Contrast and compare: 2005 United States Grand Prix and 2008 Brickyard 400. One organisation manages to create a complete farce, the other something at least a little better.

With respect to the comments at end of this coverage of this story, one does have to wonder exactly what principles the esteemed Mr Gwynne thinks we should be basing the law of the land on, and whether he would suggest we return to trial by ordeal.

Maybe my natural cynicism was correct after all :-(

Behind the times here as I've been working out of the country...

• D&D 3e OGL: Chaotic Good
• D&D 4e GSL: Lawful Evil. Except we can't choose that anymore, so just plain Evil then :-)

D&D 4th edition is something which WotC's marketing department is trying to present as a radical departure from previous editions; from what we've seen so far, this may not be as far removed from the truth as a lot of marketing hype - it does seem like the designers started with an idea of what they wanted the game to be like, and took the elements of previous editions of D&D which fitted with that model, but dropped the ones which didn't, even if they were the "core mechanics", most notably Vancian spellcasting (having a fixed number of spells per day).

Now, I like the feel a lot of the metadesign which has gone into the game which I think can be summed up by the sentiment expressed in the multiclassing preview that there shouldn't be "bad choices hidden in the rules". There's obviously an implementation issue of getting that right in a system with the complexity of D&D, but that's "just" a matter of playtesting. However, the thing I'm not necessarily liking the feel of (and this is something which I haven't seen explicitly expressed anywhere, but something I think I'm picking up) is the move towards a less narrative style of game; D&D has always been on the edge of what I like on the scale of "abstracted mechanics for the sake of making a good game", and it seems to me that 4e is moving further in that direction, if nothing else because there's no other way to get the designer's desired "balance" between all the classes. Of course, another reason for this could be that it's easy to preview the game mechanics, but much more difficult to preview the fluff, so we're getting an unbalanced view of what 4e will be like.

(Partially inspired by this debate over at Critical Hits, but something I've been meaning to post for a while anyway)

Point. Counterpoint. That is all.

Back in "the day", Ocean published a large number of ZX Spectrum games. Just because I haven't seen it done before, here is a graph showing how the programmers of each game interconnect, with thanks to World of Spectrum from the data and graphviz for the layout.

Like many other liberals, I was somewhat disappointed with the West's response to Musharraf's declaration of a state of emergeny in Pakistan last year, but admit to being pleasantly surprised when first elections happened, and even more so when the elections appeared to be reasonably fair.

In the same vein, the situation in Zimbabwe has become pretty terrible over the past few years, with the Western powers showing little to any inclination to intervene in any significant way (although credit must be given to Gordon Brown for refusing to attend the EU-Africa summit in December due to Mugabe's presence). As such, I held little faith that the current Zimbabwean election would turn out to be anything other than a farce. However, the election results so far seem to show at least a degree of fairness, with the MDC gaining something close to a majority in parliament.

Of course, neither of these situations are really resolved yet: there hasn't been any form of showdown between Musharraf and Gilani in Pakistan, and the presidental election results in Zimbabwe are taking a while to appear, but it does seem that, at least to some extent, democracy has reasserted itself in both countries. Was I wrong to criticise the West's action in both cases, or were they doing the best they could in difficult situations?

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. I wonder how different my life would have been today if it hadn't been for what he started.

eBay have stopped sellers giving neutral or negative feedback to buyers (see towards the end of the article). Now, while the old system was abused by many sellers (who wouldn't give positive feedback until they'd received it themselves), I'm not sure this is the right way to fix it. Much simpler to me would be to make feedback "double-blind": you don't get to see what feedback has been left for you on a transaction until you leave feedback for it yourself, which seems to solve the whole retaliatory feedback thing very simply.

This D&D minis article basically says "this piece is useless". Now, I can understand how in the early days of the game, Wizards' designers may not have appreciated all the nuances of cost and abilities (perhaps most famously with the Drider Sorcerer, which is banned from official tournaments), but we've now had 14 sets of minis, so how have they managed to produce a piece which their own writers are saying not to use?

Chelsea have been fined £40,000 for failure to control their players. Now, while £40,000 is a lot of money to me, Chelsea's annual wage bill is somewhere in region of £114 million, so a £40,000 fine is equivalent to fining someone on £30,000 a year a grand total of about £10.50. Do the FA really think this is going to act as any deterrent at all, or am I missing something here?

To me, Mark Haigh-Hutchinson was probably most notable for being the owner of Vortex Software, who produced a number of classic Spectrum games, including T.L.L. and Highway Encounter. He was also one of the first Spectrum copyright holders to formally grant permission for their work to be freely distributed, uploading his software to NVG in early 1995 (at least according to the file dates). He also went on to do bigger things later of course, but I'm not a console gamer so never followed that side of it. A good guy - he'll be missed.

Fireflash is dead. Long live Fireflash! At least I'm not the only one who's going to miss him.

So, Wizards have announced the future of the OGL and the blogosphere has expressed its views (see eg Critical Hits, d20 Source, Chatty DM, Open Design). While most of these have focused on the $5000 "early access fee", what seems perhaps more significant to me in the longer term is the stuff about merging the "tangible parts" of the d20 License into the OGL, particularly the bits about "community standards" and the retroactive modifications Wizards could perform to the d20 License (the most notable example of this being the Book of Erotic Fantasy, which had its d20 License revoked due to its mature content). If that sort of clause is in the v4 OGL, I can see the takeup of it being a lot smaller than the v3 OGL. No publisher wants to have to pulp their printed books because Wizards decide they don't like something.

Yay!

I have an NxN matrix containing positive real numbers. I wish to select N entries from this matrix such that every row and every column has precisely one selected entry in it, and the sum of the selected entries is minimised.

Questions:

1) Can this be done in better than O(N!) time? If so, what's the algorithm? (Alternatively, "what keywords to I need to put into Google to find this problem?").
2) If it can't be done in better than factorial time, what's a good algorithm for obtaining an approximate solution?

(In the problem I'm currently looking at, N ~ 10)

When we (in the UK anyway) had only four or five channels, it was easy enough just to scan through a listings magazine and find anything you'd be interested in watching. However, with the advent of digital TV, there are now a vast number of channels available, and while I'll hear about the big releases, I'm "worried" that I may be missing a gem or two somewhere.

While dungeon mastering tonight...

Player (in a random room of five, having ignored the other four entirely): "I lift up the prayer mat to see if there's a trapdoor underneath".

And the room description says:

"e. The prayer mat in this cell covers a trapdoor to the lower level (area 19)."