About Me
I’m a retired Software Engineer. I grew up in Toronto and I’ve been programming since sixth grade and really enjoy digging into ideas with computers. I’ve worked at Meta, and been the Artificial Intelligence Lead at Rockstar Games New England. Before that I was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, first at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, then at the Media Lab. And before that I was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. I currently live in Lexington, MA, USA.
I was part of The Centre for Metahuman Exploration
I founded and led Esc, a virtual 3D nightclub
The Journal of my road trip across America
You’ll need Acrobat ReaderI co-founded Grey Thumb, an artificial life interest group
How to communicate with an alien race
I (might have) met Roger Waters
I was a programmer on Star Trek: Armada
Calculating Pi in a video game
I sang in the band “Booty Resonant Frequency.”
email: martin at martincmartin dot comTop Posts & Pages
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Author Archives: martincmartin
How to Interview A Manager
There’s been a lot written about interviewing programmers, and about good management, but I couldn’t find anything about how to interview managers. So I’ve been looking into it and thought I’d write up what I’ve learned so far. First of … Continue reading
Life and Death
There’s a great old game I remember for my Amiga, called Life And Death. The WHDLoad download has the manual and solution, but not the game itself. I found the PC version at a number of abandonware sites, including: XTC … Continue reading
Review of “Game Design: Theory & Practice” by Richard Rouse III
I’m evaluating books on game design as potential texts for a game design course at Union College and also perhaps RPI. The first book I’m looking at is “Game Design: Theory & Practice” 2nd edition by Richard Rouse III. Overall, … Continue reading
Netflix Prize: Number of ratings per customer
Does anyone have a good distribution for characterizing the number of ratings per customer? Graphing the histogram log-log (where the vertical axis is density, not count) it’s clearly not the straight line implied by a power law: The red line … Continue reading
Game Design PowerPoint Now Online
I’ve been giving a talk on game design which has been surprisingly well received. Several people have asked me for a copy of my PowerPoint presentation. The problem was, my PowerPoint file had lots of images, but little text. I … Continue reading
Giving Grey Thumb talk tomorrow
I’m kicking off a Capture The Flag bot contest at Grey Thumb tomorrow. You can find more details at the breve Capture The Flag page. I’ll post my PowerPoint slides as soon as their done. Update: The slides and simple … Continue reading
Two New Projects
I’ve added two new projects to the Projects page. The first is something my son Miles likes, it plays sounds whenever a key is hit. The second is some notes on creating AI for Sodarace. At the moment, it’s just … Continue reading
Models break down when you exploit them
Models break down when you exploit them. Examples: “Number of lines of debugged code” is a good measure of programmer productivity, until you tie programmer reward to it. The programmers write very verbose code. Stock price is a good measure … Continue reading
Talking at Boston Postmortem
I’ll be giving my talk on game design, Just One More Game…, at the Boston Postmortem tomorrow. Here’s hoping it goes over well!
Philosophy of AI
A while ago I gave a talk at the “Dangerous Ideas Seminar” at MIT’s AI Laboratory. It was called “Breaking Out of the Black Box.” It was about how people tend to create systems out of black boxes, yet systems … Continue reading
Martin C. Martin 