Update 12 August 2018: I've updates the project to Core 2.1 and changed the Add method to treat OutOfMemoryExceptions in case of memory fragmentation.

I have been looking for a job lately and so I've run into these obnoxious interviews when someone asks you to find the optimal algorithm for some task. And as much as I hate those questions in an interview, they got me thinking about all kinds of normal situations where the implementation is not optimal. I believe it will be hard to find something less optimal than the List<T> implementation in .Net.

Reference

For reference, look at the implementation code in its entirety.

Story

I will be discussing some of the glaring issues with the code, but before that, let's talk about the "business case". You have a C-like programming language, armed with all the default types for such, like bool, int, array, etc. and you need a dynamically sized container, one where you can add, insert and remove elements. The first idea is to use an array, then resize it accordingly. Only you can't know how large the array will need to be and you can't just allocate memory and then resize that allocation, as other variables have already occupied the next blocks of memory. The solution might be to allocate an initial array, then - when its size is no longer sufficient - create a larger one, copy what you need and make the changes in it.

A comment in the source tells us what the developers meant to do: The list is initially empty and has a capacity of zero. Upon adding the first element to the list the capacity is increased to 16, and then increased in multiples of two as required. So, an empty list is just a wrapper for an empty array. A list with one element occupies the size of a 16 element array, but if you add up to 17 elements, the array will double and continue to double.

Implementation

Let's check the algorithmic complexity for the add operation. For the first 16 elements you just add elements in the internal array, n operations for n elements. Once you get to 17, the complexity increases, as you need to copy all previous 16 values first. Now it's 16+16+1, which continues up to 33, where you have 16+16+16+32+1. At 65 it's 16+16+16+32+32+64+1. So while we are adding element after element the operational complexity is on average twice as much as using an array. Meanwhile, the space occupied is half more than you actually need.

Insertion is similarly tricky, but even more inefficient. Basically, when you insert a value or a range, the first operation is EnsureCapacity, which may copy the entire array in a new array. Only afterward the insert algorithm is run and it again copies the part of the array found after the index for the insert.

Removal works in the opposite direction with the caveat that it never decreases the size of the array. If you added 10 million records in your list, then deleted them, your list now contains an internal array that is 10 million elements in size. There is a method called TrimExcess that tries to solve this, but you must call it manually. At least RemoveAll is using an O(n) algorithm instead of calling Remove repeatedly, which would have been a disaster.

The piece of code that sets the internal dimension of the list is actually in the setter of the Capacity property, and it dumbly creates an array and copies the values from the current one to the new one.

A lot of the other operations are implemented by calling the static methods on the Array class: Array.IndexOf, Array.Sort, Array.BinarySearch, Array.Reverse, etc.

The last issue that List has is that, as an array wrapper, it needs contiguous memory space. There will be times where your code will fail not because there is not enough free memory, but because it is fragmented and the runtime cannot find a free block that is large enough for your data.

Better solutions

Before I start spouting all kinds of stupid things, I will direct you to the venerable C5 collection library, which is very well designed, documented and tested. It contains all kinds of containers to optimize whichever scenario you might have been thinking about.

Let's think solutions now. The major problem of this implementation is the need of a continuous array. Why not solve it by adding more arrays instead of replacing the one with another twice as large? When the capacity is exceeded, we create a new array of similar size, then link it to our list. And since we want to have index access, not linked list access, we need to add this array into an array of arrays.

What would that mean? Memory doesn't need to be contiguous. Adding is twice as fast. Inserting is fast, also, as you only need to insert a new array between existing arrays and move around the data in a single inner array. Accessing by index is a bit more complicated, but not by much. Removal is just as simple, with the added bonus that some inner arrays might become empty and be removed directly.

This is by far not "the best" option, but just one level of optimization that tries to fix the biggest single problem with the current implementation. As one of my friends used to say: first collect data about your program, see where the bottlenecks are, then proceed to fix them in decreasing order of importance. The source can be found on GitHub.

Notes

A tester program of sorts is showing the Count, Capacity and time for random operations for a normal list and the FragmentList<T>. The next line shows the individual lengths of the inner arrays. Note that I cheated by using Lists instead of arrays. It only makes sense, as the simplistic operations of List<T> now have a limited negative impact on individual fragments. Take note of AutoDefragmentThreshold, which is 0.8 by default. It replaces all the internal lists with a single contiguous one when there are more than 80% of internal lists that are smaller than a tenth of the total count. To disable the feature you need to set the value to more than 1, not 0. I also implemented all the public methods of List<T>, although you might only need to implement IList<T> and the *Range methods.

Well, enjoy! Hope it helps.

Today I've learned something old. Yeah, it has been there from .NET 2.0 and probably at one time or another I knew about it, then I just forgot about it. I am talking about the string.Split method overload that accepts a StringSplitOptions enumeration. In fact, it is an enum just in name, because it has only two possible values: None and RemoveEmptyEntries.

I had forgotten that I can eliminate empty entries like that, even if, truth be said, string splitting with a regular expression and maybe then filtering the results with LInQ feels much better, both as readability and control over the result. So, what is your preferred method of splitting, say..., a sentence into words?

text.Split(" \t".ToCharArray(),StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

or

Regex.Split(text,@"[ \t]+").Where(s=>!String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace(s));

? (I realize that in the case I am describing I don't need the LInQ at the end except in fringe cases, but it was an example)

There was this quiz from the Planetary Society where Robert Picardo was interviewing people at a sci-fi convention and asking them what is the planet with the hottest surface in the solar system. The expected answer was Venus. Yet, if you think a little bit, Jupiter probably has a solid core, gases made liquid by high pressure and the temperature at the boundary between the gaseous and liquid layers is immense. Shouldn't Jupiter be the answer?

No. And that is because of the definition of a planetary surface. Quoting from Wikipedia: Most bodies more massive than Super-Earths, including stars and gas giants, as well as smaller gas dwarfs, transition contiguously between phases including gas, liquid and solids. As such they are generally regarded as lacking surfaces.

So there you have it: Jupiter loses due to a technicality... just like Pluto! Just kidding. I was cheating, as there is no clear boundary between the gaseous and liquid states inside Jupiter. It is hard to imagine that, since we have a clear image of what a liquid and a gas should look and behave like; it's like boiling water in a kettle and not being sure where the steam ends and the water begins. Jupiter, though, is a big kettle.

Today the free antivirus Avast reported my BitTorrent installation as infected with Win32:Evo-Gen (Susp). It also promptly removed the executable of the program. I tried to reinstall it, also to have the same happen to the installation program. I've reported a false positive (I hope it is) for BitTorrent Stable (7.9.8 build 42577) and then I added *bittorrent* as an exclusion pattern in Avast. I could then reinstall the program, retaining all of the settings and torrents in the download list.

I got this bundle of four books in the Alcatraz series, by Brandon Sanderson, and since I loved all of his books so far, I enthusiastically started to read them. First, you need to understand that there are five books in the series, with The Dark Talent just published. I think it pays to wait until you have it before you read the whole thing, since it pretty much reads as one long story (unless you read the beginning and then immediately skip to the end of each book, heh heh heh!). Second, you need to know that at the beginning the writing will appear waaaay too silly and under par compared to the author's other works. After a while it kind of grew on me, but be aware that it is written mostly for kids. Sanderson even says so in the story itself.

So at first I kind of thought this will be the series that breaks the rule, the one that I would not enjoy reading, and it took some time to shake off this feeling. It feels like the author could not make up his mind on what to write: the obligatory book about writers (after all, the rule says "write what you know", so in the end it's inevitable) or the recently obligatory Harry Potter spoof (which fantasy authors are peer pressured into writing). In the end he wrote something that has both: a story about a boy discovering he has magical powers and also a book filled with meta comments and breaks in the Fourth Wall (the character has the Breaking Talent, see) that shows some of the tools and processes in the writing business.

In fact, the more I read, the more I enjoyed the books. The characters are as always incredibly (annoyingly) positive and there is that Sanderson smartness behind even the silliest of exchanges. He references future scenes, with book and page number (which is amazing if you think about it), he hooks you to a scene then berates himself on using hooks in the book, he uses really silly and out of context details only to use them at full effectiveness a book later. In the end, you get something that children will undoubtedly read with giggling pleasure and that adults (especially those interested in writing) will see as a deconstruction of the writing process.

Now, I still feel the Alcatraz series is one of the lesser Brandon Sanderson books. The silliness sometimes feels forced and the way he writes each book changes slightly, as he experiments with the crazy shenanigans that he started with this series. It's still very entertaining, though. Give it a try, or give it to your children so they can get into writing themselves and make your life a living hell when they grow up :)

@BrandSanderson I apologize for writing four reviews of your books and still calling you Brian for some reason. :)

— Siderite Zackwehdex (@Siderite) September 11, 2016

I was in some sort of American campus, one of those where they found a gimmick to show how cool they are. In this case it was reptiles. Alligators were moving on the side of the street, right next to people. They would hiss or even try to bite if you got close enough. I was moving towards the exit, which was close to the sea and leading into a sort of beach, and I was wondering what would happen if one of these large three meter animals would bite someone. And suddenly something happened. Something large, much larger than a crocodile, came out of the water and snapped a fully grown adult alligator like a stork snatches frogs. What was that thing? A family of three was watching, fascinated, moving closer to see what was going on. "Are these people stupid?" I thought.

Sure enough, the dinosaur thing bites through the little kid. The father jumps to help but is completely ignored, his sudden pain and anguish irrelevant to the chomping reptile. Other tourists were being attacked. One in particular drew my eyes: he had one of the things pulling with its teeth on his backpack. The man acted like something annoyed him, making repeated "Ugh!" sounds while trying to climb back on the walkway. His demeanor indicated that he didn't care at all of the reptiles, temporary annoyances that stopped him from returning to normal life. At one moment he paused to scratch an itch on his face. His fingers were bitten clean off, blood gurgling from the stumps. He was in shock.

Somehow, a famous actor jumped from somewhere and made it clear that it had been just a show, although the realism of it was so extreme that I felt an immediate cognitive dissonance and the scene switched.

I was at the villa of a very rich friend and there was wind outside. Really strong wind. Nearby wooden booths that were at the edge of his garden were pushed towards me, threatening to crush me against the wall of the building. I went inside, telling my friend that he should take whatever he needs from outside because the wind is going to tear them away. He calmly pressed a button on a remote and an inflatable wall grew around the compound, holding the wind at bay. Cool trick, I thought, trying to figure out if it was firmly anchored to the ground by wires or it got all its structural strength from the material it was made of. It had to have some sort of Kevlar-like component, otherwise it would have been easy to puncture. I calculated the cost of such a feature as astronomical.

We went in, climbing to the second or third floor. Out the window I saw buildings, like near the center of Bucharest. The wind was wreaking havoc on whatever was not firmly fixed. The building across the street was 10 floors tall and apparently someone was doing roofing work when the wind started. The fire used to heat up the tar was now really intense from all the fresh oxygen and smoke was billowing strongly. Suddenly the top floor caught fire, flames stoked by the wind into unstoppable blazes. I called my friend to the window and showed him what was going on. While we watched, floor after floor were engulfed in flames, explosions starting to be heard from within. The building caught fire like a cigarette smoked in haste. I thought that if the wind went through the building, via broken windows and walls, then the a very high temperature could be reached. And as I was thinking that, the building went down. It didn't collapse, instead it leaned towards our villa and crashed right next to it.

I panicked. I knew that on 9/11 the towers collapsed because of the intense heat, but a nearby building was structurally weakened by the towers falling and it too went down eventually. I ran towards the ground floor, jumping over stairs. If the villa would crumble, I did not want to get stuck inside. While fleeing, I was considering my options. The building that went down had people in it, maybe I should head right there and help people get out. Then I also remembered the thousands of people helping after the September 11 that later got lung cancer from all the toxic stuff they put into buildings. Besides, what do I know about rescuing people from rubble? I would probably walk on their heads and crash more stuff on top of the survivors. I've decided against it, feeling like an awful human being that is smart enough to rationalize anything.

As I got down I noticed too things. First there was a large suffocating quantity of white big grained dust being blown by the wind, making it hard to breath. The light was filtered through this dust, giving it a surreal dusky quality. I used my shirt to create a makeshift breathing mask for the dust. Then there were the people. A sexy young woman, short skirt, skimpy blouse, long hair, the type that you see prowling the city centers, was now crawling on the ground, left leg sectioned just under the knee, but not bleeding, instead ending with a carbonized stump, like a lighted match that you put off before it disintegrated. I saw people with their skins completely burned off, moving slowly through the rubble, reaching for me. Some where nothing more than bloodied skeletons, some were partially covered in tar, the contrast of red inflamed burns and black tar or burned clothing evoking demonic visions of hell. These people were crying in pain and coming towards me from all sides, climbing over the ruins of buildings and cars. The smell was awful. I ran, parkour style.

As I woke up I tried to remember as much of the dream as possible. I still have no idea what I was doing in that campus and how I had gotten there. I was fascinated by the scene with the shocked tourist, as it implies knowledge of human behavior that I don't normally possess when awake. It was completely believable, yet at the same time bizarre and unexpected. Great scene! I've had disaster dreams before, top quality special effects and all, but never was I confronted with the reality of the aftermath (I usually died myself in those). I am certain I made logical decisions in the situation, but at the same time I felt ashamed at the powerlessness, fear and the fact that I was running away. Should I have stayed and helped (and gotten cancer)? Should I have rushed home and blogged about it? Maybe a strategic retreat in which I would have conferred with experts and then maybe got back with professional reinforcements?

What felt new was that while having all those random thoughts and running, I wasn't really thinking of my life. I wasn't considering whether my life is worth saving or what the purpose of my running actually is. It wasn't thinking at all; just running. It was visceral, like my body was on autopilot, taking that stupid head away from the danger before he thinks itself to death. Considering it was a virtual body in my actual head, that's saying something. I am not just sure what.

Anyway, beats the crap out of the one with being late for the exam, not having studied anything...

Copyright is something that sounds, err... right. It's about keeping the profits of the sale of work to its author. If I write a book, I expect to get the money from it, not somebody who would print it and sell it in my name. With the digital revolution, copy costs collapsed to zero: anyone can copy anything and spread it globally for free. So what does that mean for me, the author? Well, it sucks. The logical thing for me is to try to fight for my rights, turn to the law which is supposed to protect me, find technical ways of making copying my work harder, preferably impossible, going for the people who are chipping away at my hard earned profits.

However, that only makes sense from the author's point of view, specific to their work, outside of any context. Now, imagine a system that allows me to anonymously share anything to anyone, while they also can get it with no chance of being identified or even detected. Me, the author, can see that my work is being circulated, but I can't stop it or determine who is spreading it. My only recourse is to try to dismantle this devilish system that destroys my living, with the full support of law and various companies that want to get their share of the profits. And here comes the context: in order for me (and the entire media industry) to be able to protect my way of life I need to actively fight against any method that allows anonymous and/or secret sharing of information. In fact, I would be fighting for a global system of surveillance and censorship.

As you have seen, I tried to present the situation from the standpoint of the author. I feel for the poor guy (less for the snakes that get most of the money by controlling distribution and marketing), however it is clear that I can't be on his side. The hypothetical system that I have been describing kind of exists right now in various forms and media companies are making efforts to thwart attempts to make it more user friendly and more widespread. What we see today is the logical continuation of the situation. Forget intelligence companies looking for terrorist threats. Forget tyrannical states trying to find dissidents. Forget the political correctness police trying to expose and shame people for their beliefs. The real money is in stopping people distributing knowledge for free and it has direct (and dire) implications on our ability to speak freely.

Note: I used the expression "speak freely" rather than free speech, because free speech is not actually free at all. Read about it and you will see that is a completely different thing than the ability and permission to express yourself without repercussions.

Of course, I am not the first one to have thought of that. In the world it often has become more effective to use copyright in order to censor things you don't agree with. Just google it and see. Every time you hear something about economic accords, freedom of information, net neutrality, they are all talking about the same thing, only from different angles. The war is active, in full swing, with all of us possible casualties, yet few people are even aware of it. Oh, I am not saying that you can do anything about it... or can you?... but at least you should know about it.

No, it's not about mine, although this blog has had its ups and down. What I want to talk about is the list of blogs I am following and how it (d)evolved.

When I was an enthusiastic beginner in software development I was hunting for interesting blogs that would give me valuable insights into the minds of good developers, the quirks of frameworks, the hidden tools and processes that would make my life better. I was adding blog after blog to my RSS list. Later on, I kind of stopped. I had things to do, work to be done and unfortunately went through some jobs that were not conducive to learning. Perhaps seeing myself as an expert also hindered enthusiasm in learning (note to self: don't do that!). The obsolescence of the tool I was using to read RSS with and the death of Google Reader also did not help. So recently I just went back to that list of blogs and started organizing it with a new tool. I use Feedly now, in case you were wondering.

Today I had an epiphany. I have over 150 blogs that I am "following", 100 of which are software related, yet only very few of them are actually spewing content anymore. In my three year hiatus from blog reading most of the technical blogs just ... stopped. Some of them just plain vanished, complete with content that I had linked to in my own articles. At that time I was considering blogs as permanent as you can get. I mean people just write stuff for the heck of it, so others can read and learn. There would be no reason for any of this to disappear - there are still pages from 1990 active on the Internet, for crying out loud! So what happened?

One theory is that blogs were created as representations of a person's evolution. For example you are a good WPF programmer and you create something like Dr. WPF's blog. When you stop doing WPF (because Microsoft dropped the ball with it!) you stop writing. Perhaps the author still blogs in other places, other blogs that are thematic, I don't know. Another theory is that people just blog at a certain stage in their life; it's like a quarter-life crisis. When they mature, people stop blogging (which says something...). Maybe the social media explosion pushed people away from personalized platforms and they do all their publishing on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium and so on. As the IT industry moves at an ever increasing pace, the blogs may turn into antiquated relics that are obsolete by the time several posts have been published.

I feel sad either way. When I started blogging, people would come to me for help. After all I started the site years before StackOverflow arrived on the scene. I would write about programming, books, anime, life, personal ideas, jokes, space, science, rants, whatever. It happened several times that I was looking for a solution to a problem and found myself explaining it in an older post. People still praise some posts because they refer technology that is maybe a decade old. Others for getting the full picture on how I got to the end result. So for all these vanishing blogs, I feel a sense of loss for all the knowledge that was lost, for all the voices that turned silent.

I know that as a blog dies ten others appear, but there is no sense of origin anymore, no chronological timeline of the evolution of the person writing. I can even go down the "they are not making them like they used to" road. For me a blog would have functioned as a sort of resumé of someones's work. If I liked an article, I would look at others, maybe subscribe. This way I would be connected not with a concept, but with a person: as they grew, I grew. And SEO be damned, I don't care people don't discover my blog anymore because Google can't make up its mind on what I am actually writing about. When people do come, they see me, not just disparate out of context solutions to their 5 minute problems.

So I wrote this article to express my sorrow. I guess that I miss my friends, even if they never knew me.

The Emperor's Soul is set in the same world as Elantris, but for all intents and purposes it is a standalone story. It's not a full size book, but it's a bit longer than a short story. In it we find a type of magic called Forging, by which someone can carve and use a complicated seal to change the history of an object or, indeed, a soul. The forging needs to be very precise and as close as possible to the actual history of the target, otherwise the magic doesn't "stick". So what must a brilliant forger do in order to do the forbidden soul forging? They must know their target so intimately that they can't ultimately hurt them.
An intriguing idea, yet Brandon Sanderson does what he does best and focuses on the characters, while the story itself reveals the underlying motivation of each and how it affects the final outcome. The descriptions are minimal and the ending is optimistic and personal as Sanderson often likes his finales.
Since the story is short and I had no trouble reading it in a single evening, it is almost a pity not to read it, even if in itself is just a tiny "what if" tale and offers nothing spectacular.

I've read the book in a day. Just like the other two in the series (Steelheart and Firefight), I was caught up in the rhythm of the characters and the overwhelming positivity of the protagonist. Perhaps strange, I kind of missed descriptions in this one, as both locations and characters were left to the imagination and everything was action and dialogue.

Brandon Sanderson ends (why!!?? Whyy?!!?) the Reckoners series with this third book called Calamity. You absolutely have to read the other two books to understand anything about it. In fact, Reckoners feels more like a single story released in three installments than a true trilogy. In it, the team has to reckon (heh heh heh) with their leader going rogue and have a decision to make: either bring him back or kill him. All this while fighting off various Epics in different stages of madness.

I can't really say anything about the story without spoiling the hell out of it. I loved the first two books and I loved this one. Indeed, I have yet to find a Brandon Sanderson book that I don't like. If you are into superhero stories, the Reckoners series has a refreshingly original plot, a wonderful main character and true debate about what heroism really is. I recommend it highly!

Some times you need to repeat a code block a number of times and the solution is often a for block.

for (var i=0; i<n; i++)...

This is a complex line to write and most importantly obscures the intent of the code. Wouldn't it be better to have some kind of construct that says "repeat N times" and be intuitively easy to understand? Well there is one:

while (n-->0) ...

No, it isn't some C# construct that you have not heard of before, it's a while loop that checks on the value of n, then decrements it. But it looks great! It almost reads as "while n moves to 0". I liked it and I thought I should share.

The Mirror Thief is a really interesting book. It is well written, original in ideas and Martin Seay has his own unique writing style. It is also a very deceptive book, always changing shape, misleading the reader over what he is actually reading.

The book starts in Vegas, with a black former military policeman named Curtis arriving in search of a certain Stanley, in order to give him a message from a friend. The story feels like a detective-noir, but immediately there are things that just don't belong. The apparent mystical talents of Stanley, the very detailed descriptions of the surroundings, using rarely met but very specific words. At the time I thought I was going to read some sort of mystical noir thing akin to Cast a Deadly Spell.

But then the plot switches to the story of Stanley when he was a kid, hustling people on the street and doing various other bad things, his only anchor a book called The Mirror Thief, a poetry book that describes the adventures of a certain Vettor Crivano in Venice at the end of the 16^th century. While he doesn't really understand what it is about, he feels that the unnaturally meandering book hides some sort of universal secret. As a reader, you start to doubt what you have read until now. After all, aren't you reading a confusing meandering book with a lot of unexplainable details? Stanley has traversed the United States in order to find the author of the book and ask him to reveal the mystical secret that would give him the power he craves.

And just when you think you figured it out, the book reveals a third story, that of Crivano himself, but not in poetry and apparently unrelated to the book about him. While he is an alchemist and physician, his best skill appears to be fighting, and he only uses it effectively at the end. All main characters: Curtis, Stanley and Crivano feel absurdly human and flawed. Curtis carries a gun everywhere and he doesn't get to use it once, while being disarmed multiple times. He doesn't get what's going on up until the very end. Crivano is also deceived several times, another pawn in the big game of life. Paradoxically Stanley is the one most in control of his life, mostly by rejecting everything society considers normal or even moral and choosing his every step.

To me, the book was most of all about perception. The reader is confusedly pinballed from perspective to perspective, even with each of them painstakingly detailed. While reading the book you learn new words, old words, history of three different times and places and intimately get to know each character. When you get tricked, you are just following characters that get tricked, disappointed or set up themselves. The three stories are really completely unrelated, at most red herrings when mentioned in the others, and offer little closure. It is all about understanding there are other ways of looking at the world.

Bottom line: Martin Seay is often accosted by readers begging for explanations of what they have read. You cannot read the book and not feel it is a good book, but actually enjoying it is a different thing altogether. At the end you start thinking about the book, about the world, about yourself, wondering if you didn't just read the whole thing wrong and whether maybe you should start over.

Other resources:

• Martin Seay’s The Mirror Thief Is about Mirrors and Cities and Cities in Mirrors
• Martin Seay’s ‘The Mirror Thief’ as Explained by Martin Seay
• Peter Chelsom to Direct Adaptation of ‘The Mirror Thief’

I have been playing a little with the Houdini chess engine and Chess Arena. I limit the ELO of the engine to a set value and then I try to beat it. It's not like playing a human being, but saves me the humiliation of being totally thrashed by another person :) Plus I didn't have Internet. In this case the ELO was set to 1400.

One of the games I played turned out to be extremely interesting (and short). Black tried the Elephant Gambit, to which I replied clumsily, but then it made two horrible mistakes and I saw the correct continuation. What I thought was really interesting is how the computer reacted. In what I thought would lead to some sort of piece advantage after a king and rook fork turned out to be a mating situation. The only solution for the computer was to sacrifice the queen and trying to save her would have resulted in mates or even worse situations.
I will publish the PGN here, so you can explore the variations, but before that I want to point out another greatly interesting move. As the Black queen attempts to escape, the next move is a king-queen-rook fork, yet after the king moves White does not capture the queen but does a seemingly random move: 12. Qd4. Why is that? I leave you to check it out for yourselves!

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d5 {The Elephant Gambit} 3. Nxe5 Qf6 4.
d4 dxe4 5. Nc3 Bb4 6.
Bd2 Qf5 {A really bad move giving a 3 point advantage to
White.} 7. Nd5 Bd6 8. c3 {My turn for a bad move,
anything went there, Bc4, g4, but I did this, going back to 1 pawn
advantage.} Bxe5 9. dxe5 Qxe5 {Disastrous move, but interesting. Check out the continuations.} (9.
.. Qd7 {This would have been the only decent move.}) 10. Bf4 Qxf4 {Amazingly, the only move here is to sacrifice the
queen for either bishop or knight. Attempts to save the queen lead to
mate!} (10. .. Qf5 {queen attempts to escape.} 11. Nxc7+ {leads to mate in
1. no matter when the king goes.} Kf8 (11. .. Ke7 12. Qd6#) 12. Qd8#) (10.
.. Qe6 {queen attempts to live just a bit longer.} 11. Nxc7+ {Chessgasm!
and Black's pain is only beginning.} Ke7 12. Qd4 {This is the most
interesting move here and by far the best by Houdini's calculations.} Nf6
(12. .. Nc6 13. Qc5+ Kd8 14. O-O-O+ Nd4 15. Rxd4+ Bd7 16. Qf8+ Qe8 17.
Qxe8#) (12. .. Qc6 13. Bb5 Qf6 14. Qb4+ Kd8 15. Qf8#) (12. .. Qf6 13. Qc5+
Kd7 14. O-O-O+ Qd4 15. Rxd4#) 13. Qc5+ Kd8 14. Nxe6+ Bxe6 15. Qc7+ Ke8 16.
Qxb7 Bd5 17. Qc8+ Ke7 18. Qxh8) 11. Nxf4 Nc6 {White wins
easily from +11 points} 1-0

My mind has been wandering around the concept of gamification for a few weeks now. In short, it's the idea of turning a task into a game to increase motivation towards completing it. And while there is no doubt that it works - just check all the stupid games that people play obsessively in order to gain some useless points - it was a day in the park that made it clear how wrong the term is in connecting point systems to games.



I was walking with some friends and I saw two kids playing. One was shooting a ball with his feet and the other was riding a bicycle. The purpose of their ad-hoc game was for the guy with the ball to hit the kid on the bike. They were going at it again and again, squealing in joy, and it hit me: they invented a game. And while all games have a goal, not all of them require points. Moreover, the important thing is not the points themselves, but who controls the point system. That was my epiphany: they invented their own game, with its own goal and point system, but they were controlling the way points were awarded and ultimately how much they mattered. The purpose of the game was actually to challenge the players, to gently explore their limitations and try to push boundaries a little bit further out. It wasn't about losing or winning, it was about learning and becoming.

In fact, another word for point system is currency. We all know how money relates to motivation and happiness, so how come we got conned into believing that turning something into a game means showing flashy animations filled with positive emotion that award you arbitrary sums of arbitrary types of points? I've tried some of these things myself. It feels great at times to go up the (arbitrary) ranks or levels or whatever, while golden chests and diamonds and untold riches are given to me. But soon enough the feeling of emptiness overcomes the fictional rewards. I am not challenging myself, instead I am doing something repetitive and boring. That and the fact that most of these games are traps to make you spend actual cash or more valuable currency to buy theirs. You see, the game of the developers is getting more money. And they call it working, not playing.

I was reading this book today and in it a character says that money is the greatest con: it is only good for making more money. Anything that can be bought can be stolen. And it made a lot of sense to me. When you play gamified platforms like the ones I am describing, the goal of the game quickly changes in your mind. You start to ignore pointless (pardon the pun) details, like storyline, character development, dialogues, the rush of becoming better at something, the skills one acquires, even the fun of playing. Instead you start chasing stars, credits, points, jewels, levels, etc. You can then transfer those points, maybe convert them into something or getting more by converting money into them. How about going around and tricking other players to give you their points? And suddenly, you are playing a different game, the one called work. Nobody can steal the skills you acquire from you, but they can always steal your title or your badge or your trophy or the money you made.

What I am saying is that games have a goal that defines them. Turning that goal into a metric irrevocably perverts the game. Even sports like football, that start off as a way of proving your team is better than the other team and incidentally improving your physical fitness, turn into ugly deformed versions of themselves where the bottom line is getting money from distribution rights, where goals can be bought or stolen by influencing a referee, for example.

I remember this funny story about a porn game that had a very educational goal: make girls reach orgasm. In order to translate this into a computer program, the developers had several measurements of pleasure - indicated in the right side of the screen as colored bars - which all had to go over a threshold in order to make the woman cum. What do you think happened? Players ignored the moaning image of a naked female and instead focused solely on the bars. Focus on the metric and you ignore the actual goal.

To summarize: a game requires of one to define their limits, acknowledge them, then try to break them. While measuring is an important part of defining limits, the point is in breaking them, not in acquiring tokens that somehow prove it to other people. If you want to "gamify" work, then the answer is to do your tasks better and harder and to do it for yourself, because you like who you become. When you do it in order to make more money, that's work, and to win that game you only need to trick your employers or your customers that you are doing what is required. And it's only play when you enjoy who you are when doing it.

As an aside, I know people that are treating making money like a game. For them making more and more money is a good thing, it challenges them, it makes them feel good about themselves. They can be OK people that sometimes just screw you over if they feel the goal of their game is achieved better by it. These people never gamified work, they were playing a game from the very start. They love doing it.

Stay true to the goal! That is the game.