Karl Reinsch's Blog

Move Notation System For Tetris

Karl W. Reinsch — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 02:55:21 +0000

Chess has had standard notations for a long time. Isn’t it time that Tetris had one as well?

Pioneer Spacecraft and Data Preservation

Karl W. Reinsch — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 22:18:41 +0000

The newest IEEE Spectrum has a nice article on debugging a data anomaly with the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. It is a short and interesting read – one of the key issues was the need to review many years of historical data retrieved from a variety of physical media formats.

WF3 Types Deprecated In .NET 4.5

Karl W. Reinsch — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:07:51 +0000

As you are no doubt aware, .NET 4.5 shipped in October. With the release of 4.5, our team has deprecated the original Workflow engine aka WF3 (System.Workflow, etc.). There is a detailed announcement from Jurgen on the team blog. The types are marked deprecated but have not been removed. Using the types will result in [...]

Finding duplicate copies in msbuild logs

Karl W. Reinsch — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:28:52 +0000

I have recently needed to track down some build races due to duplicate file copies. The build in question is MSBuild-based. I found this tool provided by co-worker Buck Hodges to be very helpful. I ran into one issue with the tool – it does not handle node names that contain colons, such as “152:3″. [...]

Pac-Man, How Does It Work?

Karl W. Reinsch — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:00:10 +0000

Speaking of game AI…two Pac-Man-related links are making the blog rounds these days – one of them is new. The new one is Chad Birch’s “Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior”. It is clear and well illustrated. As Chad points out, he was inspired by and used Jamey Pittman’s “Pac-Man Dossier”. This is a nice resource. It [...]

Detecting Poker Bots

Karl W. Reinsch — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:00:38 +0000

The folks at the PokerStars online poker service actively police their games to make sure that bots are not being used to gain advantage. Here’s a recent post from their Game Security staff demonstrating that they paid a visit to one player in order to witness the playing and playstyle in person. It ends with [...]

WF Rules: Unleashing The Rule Engine Within .NET

Karl W. Reinsch — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:45:07 +0000

I have written previously about WF Rules, the rule engine that ships in .NET. As I have described, this rule engine is bundled in .NET versions 3.0 and higher, and is included in the default installation of Windows Vista and Windows 7. (If you are using .NET 4.0, you need the Extended / Full install [...]

Action Videogames Train Your Brain For Decision-Making

Karl W. Reinsch — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:45:12 +0000

Researcher Daphne Bavelier is back with more videogame research. Once again, the study used The Sims 2, Call Of Duty 2, and Unreal Tournament. The results of this study showed that those who played the action games made quicker decisions: “In the problem-solving exercise, the action-game players made decisions 25 percent faster than the strategy [...]

Chernoff Face Tutorial on Flowing Data

Karl W. Reinsch — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 12:45:24 +0000

If you’ve read Blindsight, then you have come across Chernoff faces. I recently spotted a tutorial on Flowing Data for using Chernoff faces with R.

How Language Shapes How We Think

Karl W. Reinsch — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:45:23 +0000

The New York Times has a fascinating article on how the language we speak may or may not shape the way we think. The title is “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” and it is written by Guy Deutscher. This is clearly a topic that has been plagued by pseudo-science over the decades, and [...]