Here is where I am in July of 2017.

Baby Time

My spouse and I are having a baby in a few months. Its hard to know what to say about this since, in addition to being highly personal, it involves, in principle, at least, the interests of at least two other human beings. I will say this. When I got married and began living with my spouse, I felt, ironically, that for the first time in my life, I had to live not just with her, but with myself. By that I mean that my own emotional state inside my home no longer radiated away harmlessly, but was responded to and echoed back at me. Until that moment in my life, I think I’ve always tried to ignore, suppress or dissipate any emotional activity but suddenly it was clear that I could no longer afford to ignore a part of myself which could affect my intimate partner.

Having a kid is like that but times ten. My partner is, at least, an adult, with her own independent existence, ability to ignore my worst qualities and even sympathize with my imperfections. A child, on the other hand, experiences a more unbalanced relationship with their parents, one, furthermore, made more fraught by material dependence and a lack of a frame of reference. I always think, at this point, of Huxley’s The Island, wherein children are raised by groups of people so that they don’t experience unalloyed exposure to the peculiarities of their parents. Contemporary western civilization, so obsessively organized around the patriarchal family unit, seems perverse in comparison. Adding to this sense of pressure is our extremely rural location and hence comparative isolation. Luckily we have some great neighbors upon whom I am (hopefully gently) prevailing to have children.

At any rate, each day I find that I turn more scrutiny upon myself.

Health

I’m thirty-six. Sometime in high-school I started doing push ups in the morning. In college I joined a rowing team and in so doing was exposed, perhaps for the first time, to the pleasures of physical conditioning. With a few notable periods in my life since then, I’ve been more or less aggressively fit. Starting at the beginning of this year, though, I’ve finally recovered a fairly aggressive routine of physical fitness which looks something like this:

Monday: fast mile (currently 6:35s) + weightlifting
Tuesday: rowing intervals. 24 minutes of rowing (plus warm up and cool down). Three minute intervals consisting of a hard sprint for one minute (split 1:53) and a cool down (split 2:00). Over 24 minutes I average a split of 1:58 or so.
Wednesday: slow run (4 miles at a 7:30s pace) or a leisurely row for about a half hour.
Thursday: same as Tuesday
Friday: Same as monday

I started the year at about an eight minute mile and I am slowly peeling off seconds. I seem to recall having run a sub six-minute mile in high school or college some time. I’m curious whether I can get back down to that time before the baby comes.

Sporadically I am working on my 2k sprint on the rowing machine. I’m doing about a 7:35 these days. I feel like I am close to my maximum without more aggressive cross training. So far I’ve never experienced any significant chest pain so I assume I am not going to die from exercise any time soon.

In other health news I’m drinking too much coffee. I typically cut back in the summer time, but I have an hour long drive to work and its boring. Attempts to drink less coffee have left me a little frightened of the drive.

Intellectual Life

I’m spread pretty thin. In this category I place game development, generative art work, technical skills related and unrelated to work, philosophy and physics.

Games and Game Design

On the practical subject of game design, my game The Death of the Corpse Wizard came out about a month ago – I’ve sold about 40 copies without doing much advertising. More importantly, since I don’t make my living as a game designer or developer, I think I’ve created a game with some substance, not entirely devoid of genuine value. I’m still contemplating to what degree I plan on developing Corpse Wizard forward or whether I want to move on to greener pastures.

On the less practical question of game design theory I’m working on trying to understand whether we can bring quantitative techniques to bear on the question of what constitutes a good strategy game. In particular, I’m trying to nail down exactly what sorts of properties the phase space of a game has, at each decision point, that make games feel fun.

I can give you a sense of what sorts of questions I am trying to think about quantitatively. Its typically understood that a game ought to present a player with about a 50% chance of winning if its to be fun. Its better to state that in the negative: the outcome of a game shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion. You can see this at work in two player games, where match making is always employed.

Incidentally, there is a pseudo-paradox here: the point of a two-player game appears to be to determine whether player 1 is better than player 2. Yet, paradoxically, we call only those games where a given player has a 50% chance of winning “fair.” But if each player has a 50% chance of winning, the outcome seems to be random, which means it cannot teach us which player is better! I leave it as an exercise to the reader to puzzle out what, if any, resolution is possible.

Anyway, suppose we are dutiful game designers. On the first turn of our game, the player’s chance of winning must necessarily be 50%, then. One question I am interested in is: what does that chance of winning look like as a function of time? Is it flat at 50% until the end of the game? This seems unlikely. Why? Because when we play a game we are, at each turn, asking what move raises our chances of winning! If our chance of winning is flat, then the game will feel meaningless, because no action will change the win rate. On the other hand, other paradoxes seem to manifest: suppose that instead a skilled player almost always chooses a move which increases her chance of winning. If that is the case, then at some point in the game, the chance of winning will be 90%. But at this point, the game’s outcome seems like a foregone conclusion! Why keep playing if almost all possible move sequences from turn N result in a win. In other words, it seems like games become more boring towards their ends, if we define boring as the property that their outcome is easy to predict.

In other words: it seems like the desire to make games non-boring is in tension with the desire to make the game playable. If the game is playable, then at each turn the player can, in principle, increase her chance of winning. If she can always increase her chance of winning, then, at some point, the game will become boring.

All this has to do with the way that individual moves change the win rate. This is, for simple games, anyway, tractable numerically. So I’m working on some experiments to try and suss out some of the structure of games and how it changes as we change the rules.

Physics

As mostly a hobby and an attempt to keep all those years of studying physics fresh, I’ve become interested in getting a good grasp of the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. To that end I’ve started planning and produce a series of lectures covering RIG Hughes’ book “The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.” The book is very good (I’m about halfway through, in terms of deep understanding). About the only complaint I could make about it is that the introductory chapters do a good job of comparing and contrasting classical and quantum mechanics, whereas I think the more interesting comparison is between classical probabilistic mechanics and quantum mechanics. Both theories operate naturally on Hilbert spaces. Classical probabilistic mechanics seems to me to have an unambiguous interpretation (though see: https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0703019.pdf) but obviously there are differences between classical probabilistic physics and quantum mechanics.

Note that the ordinary formulation of QM makes this comparison non-trivial. I think of it this way: suppose we have a classical 1D system with N particles. Each has two degrees of freedom, its position and momentum, so we need 2N numbers to represent the classical state. If we imagine shrinking this system down (or engaging in some sort of metaphysical transition) so that the system becomes quantum mechanical, each particle requires a wave function which, in open space, has an infinite number of values, one for every point in space (for instance). That is, our 2N numbers must become N*∞. It seems like we’ve lost a factor of two. But we haven’t – each of those numbers in the wave function are complex valued, so, apart from the fact that complex numbers have structure which in some ways makes them seem like less than the sum of their (real and imaginary) parts, we’re back to where we start.

Contrast that with thinking about a probabilistic description of the classical system. In that case, we simply take each observable quantity (of which there are 2N) and create a probability distribution, which has an infinite number of values per N. So we have 2*N*∞ numbers to deal with. Rather than N wave functions, which serve as a combined representation of position and momentum, we have 2*N probability distributions, each of which is mapped directly onto a classical observable.

Three questions, then:

Can we find a representation for Quantum Mechanics which is directly comparable to Classical Mechanics?
Can we find a representation for Classical Mechanics which is directly comparable to Quantum Mechanics?
In either of the above cases, what precisely accounts for the differences between the classical and quantum mechanical pictures?

Since I’m not smart enough to even pose questions which haven’t been posed before, I think, after enough reading, I can answer these questions.

Yes – the Phase Space Formulation of Quantum Mechanics uses the Wigner-Weil transform to map the wave function to position/momentum phase space quasi-probability distribution.
Yes – just create N wave functions from 2N probability distributions by adding Q + iP together for each particle.
In the first case the critical distinction between the quasi-probability distributions and the classical probability distributions is that the former sometimes take values less than 0. In the second case the quantum mechanical system still admits no dispersion free states, whereas any combination of probability distributions is allowed in the classical case. It would be interesting to work out the mathematics, but the requirement that no state is dispersion free, which has to do with the operators which represent position and momentum and the Born Rule, imposes a constraint on the types of momentum probability distributions which can coexist with each particular position probability distribution.

Anyway, if there were some miraculous surfeit of free time in my future, I’d like to spend some of it working out these ideas in detail. I’m sure it would be educational for me.

Generative Artwork

Since Clocks I haven’t undertaken a single large generative art project with a coherent theme. I’m still interested in the themes of that project: minimizing artificial randomness in generative systems in favor of exploring patterns implicit therein.

On the other hand, I have worked on a few interesting little etudes.:

Ceatues, a system built on coupled games of life.
Spin, a sort of continuous, tune-able version of Langton’s Ant
Meat is Mulder, an experiment in piecing together.

And I’ve been lucky enough to lecture a few times at the soon to be defunct Iron Yard:

More and more I see generative artwork and game design as tightly related fields. The difference lies entirely in the the absence of direct player interaction with the generative artwork. But the same quality of of lying just at the edge of predictability, which produces a sense of life in a generative artwork, generates interesting player situations in games.

I suppose I’m more interested in game design than generative art at the moment, but maybe something will strike me. The one big advantage of generative artwork is that it can be easier to work on in small bursts.

Emotional Health

I suppose that I have left this section for last indicates a bias which characterizes this entire component of my life. That bias is that I tend to not reflect deeply or frequently about whether I am happy nor not and, when I do so reflect, I tend to do so with my prefrontal cortex, so to speak.

I suppose I am happy from that point of view. I have a good relationship with my partner, a child on the way, a beautiful home and a job which is, for the most part, both reasonable and well compensated.

When I reflect deeply on my life, however, I wonder. I wonder first whether happiness really matters and I wonder whether I would or could be happier if I had a career which more accurately reflects both my gifts and my interests (two categories which don’t always overlap).

Impending fatherhood encourages reflection. You can’t help but wonder not how your child will see you, but how your example will affect your child’s conception of the world. Suddenly all your negative qualities, your petty unhappinesses, sloth and unkemptness are in sharp focus. A child ought not be exposed to a passenger seat full of empty coffee cups. What sort of universe is it where your father’s mood sours because his tiny video-game hasn’t won widespread acclaim. It seems so easy to live for the approval of others until you feel the keen but naive eye of childhood bearing down on you.

My big hope is that I’ll rise to this challenge, strip off my pettiness without losing those qualities which make living as myself possible.

State of the Life