New Game

Hello,
     I just thought I would talk a little about this game I am working on. I've been wanting to come up with a game that I could design some complex AI program for a while now. I was trying to think of one where it doesn't require a ton of complex graphics or anything like that. What I have decided upon is basically a turn based version of Age of Empires on what is kind of like a game board. For those of you who don't know what Age of Empires is I would advise you play it sometime because it's awesome. Anyways in my game the board is split up into different plots of land. Each players gets to start on one plot. The players then expand out to occupying other neighboring territories and eventually take over the other players' territories with some sort of army. Along the way the players gather resources from the land they have and can build different kinds of building on their land. Also the game is somewhat focused on trading. I want to have a open market which players can trade in their resources for money or vise versa. But the market prices would be based on the players' production of the resources and on how much is bought and sold. There might also be direct trading between players and possible treaties and alliances could be formed between players as well. As you can imagine it would seem pretty complex to write a good computer player for this game. So I'm looking forward to when I get the game working so I can start writing the computer players. I'm really enjoying working on it at the moment. Its very fun working on a big project that I've designed and thought of all on my own, as compared to doing homework programs. I even set a personal due date for a playable alpha version of the game, which is a very minimal version of the game that one could play. I couldn't quite think of what to say about my personal life at the moment so i'll leave that for another post. Feel free to let me know what you think about my game idea and if you have any suggestions or ideas for the game, I would love to hear them. Oh but one thing, I did blacksmithing for the first time ever this week and I loved it. I hope I can do it more later on in life. I made a nail by the way, it's simple but its super fun for the first thing to make. I'm pretty happy with it. If you see me, you can ask to see it, because i'll probably be caring it around with me because I like it so much. Thanks for reading my thoughts, hopefully you enjoyed them.

Interest moods and Reading

Hello you very specific person (I'm being general and specific at the same time),
I think I am going to talk about interest moods. What I mean by interest moods, is they are the moods us people have, to do a certain thing we are interested in. Lately I have been in a video game mood. This mood is kind of annoying to me while I'm here at college in the middle of a semester, because I often can not play a video game. Well I should be more specific, I'm in a RPG style video game mood. I want to play the kind of game I can play for many hours and roam around and do whatever I want within the game. I would love to have the game Oblivion again. It would be perfect for this mood. But back to why this is annoying. Because games like Oblivion take a long long time to play through and it's very easy to play for a long time and I just don't have the time to play it. So my mood goes on unsatisfied. It may just go away once I find something else of interest or I may finally get a game to play, either one would be fine with me. My previous mood I think I was in a reading mood. Up till somewhat recently my reading range had been very narrow. As in I mostly have just read Lord of the Rings (multiple times) , Harry Potter (multiple times), Eragon (multiple times), and Star Wars books (a lot of them). I have read other books but not many and not in a while. But recently my girlfriend has gotten me out of those kind of books and I started to read more of a variety. I have really enjoyed reading Louis L'Amour books. I read The Walking Drum, Jubal Sackett, and I am currently reading Sackett. Another book I read recently is The Divine Romance by Gene Edwards. I loved that book. Its a very very exciting book and I would love to read it again sometime soon. I'm going to be starting a new book series called The Hunger Games. I've been told it's very good so I'm looking forward to reading it. I would highly recommend all of these books that I mentioned. My top two would be The Divine Romance and Jubal Sackett. So as a point to this, if you always read the same kind of books or just the same books. You should brach out and try a new book. Bringing this back to moods, I hope by starting to read The Hunger Games it gets me back into a reading mood again to get over my current video game mood. I much prefer reading moods.
Thank you, you very specific person for reading this b-log post.

Pigs Theory

Hello World,
I'm going to start off this b-log with an attempt to discover what this blog will be about. I would just like to say that I will be writing how I speak, so I will not be writing with good grammar. Lets go through a list of things I would be interested in writing about: Programming/CS stuff, Relationships, God relationships, Random interesting things, Sports, Video games. This is the order of things that came to my mind, so I'm sure this says something about my priorities or what I've been thinking about recently. Those sound pretty good to me. I'm not sure I'll pick much of a focus for the entire b-log (b-log is pronounced bee-log), but I will try and pick a topic or two for each posting. About the b-log thing, I'm not sure why I decided to say it like that but I like it and I'll probably be using it from now on, just so you know. Alright so lets decide a topic and move on to something more interesting.... Alright I have one.

Pigs Theory

          So there is this game called "Pass the Pigs", where you roll these two rubber pig figures and the points you get depend on what position they both land in. Its a game of strategy,risk, and chance. Each turn a player can continue to roll and amass points until her or she get a "pig out"(end of turn and you get no points) or decides to end his or her turn and save the points he or she acquired. The game continues this way until one player reaches 100 points or more, then every other player has one more turn to try and beat that high score. The person with the highest score at the end wins. The risk of this games come down to you don't really know how likely any roll is with pig figures. At least with dice its all even, pigs are not even. My family started playing this game a while ago and I kind of got addicted to trying to see how high you can get on one turn. So I've often just sat at a table and rolled pigs over and over again trying to get a high score. But this constant rolling just for a high score seems so wasteful. I could be getting data from these rolls. So I decided to log every roll and turn in a text file. So I could get the average score I got on a turn. Very recently, I was wanting to procrastinate on homework so I found my pigs and decided to log some rolls. Now here is were the programming/CS comes into play. I had the idea that i could simply write a java program to read this text file and with that I could get a lot more out of the numbers and it would be way easier to get. So that's what I did. I programmed for about an hour and there I had a wonderful little statistics finding program. I've added more statistics since that first hour though. Now I have logged over 300 turns. Here is my latest statistics output:

The average turn score is: 31.093093093093092

The average turn length is: 4.678678678678678 rolls

The average roll score is: 6.645699614890886

The highest roll is: 20

The highest total is: 259

The longest turn length is: 39

The percentage that you will pigout on first roll is: 16.816816816816818%

Number of 1's rolled/percentage: 339, 21.00371747211896%

Number of 5's rolled/percentage: 847, 52.478314745972746%

Number of 10's rolled/percentage: 145, 8.983890954151178%

Number of 15's rolled/percentage: 42, 2.6022304832713754%

Number of 20's rolled/percentage: 185, 11.462205700123915%

Number total rolls: 1614.0

Ranges

0-10: 36.63663663663664%

11-20: 13.513513513513514%

21-35: 17.117117117117118%

36-50: 14.414414414414415%

51-75: 7.807807807807808%

76-100: 4.804804804804805%

101+: 5.105105105105105%

Out of 333.0 turns

The most consistent numbers I have found throughout this program have been the Number of *'s rolled part. So from that I can guess that the percentages I have are pretty close to what they really are and can be relied upon when playing the game, the average turn score and average turn length would also be helpful in playing the game, but the rest are more for fun and knowing the numbers of it all. This what I call Pigs Theory. Please look over the numbers more if you want, I didn't talk much about them. I hope this wasn't too boring for most people, but I really enjoy doing things like this. If anyone wants a similar program like this that reads information from a text file for stats I would love to write it for you, so just let me know. I would also love to send you a version of this program if you would like. Someday i would like to have a website where I can direct you to where you can find all my work, someday. I really kinda know how but I just haven't done it. Well Yucheng wants to go to bed and I really need to go to bed, since I wrote this instead of doing homework or sleeping. I'm kinda excited to be writing about something I enjoy so I suspect I will be doing this again sometime soon. So see you then.