@MichaelHale what sort of game is it?

Mini-puzzle game: dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78459691/diverseGatherer.html

@MichaelHale hm, the player is giving me some trouble

@MichaelHale What is a good score?

@acl What browser/platform?

@Pickett Back in early September I played the default level a few times and got 325 I think. Then my dad got 331. Then I just worked on adding features since then when I had some time. Today the little AI I wrote got 335 on the default level.

After stepping through its move sequence though I doubt I'll require that level of proficiency to unlock the next level or people will get too frustrated.

Actually, the main reason I made a little AI for it is so that I can quickly generate a score distribution for a potential new level. That way I can quickly and consistently calibrate difficulties across different levels based on percentiles in the distribution as opposed asking 10 friends to play it 5 times and then try to guess good thresholds.

Ok, it's looking nice so far.

Thank you. I'm thinking the theme will be that you are starting a music label. Each level is a city where you go around and listen to different bands at the various venues each night to sign them to your label. When you go back to your store you sell their records and get some money. Then those bands need time to write more songs while you go listen to the other bands.

:)

Is there a good way to know :How to understand the result of ListCorrelate[{{u, v}, {p, q}}, {{a, b, c}, {d, e, f}, {g, h, i}}, {3,1}] ,where $\{K_L,K_R\}={3,1}\$

@MichaelHale It's a local issue, not platform

Sorry. I accidentally hit enter instead of shift-enter. There's a lot of interest in doing more frequent releases.

?

What would you like to see in release notes?

They could have more details, but eventually at some point they have to be summaries. What would you be interested in seeing?

Fixed support case/bug numbers with their associated short (one-liner) descriptions, if nothing else.

Maybe because that's the way product maintenance releases for product I work on work. ;)

There'd be a lot of those. I mean one problem in my experience with that is the internal problem appears to be different than the problem initially reported.

A customer might report "hey this integral isn't working" or something similar, but the internal bug fix ends up being something arcane and basically not understandable about some strange internal thing which fixes a number of not obviously connected issues.

Another issue is with things that get improved, but can't understandably ever get fixed. Something like "this function now uses complex branch cuts more intellegently"

It's possible this would only partially fix an issue someone might see as a bug for example.

In the past a group of people would find the major bugs which were straightforward to report and send emails back thanking people for reporting them.

@Searke Maybe the mapping is less direct than in some other software systems, but I'm not entirely convinced it's the best excuse.

But to create a list of case numbers that have been resolved in a release was a difficult task and I'm not sure it's been done recently

Of course, there are other ways to resolve this: more continuous maintenance release cycle, shorter fix cycle, and active informing of customers on their cases.

Yeah. We're working on making release cycles shorter.

I saw a joke above about Mathematica online/ the cloud being continously updated, but it's actually kinda true

Having an online version that can be continuously updated is good motivation for shorterning the release cycle

I work on a piece of software that has couple hundred developers working on it, and has thousands of man-years put into it, and there are maintenance releases - basically just to fix bugs - every couple months. Information on all fixed - and unfixed - support cases gets back to customers, and basically all of them are either verified or actively reasoned out to be either fixed or not fixed.

Any customer bug actually affecting a sane use case should get fixed in two maintenance releases or so from the current one.

@Searke Are you speaking of the issue reporting at WRI?

I mean, that is what I see...

I would love to get all reported bugs fixed that quickly

@Searke Of course there are bugs that are huge outliers in this process, but those are quite rare indeed.

Yeah. When a bug is a result of a complicated fix that might affect other things, you end having to decide whether it's worth it or whether it should wait till that piece of functionality gets an overhaul of some kind too.

Yep...

I see this alot for example with Import/Export issues. If there's something wrong in a library being used, and you're likely to swap that library out in a year, it might be insane to mess around with complicated exporter for an insane format

Not that I'm thinking of several different formats in particular right now

@Searke I must admit I don't envy on the amount of dependencies visible on the license list. No such burden on my case.

My least favorite bug reports to comment back on are math ones.

They can easily end up with people getting upset because Numerical/Symbolic computation don't work out like they do in a textbook.

I can imagine the utter freedom of use in combination with people paying serious bucks for a small-business license may cause trouble on this.

Some people have a history of getting upset over that.

Integrals that are "wrong" because of branch cuts are the worst

I've complained of those, but not to WRI support I think. :)

In many cases, explaining why it happens is really difficult and they'll believe you're making up exuses to cover up a bug

But mostly because I haven't figured out it's a branch cut issue.

I mean you can always improve the handling of them.

Sometimes I get the idea I'm talking to a support bot... maybe it's just lots of auto-templating? Occasionally grammar looks like Eliza backreferencing my sentences. :}

I'm amzed looking back that I got through college without learning some of the common gotch-yas of symbolic computing. There wasn't any class for it. Fortunately, I had plently of exposure to numerical computing and so I wasn't too shocked.

But well, I'm on home user licenses. I'm not really expecting to have seen the "important" customer treatment the way I see at work.

Robotic sounds reponses, strangely enough, is probably a good sign.

If you submit a bug and get a simple formulaic response back, that means you submitted something understandable

and it wasn't difficult to understand what you meant

heh

Most incoming emails aren't like that. They're written by people who don't work in tech and aren't cognizant of how to report an issue so that the other person will understand it

I must admit I've read and written plenty of bug reports. :)

But I mean, no one who answers questions on stackexchange should be surprised by that.

:)

@Searke I must say I'm waiting for Edison version of... whatever it is. About to get some boards soon, and they will be looking for a use case. Even inventing that I just run command-line Mathematica on them suffices as one. ;)

I was confused about that myself

that was IBM right?

Intel

Didn't IBM sell off their chip making ... oh... well

then it makes sense. I was just conflating IBM and Intel

IBM is selling it, yes. Intel, not. :)

I haven't gotten to try it yet. I tried doing some stuff with the rasberrypi about a year ago and ended up making some silly toys that didn't do anything interesting

I mean... ehm. The board is Intel Edison. The company selling its semi business is IBM.

I don't own a baby, so I can't make intellegent baby clothes. I'm not sure what I'd try.

Edison is intriguingly smaller than RPi. Like, you can fit two boards next to each other on top of a business card, and have space to spare.

Maybe it was even more. I think you can fit two next to each other inside a "standard" matchbox, too.

I have a cat. Maybe I can make a custom fitbit for my cat.

Beware of the intrinsic static electricity put into felines.

Darn. I hate my cat. It can't do anything fun.

You can track it not doing anything!

Maybe I can make a smart couch that knows when it is being torn up by the cat.

Too bad those Sparkfun daughterboards for Edison are still no-show. Well, pretty much everything is at this moment, apart from the CPU board, which you can't effectively even power without a daughterboard.

@Searke :)

If good installation image and sensible integration to Edison peripherals will be provided by WRI, I could imagine the combination becoming actually interesting tinkering platform.

Hey, what's the simplest way to, given an ordered list, and a value, find the two values of the list that "bracket" that value?

and if the value is outside the list, just give the first two/last two elements of it?

The end special case doesn't sound that easy.

@FdotFloss walk through the list till you hit list_value > value, keep the previous element as bracket_left and the list_value as bracket_right?

Add in some special cases for when the end points are equal to the value.

@kirma, @rm-rf, yeah, okay, that's about what I was gonna do

I was hoping there was some magic MM way of doing it

There might be. Depends on if you meant "simplest" in code or simplest in readability or simplest in complexity :)

Some tricks using Unitize and friends might be fast, but not very readable in 6 months.

haha

The question does have arrays in it and arrays are almost like vectors.