Trading

Amongst many procrastinations, trips to the pub and baths I've been working surprisingly hard on my Final Year Project of late; a Christmas idly spent will encourage guilt that way. I've changed from a civil violence scenario investigating artificial intelligence, through a multi-agent approach to an investigation into trust and reputation in an e-commerce scenario.

Don't Panic.

Let's explain..

Imagine, eBay. You want to buy yourself some electronic gadget. Everyone, co-incidentally, happens to be charging the exact same amount for this gadget - but you still need to decide who to trade with. Here you'll be looking at the reputation of users - as shown through eBay's central reputation system.

Now imagine Craigslist, GumTree, et al. There's no central rating system, instead you need to get at someone's reputation through a distributed set of other users. You'll likely ask people how trustworthy another user is.

My investigation is into which model works better, based on a variety of factors. For example, changing behaviours, communication trustworthiness (see below) and 'noise' in the system (making it hard to see what's actually happening).

A problem that crops up with both of these scenarios is that of trust. Note that trust is your perception of how likely someone is to be good/bad at a specific task. How much can I trust eBay's central server? What if people have been feeding it bad information? What if I can't trust the people who are telling me about other users on Craigslist?

--

I'm doing research into all of this, and it's getting pretty fun. The maths, however, is giving me some headaches - I don't like to see equations taking up half a page and filled with Greek. I think I'm over most of those hurdles, and I've been offered the chance to get some funding to stay on at Uni over the summer and put this together into a proper research paper, for publication in one of the fancier journals in this area of Computer Science.

Exciting eh? IM me if you'd like more detail on any of it :)

Musical Stock Exchange

Ever wanted to take the spikes on a serious financial graph and make them the basis of a whimsical tune? Me neither. Enjoy:



Thanks to Will for the tip-off here.

The Epic Explosion and the Idiot Scientist

In exciting (yet, questionably relevant, other than to theoretical physicists) old news;

Explosion from 7.5billion light years away could be seen with the naked eye

- worth a read. However, notice how I'm intelligent enough to say 'old news', because the explosion was 7.5billion light years away. That means, if we can see it now, it happened 7.5billion years ago. So, it's rather ridiculous that a 'scientist' on the project should claim:

"The passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma ray bursts"

I'm so, so annoyed that I might have to go and punch the scientist concerned (Judith Racusin of Penn State University, if you're in the area).

Tic-Tac Makes it up to Football Fans

Many people on the Internet (and presumably in the so-called 'real world') seemed rather annoyed when ITV decided to broadcast a Tic-Tac advert rather than the thrilling last 20 seconds of the Liverpool vs Everton FA Cup game. There were calls for ITV to be banned from showing football, angry Facebook groups and even the odd 'flashmob' against ITV.

I wasn't, however, aware that anyone was blaming Tic-Tac. But, just in case (and also because marketing folks need salaries to keep the economy going), they made a video by way of apology:



Brilliant ;)

Grammar (I'm Right And You're Wrong)

Recently, as an aside to another post, I showed a moment's weakness. Yes, that's right - not a moments' weakness or a moments weakness, but a moment's weakness. In this post I asked you to tell me which of the following three was correct:

• Three minutes time


• Three minute's time


• Three minutes' time (my choice).

Folks commented, emailed, rang and texted* me to give me their opinions - which generally ran along the lines of me being wrong. This is why democracy doesn't work and hippy communes never make good profit returns on their marijuana plantations. Instead of everyone giving opinions, I should just tell you all what's right - that is the purpose of this communication medium, isn't it? That was rhetorical, it is.

The grammar is clear, if "time" belongs to "three minutes" then the apostrophe must surely follow the "s" of "minutes". The argument was that there was no genitive relationship; that two nouns had simply been dumped at the end of the sentence and left to their own devices to make sense. I never agreed with this, but I now have a counter example, the idiom:

"A Moment's Notice".

Now, listen here, nowhere** respectable I can find online or in print would ever write that idiom in any other way. Even the wonderful John Coltrane jazz composition is to be found with the apostrophe. The weak noun "notice" is very clearly possessed by the temporal concept of "moment" - just as "time" is possessed by "minutes" in my original example.

So, let's have no more debate on the matter. I, for my part, will endeavour never again to question my own brilliance, and I'd ask you to do the same by not planting little seeds of doubt in my head.

--

Yes, most of the grammar above is a bit tongue in cheek (Edit: Who am I kidding? It's hilarious. I bet none of you get it). But, here's a clarification on a word you'd otherwise hate me for, and one pun I couldn't resist drawing your attention to:

* I don't like it either, but that horrible verb and conjugation are here to stay.
** See what I did there? No? This is why I get to do the writing.

3D Chess

On finding myself torn away from a computer screen for some reason, with alcohol in short supply, I'll often be found turning to nearby friends, family or strangers and offering them a game of chess. They decline, with a stuttered excuse and I get to feel intellectually superior for the rest of night.

However...

...every now and then, I'm caught out. Someone actually agrees to play with me and I have to start trying to remember strategies, to plan out moves and construct elaborate defences. Soon enough, I can simply use a delightful mix of verbal gamesmanship and bluffing to lead them into making a mistake and claim a win - but this is very risky territory indeed.

So, as an alternative, I'm going to learn 3D chess.

Now, my original plan was to learn how to play Asimovian Hyperchess (yes, named after our friend Isaac). This is just chess with one extra dimension - i.e., an 8x8x8 board. I have various ideas as to how I could construct a board, and the rules are fairly simple if you know how to play regular chess. Unfortunately, I can imagine games becoming impossibly long - just working out if you were in checkmate could take minutes.

There are other variants on 3D chess already out there, but only one appears to have any real following. In order to participate, I had to delve into the murky depths of Star Trek fandom, but I've been rewarded with what appears to be a full rulebook and guide to board-making for the Tri-D chess game seen in Star Trek.


_{Mine probably won't look this elegant}

At only $9.95, including international shipping, it seems a bargain. You can get your own copy here - I'll let you know how I get on.

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