The RoBlog: 07/01/2012

The RoBlog

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Unoccupied Self-Driving Cars; Some Thoughts

I wanted to talk a little bit more about the quick comment I made in a previous post entitled "Renting Cars", Comments on FutureShock.

It seems inevitable at this point that we will have some version (or versions) of a car that will drive itself. Google’s had self-driving cars for a while now, and they’re far from the only ones pursuing this. Nevada created a special kind of license plate for self-driving cars, though I believe they still require one or more people to be in the car while it’s driving.

So where does this lead us to in the future?

Obviously it will mean that we can focus on other things besides driving during in-car time (this seems like it can only be a good thing considering how many things compete for our attention already when we’re driving, and if nothing is competing for it, the dangers of getting drowsy).

It seems likely that once we have successful consumer grade self-driving vehicles, it will only be a short step to getting unattended automatic driving approved.

If this is the case, I think there’s a very real question about whether most people will even continue to own cars, but let’s assume for a few moments that they do. What changes?

Your car can drop you off and then go find its own parking spot. I’ve often thought it’d be cool if cars at the mall (say) would self-park, and then work their way to the front-most parking spots as people leave. Of course, if cars were totally automated, this would probably be unnecessary as you’d just let your car know that you need it to pick you up and it would drive itself from whatever parking space it had found.

Your car could seek out a place to recharge (I’m making the assumption here that all self-driving cars would be electric, but while I think it’s likely, there’s no strong reason that it has to be the case). This would be important if not every parking space had recharging capabilities, which we can pretty confidently suppose at least in the short run. If, like my local grocery store, there were a small number of charging stations, then we may still get the situation I imagined above where cars jockey for the available spaces.

Tangenting here in two directions:

What is needed for a self-charging car?

For a self-driving car to recharge while you’re not there it would need a way to automatically connect with the energy grid. Current charging stations require a person do much the same kinds of actions that gas-based refueling requires: lifting hatches, taking a fueling connection off of a fueling station and plugging it in to the car in the right place.

It would seem, then, that the best approach for recharging would be inductive recharging, and that a standard system for doing this should be adopted by car manufacturers and recharging station manufacturers alike sooner rather than later.

Besides the ease created for an automatic car, inductive charging is easier on humans as well as you just pull into the right space and you’re basically done. There’s no reason that we should carry forward the old actions of fueling a car into a new fuel paradigm like electricity.

Of course, what we’ll probably get is cars that have a standard “plug-in” interface so that they can be plugged in pretty much anywhere, which will further encourage plug-in-style recharging stations. Inductive (or similar drive-onto charging) will come around and most cars and stations will eventually accommodate both for maximum flexibility.

What is needed for cars to “jockey for available spaces”?

For self-driving cars to negotiate for limited fueling stations they need something that is almost as exciting as self-driving: car-to-car communication. It’s so interesting, in fact, that I’m going to save it for another post.

Back to the benefits of having your own self-driving car.

You could potentially rent your car out to other people. I can envision a web site where people indicate where they need to go and how long they need to be there and any private car that anticipates being free during that time can fill the need for a fee. While being used, the car would ensure that it could return in time for its owner and refuse to travel (based on changed plans) to locations that would put that at risk (keeping an eye on current traffic, and having a historical traffic patterns both stored locally and available via the Internet).

Obviously, if you were tired, intoxicated, injured, under-age, or otherwise unable to drive, you could still get places in your car.

If you needed something picked up but you couldn't get away to get it, you could send your car (assuming someone would be there to load it in, and assuming that the thing you needed couldn’t be similarly shipped from its origin). This holds for things like packages as well as things like children from school and in-laws from the airport.

Let’s explore the idea of picking up children a little further. Obviously this would only work if the kid was capable of making good decisions (for example, I would totally trust my daughter now that she’s 10, but I don’t think I could when she was 4), or some trustworthy adult was there to make sure the kid was loaded appropriately.

I’d probably want some kind of occupancy sensor that would alert me if there were more or fewer passengers than expected, and probably some on-board camera so that I could look in to make sure everything was alright (onboard cameras would be helpful in the renting situation above as well, since it could take before-and-after photos of your car in case the car gets damaged in some way by the renters).

I can image a line of cars at schools waiting to pick up the appropriate children. Obviously there'd need to be some sort of process that made sure that the right kid got into the right car. This would probably need to be both on the school’s end (right license plate, for example), and on the car’s end (facial recognition of the passengers).

Already we've found some interesting things to do with full automated cars, and I’m sure there is more, but I have some non-automated driving to do, so they, along with why self-driving cars may mean fewer people owning cars (which you can probably already see where that is going), will have to wait for now.

Let me know your thoughts on the future of “car” travel in the meantime.

Labels: future, predictions, self-driving cars

- posted @ 1:00 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Grandes Cosas Vienen (A Star Wars/Coldplay Parody)
We were listening to Viva La Vida by Coldplay in the car the other day and a Star Wars-related phrase came to me as a substitution for the "I know St. Peter won't call my name."

Being on vacation, I have a little extra time on my hand, so here's a pass at a complete song. It takes a little liberty with meter, and I think could tell a better story, but not bad for under 45 minutes' work, I think.

Grandes Cosas Vienen

(Something Big is Coming)

I want to rule the gal-ax-y
Planets will line up to worship me
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Count the stars that I’m going to own

I’m never going to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemy's eyes
Listen as the crowd will sing
"Now the old kings are dead!” Long live me!"

I will master Obi Wan
Clench my fist and he’s gone
Qui-Gonn, Yoda, and Mace Windu,
Will be speckles of dust when I am through

I’ll feel the Emperor’s strength course through me
A bad-ass galactic power I will be
The dark side of the force revealed
A crimson lightsaber I will wield

All this effort is not in vein
Once you start there is never
Never an other course
But that is once I learn the Force

I have studied all of Vader’s ways
Could choke the insolent for days
Being evil to the weak and dumb
People cannot believe what I've become

I say to hell with lifting crates
Bring me heads on silver plates
I may only be thirteen
But who would never want to be king?

I’ll feel the Emperor’s strength course through me
A bad-ass galactic power I will be
The dark side of the force revealed
A crimson lightsaber I will wield

All this effort is not in vain
I know Lord Vader will call my name
I’ll become a Sith of course,
But that is once I learn the Force

I’ll feel the Emperor’s strength course through me
A bad-ass galactic power I will be
The dark side of the force revealed
A crimson lightsaber I will wield

All this effort is not in vain
I know Lord Vader will call my name
I’ll become a Sith of course,
But that is once I learn the Force

Labels: Coldplay, lyrics, parody, song, Star Wars

- posted @ 1:00 PM 0 comments

Monday, July 02, 2012

Battlecards

A more strategic version of the classic card game War

My daughter and I came up with an improvement on the classic card game War that makes it more of a thinking person’s version of the game, so I thought I’d share it. It may look complicated, but it’s really not once you account for a couple of special cases, and it allows you the opportunity to employ strategy and counter strategy in a way that the classic game doesn’t offer.

It’s not perfect. It needs a faster way of ending the game when it’s clear that you’re going to lose. I’m toying around with periodically removing the lowest remaining card from play (“everyone turn in your 2s), but can’t figure out if that’s unfair in some way, when to start removing them, and how often.

Let me know if you end up playing it, how it goes, and if you have to tweak anything to get it to work (or I forgot to address something or need more examples to help explain things).

Setup

Everyone gets an equal share of the deck, arranged in a single pile face down as in the regular game of War.

Each player takes the top 5 cards off of their pile and looks at them (but doesn't show anyone else).

Regular Game Play

Use your favorite method of choosing someone to go first. I just let my daughter go first, but since she’s beaten me every time we play it may be time to reconsider.

The first person chooses any of the five cards in her hand to lay down, face up. The remaining players decide which of the 5 cards in their hands that they want to play on their turn (we go clockwise, typically).

The person who put down the highest card gets all the face up cards, and puts them in a face-up stack that is separate from their face-down stack.

Everyone draws enough cards from the face-down pile to get back up to 5 cards (this will usually be one card, but may be more if wars were fought).

The person who won the last round then chooses a card from her hand and sets it down face up, starting the next round.

Emptying Your Face-Down Pile

At some point your face-down pile will become empty. When that happens, you can draw no more cards until you've played every card in your hand EVEN THOUGH you probably have cards in a face up pile. This means that, if you don’t get into any wars, you’ll have 5 cards to choose from, then 4, then 3, then 2, and then you’ll have no choice but to play the last card that you are holding.

This is really where the strategy comes in as an attentive opponent can guess at what you might have left and play accordingly. Similarly, you might guess how others will play knowing what you have and try to protect high cards for later use rather than risk being forced into losing one.

Once you have played the last card from your hand, you can turn over your face-up pile (making it the face-down pile), shuffle it, draw the top 5 and continue playing, creating a new face-up pile the next time you win a round.

War

If someone ahead of you in a round puts down a card that you have in your hand, you can choose to put down that card and force a war. Keep in mind that, just like in regular War, if the highest card played in the round is higher than the war cards, that person wins and the war never happens. Because of that, a war can only begin when all players have played their cards for that round.

To play out a war, take the top 3 cards from your face-down pile and place them face down next to your face up card that’s in the war (just like you would in regular War); no peeking! Then the last person to get into the war chooses any card from their hand and places it face up next to their three face-down cards. Each player engaged in the war does the same thing going from the last person to get into the war to the first person who got war forced upon them. The player with the highest face-up card wins everything. Of course, there can be more rounds of war if the highest cards played also match.

No one draws any new cards into their hands while they are at war (unless you are one of the situations listed below). So if you started the round with 5 cards in your hand and played one that got you into a war, you will only have 4 cards to choose from to try and win the war. If you get engaged in a second round of war, then you’ll only have 3 to choose from.

War: Special Cases

If you run out of face-down cards before you’ve played the three face down cards for your war, then the remaining cards come from the cards in your hand. Lucky you, you get to choose which ones they are! If using the cards in your hand would leave you with no cards in your hand, choose the card that you want to put face up, put the other card(s) face down for the war, turn over your face-up pile, shuffle it and pull the cards you need to put face down from the top of the pile (still no peaking!). Once it’s your turn to play the face up card, play the last one in your hand.

If you have no cards in your hand when a war starts (that is, the last card in your hand got you into the war), then you can turn over your face-up pile, shuffle it, draw 5 cards into your hand, and take the next 3 cards off the top of the pile and put them down without looking. Lucky you, you get 5 cards in your hand to choose from! If you’ve already shuffled the face-up pile because you’re in a second round of war, you don’t need to reshuffle them again.

If you don’t have enough cards to do a war (that is, you on the brink of losing), then pick one card to use as your face-up card, and put whatever cards you have left face down for your war cards. If you only have one card, then you don’t need to put down any face down cards; you’ll win or lose based on the one card that you have left!

If the card that got you into the war was your very last card (sad face), then that is the card that you will fight with. If anyone else’s card beats the card that you went to war with, they get it all. If the highest card played by anyone else is still a tie, then you keep playing with that card until you’ve won or lost (they will need to keep putting down cards in regular war style as long as THEY still have cards). (I can imagine a tie here where, say, two people have played their last cards and they are the same, and higher than any other players’ cards. It’s bound to be a rare condition, but a crafty player could force it. In this case, I’d suggest that the winning players take their own cards back, take the remaining cards that other players might have contributed along the way and turn them face-down. Shuffle them and deal them to the winners evenly. If there are any extra cards that would prevent an even distribution, they go to the first player to force the war. Let me know if this ever happens to you.)

The Joker Variant

This is the version that we are currently playing. It’s totally optional and probably only worth adding once you've mastered the main game. It adds another small bit of strategy that can be fun.

Add in the Jokers to the deck before shuffling and dealing. Jokers take on the value of the last card that WON a round. So if there are two people playing, and a 9 beat a 3 in the previous round, the value of any Joker is now a 9. It remains a 9 until a different value wins a round. During this time, it’s treated as any other 9. This means that if you have a Joker and no other high cards, you can suddenly get a high card. If someone wins a round with an Ace, for example, your Joker is now an ace. As soon as someone wins a round with a lower card (say, a 4), though, your Joker loses its value (from an Ace to a 4).

During a war, a Joker keeps the value of the card that won the last round the entire time. If the card that won the last round was a 6, and the current round ends up in a war starting with aces, for example, Jokers are worth 6 the whole time, not an ace since no one has won this round yet. If a war over aces is won by a 4, then the next round the Joker becomes a 4, not an ace (since the 4 is what won the round).

- posted @ 1:00 PM 2 comments

Sunday, July 01, 2012

The Road to Inspiration

I’m currently on vacation in the wilds of Northeast of Canada, by which I currently mean Prince Edward Island, which is not all that wild at all.

If you know me at all (and no doubt you don’t), you’ll know that I’m not short on ideas, but am quite short on…what…motivation?...energy?....stick-to-it-iveness? Let’s just say the “doing”.

I have now two book series that I’d like to write, any number of articles about what the future has in store for us and how to learn from past predictions, ideas for new things, ideas for improving old things, ideas for websites that should be profitable if I could only get around to them, ideas that would take hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, thoughts about all kinds of philosophy, humorous observations of all kinds, a presentation or two for the local Quantified Self meetup that I’d like to give, and the occasional food/movie criticism.

As you can guess, not much is happening on any of these fronts as of yet, but on this trip I’ve run into two, what you may call “propellants”.

First, we visited the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Nova Scotia. It was my wife’s idea to go there and, I have to say, I was pretty indifferent. I came away pretty inspired. Mr. Bell, most well known for his invention of the telephone, was hugely prolific as near as I can tell. Also, as near as I can tell, he considered himself an amateur at most everything. I don’t know why Thomas Edison, who was no doubt triply productive, doesn’t inspire me to the same depths. I imagine Edison as the head of a large enterprise and Bell as working with a small number of passionate people. I imagine the truth to be more complex than this.

I tried to find something suitable from the gift shop to capture the inspiration that I felt, but the best I could come up with was a bookmark (my daughter, on the other hand, came away with a complete ink and pen set like they used in the days before ball points). It’s not enough, but I’ll put it on my desk when I get home as a reminder that the race goes to the runner, not the one who could imagine how to run faster.

The second propellant was the discovery that a neighbor died just as we set out on our adventure. He was 57, and I don’t know what happened, but he left behind two kids, a wife, and an apparently non-trivial legacy. A reminder that, as yet, time is ticking for all of us, and once the sponge between our ears is no longer wet, everything in it dries up and blows away, so at the very least, write things down.

So that’s what I’m doing. Hopefully this means more entries about things and progress towards the increasingly large list of things I’d like to even get started on.

If you’d like to help me out on this, feel free to give me a nudge virtually or in person. The more propellants we all have, I guess, the better.

- posted @ 1:03 PM 0 comments