The Becker Blog

The Internet is a Schrödinger device.

On the interweb, after a while, things are simultaneously there and gone. They might be there, or they might not, depending on some earlier random event.

On Kindle, when we look in the box, we see the book either there or gone, not a mixture of there and gone (just like the cat).

For webpages, they too are either there or gone – sometimes they even stay there long after they’re gone.

There really is no way to predict which it will be until we look.

What is a Game?

Games are classified in many different ways and even after going round and round repeatedly, we still can’t seem to agree on what a game actually is.

Here are a few examples:

Some examples of casual (or mini) games: (posted by Clark Aldrich on seriousgames May 20, 2007

> Tips on Tap: http://www.webcourseworks.com/tipsontap/
> Binary numbers: http://forums.cisco.com/CertCom/game/binary_game.swf
> Other Cisco games: http://www.medcalf.com/games/cisco_games/

“Tips on Tap” isn’t so much a game as a contest – here the object is to see how quickly you can click the right things in the right order. The addition of scores and time constraints seems to make this into a game. I tried it – un-doing an action is difficult and frustrating.

The “Binary Game” isn’t really a game at all, in my opinion. It is an exercise – in fact, it is a worksheet. True, there is a score, and the challenge is to see how fast you can solve the problems. It appears that the introduction of scores and time keeping allows this electronic worksheet to be viewed as a game.

The “Cisco Games”, while posing more complex (and possibly interesting) problems suffer from functional complexity as well. I did not find the gameplay intuitive. Of the three groups, I’d consider these the most game-like, although I am currently at a loss to explain exactly why. If we remove the time pressure what do we have left? In many cases, what we have left is a puzzle. If we remove the score-keeping, it appears to stop being a game.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything really new when it comes to presenting text, but this one looks like it has a lot of potential. Here is a link to the original article (the samples below come from there):

http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/r_walker/

The technique described in this paper turns this:

into:

For online reading this looks like a terrific idea.

I’ve noticed that quite a few big names in ID (Instructional Design: Papert, Schank, Merrill,..) have backgrounds in AI (Artificial Intelligence, rather than the other AI) I find this a little disconcerting.

In some sense the application of concepts from artificial intelligence to human intelligence and learning is rather circular. Artificial intelligence begins with theories about how humans think, and builds machine systems that model this. Implementations of these models are of necessity distorted by the nature of the machine’s logic and circuitry – there is no reason to believe that humans process or store information in a manner anything like that required by a computer. If we then take these models of machine learning and intelligence, and reapply them to human learning, as has been done, for example, in Merrill’s Instructional Transaction Theory (Simon, 1973), we have created a circular application whose validity depends primarily on how accurate our initial AI assumptions are to reality. In other words, we create ID theories based on models of machine learning, which in turn are based on machine implementations of theories of mind. The soundness of this last connection remains an unresolved debate, as various and sometimes contrasting perspectives on theories of mind remain plausible, from theories of “mind-as-machine” through cultural evolution, the theory of extelligence, and beyond (Merrill, 1999) The notion that we can design models of human learning based on the idea that our minds are like the computers we have invented seems peculiar to this author.

Merrill, M. D. (1999). Instructional Transaction Theory (ITT): Instructional Design Based on Knowledge Objects. In C. M. Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional-design theories and models : vol. 2, a new paradigm of instructional theory (pp. 397 – 424). Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Simon, H. A. (1973). The Structure of Ill Structured Problems. Artificial Intelligence, 4(3), 181-201.