” ..’ve got a fire in the cockpit…. a bad fire… get out…”
The last 17 seconds of voice recordings of the astronauts in the Apollo 1 Fire, January 27, 1967
Sun Tzu says attack from a direction that is least expected. The corollary is that one must be vigilant in defense of areas where attack is unexpected to prevent or blunt such attack. Disaster does not always occur where risk is highest. And do not mistake known risk for all risk.
Playing with the upgraded artificial intelligence in version 1.2, it is still possible to get a very fast win. Here’s the play by play to win as the Holy Roman Empire on turn 8 with one to four regions to spare.
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The long delayed Medieval 2: Total War patch came out around the third week of June a few weeks after the Labor Day weekend it was promised. I’ve been playing it for a few weeks to exercise the new artificial intelligence (AI).
The AI and game rules still need some major improvement to be a challenge to the expert strategist and tactician even at the highest difficulty levels. I was able to satisfy the victory conditions for the ‘long’ campaign playing the Holy Roman Empire on turn 8. What follows is strategy, tactics and a recount of how to do it. I’ll point the way for how to do it by turn 7.
Want a 2048 x 1536 monitor? They sell the medical monitors at eizo.com
Try to drive it with a laptop though. If you have a laptop, it likely has an analog VGA cable. The 17″ Mac has 256 MB vram and a mini DVI. I asked sales at Eizo if they pair up seeing as they drive their monitor with a DVI-2. Dell has the video card, but not the dvi plug. There’s a PCI card and dongle to drive a couple more monitors, but they top out at 1920×1200 per monitor. I saw mention that Lenovo has a DVI on it’s Thinkpad, but I couldn’t confirm it in the specs or in the picture or on their sales support.
I don’t want to go all the way to the 30″ apple monitor. I am thinking there is room for a 16:9 monitor at 3 megapixels. What should the resolution be? We know we can drive 2048×1536 (at analog VGA speeds) on a regular laptop, even the Toshiba Portege. So what 16:9 can we fit in that? 2360×1328 is 3134080 pixels which is less than 3145728 pixels in the 2048×1536. That gives us a near perfect 16:9 to four nines at 1.777 ratio.
Can we do better? Yes. 2368 is divisible by 32 which is true of the long dimensions of our favorite resolutions {640, 800, 1024, 1280, 1440, 1600, 1920, and 2048}. But what about the memory management? They chose 2048*1536 because it is a multiple of 1024*1024. They were trying to get inside 3*220 or 3 MB which is 3 * 1048576. And if we divide that by 2368, we get 1328 with .43 of a column of pixels to spare. A little wider than 16×9, but what’s so magical about 16:9? The Golden Square is 1.618 anyway if we want to be classical. Let’s optimize instead!
If you want a Golden Square and long dimension divisible by 32 and stay in 3 MB, you have to choose between 2272×1384 (1.641) and 2240×1404 (1.595). They bracket the Golden Square ratio almost in half (divisible by 16 anyone? 2256 x 1394 just like fire wire), but 2240×1404 only leaves over 1/3 of a column of pixels so I prefer that vs. 4/7.
So build me a cinematic display at one of these resolutions, build me a laptop with a 256 MB card to drive it at 75 Hz, a port to get to the monitor and a video driver to drive it.
In 1992, I got so disgusted with my monitor’s native flicker that I installed Linux and wrote my own video driver for it, ultimately settling for 1152×720 (1.6 aspect ratio anticipating by a few years a VESA standard resolution) which was just the right number of pixels so my 386SX20 could refresh at a 72-75 Hz speed so I wouldn’t see the flicker. Without that sensitivity to flicker, I might be much more shy about optimizing and programming projects. I might be more trusting in big corporate technology machinations. 15 years later we are ready for the (almost-)quad version of VESA 361. Lay it on me. $4000 is a smaller share of my income now than the hundreds of dollars to get a 15″ CRT was then. Hit me with it. I will bet you $100 it will be mainstream in 5 years. 1920×1200 is so yesterday’s news–1200 scan lines is part of the 1994 VESA standards to be precise.
In October 2000, I left IBM Research to form a company, First Intellectual that would build “patent walls” of hundreds of patents to protect financial service companies’ service offerings, create a tidy royalty stream, parry any future efforts by competitors to collect royalties and preempt many “patent trolls” from doing the same thing. This is common practice in technology businesses, but new to services. We did OK. We got some meetings with the heads of IP at ML, MSDW, Qualcomm, JP Morgan and a few others. They didn’t really want the service we were providing, but would buy IP consulting services. After a few months, we realized that to be freelancers we’d need a big war chest to file suits. That the war chest alone was a viable business and that invention alone was not. That is, that good patents are inexpensive. We also learned that financial services are a cooperative network because for an offering, one needs the customers of all entities to participate to make the float successful. Playing mean doesn’t work well. These aren’t the kind of folks that thought they needed protection. Certainly not from each other. Trolls had not yet arrived to break up their club. We closed up shop.
Fast forward five years. On December 30, the front page headline on the Financial Times is “US financial service groups rush to join patent stampede”. Sort of. 238 patents, while up 3-fold, is nothing. IBM gets 3000 alone in their sectors. It’s still early. If you want me to be your hired gun and file 500 patents in financial services and get $1 billion a year in royalties, give me a shout. But anyway, I was there over five years ago with the answer.
One gets more myopic with time, so maybe Space-Shot.com is only a few years ahead of its time. Certainly, we don’t need to spend $1,000,000 to stay open for five years waiting. It’s run mostly by robots. First Intellectual needed people. If one comes too early to the battlefield, there is only half a decisive win. As Sun Tzu puts it, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” I knew the answer, but not the people who didn’t care for the answer I had. I suffered a defeat despite having the billion dollar business. My buddy who said next time I had a billion dollar business, I should let him syndicate it passed on this one. His loss. Life is a repeated game though.
I gave $15,000 last week to help morale in a unit in Iraq. Here’s why.
Another excellent title in the Total War series. Decisive Win takes its time to chalk up another detailed strategic and tactical analysis of this Sega game released for PC on November 17. In 26.5 turns with 199.5 to go, 45 regions are controlled including Rome at the very hard level playing the Holy Roman Empire.
Here’s a download site for the demo. The game is in stores 11/17.
The Battle of Agincourt seems to be the most difficult battle. The English Longbowman have stakes in front of them so that cavalry can’t make a frontal attack. We managed a non-decisive win the second time through. By the fifth time through, we had a decisive win with a kill rate of over 3 to 1. By the 25th time, we had a Decisive Win with a kill/capture ratio of 8 to 1 vs. the French.
The New York Times editorial page calls for non-militarization of space and is worried that we are starting a new space race.
The nuclear arms race and other races in the cold war may have been exceedingly dangerous and unwise to subject our country and the planet to such extreme weapons (that are still around albeit less in the public eye). But a race is a battle that the US is uniquely suited to decisively win with our huge economy, our innovative culture and our status as a sitting duck for asymmetric warfare such as terrorism.
Consider an analogous situation. The alternatives for Israel to stop rocket attacks from over their borders is to either clear an unduly broad patch of no-man’s land of all people permanently (which in itself requires advances in detection and the permanent enmity of the international community) or develop a laser weapon that can shoot down these rockets. The arms race offers the only glimmer of hope for peace.
