Joke of the Day #23

In the 1860s there was an adventurous, rich, eccentric German computer scientist who decided to lead an expedition into uncharted, harsh territory. Even if it turned out to be a failure, he would enjoy compiling a record of his journey. Maybe he'd even make an entire library of his findings.

Before leaving, he freed his entire collection of animals in a stable release, keeping only his mouse. Having no wife or family, the only regular people in his life he had to inform of his absence were his mailman and garbage collector. He went to an American port in transit, and was excited to see monitors of the US Navy anchored there, and spoke with a Commodore who linked him to an assembler that he would need to build his ship design, and a quartermaster who could load the ship quickly.

The assembler he contracted to build his ship gave warnings about the design he had provided, and also warned that the shipyard scheduler would rather allocate labor for domestic merchant traffic than wealthy foreigners, but he built it nevertheless. As the build was underway, a government representative told him that the codes had changed and it would have to be rebuilt. Some of the ship's chains were brittle and so there could be a problem linking to the anchor. There was a brief row when it was discovered the German's plans were in metric units; the American builders only had standard tools, and they would not acquire new sockets and ratcheting handles just for his sake.

The first post-build event was finding a crew and suitable leadership. He found a mentally unstable Army kernel who had been terminated from his position after issuing an illegal instruction to his troops, but would be useful nevertheless. The journey would be arduous, but his spirits were high.

He noted with gruesome interest the habit of cannibalism among a small tribe he called the Init, especially weak children who would likely not survive. Even parents were known to fork a child. The native peoples said that this kind of ritual killing was necessary to avoid the child coming back to haunt the Earth as a zombie. The German logged his protests, but to the native people they didn't register. The team feared that if they stayed longer they might be executed, so they left the settlement.

The expedition ventured into an almost deserted region, where they could hardly find a nibble to eat. Their maps were out-of-date and the food containers were empty. The kernel panicked and took his men back to civilization. The German pressed on alone; he avoided resource starvation by catching birds. One chubby, round robin caught in his snare made for a hearty meal. Throughout the journey, he found himself covered in insects despite his best efforts to de-bug his body and clothes.

After an additional week of no significant findings, the German happened upon a mountain which did not exist on his map.  Unfortunately it turned out to be a volcano, and it erupted in a shower of molten #pragma. Due to a heap of falling volanic rock, he suffered a severe head crash and knew that he would not survive much longer. Trapped in a cave-in while trying to ESC, he wanted an ALT method of dying rather than resource starvation. Using his own bootstraps and some scrounged threads, he made enough rope to end his life. He scrawled an abbreviation of his own name in the side of the cave: "SIGABRT". Because the volcanic embers entombed him in the cave, explorers agreed his body could never be recovered, and will remain hanging indefinitely.

Name that Car #4: Unnamed wagon in Target Facebook ad

Posted by Target on Facebook August 20, 2013

What we have here is a classic scene from American late 20th century culture: a station wagon filled with stuff that a college student will need to live on his or her own for the next four glorious years.

As you can see, I "like" Target. The main reason I shop at Target is because the service, quality and (surprisingly) prices of my local Walmart are very poor indeed. Yet one of the reasons I "like" Target is that they don't have ridiculous "edgy" advertising. This is just lighthearted, feel-good stuff. This particular picture kinda reminds me of 1980's commercials with their warm tones and happy jingles.

Wait! Look at the wagon! No wonder it reminds me of the 80's... that wagon looks like it's from about 1980. I perfectly understand the need of non-automotive companies to use completely nondescript, unidentifiable vehicles in their advertising, since they don't want to alienate buyers of other car brands or peg their company to the image of the brand you see on the screen. Generally this effect is silly, since they resort to debadging a 1980s BMW or similar, and just assume we'll write it off as a boxy old car with no known provenance. This does much of the same thing. Target doesn't sell cars and they don't really want you to know or care what wagon this is. But too bad for them, because I do care, and I will figure it out.

They did a good job making it look nondescript. The tailgate is up and out of the way, preventing us from seeing the badge itself. The design language of the rear end is neither very distinctive nor very recent...  this looks like a car I have probably not seen on the roads in a long time.

1985 Mercedes W123 looks great, but it's not the one.

My first impression when I saw it was Mercedes-Benz. Compare it to a W123 or W201 wagon, though, and you see that the Mercs always had a certain texture to the glass that this wagon doesn't share. It's obviously not a Merc, or an Audi, which had decidedly square taillights.

The triangular amber indicators that you see at the top of the taillight cluster flummoxed me for a bit. Almost all of the period wagons that would be known to North Americans had proud upright rectangles for taillights. All of my earliest guesses for American makes were badly wrong: Ford Fairmont (no resemblence), Ford LTD (none here either), or even ugly Japanese wagons like the Nissan Prairie. All were highly angular and had none of that comparatively interesting shape of the rear that we see on this example.

So I did a few more Google image searches of early-80s wagons that I could remember. I stuck with the German idea and it hit me that it might be a Volkswagen, simply because they were the most likely to have this kind of obscure, never-used-again design language for a station wagon rear end.

VW sold lots of popular world cars in the United States, but generally only after giving them silly NA-specific names. None of them did very well except the Beetle. The Volkswagen Golf was sold here as the Rabbit, the Volkswagen Type 181 was sold as the Thing, and the first-gen VW Passat made it to the States as the Volkswagen Dasher. I am not sure if the names made them especially memorable, because they have almost totally faded from the American consciousness.  Though the Mk 1 Golf was beloved in Europe, even assembling the car in the US did not help its appeal very much in the States, and the Golf never recaptured the appeal of the old Beetle on our shores.

The Dasher was even more of an odd fellow. As American cars of the 1970s go, it was quite small, but it was the biggest Volkswagen you could buy, and it was not especially cheap. Original MSRP (according to NADA) on a 1978 Volkswagen Dasher wagon was a hefty $6,375. Bearing in mind that 1970s dollars were worth quite a lot of modern dollars, you could have saved almost two grand buying a Chevy Nova of comparable size (although gas mileage and refinement would be much worse) and saved a bit by buying yourself a fancy Buick or a titillating Pontiac Firebird Formula with the top 180-hp V8. I actually still do see Firebirds and Novas of the 1970s on the road today, while I have certainly not seen a Dasher in at least the 15 years since I've been paying attention to all the cars I see. Is the German quality really worth that huge premium, if they don't seem to last any longer overall?

1980 Volkswagen Dasher Diesel

But this is indeed a Volkswagen Dasher, which was sold in the US from 1974 to 1981. I can't possibly determine what year this car is based on the rear end alone. Maybe I had a fortunate guess in the first place, since the taillights of the wagon share no styling resemblance with those of the sedan.

I'll credit the excellent Consumer Guide car book of the 1970s (the entire collection spans the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s as well) for jogging my memory. The whole collection is amazing, but the 1940s book is hard to find, and the 1930s book is downright rare (and correspondingly expensive). Buy all those books if you can find them, as they rank among the best resources for car aficionados in the US.

Joke of the Day #22

Sal: Why did you flee to Canada after you escaped from prison?

Hal: Because I had nowhere else Toronto.

Priebe's analogy

The memory hierarchy is one of the abstractions in computer architecture that has withstood the test of time for at least the past 30 years. It was a lot simpler in the '80s, since computers did not have caches and while mainframes had access to tape storage, most microcomputers did not have hard disk drives.

There are many figures of merit to memory. The most important consideration is the distinction between size and speed: you can have one or the other. There are frontiers to what is possible with memory using today's technology. There is no memory that has the capacity of a modern hard disk with the access time of an CPU register, even for all the money in the world. However, since a computer needs to be able to execute programs using instruction and data memory very quickly, and it needs to store large files for future use, there need to be present multiple levels of memory in all digital systems except for the most very basic embedded systems. Other considerations exist: cost per gigabyte, reliability, physical size, and expandability.

Volatility

An unmentioned characteristic of the fastest memory is that it is invariably short-term. It is possible to execute code that rewrites the entire register file a million times in the blink of an eye. The SRAM on the processor, known as the cache, is short-term memory for the processor and it is constantly updated to whatever is most likely to be used by the processor, possibly changing every entry in the table every time a new process is completed. DRAM modules, historically and still known as "main memory," need to be constantly refreshed and they vanish when the power is out. Flash memory is persistent semiconductor memory, but compared to a disk it cannot be written as frequently; the mean longevity of flash-based memory as of this writing is about 10,000 writes; nevertheless, manufacturers as of 2013 are capable of warrantying SSDs (solid-state drives, or hard drives based on flash) to the same length as conventional disk drives. Nevertheless, the cost per gigabyte of semiconductors is much more than magnetic disk platters, so HDDs remain dominant for persistent storage at this time.

The bad old days

In the beginning, there was obviously no defined hierarchy. However, even the earliest machines had registers, even if it was only an accumulator for intermediate arithmetic results. The computer programs of the 1940s to 1960s were mostly arithmetical, designed to provide mathematical solutions to artillery trajectories, business solutions, and bookkeeping batch processing. Instructions and data still had to be entered into the machine's memory from punched cards or tape, and the "main memory" went through some ugly experimentation (UNIVAC used mercury delay line memory) until in 1954 it settled on magnetic core memory. This had a great run, but by the end of the 1970s it had been totally superseded by semiconductor-based DRAM.

All of these memories were slow (DRAM is still very slow compared to CPUs today and it will never catch up), but the main performance bottleneck has almost always been getting data into memory. It took far longer to enter the punched cards and read them into the machine than it did to execute the instructions. Although memories became larger and could store ever more complex programs, they were always outpaced by the demands of programs. Efficient memory usage was especially critical on the small-scale microcomputers that were the vanguard of the PC revolution in the early 1980s. These had a small amount of ROM that was always loaded when the computer was powered on to run the BIOS; the cheaper 8-bit home computers like the VIC-20 and Apple IIe did not have hard disk drives and this untouchable ROM was the only persistent memory on the machine, save for external floppy disks. The IBM PC started shipping with a hard drive in 1983, and eventually everybody else got the idea.

Does anyone miss reading programs into memory on microcomputers using floppy disks, or, even worse, compact cassettes? Neither do I. Computers sucked back then. I can be nostalgic about some aspects of old technology, but we should be infinitely grateful for what the past 20 years has brought us in terms of computing.

In the 1980s, the processor rarely had access to any on-chip memory aside from the register file, and coders in assembly (or compilers, for that matter) routinely used as many of the registers as they could, so it was impossible to use them for any kind of storage. DRAM was universally used to load programs, but, as previously stated, was just as slow relative to the CPU then as it is now. To get around this problem, Intel started putting L1 cache memory on-chip for the 486 processor, and with the Pentium Pro they finally had L1 and L2 caches. Cache memory stands alongside pipelining and multiple cores as one of the most important breakthroughs in microprocessors. Since then we've added L3 cache as well, since the roles of each cache level have changed a bit with multiple cores on the same die, but the memory hierarchy has remained in the same form since c. 1995.

Priebe's analogy*

All of the various types of memory have different roles to play. They are all needed in some way. All general purpose computers built nowadays will have a CPU with a register file, onboard cache, and will need RAM on the motherboard, and will probably also need an SSD or HDD. For truly massive data storage, tertiary storage sits below the disk.

To understand the role they each play, and the timeliness versus capacity tradeoff, I'll share with you Priebe's analogy. Suppose you are watching a football game at home. You are responsible for providing access to beer whenever one of your friends runs empty.

1. All beer enters your mouth from a bottle in your hand. Think of a beer in your hand as a register (and when everyone present in the party has a beer in their hand, you may be said to be fully utilizing the register file). It is so quickly available that it is practically no latency. However, just as you can only hold one beer in your hand, the register file can't hold much data, perhaps on the order of hundreds of bytes.
2. You could go to the fridge each time someone wants a beer (perhaps like you once did in the olden days) but you have yourself a fancy cooler onsite. Think of the cooler as the cache. This cooler also provides a short access time, although not as quite as short as bringing the bottle to your lips, you can still lean over, flip the lid, and grab a cold one in a few seconds. It takes maybe ten times longer to do this than to drink from a beer that is already in your hand, but this can't be helped. If you use an operand in the register for as long as you can and consistently find what you need in the cache, it's the best possible outcome.
3. The fridge is the lowest level of access that could be described as readily available. Think of the fridge as main memory. You're going to take a couple minutes to get what you need and load the cooler back up, making it much less convenient. However, it is still basically present. If someone had beer in their fridge, they would treat it like it was on the premises. Going into memory is a distinct penalty from using the cache, but it is only thousands of times slower. I guess if we wanted to make it realistic, the main memory access should take hours compared to the cache access! Still, as we're going to see, it could be a lot worse.
4. You have a large party and they consume all the beer in the fridge! If the fridge is empty, this is a very bad thing. You can't cancel all the festivities, but everyone is in for a long wait. You have to go to the store to get more beer. Think of the supermarket as the disk drive, or secondary storage. The difference between walking to the fridge to retrieve even one beer compared to driving through heavy traffic and standing in an enormous checkout line to purchase a new supply of beer, which you had to get at the rearmost aisle, is somewhat analogous to the difference between a memory access and a disk access. Except that a disk access is on the scale of milliseconds, which amounts to millions of cycles. It's massively slower than main memory, so it's truly a tragedy for performance whenever a disk access occurs (sometimes through a page fault), but its size is practically unlimited for most purposes.
5. For desktops, the disk is as far down as the hierarchy goes and it is where the example ended in class. However, I personally wanted to carry it further! If an organization had implausibly high demands for beer and denuded an entire store of its supply, they would just go to another one, and another until their demands were met. Likewise, a user who needed more storage space than a single disk would simply have to buy more disks until the demand was satisfied. However, there are businesses whose sole role is to deal in beer and provide it to people, and for them, their own supply might exceed that of any supermarket's supply, so it makes sense that they would incorporate a layer of supply that went above and beyond going to the store and buying some. Likewise, there are archives and databases of tertiary storage which store petabytes of data, far more than any individual would normally acquire, and stores them on magnetic tape libraries, swapping between sections of the library as needed. Accessing data on a tape archive amounts to billions of cycles.  It's so slow that, using the same time scale as the previous examples, you could think of tertiary storage as founding a brewery and building it from the ground up to be one of the world's largest breweries. It's incredibly, agonizingly slow, but archives do need to exist to back up data in huge quantities, just like someone had to spend the time to make a successful brewing company, or else we wouldn't have beer available to us in the first place.

*- This analogy was mentioned in a lecture of my introductory computer architecture class as taught by Dr. Apan Qasem in Spring 2013. Dr. Roger Priebe is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Texas State University, my alma mater. Dr. Qasem is an Assistant Professor at the same institution.

There were two Murderers' Rows in 1927

There's the one we know best....

1927 New York Yankees

...and the one which actually changed the world forever.

Solvay Conference, 1927

Name that Car #3: Ice Station Zebra (1968)

This is a very underrated action movie. The scenes in the sub are rather terrifying. I really like Rock Hudson in this role. I think Patrick McGoohan also did a fantastic job. I also like the cars.

The Marines arrive

The first tenth of the movie takes place in the United Kingdom, at a US submarine base. US Marines are quickly mustered as part of a very hush-hush rescue operation in the Arctic. They are carried to the base in trucks that are obviously not of local manufacture.

1965 Ford F-100

It's clearly visible that these are Ford trucks with the spaced-out F O R D lettering across the grill. The general shape of the truck leads us into the 1961-1966 fourth generation. The fact that the amber turn signals are mounted co-linearly with the Ford lettering means that it must be 1965-1966, and the fact that it uses the simple eggcrate grill rather than the more overwrought later grill makes it pretty definitively a 1965 Ford F-100. If this movie were not made in 1968, leaving no doubt that the trucks can be identified by grill trim, then it would be a lot harder to establish the provenance of these trucks. On older trucks (even moreso than cars), grills are often swapped for adjacent model years by the restorers to fit with their own tastes or what parts are available. The military versions obviously use painted trim rather than chrome on the grill, but the details are all still there to find out.

Jones's escort vehicle

Right after the convoy pulls away, a poncy British luxury car pops up. Keen eyes will notice that it's an obviously Bentley grill, but identifying it from the front-end only is very difficult. If there were any questions that it's a Bentley, the winged B logo can be seen clearly in an earlier scene.

Even in the 1960s, Rolls-Royce and Bentley still often allowed customers to purchase rolling chassis whose bodywork would be built up by outside coachbuilders. However, by the late 1940s RR-Bentley were also employing John Polwhele Blatchley to design in-house bodywork designs. With a separate chassis, the coachbuilders had a free hand in where to make the door hinges, and Blatchley's "standard steel sports saloon" design for the Bentley Mark VI chose to have suicide front doors (with hinges at the rear) and conventional rear doors (hinges at the front). So too does the car in this movie. But the same could also be said about the R Type, its successor.

From the rear...

The rear shots of the car while driving through the countryside are what shows that it must be a Mark VI and not the later R Type: the rather stubby boot. The distinguishing feature between the R Type and earlier Mark VI was that the former had a much longer boot. The fact that the Mark VI was over twice as common on British roads also makes it a more obvious choice to put in the film.

Bentley didn't do distinct model years (far too American and vulgar) so it's not straightforward to distinguish between the earliest 1946 Mark VIs and the latest from 1952; this car, by my estimation, could come from anywhere in that timeframe.

...the difference is clear. Bentley Mark VI for sure.

Name that Car #2: The Big Sleep (1946)

Marlowe's car in the film

Ah, this is a great film. One of the exemplars of the film noir genre. This is one of several high-quality Bogart/Bacall pictures by Warner Bros. in the 1940s. Bogie is at his smoothest and cleverest. I loved the character of Philip Marlowe and the fact that he drove around in the same car throughout the movie meant that it was begging to be named. The car itself was not called upon to do any dangerous chases, and towards the end of the movie he lets air out of one of his own tires as an excuse to request help from the auto shop which is a front for more sinister operations.

Marlowe doesn't ask for any money from the General above his "$25 a day plus expenses". A working man's car suits a working man's wage. It's clearly a 1938 Plymouth coupe. In 1946, most Americans still had prewar cars, and the last ones had been built in very early 1942. By 1949, most of these had been replaced with new cars. Still, the expansion of the market was inexhaustible, and demand kept outpacing supply until about 1954, when the Ford-Chevy price war resulted in record sales for both, and started pushing the independents out of business.

A beautifully preserved '38 Plymouth

An additional fun fact- the car wasn't the only old thing about the movie when it was released. Filming on The Big Sleep was actually completed early in 1945, but it lay on a shelf until Warner Bros. finished releasing its backlog of war-related films, since these were assumed to have a dwindling shelf life, while The Big Sleep was not time-sensitive. The wartime scenery includes a "B" fuel ration window sticker on Marlowe's Plymouth. This entitled him to a whopping eight gallons of gasoline per week!

Spot the sticker

Name that Car #1: Driver (PS1, 1999)

Welcome to the "Name that Car" feature, where I attempt to provide a solid identification of an interesting or well-known car in film, video games, or other visual media.

It's 1999. If you're a cool kid, you have a PlayStation. I wasn't a cool kid and I had a Nintendo 64. Just between Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time, I probably had more fun than the cool kids. But that's a subject left for another article.

Driver was a very popular PS-1 game released in 1999. I got to play just a bit of it on my brother's PlayStation. The general idea is that you were a getaway driver for various criminals and you had to start off by proving your driving skills. The rest of the game seemed to involve escaping from cops, keeping your "felony level" down, not wrecking your ride too much, meeting time deadlines, and blah blah blah... Grand Theft Auto III would become so enormously popular two years later that we already fully know how this kind of game operates.

But unlike in GTA, you couldn't pick your ride. Oh no, that would be too easy. It's not about the car, it's about the driver! So to show how awesome you are, you get to tool around in what looks like a lousy Malaise-mobile. Let's take a few looks at it.

Based on the general order of the back end I'm going to start with 70s Buick. If the front end didn't have dual headlights, I would say it's a perfect 1975-1979 Buick Skylark coupe. The side profile is simple, just a straight line running across with a curved roofline going backwards to a fairly stubby trunk. This points me in the direction of the GM X-body from the mid-to-late 1970s, something shared with the Chevy Nova, Pontiac Ventura, and Oldsmobile Omega. Only the Buick has that characteristic slatted grill treatment. Still, the dual headlights are quite clearly present, which disqualifies that prediction. We have to find a closest match!

The Buick Regals from 1973-1977 also have the grill treatment we're looking for, while they do have the vestigial inside lights that match the square shape of the Driver car. From the front it's a dead ringer. The back end is not quite as pinched with the bumper not quite as high, but let's chalk it up to artistic exaggeration on the part of the game designers. From the side, it looks like the Driver car is too stubby to be a longer pre-1977 Buick, but this isn't carried over to other views of the car which incorporate a partial angle. With few polygons to play with, the swoopy profile of the Regal might have been mashed a bit for that side view. I'm going with a 1975 Buick Regal black coupe, final answer.

It really helps to see these two images, for comparison. Got a better idea than me? Feel free to mention it in the comments.

Why do all Monopoly video games suck?

For one of the best board games ever, Monopoly has gotten poor treatment in the digital realm.

The board game

I am a very big fan of a game of Monopoly on a plain, unadorned board. There is nothing like the joy of starting a Monopoly game with your family or best friends. If you want to have some unpredictability, you'll need more than two people. On the other hand, because so much of the game is spent on players planning their moves, six or more players is unwieldy. With three to five players, you've got a fun game going.

One of the most charming factors about Monopoly is its accessibility. There are metal tokens for player characters, there are title deed cards, there is money, and there are houses, hotels, chance cards, and community chest cards. But none of this clutter adversely affects the ability to start a game and play it. While firmly outside of the realm of real life, all of the mechanics of the game are sensible.

The single most endearing factor about Monopoly is clearly its customizability. With all of these game elements in play, and several ambiguous board locations (Free Parking?) there are many opportunities for players to experiment with new rules, and keep those that tend to speed gameplay or make it more exciting.

Probably all of my readers have played to the end of a Monopoly game at least once. But if the money supply is kept stagnant except for GO money, the following problems arise:

1. Each player starts with $1500 and can only get it from other players or from passing GO and obtaining $200 each lap of the board. This puts a firm brake on the supply of money needed to buy property and trade.
2. The only other way to obtain money is through the pittances available on Chance and Community Chest. But what these cards giveth with one hand, they taketh away with the other: street repairs, school tax, as well as the income tax and luxury tax squares, will have the bank eating up more money than it would yield from the second place beauty contest opportunities.
3. When in Jail, according to the traditional rules, you can still obtain money from your properties. It makes Jail a cushy place to be.
4. Free Parking is simply a blank square. It is begging for more meaning.

We can solve all of these problems with the addition of very common "house rules":

1. Free Parking Jackpot: Start with $500 under Free Parking. All monies taken from players on Luxury Tax, Income Tax, Chance, or Community Chest go straight into the Free Parking pool. Basically, whenever the bank is owed money, it goes into the Free Parking pool instead. Whoever lands on Free Parking gets the jackpot. After the jackpot is won, it's started off again with $500 from the bank.
2. No rent can be collected from players in Jail. In the late stages of the game, Jail is a luxury because players inside don't have to go around the board for three turns unless they roll doubles. Players should have a disincentive to go to Jail, and this can be enforced by not paying them for their own property usage while incarcerated.
3. Random bargaining. For example, if a creditor asks a debtor to pay only half because that would prevent his or her bankruptcy, it is allowed. Whatever satisfies the creditor is OK.

The video game version

Why shouldn't Monopoly prove to be a decent video game? I know it would have to be priced lower than most modern video games, since a Monopoly board, if not in your closet already, can certainly be found for under $20. With the game mechanics already so well-known, it sounds like development should be quick and painless, and correspondingly cheap. A video game version of Monopoly should exist, because it would solve the biggest problems with the game as it currently exists.

• Length. Some rounds take hours and hours to conclude, and it would be nice to save the current state of the game and get back to it at a later time, without leaving the board and all of its cards and doodads sitting on the kitchen table.
• Cheating. If the banker is a computer, and the dice rolls are truly randomized, cheating is practically impossible. If you like playing with your cousin Frank but you know he's a cheater, this could let him get in on the game.
• More variations. People shell out decent money to buy countless specialty versions of Monopoly. There is almost no cost associated with porting different "skins" to the digital board and pieces. Why hasn't it been done? Why can't we have a choice of various game modes?

We should start with a list of some of the attempts that were made before sorted by console, with the year of release, and a review score following. This is by no means an exhaustive list; there are well over a dozen unique Monopoly games.

Sega Genesis, 1992, 60/100 (Sega-16)
Nintendo 64, 2000, 50/100 (X64)
Playstation, 1997, 42/100 (Gamespot)
Nintendo Entertainment System, 1991, 6.25/10 (Electronic Gaming Monthly)
Windows, 1995, 60/100 (PC Games)
Windows, 1997, 3/5 (High Score)

Current version for sale

The Playstation port of Monopoly suffered from other even worse reviews, but I've given the most median score I could find. Generally they are rated poor-to-middling. The most recent EA version, released in 2008 for PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360, is not generally considered a classic either, scoring 54% for PS3 and 56% for Xbox on Metacritic.

They are sometimes rated higher in retrospect, after prices plummet and you can find an old-gen Monopoly game for spare change. But if the low expectations engendered by depreciation actually affect how good a game is, then surely we would all be ignoring the new franchises out today and spending our time on carts from Second Time Around. Come to think of it, that actually sounds appealing to me, since the cost of a new video game console and $50-60 games is a bit perilous to me. But I'm not everyone.

The problems

Let me take an archetypal example of the problem with Monopoly video games: Monopoly for SNES, a game that I owned and never liked. Why was it bad?

1. Transactions should be natural and quick in Monopoly. Instead, with the necessity of switching between menus and submenus to find the right property and select the correct amount of money in your deal, dealing becomes a hassle and something you'd rather avoid. At its heart, Monopoly is a board game with many different actions that are done most comfortably with human hands, and it is hard to apply the same level of choices to a video game with just a handful of buttons.
2. Turn-based video games don't allow continuous communications between players. Table-talk is essential or any board game would be stiflingly dull.
3. The rules of the game cannot be adjusted infinitely. There was no ability to change the rules, which means it proceeded at a rate that I found dull.
4. It's hard to graphically improve the real world. We're all used to playing Monopoly in board game form. Video games can hardly make haptic tasks like rolling dice and handling money any better than the real thing. The makers like to incorporate sound bites and animations as well, and while these might be funny the first game you play, it's annoying to hear the same one-liner again after the one hundredth time you've been released from Jail.
5. Computers are not your friends. Monopoly is not like chess. We do not play Monopoly or most other board games to become masters with the highest ranking. We play because the experience is fun with our friends and family. Computers are stiff bargainers and utterly joyless in deal mongering.

Despite all these problems, Monopoly remains a perennial remake for each subsequent video game console generation. The general lackluster feel of each video game seems to have no effect on the popularity of the board game itself. Some board games are less popular than they were before, but Monopoly is the flagship of the huge Hasbro enterprise, and it still sells in significant quantities and earns considerable revenue for Hasbro, helped no doubt by the presence of nearly 100 specialty versions.

Can any board games translate well to video games?

Definitely. Chess is almost better in digital form than physical form. Chess is an art form with no random chance whatsoever, where there is such a huge continuum of expertise that poor players will never defeat superior players. This factor is a bit of a barrier to entry for those who are not prepared to learn how to improve, and a point of embarrassment for many poor players (me included). Playing against a decent chess AI will usually also end in defeat, but at least chess experience can be gained this way without congratulating a human being for beating you.

Chess's seriousness is part of the essence of it. Nobody expects a chess AI to be a wordsmith. And that's worked for the entirety of video games during the 20th century, which could only support the logic involved in predicting how to win the game, not how to entertain you.

The future

A board game like Monopoly is fun in its original form because it involves human beings who are playing a game. The table talk, bickering, random gags, haggling, and even cheating are elements of human interaction that add in intangible ways to the gameplay, but haven't yet been emulated by computers.

Robust human-computer interaction is predicted by most experts for the coming years. Researchers for companies and universities have been trying to make robots more lifelike, with more advanced mannerisms and gestures. This is an extremely ambitious task that will no doubt take decades to complete. However, the task of believable computer personalities simply in the digital realm (using inputs from a user's keyboard and returning text or even voice responses) is more readily achievable and I think that it will start to appear in user interfaces and video games long before physical robots start to do so. Robotics will be expensive for a very long time to come, but computing power is still expanding with Moore's Law, and a purely software-based human simulation will be more sooner developed, and more readily available, than a human simulation which incorporates a physical body.

I am not myopically worried about making a good Monopoly video game. What I suggest is not so much a proposal that adding intelligent human-like AI to Monopoly would make it a good game, as a proposal that we can use the mechanics of Monopoly and an observation of the social behavior involved, in order to improve the state of human-computer interaction. When computers become decent social companions in a game, they are one step closer to being decent companions in the real world.

As far as this one game is concerned, I think that there will always be a role for Monopoly on a home video game system. It's just such a shame that it never translates as well as it should. The ingredients for a classic Monopoly video game shouldn't be hard to isolate. I think you should start with:

1. A user interface that lets you see your own properties, and those of your others, with relative ease, so even though you can't blow on the dice and whisper your demand, at least you know right off the bat what you don't want to roll to stay alive.
2. A huge variability in rules changes. They have been getting better at this in more recent versions.
3. Computers which are unpredictable and entertaining. Let's throw in the option of making your opponents gullible 8-year-olds, or by plying everyone at the table with booze.

Are we getting smarter?

The following is a reworded re-post of a Facebook note that I wrote in 2007.

If you believe in the validity of IQ (intelligence quotient), then the inevitable conclusion of the Flynn effect, which states that IQ scores tend to rise over time, is that we are getting smarter. Going back one generation would see marginally lower IQ scores, and going back one more would compound the effect. Wouldn't it be great if we could entitle ourselves to a pat on the back for just being born in this time period? How great does it feel to be the smartest generation that ever lived?

However, I don't think that IQ is a measurement that stands up well to the course of time. If you extrapolated backwords and accounted for regional differences, the inhabitants of Salina, Kansas, USA in 1895 would not appear to rank high in terms of brainpower. And yet here is their 8th grade final exam:

8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS -1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph.
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of "lie," "play,"' and "run."
5. Define case; Illustrate each case.
6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

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Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per foot?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

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U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided..
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865..

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Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.'
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

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Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Please share your opinions and tell me if you think that was a cakewalk. If you didn't, then remember to show your elders a little more respect.  And before you mention how most students never got further than 8th grade or high school, try and imagine how much harder they had to work for their college degree. Try and understand how many of them still had to get degrees in order to build the society and technology of the 20th century. The old men and women of today might not know some things you know, but they know a lot of stuff that you don't know, and might never have to learn.