First color photos taken with the Game Boy Camera. I just shot whatever was around to be used as test subjects.

November 10, 2001 - My first outdoor attempts. First off, notice the vignetting in these images (the halo that seems to be around the pictures). This is caused by the camera itself reflecting in the Hot Mirror filter. I’ll have to use a black magic marker or something to make the GB Camera black so it doesn’t reflect (I think it wasn’t a problem indoors because the camera didn’t have such bright light on it). In the picture of the trees, the blue sky came out nicely peeking through the top. I’ll have to solve the halo problem before my next attempts.

[That’s it. I never got the motivation to shoot any others in this series, as cheap color digital cameras became more prevalent, and the novelty of taking low quality color pictures with a cheap handheld device wore off].

Posted by David at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Filed under: Games | Ideas | Photography | Technology

Note: Do not play the game described below if you are in any potential danger of hurting yourself or others, or if you are near traffic, or anywhere that you aren’t positive it can be played safely. Play at your own risk.

That’s got you curious, huh? What’s the Sensory Deprivation game that’s so dangerous it requires a disclaimer? It’s something I found myself doing one day in college as I was walking across the busy campus and saw a blind student walking in the opposite direction with a walking cane. I wondered what it’s like to confidently walk around, even while unable to see. Blind people seem to do it okay. Could I?

I had my sunglasses on, so I figured nobody would notice if I suddenly closed my eyes. First I looked out at the ground ahead, the people walking around, and figured that if I just kept walking straight I would avoid all of them, and the lamp post. How many steps could I take before I had to open my eyes again? I decided to find out. Without changing my stride, I closed my eyes.

The answer was only around 6 steps. I had no confidence in my ability to navigate at all. I felt like at any second I would smash into something or someone. I must be veering one way or the other, right? When I opened my eyes, I realized that I had been walking straight after all and was actually doing pretty well. So I tried it again. After another 6 steps, I couldn’t bear it.

Why was I only able to take 6 steps? How many would I have been able to take if I’d had a walking cane before I freaked out about bumping into things? How long does it take the newly-blind to be able to get around confidently? Is it faster to learn with a cane, with a guide dog, or with echolocation?

I haven’t really played the game since then. Do I dare, here on the busy streets of Manhattan? Do I get bonus points if I play while wearing my iPod? How many steps can you take?

Posted by David at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)
Filed under: Games | Ideas

I just noticed this. On the north side of City Hall Park, right next to the Tweed Courthouse, gated off from the public, there’s a basketball hoop.

When was this installed? Does anyone use it? Is Mayor Bloomberg enjoying an occasional game of H-O-R-S-E when he’s got some downtime?

Posted by David at 2:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under: Games | New York | Politics

Occasionally during downtime on a particularly slow photo shoot, I’ve played this game with my assistants. Everyone takes out a piece of paper, and numbers it from 1 to 50. Then you get 10 minutes to write down every state you can remember. Finally, you compare it to the master list and see who got the most answers. 10 minutes seems like more than enough time to remember a list of 50 items, right? And yet somehow I’ve never managed to get more than 48 of them.

Well, you don’t need to get out a piece of paper or a timer. I’ve put together an on-line version of this game. It’s a bit low-tech [see update below for high-tech version], but it works.

Have a go at it and then post your score in the comments.

Update: Thanks to reader Erik Wannebo, we now have a nifty interactive version which keeps track of your progress as you go and tallies your score for you. Check it out!

Posted by David at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1152)
Filed under: Education | Favorites | Games | Lists

The news lately has been full of reports of people’s Wii Remotes (aka “Wiimotes”) flying out of their hands and smashing into their television sets during heated gameplay with the new Nintendo Wii. Every time I hear reference to Flying Wiimotes, I keep thinking of that old Flying Toasters screen saver from the “After Dark” series that was so popular on people’s computers in the early 1990s.

So it got me thinking. Someone should combine the nostalgia of that old screen saver with this modern bit of technology history and make a Flying Wiimotes screen saver to commemorate this gaming snafu. It strikes me as a simple thing to do, but it’s just slightly beyond my programming expertise (or lack thereof). Anybody want to try their hand at it? There’s even an open source clone of the flying toasters screen saver as a starting point.

Posted by David at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under: Games | Ideas | Technology

The upcoming Nintendo system, called the “Wii” (pronounced “We”), knows how you’re moving the controller. In fact, some games are controlled without pushing buttons at all, but by simply moving the controller. In a tennis game, for example, you literally swing the controller like a tennis racket, and your character on-screen mimics your move.

So I’m thinking: Someone should come up with a game that uses a dumbbell accessory allowing you to attach the controller to your dumbbell. The game could have several component. There could be a section that’s just a normal workout, that just gives you training advice and lets you workout along with an on-screen trainer, and it tracks your progress because it knows how many reps and sets you’re doing by tracking your movement. And there could be actual games that incorporate your workout with the game. Maybe every time you raise the dumbbell over your head, you shoot an alien. Or punch an alien. Or pick an apple. Or something like that. I’m not a game designer, but I think it’s got potential.

I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this is already in the works. Maybe I should have foregone that gym membership in favor of the much less expensive Nintendo Wii.

Posted by David at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Filed under: Games | Ideas

The art in this airport food court reminded me of Super Mario Brothers:

Posted by David at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Filed under: Art | Design | Entertainment | Games | Travel

I’ve had this design floating around my head for the past few days:

Posted by David at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Filed under: Design | Games | Ideas

I’m really into Boggle these days. And I don’t mean that wussy 4x4 Boggle. No, I’m talkin’ about 5x5 Big Boggle. I know there are several on-line versions available, but nothing beats the fun of playing real people face-to-face, and the shake-shake sound of the cubes in the Boggle board. So I’ve been playing the real world game, and that’s when I noticed the Big Boggle game in progress on the Big Boggle box.

I think that must be the best Big Boggle tray ever. How carefully did they have to plan it? It’s hard to believe such a great tray is even possible by chance alone. There must be tons of great words on that tray. Take a look and see how many you can find. Remember: This isn’t the wussy edition, so to make things extra tough we’re not only disallowing 3 letter words, but 4 letter words as well.

So how many 5-letter or longer words can you find? For an added challenge, limit yourself to just 3 minutes.

I’ll start things off: PREDATING, STEAMERS, BEIGNETS…

And no fair using a computer program to figure it out. Just use your brain.

Posted by David at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Filed under: Entertainment | Games | Language

I saw this in a toy store the other day. I was just there to buy something for, um… Okay, sometimes I just like to go to the toy store. Anyway, I saw this toy. Spy Vision Goggles. Pretty cool, right? It says right there on the box: “See in the Dark 25 Feet!” How awesome is that? Man, we never had anything that cool when I was a kid. I can’t believe the technology for this stuff has gotten so cheap that they can — Hey, wait a minute.

“Night vision goggles with lights?” What does that mean? Here’s the fine print: “The Spy Vision Goggles can see in the dark up to 25 feet away with two powerful beams of light!” So basically they just have little flashlights on the sides. If you’re in the dark, you can turn on the light. Wow. That’s a far cry from seeing in the dark. In fact, that’s pretty much the opposite of seeing in the dark.

When I was a kid, I had a pretty good imagination. But not that good.

Posted by David at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Filed under: Advertising | Games

Chess is a game of war. So for those who disapprove of war, I’ve come up with the Pacifist Chess Set. The concept is illustrated above.

At first glance, it looks like you could play a legitimate game of chess with this set. But once you start playing you realize that you can’t play for very long — at least not very easily. As you play, and your pieces get closer to your opponent’s pieces, it becomes apparent that one side’s pieces are indistinguishable from the other side’s pieces. They are all the same color.

It’s not really a functional chess set. It’s more of an art or conversation piece. It makes the statement that, no matter what side of the battle we’re on, we have in common that we are all human.

[I got this idea while wandering through the Imagery of Chess Revisited exhibit at the Noguchi Museum in Queens. The exhibit is only around for two more weeks, but if you get a chance I highly recommend a visit. It features works by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, and others. A book is also available, in case you miss the show.]

Posted by David at 12:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Filed under: Art | Favorites | Games | Ideas | Politics