Roundtuit

Adding a new category called “Been Done” today, for the inevitable case where a roundtuit was actually already done before it was blogged here. Been Dones will have their Active Roundtuits label removed.

And the first Been Done is Hendrix Through Headphones! A shout out to Roundtuiteers David Solomonoff and Josh Finkler for adding the comments that show that this has Been Done!

See comments on the post for details and links.

AI Guys (like myself) have been trying to get machines to play chess for decades. Personally, I think it’s a misplaced effort, in that it’s allied with the idea that rationale is the missing element in making machines more like natural intelligence. Bull-da-da, I say!

Computers generally play chess by doing massive look ahead to possible future game configurations. People don’t do this. Computers are also programmed to play chess, whereas we mere humans must learn the game. Chess is a very hard game to learn from experience, both for humans and machines.

Backgammon is very different. A machine has learned to play backgammon very well, simply from experience.

Why backgammon, and not chess? I believe it is because lots of game configurations can be accessed even by a novice player in the former, but not the later. In a sense, the randomness of the dice rolls (the noise) in backgammon makes it easier to learn!

To test this theory, I want to playtest what I call noisy chess. It’s like normal chess, but with the addition of a 6-sided die and a spinner:

Game play proceeds the usual way, but the player must roll the die after each move. If the result is a 0 (which happens half the time), the move stands. If the move is a 1 (which happens 1/3 of the time), the player spins. The player reads the spinner on the inner ring in this case (which has 8 slots, corresponding to the 8 squares around the place that the player has just moved to). The player’s piece is moved into the corresponding adjacent square (if it can be placed there, see rules below). If the die result is a 2 (which happens 1/6 of the time), the player spins, and reads from the outer ring of the spinner (which has 16 slots, corresponding to the 16 squares 2 spaces away from the square the player has just moved to). Once again, the player’s piece moves to the corresponding square from the spinner.

Additional rules are that a player’s piece can’t move onto a square where player already has a piece. A player also cannot move into check. If these cases occur due to a spin, the player spins again. One might also want to restrict bishops to appropriate diagonals, but I’m not sure about that.

I think noisy chess would open up lots of possibilities, including proximate attacks. But I theorize that it would make chess much more learnable, both by people and machines.

And I’m going to playtest it, soon as I get a roundtuit. If you do first, please let me know!

Contributed by Rob Smith.

People just don’t understand why the electric guitar must be extraordinarily loud. It’s not about some mindless sonic penis extension power trip (well, it is, but that’s not all it’s about). When a guitar is super loud, complex resonances and feedback loops emerge, between the air, the room, the wood of the guitar, its strings, its pickups, the structure and tubes of its amp, even the guitarist’s own body. All of this is part of the instrument.

If you aren’t loud, it’s like playing a violin without a bow. Sure, you can make music on it, but there’s a big difference between tinkling and soaring.

So players like me, who live in the dense population of a UK city, can’t play our real instrument at all, at least not without risking rankled neighbors and visits from the boys in blue.

Artificial solutions will never substitute for turning it up to 11, but I think I have a small idea that could simulate the experience.

There’s a neat guitar toy called the eBow.

It’s basically a magnetic oscillator with a 9-volt battery that you hold over a guitar string. It’s a way to excite the strings without touching them (the way acoustic feedback can), but with the silence of magnetic energy. It gives you bow-like effects (thus the name).

Unfortunately, the eBow is for one string at a time, and has no real control. In my experience, you play with your eBow for a few minutes, then it vanishes into your gig bag, with thoughts of how cool it could be.

But what if you mounted an eBow-like magnetic oscillator over the guitar bridge, coupled it to a mike or an input jack from your amp (so it could “listen” to your playing), and then ran some DSP to control the magnetic oscillations, using pre-specified and programmable profiles, that give simulated feedback effects?

Sort of an ebow on high-tech steroids.

I think this would be awesome for middle-aged rockers who want to be Hendrix through Headphones. It might also create an interesting new hybrid instrument for non-masturbatory performance.

UPDATE: Turns out this is a Been Done! See the comments for details of where you can actually get devices of this sort. Thanks to the commentors for the info!