How to Interview A Manager

Posted on May 9, 2007 by martincmartin

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 all, some things not to do. While you might want to lead with a big, open ended question (“What’s your management philosophy?”), you don’t want most of your questions to be like that. That’s because while some people are reflecitve and think explicitly about what they do, there are others who are “naturals.” The naturals have good instincts about how to handle most situations, but they may never really have thought about what they’re doing or tried to put it into words. So instead, you want most of your questions to be scenarios.

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Life and Death

Posted on April 19, 2007 by martincmartin

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:

The beeper codes and solution are available from the XTC Abandonware site, and I’ve mirrored them here.

Actually, that XTC site has a bunch of games, including old Infocom games like “A Mind Forever Voyaging.” Cool.

I’d still love an Amiga version…

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Review of “Game Design: Theory & Practice” by Richard Rouse III

Posted on December 12, 2006 by martincmartin

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, I like it. He mixes high level ideas with both analysis of specific games and interviews with game designers, and talks a lot about nuts and bolts. For example, there’s a chapter on the design document, and another on documentation in general. There are also two appendices of example design docs, one for a hypothetical game, the other for The Suffering. He also takes a historical perspective, analyzing Centipede and Tetris along with The Sims and GTA III.

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Netflix Prize: Number of ratings per customer

Posted on December 6, 2006 by martincmartin

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:

Histogram of the number of ratings per customer

The red line is the gamma distribution fit by the method of moments. It’s way too high on the left, and way too low on the right. Can anyone think of anything better?

This thread on the Netflix Prize forums:

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Game Design PowerPoint Now Online

Posted on October 9, 2006 by martincmartin

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 think that’s the most engaging format – certainly TV shows don’t just display notes on the screen while someone talks. But the down side was that, for those who wanted to show the ideas to their friends, the PowerPoint just wasn’t sufficient.

So, I’ve created a new one, which is just my notes on top of the images. The images become kind of hard to see, but hey, if you want the full effect, you’ll have to come to my talk. 🙂

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Giving Grey Thumb talk tomorrow

Posted on October 1, 2006 by martincmartin

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 example bots are now available here.

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Two New Projects

Posted on August 20, 2006 by martincmartin

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 about how to interface a program to the Sodaracer.

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Models break down when you exploit them

Posted on July 17, 2006 by martincmartin

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 of the performace of a company, unless you tie management’s reward to it by giving them stock options. Then they manipulate the stock price, as happened in the ’90s at places like Enron and Worldcom.
  • Macroeconomic models, for example that high unemployment coincided with low wage inflation and vice versa, are valid until people try to exploit them.
    Such trade-offs, [Robert Lucas] argued, existed only if no one expected policymakers to exploit them. Unanticipated inflation would erode the real value of wages, making workers cheaper to hire. But if central bankers tried to engineer such a result, by systematically loosening monetary policy, then forward-looking workers would pre-empt them, raising their wage claims in anticipation of higher inflation to come. Cheap money would result in higher prices, leaving unemployment unchanged.
    – The Economist July 13th 2006, Big questions and big numbers

What does this imply for adaptive behavior? When a creature discovers a relationship, that may hold as long as it doesn’t try to exploit it.

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Talking at Boston Postmortem

Posted on June 12, 2006 by martincmartin

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!

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Philosophy of AI

Posted on June 12, 2006 by martincmartin

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 designed by nature have more interdependence between the parts.

A little later, at the Indie A.I. seminar, I gave the talk “Taking Vague Boundaries Seriously.”

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