Sympathy for the ghosts

I’ve spent a fair bit of time playing Pac-Man, and even more by watching it. I didn’t do it for fun, but for the sake of research. Honestly. I would never play Pac-Man for having fun, as it bores me to tears. There are sooo many better games to waste my time in a funnier way. However, for reasons unclear to me, Pac-Man was extremely popular a few decades ago, and is still pretty popular (which was partly the reason for doing research in it).

It is comforting to see that many guys have wasted way more time on Pac-Man time than me. To get a taste, check the First Church of Pac-Man. Or the wikipage of Billy Mitchell, who was the first to obtain maximum score on the original Pac-Man (in 1999, 19 years after the game release!) All you have to do for this is learn some patterns. And spend some years practicing… Ms. Pac-Man is non-deterministic, but that’s no obstacle, either.

But let’s not forget about the ghosts. They have their own personalities (the very first examples of a “game AI” ever!) Blinky gets aggressive easily, Clyde likes to wander off, and Inky moves erratically. And today I found a video that made me realize the misery of their (after?)life. Watch their heart-gripping drama:

I will never play Pac-Man any more.

The power of CiteSeer. To the x-th

CiteSeer seems to be back. That might not be very fresh news, but I discovered it only now. Well, discovery might be a strong word here: Google started to put citeseer links to the first places of my article searches.

A few years ago CiteSeer was like a miracle: a site that gives you full access all the articles you’ve stumbled upon, plus the articles that cite that article, plus the bibTeX entry to save typing. A miracle indeed. Not without errors (my .bib files were messed up for years due to copy-pasting those automatically generated bibTeX entries), but it was the best available. Up to around 2004, when it seriously started to look like abandoned. The server (and its mirrors) were often unavailable, and there was a time when the only proper way to find something was to google within the citeseer pages, citeseer’s own search being completely useless. Most importantly, the article database was not updated after 2004. Google Scholar became the way to go. I don’t particularly like Scholar, but the others are much, much worse. Does anyone use Rexa, Scirus, or Libra?

But now, CiteSeer strikes back, this time with an x-ponent to make it look more dangerous (which is said to express its neXt-generationness). It is no Scholar yet, but google searches now lead you to citeseerx pages. Seems like it just entered the beta phase, so there is hope we will see improvements soon.