Down With Numbers

I’ve talked before about “Golf?”, the rather mad, er, golf game. Having successfully got Chips addicted, we decided that the holes the game comes with are inferior to ones we could make ourselves. So, we set about figuring out the course file formats.

A day later and it’s mostly figured out. At one point I had 5 instances of XVI32 open.

Next stop, the model file formats. Ergh.

Update: Model file format is now also mostly figured out. How thrilling.

Cars are generally a mystery to me. I’ve been in some form of roadgoing vehicle an uncountable number of times (specifically, ℵ₁ times) but as far as I’m concerned, they’re mysterious pieces of engineering which have the ability to transport me over tarmac at the driver’s push of a pedal or three.

Having recently spent a day being expertly driven across a variety of 4×4 offroad courses in an old diesel Land Rover I find myself with far more respect for these mysterious machines. So, I’ve started doing what I do best: learning new things. Why remain in ignorance when the internet is at my fingertips?

Off I went, head held high, to the automobiles section of How Stuff Works. Half an hour later and I’m happy with the basic operation of a petrol engine. Another fifteen minutes and I’m up on diesel engines too. Over the last few days I’ve absorbed the key points of clutches, transmissions, disc and drum brakes, cooling systems, superchargers and turbochargers, ignition systems, injection systems, and more.

It’s both fascinating and enlightening. Although I already knew that cars were hugely complex in their details, I didn’t have a sense of the scale of complexity - of just how well everything has to link together. I can’t drive (although I intend to rectify that sometime) and yet I still find myself exhaling “oh, so THAT’S why that happens” as the automechanical mist clears.

Perhaps an example of my ignorance. When you compare a car with and without a turbo (I use turbo to mean either a turbocharger or supercharger), the car without the turbo will be more efficient at lower speeds than the car with the turbo. Why? Well, a turbo compresses the air going into the engine above what it would be in a naturally aspirated engine. The engine will then compress the air/fuel mixture further before igniting it with the spark plug.

The problem is this. When the mixture is compressed in the engine, be it normal or turbocharged, it heats up, and compressing air from a turbo heats up more. This isn’t good, because it can lead to spontaneous ignition of the air/fuel mixture before the spark plug has a chance to fire, killing performance. To counter this, the amount you compress the air by in the engine has to be reduced. Therefore, at lower speeds when the turbo isn’t doing much, you basically have a naturally aspirated engine with a lower compression ratio. Presto, less efficient than the turbo-less engine.

A few days ago I wouldn’t have had a clue what I just said. But now I do.

“You have dialed an imaginary number. Please rotate your telephone by 90 degrees and dial again.”

At the end of June, I have to take two mathematics exams. These are the Sixth Term Examination Papers, Mathematics II and III, or STEP II and STEP III as they are universally referred to on mathematics discussion boards. The former is based on a single Mathematics A-level syllabus, and the latter also draws on material from a significant portion of the Further Mathematics A-level syllabus as well. There also exists STEP I, which is easier than STEP II but uses the same syllabus.

Each paper contains 14 questions: 8 pure, 3 mechanics and 3 statistics. Your final mark is based on your six best answers, so on that basis the questions are designed to take an absolute minimum of half an hour each. This usually indicates one of two things: either each question has lots of individual parts, or the questions are all very difficult.

It turns out that it’s the latter option. Most people required to take them will start preparation about six months before the actual exams, myself included. There are about 15 years of past papers, and by the end of June I will have done all of them. It should be fairly obvious that this can be a rather frustrating process at times.

Why am I saying all this? Well, I felt like introducing my actual point: some of the questions are very funny. Perhaps the examiners think that candidates will need a little light relief at the time, or perhaps they’re just amusing themselves. Whatever the reason, you certainly won’t find this kind of wording on an A-level paper, despite the STEP papers being just as serious and important.

Take STEP II, 1995. Question 12 begins “Bread roll throwing duels at the Drones’ Club are governed by a strict etiquette,” and question 3 starts by saying that “The Tour de Clochemerle is not yet as big as the rival Tour de France.”

Or perhaps STEP I, 1997, question 13 is more amusing. It starts by saying that “James Blond returns to his flat to find it in complete darkness.” It then goes on to tell you about the probability of four different assassins using certain types of trap: a bomb, a “deadly trained silent anaconda,” or a “vicious attack canary.” (Rest easy: there is no canary. The question later tells you that our protagonist heard no singing, and so deduced its absence.)

Then there’s the statistics questions in STEP II, 1994. Question 12 is about Calamity Jane playing a game of craps with Buffalo Bill; question 13 introduces the makers of “Cruncho (’The Cereal Which Cares’)” who are giving out a series of cards depicting famous mathematicians; and question 14 is about “Septimus Moneybags” throwing darts.

How about STEP I, 1999? From the mechanics section, question 9 asks you to calculate aspects of a race between a tortoise and a hare - clearly Aesop is secretly a mathematics examiner. Then there’s question 11 which talks about the “Starmakers of Kryton” who have the ability to place stars at the corners of an equilateral triangle. Must have big levers.

Unfortunately not every question contains similar nuggets of amusement. It is very rare for a pure mathematics question to have anything humourous in it - heck, they’re usually quite frightening, with Greek letters flying everywhere. Oh well.

Setting Geometry Wars aside, I’ve been playing three different games over the last few weeks. One is brand new; one is a crazy independent demo beta thing; one is six years old. I’m going to talk about all three, so sit up straight and pay attention at the back.

Let’s start with the brand new one: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, or just Oblivion to everyone everywhere in the entire known gamiverse. I purchased the Xbox 360 version a few days ago, and so far I’ve only accumulated a grand total of 2 hours of gameplay. On that basis, feel free to ignore absolutely everything I say about it and skip down to the next pretty bit of bold text, because clearly I know nothing.

My first impressions were ones of confusion and dullness, interchanging with each other at regular intervals. You spend the first hour wandering through dark stone corridors and manky sewers, slaying rats and goblins with your many weapons of mass slicing. Whenever you loot a body you’re guaranteed to find exciting items like rat meat and tiny little daggers. Of course there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to use the items you pick up, what with the inventory system being ridiculously convoluted and the tutorial consisting of a few vague, unhelpful messages.

For the second hour, everything changes. The world is your mussel. Mind you, there’s no indication of how you find anything useful in the locations you can now travel to at your whim, so you’re pretty much forced just to carry on with the main quest. Guess what? More goblins. The sky is burning red this time, though!

I’m sure it’ll improve.

Now for the crazy independent demo beta thing, otherwise known as “Golf?” The title does give you a modest hint as to the theme of the game, but it’s no Microsoft Tiger Woods Golf Simulator Expansion 2006. It’s actually fun!

Most golf games employ a hold-’n'-wait system of charging up your club before you wallop it into the rough/bunker/lake. Golf?, however, chooses a system whereby your mouse is like the head of the club. The faster you move the mouse, the faster the club swings; the further from perfectly horizontal the swing is, the more slice or hook you apply to the ball as it scythes its way across the fairway and into the rough/bunker/lake.

Oh, I almost forgot: the caddy is an alcoholic levitating robot, the game is black and white except for the players, the trees are wireframe pears, and the golf carts have turbo rocket boosts. (It has golf carts!)

We’re nearly done. The last game I’m going to ramble a little bit about is that Ion Storm classic from the year 2000, Deus Ex. It’s amazing to think that Deus Ex was made by the same company that gave you Daikatana, that instant classic for all the wrong reasons.

From all the games I’ve played, Deus Ex is probably my favourite. I love how you can change different aspects of the story by killing different people - you can even keep your brother alive or leave him to die. I love how open the environments are - there are always many different ways to accomplish your goals. I love how deep and intricate the storyline is - it’s far enough off-the-wall to hold your interest, but not overly so. I love the inventory system - just big enough to prevent you from keeping all the cool weapons, and allowing you to substitute space in the arsenal for utilities.

I could go on. In fact I would if this post wasn’t getting dangerously close to ripping a hole in the space-time continuum with its length. I’ll leave it at this, though: I play Deus Ex once or twice each year, and I’m still discovering different ways you can make the story go.