Remember these? Recently they have been reprinted. I saw a bunch in a bookstore two months ago.

I wrote this year’s annual Christmas letter in the format of a CYOA book (actually more like a printed copy of Colossal Cave). After reading it, my friend Doug (of the CPH Gaming Collective) pointed me towards a *great* article on the narrative structure of the CYOA books.

The conclusion of the article discusses one very interesting CYOA ending in a specific book – Inside UFO 54-40. The winning ending is unique in that it is disconnected from the narrative graph. There is no series of choices you can make to get to that ending. You can only “win” by “cheating”.

In the story, your concord flight is interrupted when you are beamed aboard a nearby spacecraft trolling the universe for intelligent life. Once aboard you discover your new captors, the U-TY, are interested in keeping you around only to the extent that you can help them find Ultima, the ‘planet of paradise’. The planet’s location is cloaked in mystery and you are only told that it’s a place that cannot be reached ‘by making a choice or following directions’. However this is all foreshadowing for when the reader finally becomes frustrated in the apparently impossible quest and begins flipping through the book hunting for that ending. In fact not choosing is the only way to reach Ultima.

This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded. You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end.

This is a beautiful gem. By far the most interesting ending in any CYOA book, it is significant exactly because it recants the basis of the whole medium! Free will triumphs over destiny. And yet, at the same time, you are still choosing your own adventure. This is, in my opinion, the greatest achievement in the genre.

It’s unusual too – for one of the most fascinating example of an element of a medium to be so deliciously self-annihilating. I can’t really think of another case where it happens.

I’m afraid I’ve fallen behind on my blog again. It happens from time to time when I am very busy. I was going to post a huge picture bomb of all the things I have done in the past two weeks, but I think instead I will break them up and back post them. My main motivation for doing this is that I want people to see my Cylon Tea hack, and if I post everything at once, it will be buried. Mmm… Cylon Tea.

At the beginning of the quarter, Joanna and I took Thursday and Friday off and went on a mini-vacation to LA. I went to my first Seder ever at Jo’s dad’s house, which was fun. However, I did think that the stuff that was read from the little-book-whose-name-starts-with-an-h was a bit over-the-top jangsty. Groups in general seem to like to dwell on how they have been wronged or oppressed in the past.

Other highlights of the weekend included: getting up and writing my BS 12-page project proposal for CS194 at 10:30 on Thursday, so I could email it to Travis by 3pm, so he could print it out and hand it in for me, going to the Urth Cafe, and hanging out in Santa Monica. We spent about two hours in a large bookstore dedicated entirely to architecture and adjacent disciplines.

While in Santa Monica, we ate lunch at Ye Olde King’s Head – a British Pub. We also shopped at the Tudor House, which makes delicious chicken curry pies. The Tudor House also sold some very strange British food. I think that the Brits’ main motivation in conquering India was to bring the yummy food of the Indian man into the Empire. And who can blame them, really. Boiled beef? Ick.

I’ve been back in California for almost two days now (though it doesn’t seem like it has been that long). It’s been a great 48 hours, and a good start to the quarter.

Highlights have included:

Mythology nuts (of which I might be the only one here) and people interested in the legend of King Arthur (which I believe to be of general appeal): I have two books to recommend.

The Search for King Arthur

I found this book at the Stormville flea market over Memorial Day for $4. It sat on the trunk next to my bed for a while and then I finally got around to reading it – and finished it in the space of two days. In this book the author reveals and explores some of the historical basis for the legend of King Arthur. This legend was born after the Saxon invasion of Great Britain after the Roman occupation. With the Empire collapsing, Rome recalled their legions and the Welsh (original ethnic British) were left to fend for themselves. On the verge of extermination by the Saxon hoards, the Welsh found their savior in one Artorius, a man of mixed Welsh and Roman descent. The disjoint tribes agreed to fight under the leadership of this one man, who took the title Dux Bellorum – Lord of Battles. While the Saxons were never forced off the British Isles, the conquests of the Dux Bellorum ensured the continuing sovereignty of the Welsh people.

Side note: the Welsh don’t like being called “Welsh” as it is actually the Saxon word for “slave”. However, their own word for themselves, “Cymraeg” is unpronounceable. This highlights the fact that even in the middle ages, good marketing is important.

Amazon Link: The Search for King Arthur

The Mists of Avalon

If you are going to read one book about the legend of Arthur in your life, it should be The Mists of Avalon. I noticed in the bookstore the other day that it has recently been reprinted in hardcover. Unlike other books which attempt to tell the story of King Arthur, this book focuses on the character of Arthur’s sister, Morgaine (Le Fay). This is a more interesting approach, in my opinion, since the story of Arthur is more or less preordained and set in stone. The Mists of Avalon also attempts to frame the tale in a more (semi-)historic context than Mallory or White. It demonstrates establishment of Arthur’s reign, the hayday of Camelot and it’s eventual fall against a backdrop of the wanning of pagan mysticism and the coming of Christianity to Britain.

Amazon Link: The Mists of Avalon

I went to one of Don Knuth’s computer science “musings” lectures today. I thought that it was a shame that I’ve been on the same campus as this living legend but I’ve never heard him speak. The topic of his ninety minute talk was a newly discovered isomorphism between integer partitions and set partitions. I was able to follow the first half of the lecture since I had just taken applied group theory last quarter, but it became rather abstract towards the end. The one take away point was that there exists a relationship between nesting and crossing across a partition and it’s dual that isn’t yet well understood but apparently constitutes a fundamental result. Like I said, it got abstract rather quickly.

But damn, that guy Knuth is smart. He’s really old and has the same cranial structure as Yoda, but he can still think circles around most of the people in the audience. I’ve never encountered someone so old who was still completely with it. He must have been something in his younger years.

Knuth said he was still hard at work on volume four, but that parts of it should be available in bookstores soon (volume four is being published in quarterly “episodes” it would seem). I really need to get myself a copy of his codices. I’m hoping to run across them at a flea market sometime and pick them up on the cheap.

Of course if you don’t know what books I’m talking about you won’t have understood the significance of any of this, so never you mind.

I was playing chess online today on the ICC (Internet Chess Club) and I had an interesting blitz game against Serena-Maria(WIM). Playing as white I was up a full piece at one point, but then blundered a bishop. However, I still had a formidable passed pawn and black resigned. She missed a forced draw. Can you find it?

Black to play and draw

In other chess-related news, I read Marilyn Yalom’s Birth of the Chess Queen: A History the other day in the bookstore. Yalom is apparently a Stanford prof, by the way. The book tells the story of the rise of the chess queen from being the originally the weakest piece (she originally moved like the king) to the most powerful piece on the board. Some parts of the book were interesting but it was much more a book on fem studies than on chess, so I was ultimately left disappointed. Yalom’s thesis is that the elevation of the chess queen parallels the rise of women’s status from the tenth to eighteenth centuries. I think this thesis is shot to hell by the fact that the game is just more engaging with piece movements that allow for sharper tactical positions, a facet of the issue she ignores almost completely. Facts can be so inconvenient sometimes.