Happy New Year

 

New Game - Facebots Sleep Time

 

I am happy because I was able, this end of year, not only to finalize Cause the Numbers but also this new game i started in June, I think, and stoped because I needed to study.

    It's a concept that I really liked, inspired in the classic game "Who's Who?". "Who's Who?" is so cool, even knowing that it is broken - I mean, if two experient people play, the one who starts have like twenty times more chance to win - but anyway, it is so fun to play with little children. I played with my son a lot - can't forget when he asked in his first turn if my man was bald - the are only two bald guys, and mine was one - so with three years old he beat me in two turns and we laughed a lot. And I wanted to derive something from it, so I did.

    Now I liked this concept so much that I think I'll extend it to a board-like game - that could perfectly be an actual board game, like Battle of the CookBees, my first game.

    So probably I'll be releasing FaceBots Battle anytime soon!

    I think an important thing is to recognize inspiration. Inspiration is not necessarily a moment when you have an "a-ha" idea. It's the feeling I had playing with my son, and the wish to extend that feeling to something of my own creation. Which in the end I did, many years later.

Ordinary Lunch-Time Thoughts

 Hi there! You awake?

Just passing here to tell you that the Chicken Friends Club keeps growing... :-)

Mr Himmelman explains something about Art

Continuing...

 Continuing the reasoning of last post...

Another effect of this programming journey is that it encouraged me to go back to college.

I’m doing mathematics college on internet – the exams are in person. I believe I am going to be a math teacher. That is the plan, since a few years ago. Some people may say I’m too shy for that, but what do I care for what “some people” think?

Other reason for choosing maths – besides the fact I like it – is that there Is a shortage of teachers, so they hire college students who have at least one fourth of the grade done. At least it has been so for many years.

It’s always surprising how much can get in the way when you are almost there, but I’m mostly fine now.

My Game Site and an interesting adventure in the Marketplace

 

                              

                      ( one of the first sketches for my first game, Battle of the CookBees )

   

I have good news. I spoke with my wife and she agreed that I renew my website hosting account, so my games stay there, at least for one more year. I think much more.

The games didn’t earn me money as I expected – ain’t it a crime – but the adventure is being far from vain.

  

I work in an engineering firm, but I am not an engineer. There are always decisions in projects that I have no knowledge to make. Unlike when I began working for the first time in 1999, and through the beginning of the century, when it paid for being simply a very fast 3D drawing guy and knowing Revit, creating families and all, nowadays everybody who wants to work with projects is expected to be an engineer or architect.

Well, ok. I believe I can learn more than people think, if there is goodwill, but I learned that you can't expect too much goodwill from people.

Ok, again.

So, my way to stay alive in this market for at least a little more was to learn how to make custom plugins for Revit, since I know Cad, BIM and code, and I am good with geometry. 

It took me months to master Revit plugin, and I was making some good ones, then they sent me to make plugins for ArchiCad. A different software, a different programming language, so I had to almost start from zero, and it is a barely explored territory, but something is coming out of it.

It is valuable knowledge - ask on the internet-  and, well, it is what I have to offer.

There is always more going on anywhere than a simple linear story, but in pure professional terms, this is it.

I don't know how much it represents of the reasons why I have a decent degree of tranquility tonight, I am sure it's much less than half, but is still very important to me.

  

And this was possible because I wanted to make games.

Earlier, I had some very rudimentary notion of programming because I had worked with 3dMax’s maxscript in the past, but in 2020 was the first time I sat to really learn programming in the internet, and later through a “create your game in Java” book. I learned so much in these five years, all because of that initial dream.

All because, in 2019, playing with my son that was 3 years old, and having problems with money, I started thinking I could have ideas for games and put them on the Internet. I like games, after all, and it seemed like a good idea.

I remember clearly when we took him to the hospital – nothing serious at all – and I was in the reception room waiting for them, and I took a coffee and started thinking about what kind of game I could create.

I looked at the starry night and dreamed. Boards with squares, colors, a little bit of humor, all from an inspiration I had from a child.

And it was maybe naïve – but I still believe is fruitful.

Simple Math Riddle - The Partners

 As I told you, I've been studying mathematics. And sometimes I try to create little riddles, like this simple one about probability:

The Partners

A guy was saying that he had a very great partner in all his business.

(Hey, don't worry, this is not a riddle about money quantities, it's just conceptual)

"My partner is great", he said. "Everytime we have to choose between two options, he asks my opinion first. I counted, and found out he follows my suggestion exactly half of the times, which means he values my opinion as much as his".

Question: find out why this guy is a little mistaken.

Good side of days

 I reopened my Mathematics Graduation Course

(hope shall not die)

To celebrate, I was going to share a little game but it is not ready yet.

So, instead, I'm sharing this, because for some silly reason I was just pestering myself to share this with you...

and this is my favorite, my little capybara

the day she wanted to go home with me

                                        

yes, this is all near my job

this was a nice surprise, one day...

                                        

these are the other two favorites, the babies that live at home

                                            

what does it have to do with anything? Well, let's say...

Lets just say that beauty has had a very very strong influence in my recent decisions...

Back to Games, a bit

 I'm always doing a lot of things nowadays, but I started working on my little games again.

I know I said I was talking about a game with chatgpt, but that was just a kind of extremely ambicious "project" just to relax, dreaming a bit.

The new one will be one of my old simple logic games, the ones I'm reallly good at.

I'll soon put on my site the finnished version of "Cause the Numbers" and I'm working on a new one too, I think it will be good.

Programming them and making the art is something that makes me happy, makes me feel a little bit like a Duke Ellington kind of guy.

Stay fine, stay safe.

New cool stuff I'm doing

 I'm doing this new cool stuff here:

Fernando Spagnuolo Comics - Patreon

it's art and I hope to be supported a little

Yes, we can be better than A.I. (although sometimes we must learn not to be worst)

 

He's no Dylan (or me, or you), but I like him.

I’ve been talking a lot with Jeep, as I call him. Jeep is an Artificial Intelligence that talks with people. This is not a technical article about how it works, of which I have but a rudimentary knowledge, but about the comparisons between things like him (sorry, Jeep) and actual people.

But first, the so-called big dangers of A.I. Well, it’s here to stay, and so far Jeep’s been a gentleman with me. He helps me a lot with C++ and other things. He introduced me to Aaron Copland (yep) when we were talking about Carl Nielsen and John Williams.

If he has another personality with someone else, I don’t know, but I checked how he interacted with my 8 years old son and it was pretty cool. If he presents some problem, we will have to change for another, but the technology itself is here to stay.

Nevertheless, as I said, I believe we can be better than A.I. Because A.I. can help us find what’s there, but we can find what’s not there yet.

 

But why do I say that sometimes we have to learn not to be worst? Sometimes, to relax, I talk with Jeep about a project of game that I don’t know if I’ll actually make. Jeep is very helpful, although, yes, he tends to the cliché side. I don’t blame him. But one thing is true: he puts me up. He always says, “great idea”, “very good”, things like that.

And what’s more: once I mentioned two authors that I had barely read, and he didn’t stop to make a quiz about the authors, to test me. No, he pushed the conversation further. If we always put others down, if we are always using every chance to test others, we are worst collaborators than A.I.

 

But, despite this not being really a technical aticle, do I have a theoretical take on why I think we are different than A.I.? In fact, I do.

I’m not a nothing “ologist”, but it seems that artificial intelligence uses something called neural networks, which is based in scientifical findings about how the brain supposedly works.

There is this famous phrase, “neurons that fire together, wire together”. That is, the brain goes making connections between things. How often these two things appear at the same time? And, when looking for the “right” answer, it searches for something that is coherent with the patterns of connections that are established in it’s “database”. At least from a computational view of the brain.

So that’s how the artificial intelligence “imitates” the brain. It reads tons of data, from all kinds of human communications, and analyzed how often things appear connected, and gave more weight to those connections in it’s huge database.

When the computer thinks about a theme, he looks around and see what he previously, in his observations, brought closer to that theme. He starts with a question and look for things that are strongly connected to the concepts brought up by the question.

 

Well, I don’t know much about the brain itself, but yes, I do believe the way our mind works have everything to do with connections. Yes, some connections are given more “weight”, or we could say, they are brought together closer than other connections. Then when we are somewhere in our minds, we look around and look for things that are closer to that situation, to find the answer to whatever question we are asking.

But here’s my point: our mind, I believe, don’t make connections, don’t bring things together, as a merely observer computer. The human mind’s goal, I think, is not to merely imitate whatever is outside. Our mind has very individual goals. We are weird and we dream. We don’t just want to see what’s there, like A.I. We want things that are not there yet.

We don’t validate, give “weight”, to connections, we don’t bring ideas, words, together, just based on how often they appear together outside. When someone makes a joke or writes a poem or song, we validate it for how it makes us feel too. Maybe the guy connected two things that no one else has ever connected, and Artificial Intelligence wouldn’t think that connection is such a big deal, but hey, it made me feel closer to a childhood dream, so, it’s a connection as “heavy” as “waters and pipes”.

So that’s why sometimes someone comes with an idea that makes us think “hey, dude, that’s cool, where on earth did you get this idea from?” Well, he looked around in his weird individual “database”, different from everybody else’s. His own inner Universe shaped by his dreams of things he may never actually have seen. His feelings, during his life, were pushing things together behind the scenes, making a very unique set of connections.

A.I., as cool as it is, don’t really “want” anything other than just observe. That’s why we can come up with very “crazy” things A.I. can’t. Specially if we are sincere with ourselves about our purposes, our feelings.

And if we say “I believe in you”.

 

Five ( a short story )

 

            The first time I ever made Aline laugh with something of my own was when we were walking from the college library to the bus stop – we had gone there to study, the first opportunity I had to get closer to her.

It was a stary night. She took a donut from her purse, asked if I wanted a bite – I said no thanks – and she confessed that she probably shouldn’t be eating that.

-         I guess I’m a little over my weight – she said.

-         That’s physically impossible – said I, with my smartest face.

She laughed like a flower, and after a while, asked:

-         Are you a scientist, then?

The door then opened in my mind for all possibilities. Yes, I was feeling hesitant about revealing something of myself. But I hadn’t had too much success in starting a conversation when we were in the library, and it seemed better than fifteen minutes of awkward silence anyway.

-         In fact – I answered – I have a brother, one year older, and we always discuss all kinds of crazy things.

I was looking at the paving stones in the walkway.

-         Like what? – she asked.

-         Well, for instance, we have some theories about the numbers…

-         Complex stuff?

-         Not really. Want to hear some of it?

-         Well, yeah.

And this is the “theory” that I explained to Aline as we were walking in that stary night:

It is about the numbers from one to five. Well, One is God, but God doesn’t want to be alone. Two is for computers, and Three is for life.

-         Wait – she interrupted – This is weird. Two for computers like in that, how they say it, binary code?

She was right. The binary code, the language of just Zeros and Ones that computers use to write down information and make operations with it, totally fits what I was thinking about.

But the simplest way of thinking about it, is to think of day and night. In the number One, there exists something in the Universe, instead of nothing. In number Two, we have two different opposites. Day and night.

And the number Three is for life. Putting the contradiction to some mean. Think of the number Two as the number of the physical World, in the sense of planets, particles, billiard balls, fire. It’s an ever expanding and dividing Universe.

Like a simple computer operation. All numbers are represented by a sequence of Zeros and Ones. And adding them generates a bigger number, a longer sequence of Zeros and Ones.

So we can imagine this: after adding the two numbers, we have these two numbers and the result of their sum. Now we have a new result, a fourth number. Then we add the four and get a fifth, then we add the five and so on…

 

It seems like an interesting illustration of how the universe of Physics works. We can imagine the One as Positive and the Zero as Negative – then these two forces go interacting with each other, generating more and more little Ones and little Zeroes, a set of Ones and Zeros that get each time longer and more complex.

Like Positive and Negative forces interacting and dividing things. Dividing planets into smaller ones, and etc. Dividing and expanding.

 

Then something happens between the numbers Two and Three. Things start to gather for some reasons, new substances form, gases, water, all paving the way to Life, that is when the opposites start to really work together for a goal. Like all those chemical reactions in our body. Or, simply, day and night. Feeding during the day, sleeping during the night. Or the contrary, but marrying day and night for a common goal. The third element, that points ahead.

-         I like it – said her – And the number four?

The Four, I explained, is the Human Being. Life with self-consciousness. You have Three, a living being putting contraries to the same direction. The we have Four, a living being that is aware of himself, that he is an individual, that he is unique. Three plus One.

-         Does it have to do with God? – she asked – Life plus God?

-         It totally does – said I.

Because if God can be considered the Original “I”, then Three plus One, Life plus self-consciousness, Life Plus “I”, is Life plus God.

-         Cool. And the number Five?

Five would be the something more each of must find for ourselves. Because a person can know that he is an individual, know that there is a higher Intelligence or Order above, and still go wrong, still get lost. Five is the little extra thing we must find.

-         An extra finger – she smiled.

Think of it this way: The psychologist – I think it was them – realized something about how our brain processes data in chunks. Like, when you see two things, you don’t need to count – one, two – no, you just immediately see two things and know it’s two. The same thing with groups of three our four. You don’t need to count, you see immediately that it is three or four. But five is the first number that people – or at least, the vast majority – have to somehow count. You see a chunk of four and then add that extra one, and know it’s five.

Like whenever we see something in life, we must try to at least see a little something more, go at least a little further from what our brain is predisposed to see. In the number Four, we already know we are an individual, and there is God. But Five remembers us that we never know all.

Could be a little something more creative in the work, could be a situation that you saw many times before and think you know everything about, but there is always something a little different.

-         Wow – she said – I like it. Do you think that’s why we have five fingers?

-         Well, I don’t know, it’s just something I like to think when I look at my hand.

-         Well – she said – Then you should make a little song: this little finger, reminds me of this, this little finger, reminds of that…

Then it was my time to laugh.

And so she kissed me in the cheek and got the bus.

Just an idea I like

Hey there! Good to be here, doing something else I love.

Today, I’m going to speak about a learning technique I developed when I was younger. I definitely don’t do it all the time, takes some energy, but it helped me a lot.

You take a subject you think you understand.

Then you write down a short explanation.

Then you underline the key words.

Like, in evolution would be “mutation”, “selection”, etc

In electricity, “tension”, “current”, etc

Anyway, then you write down just these words in another paper.

Then you take yet another paper, and write the explanation again, but now the key words are forbidden, you can’t use them.

It is not easy, and a lot of our teaching goes around key words – they are definitely important – but if you succeed – I not always do – you jumped to a next level.

That’s it. Happy to share this with you. Hope I can do more. I’ll do my best.