I’ve been very distracted recently due to my participation in the Google AI Challenge organized by the University of Waterloo and sponsored by Google. This is a programming contest in which participants each submit a bot that is capable of playing PlanetWars, a simple game based on the commercially-released game Galcon. I’ll probably confine the technical details and my own bot’s strategy to my Knights of the Cardboard Castle blog, but I thought it would interesting to look at some of the publicly available statistics.
Since I submitted my own entry, my wife and I have been scrutinizing the rankings on a fairly regular basis. It’s fun after all to see who’s doing the best and to know which countries they’re from. And seeing as how I’m Malaysian, it was only natural to want to know how well participants from neighboring countries might be doing. Keep in mind of course, that the contest only ends in December 2010, so the rankings are still in flux as new participants are still joining and entries are still being tweaked.
So I’m back from my six days holiday trip to Vietnam. Overall, it was a very worthwhile trip for surprisingly low cost. We had one night in Hanoi, one on Cat Ba Island in Hai Long Bay, two nights on the train going and coming back from Sapa and one night in Sapa itself. This isn’t a travel blog and I don’t see myself as much of a travel writer, so I’ll just jot down some general observations grouped by location. It’s easy enough to find real tourist information on other websites anyhow.
I suppose I should write a post about my experience about climbing Mt. Kinabalu, but there’s already so much information out there about it that there’s little of value that I can add. We did what is by now the standard three day two night package, staying overnight on Tuesday evening at the National Park HQ and starting out from Timpohon gate for the trek to Laban Rata at about 8:20 AM.
My wife and I did better than average on this part of the trip, arriving at about 12:40 PM. One guy we saw however managed to arrive at about 10:30 AM. The rest of our group arrived at about 2:30 PM which is about the average I think. Shan’s mother insisted that we use a porter so that helped us to be faster as we only had to carry our food and water but it also created a problem for us as the porter stayed behind with the rest of them while we raced ahead, so we had no warm clothes to wear at Laban Rata and had to snuggle under the blankets while waiting for our luggage to arrive.
I’m going to be busy at work in the run up to the Chinese New Year holidays and likely will not have any regular net access during that time while I’m away, so this is going to be the last post for at least a couple of weeks or so. In the meantime, if you’re starved of reading material, here are links to some interesting stuff I’ve read recently:
I’m not much of a fan of classical music, but it’s still sobering to learn that sales of just a few hundred units are currently sufficient to get an album on the Top Ten list by Billboard magazine. My wife, who is something of a fan, argues that this is countered by the fact that classical music recordings have a much longer shelf life than other works, but I think an upper limit of a few hundred sales is still rather pathetic. I fail to see how it’s economic to even produce these albums. Sales outside North America seem somewhat healthier however.
This is an older article that dates from August last year but I only recently came across it while reading one of the blogs by The Economist. As someone who’s married but has decided not to have children, I supposed I’m biased but it confirms a point I’ve been making for a long time now: having children is easily the most environmentally unfriendly things a person can do. It doesn’t matter how else you do right, like driving an electric, recycling regularly, use energy efficient light bulbs, etc. As soon as you have a child, your carbon impact takes off like a rocket.
Shanghai is cracking down on the wearing of pyjamas in public, apparently because it looks unseemly? What would they think about Malaysian-style singlets and short pants?
This review and summary of recently published biography of Ayn Rand, entitled Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Ann C. Heller, compares her to Stalin and argues that even though she rejected the Soviet Union and eagerly fled to the United States, there is still something profoundly Russian about her thoughts and views. It also relates an astonishing anecdote about how she treated her husband Frank O’ Connor who suffered from dementia in the last years of his life. Apparently Rand believed that he could snap out of it if only his willpower were strong enough and assigned him long, grueling lessons on how to think and remember and warned other people not to humor him but instead treat him as they would any other normally functioning person.
This essay by fantasy author Terry Pratchett who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease is very well-written and moving. It’s a plea for the authorities to allow people with incurable diseases to decide to die gracefully at the time and in the manner of their choice.
After much vacillation, I have decided to split my gaming related content to a new blog, Knights of the Cardboard Castle. This makes the theme and subject matter of the two different blogs much clearer. This means that henceforth no new posts on games or gaming related subjects will be added to this blog. Calltoreason.org will continue to exist but as I don’t always have interesting things to say on more serious subjects, I expect that it will be updated less often. The old content isn’t going to be moved because after some experimentation, I’ve decided that it will be too much trouble.
The real adventure for us started with the trip to Camp 5. First we had to take a one-hour boat ride from the entrance to the Clearwater Caves, carrying all the gear that we would need for the next two nights with us. Then, led by our guides but carrying our own stuff, we had to hike along a jungle trail 8.8 km to Camp 5. The terrain was flat for the most part, but there were still plenty of roots, rocks and muddy patches on the trail, so we had to keep our eyes constantly glued towards the ground or else we’d trip or slip and fall. We arrived about 2.5 hours later, including time for a rest stop in the middle.
Camp 5 turned out to be a small cluster of wooden buildings next the swift flowing Melinau River. The accommodation is very spartan: basically each person is assigned a hard mattress on top of a wooden platform in a large communal room. The scenery however is fantastic. The camp itself is located just at the base of the mountain that we’d be climbing, part of Gunung Api. On the opposite side of the river lies the even more majestic Mount Benarat. Meals were prepared by the guides assigned to each group using rations that they had carried with them from Mulu and eaten in the large open cantine area. After dinner, our guide briefed us on what the climb would be liked, reminded us of what we’d need to bring and gave some advice.
Writing everything that I have to say about this trip would both take too much space and too much time for a single post, so I’m going to split this into two parts. My wife and I went on a four day / three night trip to Mulu in Sarawak state over the extended Hari Raya holidays and, quite unexpectedly to us, had one of those rare, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. We’d originally planned to have a small and simple trip to take advantage of the holidays, and since we’re currently based in Kota Kinabalu, thought that it would be a good idea to visit Sarawak, which neither of us had ever been to. The caves at Mulu is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and we’ve all read about them in our geography textbooks, so it was the natural candidate.
Visiting only the caves however is normally just a two day / one night excursion, so my wife looked for something else we could do in the area. She eventually picked the Pinnacles to tack on to our trip. It was advertised as a hiking and mountain climbing trip. We expected it to be somewhat strenuous and thought it would make for a good warming up exercise for our Mount Kinabalu climb planned for early next year. I did not expect that it would turn out to be the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done in my life. But more on that in the second part.
