In stone skipping, one tosses a stone with a flattened surface across water (or other fluid) to try to get it to bounce as many times as possible. (There are also military applications, but let’s stick to the fun stuff.) A few months ago, mechanical engineer Tadd Truscott and collagues wrote a quick study on […]
Tag: games
Rating tiddlywinks (statistically)
Dr. Patrick Barrie, PhD, MRSC, CEng, MIChemE, Cchem, MA, BA, of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at Cambridge University, UK, presents A new sports ratings system: The tiddlywinks world ratings in the Journal of Applied Statistics Volume 30, Issue 4, 2003 “After each tournament, a ‘tournament rating’ is calculated for each player based […]
Playing with pigs and lasers
Pigs, like humans, can get bored. Perhaps they’d like to play a game to amuse themselves? Even better, with interacting humans? A project designed to examine such possibilities is underway at Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht and Wageningen University Livestock Research Department in The Netherlands. It’s called ‘Playing With Pigs’ and is “researching the complex […]
Predicting Crowdsourced Decisions on Toxic Behavior in Online Games
A reported advance in the game of predicting what mobs will decide about yobs who run riot in online games: “STFU NOOB! Predicting Crowdsourced Decisions on Toxic Behavior in Online Games,” Jeremy Blackburn and Haewoon Kwak, arXiv:1404.5905, epub April 23, 2014. (Thanks to investigator Evie Tsing for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at […]