For tonight’s Innovation Session I’m going to make a Liar’s dice cheat sheet. This will hopefully be a simple and beautiful way to remember what the odds of a certain bet are at any point in the game – even if it’s been a long night. Liar’s dice is a simple game. Each player starts with five dice, everyone rolls and you take turns guessing the combined dice of everyone, even though you can only see your five. The bidding has to increase so eventually someone gets called a liar and everyone shows. Either the liar or the person that called them one loses and must discard a die. The game then repeats, now with one less die. See the full rules here. Most of the game revolves around bluffing, second guessing and such. But, at the end of the round, someone has to be right and that is always
A few weeks ago I wrote about my Innovation Sessions and listed three benefits/goals: train my innovation skills by introducing my mind to new and diverse problems, racking my brain for solutions and to exposing the resulting solutions to public criticism. explore ideas I have for products, visualizations or tools learn new skills and hone others that I do not use as regularly in my day job I forgot a fourth one which in many ways outweighs the other three: meeting cool people. Over the past month I have had lunch, coffee, beers or gone surfing with about a half dozen cool people that I met because of my Innovation Sessions. They shared a common interest, saw an idea of mine posted and were kind enough to reach out. Because of those meetings, some of the ideas might turn into realities. Even when they don’t, which will most often be the
In January I described a project idea for finding out which state is the most normal. Tonight I will pick up where I left off. Data Collection I am going to start by gathering data for each of the 50 states in a CSV – I also posted it as a google doc if you want to follow along. Eventually I suspect I will have to translate this into JSON before loading it into the visualization – but this is an easy way to get started. The first place I am going to try to get data is the US Census. Thankfully they have an API that I can use to get some population & demographic facts: http://www.census.gov/developers/ Unfortunately, the existance of an API is the only thing to get excited about. I got nowhere tonight. The US Census API is horrible to work with. I could be blind, but it took me an
Last December I started measuring a few things about myself every day. Now, four months in, I’d like to take a look at how it has gone and what that data has shown me so I can improve upon the system. Success of the System Over 102 days I completed the survey 80 times. Based on that I would deem the method a success. Any system that is able to remind me to do something and succeed in getting me to do it ~80% of the time is doing pretty well in my book. Pivoting my completion percent by the day of week gave me the following. The astute reader will notice that my completion rate was >1 on Wednesdays. I thought there might be a bug or double logging errors in my system. When I looked into it I realized that a few of those were actually my
Last December – nearly five months ago – I posted my first innovation session. The idea was one that I had been floating just long enough to come up with a name (which I later found out is another name for a brainstorm). I was driving home after a surf session one Saturday, a time in which my head is usually very idea filled thanks to endorphins and adrenaline, and I realized that I could practice innovating. It dawned on me that innovation is a mental response and like other responses, it could be trained and strengthened. I am a strong believer in innovation. Not only do I enjoy it, but it is also the skill set that I will likely depend on to put food on my family’s table for the next 40 or so years. The magnitude of that realization led me to take action and create situations where I
Imagine this – its 6:00 AM on a Thrusday and you’re driving half an hour up the coast to surf a wave you never go to during the week. Why? Because your iPhone told you to. That killer session you had last summer, it looks like the swell is lining up to recreate it. So you grab your board and hit the road hoping to turn the stoke up to 11. The world of surf forecasting & reporting has evolved slowly over the last 50 years. While it has adapted to the world of websites and mobile apps – most are simply new skins on the broadcast weather radio reports surfers have relied on since 1967. They are channels for data. They tell you the swell height, period and direction and something about the wind. Even when they look amazing they are usually showing the same information. They are not simple and intuitive nor are
Back in January I set a goal for the year to create things with my hands. A quarter through the year I had yet to do anything – not a result I am happy with. So, to correct this, on Sunday I set out to get some supplies and started three new projects, two of which I completed and will share here. Problem One: Wet Surfing Gloves I am a So-Cal surfer and always will be. My hands go numb after about an hour in 55*F water. I currently live in San Francisco, which means I have to wear 3mm neoprene gloves for about half of the year. Getting them dry is a pain because they have to be upright – the outer shell of the gloves is somewhat water tight and the inside is a fleece-like lining that absorbs water. Here is how I solved my wet surfing glove problem.
This weekend I took my Mavericks gun out for a paddle in the small waves on Bolinas, CA. To give some back-story, about a year ago I decided I wanted to surf Mavericks and took the first step I normally take when facing new challenges; I bought a surfboard. I named her ‘Hail Mary Mother of Grace’ because some day when I take her down off the wall racks to surf, it will be accompanied by much prayer from my loved ones. This weekend wasn’t that occasion, but it was the first time in a year she left her perch in my living room. I wanted to get familiar with how she paddled, how hard it was to duck dive and how the rails held the face of a wave. Paddling a gun is different than anything else I’ve ever been on. It sits high in the water like a longboard, but
This week I’m going to pick off where I left off last week – analyzing the game Pass the Pigs. If you haven’t read last week’s post yet, you should do that first here. At this point, we’re going to switch from solving algebraically to doing a bit of programming. All of the code I’m using can be found here – feel free to fork it and play along. Threshold Simulation Right off the bat – I’m going to check if last week’s conclusion is correct by running a simulation of the different risk thresholds. What we concluded was that once you were above 18 points your rolls would be risking more than their potential reward. In the chart below the x axis represents the risk threshold of the player, how many points they are comfortable accruing each round before passing, and the boxplot represents the results they have after 1,000 simulations. You
The Kroleski home is one that enjoys boardgames. We’re a fun loving kind of people. My wife & I are both very competitive though – so things can get a bit intense when we start playing. In order to get the upper hand for our game nights – I’m starting a new series where I use math to look for ways I can increase my chances of winning various board games. Tonight I’m going to look at a game called Pass the Pigs. We heard about this game from our friends Chris & Gretchen & ended up buying it before our New Zealand trip because it was light weight and we could play it anywhere. For those who haven’t played before – here are the rules. This game is perfect for my first ‘Boardgames & Math’ because it is incredibly simple. There is really only one decision to make; should