what genres of music do you guys listen to?

@NathanMerrill My favorite is either metalcore (Architects, Silent Planet, Northlane) or emo/emo-rock (Brand New, Sorority noise, basement, tiny moving parts). But I'll listen to a bunch of other stuff too. Like techno (no particular artists, but stuff on YT like trap nation), blues rock (royal blood, grandson), or a variety of other things

There's another genre that I really like but I'm not exactly sure what the word for it is. Stuff like Walk the moon, spoon, young the giant, and nothing but thieves, I guess?

wow. I've never heard of a single one of those artists

name 3 songs (from different genres that you mentioned), and I'll give them a shot.

Haha

Architects: Hereafter

Sorority noise: No Halo

Royal blood: Little monster

What music do you listen to?

Right now, the three you mentioned

Ok, didn't like any of them. I'd rank them 3, 1, 2. The first song had the best 5 seconds though, until the actual metal part started :)

What music do you normally listen to?

I listen to soundtracks, piano, and singer-songwriter (but generally not pop singer-songwriter, more piano singer-songwriter)

oh, and big band jazz

@NathanMerrill I've been listening to a lot of mat kerekes recently. He's a guitar singer-songwriter

@DJMcMayhem listened to diamonds. I like the song, hate the music video

Huh, I've never watched one of his music videos. And I actually don't know that song

I generally don't either, but I generally prefer youtube's searching experience

I really like the whole album Luna... Luna and the something

Bosque Verde is super relaxing, and My lucky #3 is fun and more upbeat

yeah, trying My lucky #3

and honestly, I'm surprised you'd call that upbeat. That is definitely more relaxing music to me :)

Oh it's definitely relaxing to me too. I just meant compared to some of his more mellow songs

oh gotcha. Yeah, it's not like slow or anything

@NathanMerrill I'll listen to all of these in like an hour and half when I'm at work

Also, channel recommendation: Rousseau classical piano, and sometimes pop covers with a really cool visualizer

And I've also never heard about any of the artist both of you mentioned:)

@flawr I did try to pick more obscure artists. I'm hoping you've heard of John Williams or The Piano Guys

oh John Williams apparently wrote the music to harry potter!

I have actually played that a while ago, but didn't remember the name:)

@DJMcMayhem so, the Synthesia visualization is actually pretty common among piano music videos

I agree, it's fun to watch, though

and Rousseau is quite good, he can play pretty advanced songs

@NathanMerrill Hmm, I thought that was only when it's just a midi track. I had never seen it before with a real person playing it at the same time

@NathanMerrill Oh, I do know of Sara Bareilles!

yeah, midi tracks can make it very easy, but what you need is computer input of when the person is playing. If you notice, there are actual lights on his piano, indicating that it is an electric piano

@DJMcMayhem yeah, but I don't like her most popular stuff. Except for King of Anything.

I shouldn't say that I don't like it: I've just heard it too many times, and it's still my least favorite musically

@flawr aren't you going to tell us of the artists you have heard of?

You mean the ones I listen to?

yeah

I'll also try to pick a few more obscure ones:)

Let's start with metal/rock&similar: Falkenbach, Esben and the Witch, Inter Arma, Woods of Ypres, Year of No Light

I do also like to listen to classical music but without being able to pin down a certain group or composer

old classical (like bach/beethoven/etc), or new classical?

a few musicians that I don't reallyknow the genre: Selah Sue, Sarah Niemietz, Rainbow, Pascal Pinon, Marian Hill, Flbots

@DJMcMayhem Portal is a great song. Mostly because it is funny

actually, there are 2 songs, both of them great

@NathanMerrill I'd say qute diverse I probably know the old well known composers better than anything newer but it is a little bit hard to say where you draw the line:)

@NathanMerrill @DJ means a band called Portal :)

@NathanMerrill Do you mean Portal the game, or Portal the band? (<-- that's the link I remember flawr posting)

Ninja'd

@DJMcMayhem If you like strange stuff you should also try Old Man Gloom (OMG)

(I think @AlexA. first recommended me these:)

Haha, ok

@flawr Where would you recommend starting with these? I think it's the funny that we both listen to a lot of "Metal" but our interests in it are totally different

It is such a vast spectrum!

here some songs: falkenbach e&tw inter arma woods of ypres yonl bagarre generale

About a year ago I discovered quite a few french metal bands

But I also discovered youtube channels like worldhaspostrock that just feature an endless collection of post rock, which I now quite like for listening to at work

Mainly because it seems that post rock is rarely with vocals it is not so distracting

But I also really like browsing sites like bandcamp to find some really unknown indie artists

@flawr I googled "Post rock bands* and the only result I recognized was Explosions in the sky. They're really good

@DJMcMayhem I honestly couldn't name you a single one, I just enjoy these playlists:)

@flawr Seeing only the title, I was like "...but LEGO is 'real life'". Then I watched it and yeah, very cool.

hehe:)

Behind the Scenes was indeed very cool too. :)

@flawr vroom vroom boom boom

@flawr @DJMcMayhem yes, yes I meant Portal the game. But the songs from it are weird

@flawr falkenbach I surprisingly like. I don't know if it is considered metal, but it has actual notes in it!

the rest of those songs too slow for me. I must be the odd one out here, but I definitely prefer faster beats.

that said, I didn't hate any of them. If I had a coworker playing them, I wouldn't ask them to stop.

anyways, what prompted the question is I found a website called JQBX. You get to listen with others that share your tastes

Oh cool!

...if you have spotify:)

yeah, I should have mentioned that. You need spotify premium

there are other sites that work with youtube, I don't remember their names though

@flawr It's very weird, but I sort of like it?

More than portal, but not enough to listen to for more than a song or two

right, for me it is also something that needs "active listening"

I think I liked the guitar riffs a lot, but the vocals got old pretty quickly

@NathanMerrill I liked these. I didn't really care for the Sara Bareilles song, but the other two were great. I remember you recommending William Joseph a long time ago. And he has a cover of a Muse song, which I really like (Butterflies and Hurricanes).

Have you ever listened to Two Steps From Hell/Thomas Bergersen? He's my wife's favorite composer

I found mount salem a while ago, but unfortunately the linked album is the only one they ever released up to this day.

Ooh, I like that a lot

@DJMcMayhem Butterflies and Hurricanes is also one of my favorites

@DJMcMayhem yep. The problem with the "Epic" composers is that they all sound the same IMO. I really like the lighthearted stuff they do

Like this one:

I loooove TSFH and Thomas Bergersen.

I don't listen to a lot of Bergersen, but I really love Skyworld. Blackheart and All is hell that ends well are my favorites

oh, that's not the one I meant.

It's still a good one.

That melody at 1:33 is really good

Pretty neat: Veritasium video about aerogels.

Also, I guess it's time to plug my Fantastic Epic Songs playlist again. :P Plenty of variety in there.

That's hilarious.

TIL a drive-through and a drive-by are not the same thing

@flawr Yes, very very different. A "Drive-in" is also different

Can confirm.

Also, drive-through shooting and drive-in shooting are not things.

Just like there aren't drive-by theaters, or drive-in restaurants? :P

Some people have certainly attempted the latter!

@DJMcMayhem Both of wich I imagine as funny but probably a little bit cumbersome:)

Actually wait, @DJMcMayhem are there any Sonic restaurants in your area?

Those basically count as drive-in restaurants, methinks.

Ah, that's true

So I'm working on a board game AI... and I'm trying to figure out how to make it actually good.

Does it already have a name? If so, just prepend a "Deep-" and I guarantee it will be at least 1000x better.

I have mentioned this before, but the game in Twin Tin Bots. Premise: you organize tokens to make programs for your two robots. Your robots roam around on a board, trying to collect "crystals" / stealing from other bots. The catch is that you are only allowed to edit one token of one robot per turn, but both robot's programs are executed each turn.

Right now I have most of the game logic implemented... enough to allow scoring and thus develop some AI heuristics for scoring. My game tree code can visit about 100,000 nodes/second.

The issue is that there's a few game mechanics which make things a bit hard. The main one is that, on rare occasions, a player can make two edits in a turn. That bumps the legal move count from 50 to like 1000.

And it's a 2-6 player game, so you can't even thoroughly brute-force one whole round of the game.

So I'm trying to think of some good heuristics.

And also how to combine heuristics / evaluations from multiple heuristics, so that the most meaning can be extracted from the game tree in a certain amount of time.

I think my goal would be for the AI to "make a plan" that's 7 or 8 moves deep.

So 20 ply minimum, but (in my dreams) even up to 50 ply in the worst case.