Vince guy spent four years wallowing in equations and graph paper building a totalitarian Sim City hellscape called Magnasanti, racking up a population of six million and claiming to beat an otherwise unbeatable game.

I urge you to watch the video of the process – it’s fascinating, as is the article. I wonder what Will Wright would say if he saw this?

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“We kind of played with the ‘intrigue of the mind’ idea and kind of go into the subjective where the player asks ‘is this really happening or are you imagining it?’ I think we really have both sides of that coin in the game.”

A few weeks after finishing it, I’m still not sure what was real and what wasn’t. I like to think it’s part of the game’s charm.

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From the original paper (PDF):

We experimented on a data set of about 66000 Amazon reviews for various books and products. Using a gold standard in which each sentence was tagged by 3 annotators, we obtained precision of 77% and recall of 83.1% for identifying sarcastic sentences.

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An informative piece by bigmouthmedia.

In the proposed draft of HTML 5, hyperlink auditing allows you to “attach” resources to a link which, when clicked, will ping a source(s).

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New research by the EFF suggesting that most browsers create a unique signature that can be used as a means of identification.

The findings were the result of an experiment EFF conducted with volunteers who visited http://panopticlick.eff.org … EFF found that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable, creating unique and identifiable browser “fingerprints”. Browsers with Adobe Flash or Java plug-ins installed were 94% unique and trackable.

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