“I have signed in blood, as I know you respect the old traditions,” says my character. When the villain reaches for the pen, I kneecap him with my derringer. A simple statement, indicating a sudden, violent act. Unexpected as it was part of a previously peaceful negotiation. How do you deal with that as a […]| Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal
Did you know that Lawvere did classified work on arms control in the 1960s, back when he was writing his thesis? Did you know that the French government offered him a job in military intelligence? The following paper should be interesting to applied category theorists—for a couple of different reasons: • Bill Lawvere, The category […]| Azimuth
That is, all sports push people to the limits of what human biology, and the human psychology of obsession, can accomplish. Terminology: I mention figure skating below, but I don’t really think of figure skating as a “sport” – part of the definition of a “sport,” in my mind, is that you’re directly competing against … Continue reading "All sports are equally hard in equilibrium"| Neurotoxin
The goal: Eliminate revenue fraud. The vulnerability: Humans love to gamble – Chinese people more than most. What changed: .. The post Fāpiào, Game Theory and Compliance appeared first on JUST EVIL ENOUGH.| JUST EVIL ENOUGH
An extension to game theory where agents can split and merge, reveals interesting dynamics.| Forms of life, forms of mind
It’s impossible to be in Rational / Purposeful Mode and yet at the same time be ‘in reality’. That just can’t be done. When we think about things then we’re not in the real world, and when we deliberately act...| The Negative Psychologist
We like fairness, don't we folks? The oldly new idea that if our PCs fall in a pit, it's because we the players failed some minor challenge, whether of preparedness or of observation of the DM's description. That's fundamental to "skill"-based play, the idea that your decisions affect the outcome for your guy. But there's some give there-- how informed does your decision have to be, and how fitting the consequence for the occasional failure?| Whose Measure God Could Not Take
“What sort of fool would use fire against an elemental of fire?” “No sword of iron or bronze can pierce the dragon’s hide.” “Why would a ghost fear cold? It is …| Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal
“The creatures of the wood shun fire.” “Only a ritual blessed arrow can slay the demon.” “A gold-tipped spear will bring the light of the Sun to the heart of the Darkn…| Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal
“It is only by fire that the monster can be slain.” “A silver weapon can kill a werebeast, nothing else will end its life.” “Each elemental has an element to which it …| Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal
You can make a game that is very easy to learn and play if you ask the players to do very little. But here’s my theory: the more a game lets you contribute — the more it asks of you — the more rewarding play can be. And I mean rewarding in the sense of […]| ars ludi
Figure 1: And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer, put fire in it, added incense, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them. Then fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. Lev 10:1-2 Notes on committing to things, and the implications of that for cooperation. Relevant to multi-agent causality where agents make decisions, in the context of iterated games in multi-agent systems with applications to AI safe...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
All the hammering and pounding and forge-labor is done (for now). The first draft of the Ground Table principles has been nailed to the door. But how do you test a thing like that? How do you know you got it right? Well one test is the basic gut-check: does it *feel* right. Another is […]| ars ludi
Well this story is just a pure delight. In 2017, the Chinese said that by 2030, they were going to be the world champions of AI. So in 2022, the U.S. put export controls on the fancy computer chips, especially Nvidia chips, that AI needed. Then in 2025, the Chinese announced an AI entity called DeepSeek that used, in part, outdated Nvidia chips but mostly inventive software. DeepSeek works as well as or better for AI’s LLMs, the large language models like ChatGPT. It uses 2,048 of those ol...| The Last Word On Nothing
Content warning: Links to and discussion of edgy people with perverse opinions on hot-button topics too diverse to mention but which surely include gender, eugenics, speech and religion Notes on eccentrics, mavericks, outsider geniuses and fools. What my family called stroppy people. Lacking an identifiable label so you show up in diversity metrics? Not sure whether you are rebelling against society or conforming to a subgroup? How do you get by as a mad outsider? Will you be right twice a da...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
Game theory and decision theory for lots of interacting agents| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
Figure 1 On rituals without (necessarily) faith. TBD Related: tribal bonding, mind altering substances. 1 Incoming Future Day 2025 – Science, Technology & the Future Wheal’s Homegrown Humans Newsletter Ritual Behavior, Habits, Human Culture, Religion, Civilization, Marriage, Death, Burning Man & Community | Dimitris Xygalatas | #75 (5) Psychedelics, Civilization, Religion, Death & Plant Medicine | Brian Muraresku | #1 Shamanism, Psychedelics, Social Behavior, Religion & Evolution of Huma...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
Figure 1 Placeholder. Notes on how to implement alignment in AI systems. This is necessarily a fuzzy concept, because Alignment is fuzzy and AI is fuzzy. We need to make peace with the frustrations of this fuzziness and move on. 1 Fine tuning to do nice stuff Think RLHF, Constitutional AI etc. I’m not greatly persuaded that these are the right way to go, but they are interesting. 2 Classifying models as unaligned I’m familiar only with mechanistic interpretability at the moment; I’m su...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
Figure 1 One of the problems of the modern world is that it is so deep, specialised, and complicated that it is difficult hard to tell real progress in some specialised areas from bullshit. This is a problem in science, but I think, everywhere that anything complicated is happening This leads to the deeper problem that it is easier to seem good than to be good. Sometimes, e.g. art, these can be nearly the same thing. But sometimes, with the production of material goods or the production of ...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
Figure 1 Certifying NNs to be what they say they are. Various interesting challenges in this domain. I am not sure if this is well-specified category in itself. Possibly at some point I will separate the cryptographic verification from other certification ideas. Or maybe some other taxonomy? TBD 1 Ownership of models Keyword: Proof-of-learning, … (Garg et al. 2023; Goldwasser et al. 2022; Jia et al. 2021) TBD 2 Proof of training E.g. Abbaszadeh et al. (2024): A zero-knowledge proof of trai...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
“Our ground is level and our table is round” What do we want out of role-playing games? What do we think they should do? What do we value? Our crew has been talking about this stuff for ages, in person, in posts, and through the games we design. But I realized we never put all […]| ars ludi
It occurred to me that even though our crew has all these ideas about how we think games should be -- all these principles and conclusions from years and years of play, including eight years of Story Games Seattle -- they are not all together in one nice, neat, easy-to-read place. So we decided t| ars ludi
What is a game? What is a role-playing game? What is a story game? Buckle up because today I am tackling the big fish: definitions. When I talk about definitions, what I’m looking for is a *useful* definition. I want something that reflects the truth of what we actually do. A definition that sheds light […]| ars ludi
How unreasonable is it to not vaccinate your children? I ask this not as a rhetorical question, but as a mathematical one. How do we describe, mathematically, the benefits and risks of vaccination?…| Gravity and Levity
Are you looking for practical mediation tips and tricks? Check out these five most effective tips to help you "win" your next mediation. Click here now!| ADR Times
