Blizzard embraces pseudonyms

Blizzard Software's lets you use the same name on multiple games and on multiple servers within the same game. Historically, they required you to use a "real name" (in their case, a name on a credit card). This week they announced that they are deploying a new system without that requirement:

A BattleTag is a unified, player-chosen nickname that will identify you across all of Battle.net – in Blizzard Entertainment games, on our websites, and in our community forums. Similar to Real ID, BattleTags will give players on Battle.net a new way to find and chat with friends they've met in-game, form friendships, form groups, and stay connected across multiple Blizzard Entertainment games. BattleTags will also provide a new option for displaying public profiles.[...] You can use any name you wish, as long as it adheres to the BattleTag Naming Policy.

I am glad they have seen the light. There are all sorts of problems with giving away a real [sic] name within a game.

From a technical perspective, the tradeoffs they choose for the BattleTag names are interesting and strike me as solid:

If my BattleTag isn't unique, what makes me uniquely identifiable? How will I know I'm adding the right friend to my friends list? Each BattleTag is automatically assigned a 4-digit BattleTag code, which combines with your chosen name to create a unique identifier (e.g. AwesomeGnome#3592).

I'll go out on a limb and assume that the user interfaces that use this facility will indicate when you are talking to someone on your friends list. In that case, the system will be much like a pet names system, just with every name including a reasonable default nickname. When working within such UIs, they will achieve all of Zooko's Triangle. When working outside it, the security aspect will be weaker, because attackers can make phony accounts with a victim's nickname but a different numeric code. That's probably not important in practice, so long as all major activities happen within a good UI such as one within one of Blizzard's video games.

Regarding pseudonymity, I have to agree with the commenters on the above post. Why not do it this way to begin with and not bother with RealID? They can still support real [sic] names for people who want them, simply by putting a star next to the names of people whose online handle matches their credit card. Going forward, now that they've done this right, why not simply scrap RealID? It looks like high-level political face cover. You have to read closely in the announcement even to realize what they are talking about.

Brad on Watson

Brad's Ideas has a number of neat comments about the Watson Jeapordy match. One thing Brad mentions made me wonder about Jeopardy mechanics:

You can buzz in as soon as Trebek stops speaking. If you buzz early, you can’t buzz again for 0.2 seconds. Watson gets an electronic signal when it is time to buzz, and then physically presses the button. The humans get a light, but they don’t bother looking at it, they try timing when Trebek will finish. I think this is a serious advantage for Watson.

I agree that this is a big advantage to Watson. However, I don't understand why it works this way. The reason you can't buzz early is because it makes the game annoying to watch and unpleasant to participate in. Alex would constantly be interrupted as the contestants race to buzz in and cut him off.

However, making contestants hit the buzzer just when Alex finishes adds a substantial dexterity element to the game. Watson has an advantage in this dexterity game, but who cares? Everyone wants to know if Watson is smart, not if he can press a button with millisecond precision.

A better way to handle the buzzer, it seems to me, would be to let people buzz in early but not to count it until Alex finishes the question. At that point, if more than one person has buzzed in, the winner is selected randomly. Otherwise, it's a speed race, with no precision to the timing. This slight change in the algorithm should remove the precision timing from buzzing in and make it more of a race to figure out the answer the fastest.

Ken Jennings reflects on Watson

Ken Jennings, arguably the all-time champion at Jeopardy, has a great article on Slate. He reflects on his and Brad Rutter's match with Watson.

I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson's case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels "sure" enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy! player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.

Computers 1, Humans 0

One of the two Watson Jeopardy games has now been televised, and Watson won handily. Watson has $35,734, Rutter has $10,400, and Jennings has $4,800. Watson has more than twice the other two's scores combined. We'll find out tonight whether the computer can hold its lead.

It was an interesting match to watch. The audience was the most excited Jeopardy audience I've ever seen, and they were rooting for Watson. When he took a guess and got it right, there was a thunderclap of applause. When he had to make a wager, as with a daily double, they broke up laughing at Watson's odd-ball wagers such as $6,345.

The game was much closer than the score indicates. For many of the questions, all three contestants would know the answer, and it was a race to ring in the fastest. On many of them, if Watson had needed six seconds rather than five to figure out its answer, a human would have rung in first.

One thing I was surprised about was the Final Jeopardy question. The category was "U.S. cities", and I thought Watson would knock it out of the park. I thought it would bet high and answer it easily. The opposite was the case. The computer had no idea what the names of airports mean. Apparently, even with all the time contestants are given for Final Jeopardy, it couldn't connect the dots from "World War II" to "O'Hara" and "Midway". Yet, it still did okay in the end, because it only bet about $1000 on the question. Did it bet so low because of the category, or did the programmers have Watson be categorically cautious in Final Jeopardy?

I don't know, but one thing is clear. Humanity has met its trivia overlords, and they're made of silicon. This game show duel is just a spectacle, but take a moment to look what it means for the future. The way Watson is competing ultimately relies on a large, natural-language database. Unlike with Cyc or the Semantic Web, the computer doesn't need humans to explicitly re-encode information into a machine-friendly synthetic language. It is directly using the natural-language texts we wrote for communicating among ourselves.

The applications are far-reaching. At the simplest, Watson hints at greatly improved web searching, both when looking for pages and when looking for information. Other applications are in medicine. Imagine a Watson that had read a hospital's case files and a medical school's entire library, including the latest journal articles? No doctor can match that. For knowledge workers in any domain, imagine how much it would help to have a personal Watson that had read every email the person had ever sent or received? Natural-language processing has just passed a tipping point.

More about Watson is available on the Jeopardy web site.

Watson, the new Deep Blue

IBM worked long to build a chess computer that can rival the world's best chess players. Now they have built a computer that does something harder: answer pointless trivia questions. Harder for a computer, anyway. Airing starts tonight, and I can't wait.

Part of the fun of it is that this is an application that still requires one of the biggest computers that anyone on the planet can build:

Well the body of Watson, which is not on camera, is like 10 huge refrigerators, in an air-conditioned room.... Watson has the power of a couple thousand laptops working together.

On the down side, it's not a particularly elegant machine:

Instead of just trying one approach, saying 'We're going to do it statistically' or 'We're going to teach the computer a million different rules about the world,' IBM just tried a very pragmatic approach, which said that if there's anything that works, we're going to include it in this. So they've got hundreds of different algorithms all trying a different approach to understanding the clue and trying to figure out the answer. And then it's up to the computer to look at thousands of different candidate answers and pick out the one that's most likely to be right.

Pseudonymity

People participating in online forums are better off being identified by pseudonyms rather than by their legal names. This is pretty engrained in me after many years of participating in such forums, so it takes some soul searching to explain. Let me try and distill out three points.

First, people have multiple parts of their lives, and they don't want them to mix. There are many reasons why this is good, but at the very least let's observe that this is how most people arrange their lives. There's work, and there's play. On the Internet, pseudonyms allow these separate lives to be separated more effectively.

Second, it fights prejudice. What makes prejudice so bad is not just that people are judged wrongly, but that they are judged wrongly using information that really should be irrelevant. Using pseudonyms means that this irrelevant information can be completely non-present. If your name is Julie or Juan or Duk-Kwan, you can expect to get a different--unfairly different--reaction if people learn your name, and thus your probable gender or ethnicity.

Finally, let me emphasize that pseudonyms are not anonymous. They are actual names, and they accumulate a reputation just like any other name. "Tom Cruise" is a pseudonym, but it's a name that has a very strong reputation (of one sort or another). So it goes with online pseudonyms, as well.

Given this, readers won't be surprised that I oppose Blizzard's trend toward using a "real" ID, "real" meaning a name on the credit card that pays for an account. Already, if you want to participate in cross-server chat on their games, you have to expose your credit-card name to everyone on your cross-server friends list. Now they are talking about changing the official forums to use credit-card names rather than

The idea seams to be that if people post under their credit-card names rather than their Warcraft character names, then they'll post better content to the forums. I don't agree this is a sufficient reason for the change, and I don't even think they are going to get the result the hope for.

Aside from all this heavy stuff, why in the world is a fantasy online computer game going this way? Grey Shade says it best:

But that’s it, you get it? That’s why I play. That’s why my friends play. Because we like to come home from a long day of being John Smith or Jane Doe and get on the computer and MURDER SOME REALLY AWESOME INTERNET DRAGONS.

UPDATE: Blizzard cancelled enforced real names on the forums, and said they are going to strive to prevent real names leaking in-game for people who want that. Good choices! Crisis averted. Everyone can go back, now, to killing Internet dragons.

Mass Effect for Xb^H^H Windows

I just got Mass Effect for Windows, but after reading the README file, I fear for the computer it will be installed on:

Game Known Issues
-----------------
In Mass Effect you will occsaionally find elevators that connect different
locations. While riding in an elevator the game is loading significant amounts
of information and modifying data. We recommend against saving the game after
an elevator is activated until the player departs the elevator. Saving during
elevator trips can occasional cause unusual behaviors.

Okay, I can see that being hard to fix. Load/save systems are often tricky, and being between zones would only make it worse. It goes on, though:

Mass Effect does not run on a system using a GMA X3000 video card, a general
protection fault error appear after double clicking the start icon.

Um, wow. That's it? It just doesn't work if you have this card?

Mass Effect does not run optimally on the Sapphire Radeon x1550 series of video
cards. We recommend that Mass Effect is not played on a system with this video
card.

Or that one?

Mass Effect does not run optimally on the NVIDIA GeForce 7100 series of video
cards. We recommend that Mass Effect is not played on a system with this video
card.

That one, either? Methinks they should list the cards it does work with, and on the box, not in a README file.

Mass Effect does not run optimally on a computer with a Pentium 4 CPU with a
FSB below 800 MHz under Windows Vista. We recommend that Mass Effect is not
played on a system with this CPU and operating system combination.

Err, okay. This kinda goes along with "minimum system requirements".

The the NVIDIA 8800 Series of video cards can require significant time (30
seconds or more) to change resolutions. This is due to a required
recalculation of thousands of video shaders.

"Required". As if they couldn't have precomputed shaders for the 10-20 most common resolutions. As if any other game has this problem.

After reading this, I wasn't confident. Sure enough, I get a General Protection Fault on startup. As extra weirdness, it reports a "file not found" exception from within some graphics library.

Overall, I guess what the developers did is make the Xbox version first, and then make a half-hearted attempt to port to Windows. If I'd realized how flaky this is, I probably would have passed it over.