Cognitive Model of HoN

Months and months ago, Julian and I were stuck in yet another baddies game of HoN and he wanted the team to do one thing, but half the team disagreed. He asked in frustration why they wouldn't listen. Putting aside the typical explanation of them being stupid/noob, I thought I'd try using cognitive models of learning to explain the answer.

I don't think all HoN players are stupid, and there have been times where someone has asked me to do something and I thought it was the dumbest idea ever, but now I've learned how good it really is. I've probably played close to 800 games of  HoN/DotA where I did not use wards of sight, and yelled at anyone who even thought about suggesting I buy some. Now it's usually one of the very first items I buy, and counter-warding is one of my favourite parts of the game.

Rewind to another tangent, I remember a time when AG was explaining to me how chess algorithms work. I don't know if this is still true, as I've never looked into writing chess AI, but at the time, it seemed like the most logical way to program a chess computer. The computer will look at the legal moves available (using heuristics to trim down the list (e.g. not playing h3 on the first move, as this is typically considered wasteful (although AG also told me there are these weird chess movements that come and go where all of a sudden, people seem to like to play moves like that))). Then it will use depth-first search to try to find the best possible move out of all the legal moves, "switching sides" and calculating the same for the opponent. I think I read somewhere that it usually did about 7 moves ahead. It determines the "best" move by adding up the values of the pieces it has, adding a few points for certain things like square control, active pieces, etc, and comparing that to the calculated value for the opponent at that point in time. Then it works out the best trade-off. If there are two equally good choices, it chooses at random.

It "learns" but playing lots of games, and when it wins, it "strengthens" the path for that series of moves, and when it loses, it "weakens" the path for that series of moves. The next time it comes to a crossroads, it will end up choose the stronger path.

Considering a computer has insane processing power, it can handle quite a lot of calculations. Plus, computers don't necessarily "forget" to take things into account. Humans, on the other hand, are quite fallible. I wanted to explain all of this because I wanted to contrast that to how I think humans develop "HoN-sense" (for some reason, I read that as rhyming with "nonsense").

When something good happens, you tend to want to replicate things so that it might happen again, and when something bad happens, you tend to avoid similar situations in case it does happen again. This is how things like superstitions develop. What I've typically found with HoN players (and which I am also guilty of) is that when they win, it's because they did well, and when they lose, it's because their team did poorly. So if you combine the two, you get players who remember the awesome things they did that caused the win, and banlist the baddies who made them lose.

Imagine that your HoN experience was quite limited, and of the few times you did the above strategy, you ended up winning. You play a few more games, and your cognitive map starts to look like this:

You've played and won with Pyromancer the most, so that is the strongest path at the moment. But you've experimented with a few other heroes and strategies, some going well, others not so well. I should point out that unlike a computer, we are unlikely to have calculated every possible path. So in this case, the lines represent past experiences. Whether the lines lead to win or lose indicates the outcome. The "strength" of the line in this case doesn't indicate the best path, but number of times that path has led to that outcome.

A bit more time, and you might start to see a pattern ("Every time I play Nymphora, go top, and buy boots and wards, I lose"). The only problem with HoN as opposed to a game like chess, is that there are so many other factors involved that it is quite difficult to consider every single one of them. Team balance, good lanes, runes, hero match-up, team skill, and neutral creep spawns are probably only a few. But because we tend not to overanalyse the situation (especially because this is supposed to be fun), you end up thinking Nymphora + top lane + boots/wards = LOSS. This is despite the fact that the map might look a bit more like this:

Every person goes through a different developmental journey, and everyone will come up with different cognitive maps with different lines. So when two people with opposing ideas come together, it's difficult to convince one person to try something they "know" to be a losing strategy. As far as they are concerned, it has never worked in the past, and is unlikely to work now. Even if it is a weak line leading to a losing path, they may feel adverse to that strategy as they believe there are other winning strategies available.

Which is why I think it's great to play with open-minded people who have never played before. They have no existing map, and so they end up learning your map, and you work really well together. ^_^

I think I'm skill-capped at the moment, and I don't think I will get better until I spend more time playing with better players, as I have the cognitive map of a 1500 player. It's something that I find difficult to do, but when I play with stronger opponents, I should spend more time trying to take on their maps, instead of feeling sad that I got completely crushed.

Stim Pack

Obviously, there is physical arousal (either of the sexual nature, "He/She is so hot I want to have sex now", or the adrenaline nature, "That tiger is going to eat me, I'd better run as fast as I can"), but what about intellectual arousal? Something that makes you want to think things, argue, debate, hypothesize.

The mentor I have at work that I mentioned earlier, I was thinking about the nature of our relationship, and though I consider him a mentor, he doesn't seem to give me all that much advice. I don't really know what mentors are meant to do, yet I somehow went from zero to three mentors in the space of about a year. I always thought they were meant to be sagely, and give advice (somewhat like those elderly people in old-school RPGs who you have to talk to in order to work out the next part of the quest). Though he does give me some advice, I feel that he is more of a person I can bounce ideas off, and discuss things with.

Every time we have a chat, I always walk away agitated, but in a good way. I suddenly want to do all those projects that have been put aside. I want to argue with everybody about everything and anything. So many hypothetical situations and money making schemes always start chugging away at the back of my mind. Is this what intellectual arousal is? Is this what it is like to have a muse?

Unfortunately, as I only ever see him at work, the effect usually wears off pretty quickly, as I have work to do (hooray!) and I'm not being paid to debate hypotheticals with people. I find that by the time I get home, all that energy has been sapped away, and the feeling is gone again.

When I tried to go to sleep tonight, I found myself lying in bed for a while. My train of thought eventually led me to think about my mentor, and I found that I was having an imaginary conversation with him in my head. I also found that I had an itch to do something, and I didn't really want to sleep anymore (which is why I'm awake now, even though I have to get up to go to work tomorrow). In the same way that you can picture an attractive person naked in your mind and it causes sexual arousal, I wonder if having these imaginary conversations is enough to provoke intellectual arousal.

It seems like a pretty dangerous thing though. I tried playing a game of HoN just then, even though I'm feeling so tired, and it felt a bit like watching the game with a strobe light. I'm farming peacefully, oh, now we're in a team fight, oh, I'm at the fountain now, oh, we're pushing a tower. Julian, Char and Twins carried the team though, so we won. :D

I thought about inviting him to something after work so that I could keep the buzz, but it feels weird. He invited me to something once, but it was a developer thing, so it was a bit work-related. Other than Tong's meet ups, I don't really have any developer things I could invite him to. Maybe I should frame a picture of him and put it on my desk. Though how would I explain that to MrMan5.5...?

Virtual Memory

There was a deal on Scoopon for a discounted photobook, where you send in a digital photobook, and they print and bind it into a hardcover book. I decided I wanted to get one for myself, but I don't really take the kind of photos that you would want to put in a coffee table photo book, so I figured it'd be a waste of money. Then I had the idea of putting in HoN screenshots, from memorable games. MrMan5.5 told me it was a waste of money, but I disagree.

Are memories from game events any less "valid" than memories of events from real life? I have quite a lot of fond memories from gaming. There was a UBRS run I went on with some guildmates, and one of the warlocks, Philip, wanted to play a joke on the party. He got us to summon him on the bridge, then he jumped off the bridge, hoping to shock everyone, then accept the summon and reappear on the bridge. Only he lagged a bit, and so he hit the ground and died before accepting the summon.

There was the naked boarhunting session with Meshu and Stringbeans, where the three of us (two mages and a priest) ran around Durotar killing level 8 boars with unarmed melee attacks, which took a loooooooong time as it was back before the removed the unarmed weapon skill.

There was the time Isoraji and I jumped down from the World Tree and I ran out of feathers on the way down, so I coudn't levitate myself anymore and died. It was a painful and expensive trip - I realised I should have just hearthstoned right away, but Iso convinced me to make it to the bottom, I thought the only way out was to keep corpse running and jumping further down the tree until I hit the ground. (Iso was a hunter, so I don't know how he expected to survive the fall, not to mention the fact that he used to play Alliance, so he must have known it was quite a long drop).

OK, so a lot of these are WoW memories rather than HoN memories, but there have been some pretty good moments in HoN as well. And most of the other multiplayer games I've played.

I just wonder if I go so far as to make a photobook someone is going to accuse me of being unable to tell fantasy from reality. I don't understand why people can recount the details of a tense sports game and it's fine, but if you start talking about a game in the same way, you have an addiction/need to get a life.

I've been addicted to a game, and there have been times where I think I've been pretty close to becoming addicted to other games, but I think I'm still able to tell fantasy from reality. So for that reason, I am making my own gaming memories coffee table photo book.

Fifteen Minute Cast Time

Julian, Char and I were discussing how we could make money by creating a HoN stream commentated by a girl (Char). The idea seemed pretty straightforward, we play, stream the games while playing, and chat as we normally do on Mumble. The allure would be the fact that there is a female playing HoN, and people would watch just to see what's going on. Their views would generate income from ads, which we could split between the five of us (Char getting the biggest share, of course, as she is the one doing most of the work (I think the fact that the five of us have to play is work for us, although, Julian said Char could just stream on her own with randoms and get all the profit, which makes sense to me)). Besides, we play every night anyway, so why not profit from it?

So why Char and not me - after all, I'm also a female that plays HoN? I thought Char could do the cute, Asian girl over webcam thing, and get even more money, so that was my biggest reason. But a part of it was to do with the fact that I've focused a lot on recognition based on merit, not gender (i.e. I'd like to be good, not good "for a girl"). The idea of selling my channel based on the fact that I'm female isn't appealing to me at all. Though that didn't stop me from suggesting someone else should do it.

The last part that frightened me was the thought that we lose often. In fact, I have a 50% win rate, so we'd be expected to lose about half of our games. Losing between friends isn't a big deal. We think about what went wrong, blame the random person on our team, and queue up again. Losing when 500 people are watching seems really embarrassing. Not just that though, I'm afraid that every time we lose, it just feeds into the stereotype that girls are bad at games.

Which is so ridiculous. I avoid having my skill judged with a female bias in mind, but at the same time, I'm afraid that when I am judged, I'll end up contributing to that bias.

I remember at the HoN tournament we played in about a month ago, we were seeded against the Qlimax Crew. As soon as they saw us, they were so confident they were going to win, and as they were walking back to their seats, they were laughing that we had a girl on our team. They completely crushed us. Their strategy was really aggressive and it seemed like they didn't even consider us a threat. It was almost like they were playing a practice game and we weren't even there.

I watched a replay of one of their other matches in the tournament, and they were a lot more cautious. I kinda feel like I let the team down. Maybe if I hadn't been there, they wouldn't have been so arrogant, as the team was an unknown, and they might have played cautiously in the first match, which wouldn't have caused the strategy we had practiced to unravel so quickly.

Besides, I wouldn't want any bad reputation to come to LCF, as I still think of it as Simon's clan, even though I've been clan leader since the beta.

Yellow Belly

I was discussing yellow fever with someone (the fondness for Asians, not the disease), and jokingly mentioned a mutual friend of ours who I thought had it (his Chinese is better than mine, so that is definitely evidence that he has yellow fever in my books). He then said, "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but has it, and he has it bad." It confused me, as I thought it was pretty clear that he had a thing for Asian girls, as from what I know, he has only had Asian girlfriends, and he usually spends his time hanging around Asian females (though whether that is a side-effect of studying commerce, it's hard to say). 

The fact that this is the first time I have heard my friend mention that our friend had yellow fever made me think about the lack of discussion between him and his other male friends (who I also happen to know) about romantically inclined things. It's not manly to discuss feelings, blah, blah, blah, but we were discussing it, so it's not like he didn't want to talk about it ever, just not with his other male friends.

Is it because they're not interested in hearing about that kind of thing? I don't think that's true, as I've talked with a lot of guys about various topics of the romantic nature, and they seem fairly happy to discuss things (considering that I am now in a happy relationship, living vicariously through them is my only source of relationship drama).

So it's probably because they don't want to be seen as "girly" by their friends, so they don't talk about dating in general. I am really curious about how they go about telling their friends that they are now dating someone.

"Hey guys."

"Hey."

"Started playing Gears of War 3."

"Oh, how is it?"

"Pretty good so far, started off a lot harder than I expected."

"I have a girlfriend now, don't have money to buy GoW3."

"Sucks to be you."

I remember at Julian and Lucy's wedding, Julian's best man talked about how when he first starting dating Lucy, he asked for tips from his friend. I can't remember the rest of the speech, but I remember thinking that it was really bizarre. The first thing I thought of was a picture of Julian and Twins standing over a map, like in one of those war planning sessions. There was a model for Lucy on one side of the map, and Julian's "army" was spread out over the other side. Twins explained that he had to flank Lucy with dinner, and then while she was distracted, have the chocolate cavalry charge in.

How do people normally go about asking their friends for advice?

Cognitive Fetish

This post is a reply to a reply to my post Naked. Which is really exciting, as the reason for my blog being public is because I want to have discussions with people about the things that I think about, and the one great thing about a reply in blog form is that it means the person has sat down and thought about it, so their response is well-constructed.

I hope this post is generic enough that the person can't be identified. The post got me thinking about fetishes (of the sexual kind), and whether it was bad to have an abnormal fetish. I always preferred to break it down into harmful and non-harmful, rather than normal and abnormal. I believe if someone gets off on watching clocks tick from 11:59PM to midnight, and they're not doing anything harmful to anyone, then so be it. Who cares if it's "weird" or whatever? Though "harmful" may not be the right word, as some people enjoy BSDM, among other things, and so they might want to be harmed in that way. So maybe something along the lines of doing something to someone which they don't want done to them.

Anyway, the post also had me thinking about the way in which fetishes develop. I've been meaning to write up a cognitive model of HoN learning for a while now, but I've been too lazy. The idea behind this is somewhat similar.

When you first start exploring sexual material, chances are you did not know what you were looking for, and you were too embarrassed to do a deep search, so you would stop at the first thing that remotely turned you on, and that you had relatively easy access to. These days, for most people, that would be something found on the internet - which was DBZ fanfiction in my case. What you tend to go searching for may also have links to what you have been told by others is "hot" - for instance, the stereotypes surrounding maids, schoolgirls, nurses, etc. You sample this for a while, and it works for you.

Later, you might decide to expand your horizons, maybe try out a Russian dominatrix instead of the maid you always go back to. The mood has changed, and you have to adjust your style. Rather than watching the demure maid who does whatever she is told, and will do anything to please her master, suddenly you're watching a woman who knows what she wants, and if she isn't pleasured NOW, then there will be punishment. Things are so new, and the things that you might have looked out for before (brief glimpses up the maids skirt, or the ridiculously clumsy maid falling on an erect penis (sounds painful to me)) aren't there, and you have to learn what new things are there to excite you.

Maybe it takes too long. You think to yourself, "I should have finished by now, what's going on?" Maybe Russian dominatrices aren't for you, and so you go back to the familiar, the things that you know work. Over time, your mind has things that it is guaranteed to get off on, things it is sometimes in the mood for, and things that don't really work, or might work after a lot of effort.

I think it is when you don't try out new things, that you end up with a very small number of things in each category, and you just become so accustomed to your favourites that it is hard for you to adjust to seeing something new. Then there starts to be some crossover, where you start to notice in the outside world those things that you previously only looked for while masturbating. It's natural to find people attractive and be aroused, but I think when it's at the point where you are starting to fixate on certain things, and aren't able to control it, that it gets to the point of being a fetish.

It makes me wonder whether maids, schoolgirls and nurses are really that interesting to the male libido, or whether it's just a reinforced stereotype.

For a while, I was a bit afraid that I had an abnormal fetish, and that it was bordering on harmful. We used to have a shared computer at home, so looking up porn was pretty much impossible. However, I discovered a bunch of books that my aunt had given us, and some of those books featured Mills and Boon type romance novels. I can't remember how old I was at the time, but I read them thinking they'd be like the Babysitters Club style romances, not having any idea what I was reading until it was too late.

For those who have yet to open one of those books, a lot of them feature a sex scene where the guy is so overcome with desire for a woman that he has to have her, and somehow her clothes seem to just fall off, and she is so wet that he can just slide in and thrust deep (it's always a deep thrust, I think in that world, there is no other kind) inside her. Of course, they both orgasm at the exact same time, which shows how in love they are.

Being the naive girl that I was at the time, I started to believe that that is how it happened, and so a lot of my fantasies involved doing something mundane in a room with a guy, when suddenly he would be so overcome and he would take me right then and there (never having had sex before, the details were kinda fuzzy). Those were the kind of stories I would seek out (you can look pretty inconspicuous reading text on the computer, and chances are, nobody would be reading with you over your shoulder, so it was something I could do with a shared computer - I also learned how to clear browsing history around the same time).

For a long time, I seemed to have a bit of a fetish for being practically raped, but then it actually happened (me having sex, not me being raped), and it kinda dispelled the idea. I would sometimes find a story, and a voice in the back of my head would tell me that things don't really happen like that, which would occasionally ruin the mood. That's when I started trying out new things, and found other things that worked for me.

One last thing that I thought about. The poster said that it is hot when a girl talks about sexual things, but creepy when a guy does it. Personally, I disagree. I used to read a blog written by a guy about things he did with his wife and various other women (can't say if it was real or fake though), and I didn't find it creepy at all. Actually, it was pretty hot, until it got a bit boring, as it was mostly the same stuff over and over again.

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I did WiiFit again today. I think my body started to get used to it, as I found I was thinking about doing yoga quite a lot during my week without WiiFit. Plus, I am now at 67kg, so I think that's another sign that I should continue. Although, I want to take up ice skating, and I'm going to sign up the term starting in October.

Couch Potato Returns

Our Wii died, and with it, all of the WiiFit save data. We bought a new one, but I couldn't even find the motivation to make it through the first exercise today. When previously, I could force myself to do WiiFit even if I was feeling exhausted, which says to me that it was probably all about the high scores anyway.

Not sure what I will do instead. Read the start of the book GP gave me, but the idea of having to do something like that to lose weight puts me off completely.