The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Have no fear... my coworker confided to me that he is on Sequence 4. (In his words, he just got to the South of the map where the bigger ships are).

I'm legitimately trying to figure out what would have been in a Seq13? Eddie going back to the Observatory? Who would he spy on? Everyone is dead. There are no Templars left in the story. Maybe Black Bart/Aita showing up as a hologram in the observatory charging Edward to keep this secret? Maybe a reunion with Adewale and the Assassins to help kick off Adewale's character arc in Freedom Cry.

Edward's wife was dead at the end even. Retiring and going back to England and renting a house from Tessa (mother of Haytham) doesn't seem very interesting. We see Edward happy with his children at the end at least, but there doesn't seem to be much left in the way of gameplay action.

I mean, even in the present day, John has tried to poison you to death and was killed. More interaction with Shaun and Rebecca? Aren't they on some sort of watchlist now?

I got the game for Christmas and just finished it yesterday, so you beat me! Congrats!

how big are you guys on forum games?
there's a big thing i'm playing on Gamefaqs, like a Survivor kind of thing called The Epic Struggle.
132 players, in 12 teams.
we need a few more, and a friendly face is always useful in that sort of stuff
if anyone likes that kind of stuff, let me know.

EDIT: i think it's full now

shameless plug. http://trackr-launch.herokuapp.com/?ref=VWiEC

Trackr looks cool and I've been following their progress for a while. (them and Stick'N'Find). They are in the middle of a launch. If you click on the above site, not only can you get one for free, but I'll move up the queue for my free one. haha

I don't know if this has been brought to your guys' attention, but here's some real life wall climbing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODE7E4fflAE

I had a really messed-up dream recently.
A First Civilization girl appeared in my backyard and no one understood her but me. She was all shy and afraid and I had to hide her in my room. Whenever we went outside, she had to pretend to be hardcore cosplaying. Also she was (for some reason) an Assassin's Creed fan and was like, "HUMANS ARE SO COOL!" Then she curled up next to me and fell asleep and just ugh cute aliens ugh what the hell is up with my brain.

I think the real question is: Why aren't you writing this book already?

That's a good point, I think I might do that.

They finally made it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4vE_vpkr90

Nah, that was proven to be fake a couple weeks ago. I know, I was happy too.

was there anyone who thought that was real even for a minute?

I did because I'm the most optimistic person I know, but the day after I saw the video, it was proven to be false. The presentation is what made me want to believe it.

Darn it, you just had to ruin my April Fools Day joke, Mr. Fogey. But yeah it's confirmed to be a prank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLzHj3aFCaE

I've entered another programming contest - as if I wasn't busy enough already! This one is very competitive. There are about 250 people actively testing solutions plus another 500 who have registered but haven't submitted anything yet. One cool thing is that you can check your score and see how it stacks up against the competition during the contest, rather than waiting for judges after the submission deadline. So far I've been in the middle of the pack, sometimes ranked in the top 100. If I don't have a breakthrough soon then I'll learn to embrace failure.

This first round is two weeks long and it's a fun problem. There's a game similar to Candy Crush and the goal is to write a program that plays it well (kind of like a chess program except the game is simpler than chess). It's straightforward to write a greedy program that always goes for a quick scoring move. The hard part is looking ahead to see how to chain moves together for a higher score. The gameplay is identical to this game: Sushi Dash.

If I weren't a chemist, I'd probably do something in the software engineering/coding world. I always love putting together web pages from scratch in HTML and CSS, but I don't have time to learn much else. (I did take an intro to programming class in college where we used C++). I'd love to learn PHP, Java, Python, anything else really, but don't have the time desire to put in the effort at this point to do so. Building technology would be a very fascinating field to be a part of.

I just finished a course that introduced me to programming in Python. I study linguistics and initially most students (including myself) didn't see the link between linguistics and programming, but it turns out that there are some cool things you can do with written texts in Python (like making frequency dictionaries), and I thought it was pretty easy to learn. Too bad there are not a lot of courses to follow up on this introduction, because it was really fun (and frustrating at some points, when you just can't get the thing to work).

Can we check how you're doing in that contest, Stabguy? Is there some kind of leaderboard that you can link us to?

The leaderboard is here: standings. I'm competing under the name "stabguy". If I'm not in the top 100, try page 2. There's still one week to go in this round. Thankfully, there will be a long break before the second and third rounds. The top four finishers in each round qualify for a trip to San Francisco to compete in a live 12 hour event for the grand prize of $15,000.

Well that was a lesson in humility. Humility 101.

Nah, it wasn't that bad. I finished round 1 about where I started: 85th place (pending final system tests). There were a total of 333 competitors who submitted solutions so I was right at the top 25th percentile. That's pretty good for my first contest on this site. I consider it a learning opportunity. Now that I'm familiar with the problem I will examine the solutions of the winners and see what worked for them. Technical details follow...

Right away I came up with good data representations for the game board and tight functions for generating moves and evaluating board positions. My fundamentals were solid but I never came up with a good overall strategy.

The right way to find the best solution is identical to a chess program: depth-first search of the game tree (looking ahead n moves) with a payoff function at the leaves of the tree to estimate the value of the board position. That's where I started. Unfortunately, we had to make 10,000 moves in 30 seconds. At 30 milliseconds per move, there's not enough time to play it like chess. I tried focusing on slam dunk moves (the equivalent of captures in chess) and had some success with this approach.

You know how some versions of Tetris show you a preview of the next piece that will fall? This game is like that. You can see the next 2x2 square, the one after that, and so on. So I tried out a strategy of delaying moves until the right time to maximize that cascading effect, like in Candy Crush when you get a chain reaction going. I even tried the Hungarian Algorithm to plan the next 10 or so moves and maximize their combined score.

Nothing was working. Literally on the final day of competition I went back to the chess strategy and pulled out an old trick: do a breadth-first search, evaluate each resulting position with your payoff function, and only explore those moves that look strong. It wasn't great but it got me back up into the top 100. As it turns out, this was the first time I was on the right track. The top four finishers all used an algorithm called Beam Search. I had never heard of this algorithm but it's a variation of breadth-first search with a heuristic to only consider the best moves. The winner says he beam searched the full 10,000 moves before committing to his first move. That's pretty neat. I want to learn more about it.

Look on the bright side, Stab. You now have more time for AC projects.

Done.

Let me know if you find any errors (such as an AC4 link pointing to an AC3 page).

Kill-Streaks in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Revelations, III and Black Flag are most likely expansions on Shock and Awe combat, which was likely not intended to be used the way TheHiddenBlade used it. Ubisoft may have seen our use of this "system" and added it as a full feature.

My daughter pretending to be me: "Hmmmm..... I feel like cleaning the kitchen and the bathrooms.... then stabbing some people".

Well, I didn't intend to enter the second round of that programming contest but ended up making a half-assed effort. The problem was somewhat interesting. There's a classic set of problems in geometry called packing problems, one in particular concerns fitting a bunch of different sized rectangles into a small space. The problem for this contest is kind of the opposite: arrange a bunch of rectangles so that there are holes between them. Try to create many holes and make the holes as large as possible. Your score equals the number of holes squared times the total area: count * count * area. You're allowed to rotate the rectangles 90 degrees but they remain axis-aligned.

My approach was to focus on the count (because it's squared!) and let the area take care of itself. For example, here's my solution for a simple problem with only 159 rectangles:

The gray boxes are rectangles I placed and the pink areas are scoring holes. There are 118 holes with a total area of 31073791, so my score for this data set was about 4.33e+11. Pretty good, right? One thing I do to maximize area is to rotate the rectangles so that four of them show their long side to the same hole. I call this a "major" hole and it will be diagonally connected to up to four "minor" holes, where the short ends of the rectangles come together. Say the rectangles are 5 units by 1 unit. You could make two 5x1 holes or you could make a 5x5 hole and a 1x1 hole. The former has a total area of 10 (5*1 + 5*1) whereas the latter has an area of 26 (5*5 + 1*1). That's the logic behind my major/minor hole strategy.

My program is working as designed. Evidently the design wasn't good enough. The leaders are scoring about 17 times higher than me. Once again, I'm barely in the top 100 on the leaderboard. Maybe I should have put more emphasis on the total area. For example, take some of the longer rectangles and make them "hold hands" around one big hole while using the little rectangles to drive up the hole count. I never did the math to determine if this was a better strategy.

Anyway, today is the last day of the contest and I don't have time to redesign it.

Soooooo...... this is supposed to be evidence of you being half-assed? Do you expect us to believe that?

With all this big stuff happening at E3, don't forget the FIFA world cup kicking off tomorrow! Who's excited?

I run an office pool for it and have been collecting entries all week. I've actually got your homeland and all its vowels winning Group B and coming in 3rd (losing to Belgium in the semifinal and defeating Spain in the 3rd place game).

USA should be good for a solid 4th place this year.

in pool play.

Well the last 3 friendly matches that the Dutch squad played were terrible, a lot of teams are way better at this moment so my money's on Spain winning group B, us coming in second and losing to Brazil immediately. Brazil then goes on to collect the cup in the final against Spain. Belgium is gonna make it far. I've got USA scoring twice against Germany (because why not?) but they still end up losing 3-2 and remain pointless in group G.

playstation plus year membership $10 off at amazon right now. only $40 instead of $50. they stack, so you you can simply buy and extend your current membership one year by applying immediately. http://www.amazon.com/1-Year-PlayStation-Plus-Membership-Digital/dp/B004...

Step one: complete.

dayum... opening up a can of whoop-ass on the defending champs.

I have no idea how they've managed it. My throat hurts from yelling at the tv. My hopes of winning the group stage have increased greatly, which means we won't have to face Brazil if they come in first as well. We might actually reach the final.
In related news, I won't be winning the office pool.

Yeah, wtf happened?

Yeah, I'm excited by that result because it ruins a lot of the knockout stage for everyone assuming, of course, that Netherlands and Spain finish 1-2 in the group. Believe it or not, I actually had a co-worker pick Spain to not make it out of group play.

Watching (highlights of) yesterday... that's not so crazy now...

After watching USA vs Portugal I must say that I'm impressed with Cristiano Ronaldo. Not with his play but with his haircut! Just look at that masterpiece:

I've seen more impressive patterns cut into the side of someone's hair than that...

I liked how Ghana's Asamoah Gyan made it easier for referees and commentators to spot his shirt number.

Also, I read that Ronaldo's zig-zag is a tribute to a boy who had a brain tumor removed recently. The zig-zag is supposed to mirror the boy's scar. (source)

USA's team really surprised me this World Cup. I had no idea they were capable of this. I don't think they can beat Belgium though.
And I was completely wrong about the Dutch squad too. Somehow I'm still in 4th place in the office pool though, directly behind my dad.

I'm in dead last in mine. My wife is in first. But I am actually in good shape. Despite getting only 7/16 teams right coming out of group play, I got my semi-finalists through (and placed properly in the knockout stage bracket).

Belgium shmelgium. Did you see what team USA did to Germany? We beat them into submission and handed them a 1-0 victory. And the crowd was chanting "USA! USA! We are the champions, my friend..."

8 teams remaining...
The Belgium-USA game was really enjoyable to watch as a neutral viewer. Tim Howard and that Yedlin dude that covered the right flank for most of the game were on fire! Too bad they didn't win.
Netherlands threaded the needle. I don't think we'll have that kind of luck again. I expect the game vs Costa Rica to be just as close.

Semifinals is still intact! Go Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium for sure. If Brazil loses, I wouldn't care.

Well, ya can't always win the penalty shootout...
Netherlands did way better this year than I expected them to do though, so I'm still sort of happy.
Also, did you see how Germany absolutely CRUSHED Brazil? Soon-to-be World Cup winners, right there.

If you guys wouldn't mind returning the favor and destroying Brazil, I'd be happy. Then Germany can take care of Argentina and I'll win the pool.

But I'm trying to cut a deal with the person that wins if Germany wins and Brazil wins the third place game to agree to split the prize pool if Germany wins and not have to worry about the third place matchup.

I'm going to Atomic Lollipop in Toronto tomorrow, which is a convention for games, anime and all kinds of cool stuff.
I'll be doing a random Modern Assassin "light" cosplay I just tossed together, and I may pick up a styrofoam ball, a carving tool and some Gold spray paint so I can make some kind of Apple of Eden (but that'll have to wait until Sunday, or I might not get to do it at all.)

Would be cool to walk around with an apple of Eden there, paralyzing people and stuff. Have fun, man!

I've had a bit of luck with getting rare coins from change. First a mercury dime.

Too bad I wasn't smart enough to keep it somewhere else besides my wallet and accidentally spent it. But then I happened upon a 1903 Indian penny.

Something I was part of made Newsweek this week... so that's pretty cool.

I saw the Assassin's Brotherhood insignia on many pamphlets stapled to posts in Athens yesterday. I don't read/speak Greek, so I haven't a clue what the rest of the letters spelled... so which one of you is up to something in Athens?