just another post

[gfish]

This is making the rounds, but it was so cool I just had to jump on the bandwagon: a really impressive analysis of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I would have liked to see a bit more rigorous graph theory analysis, rating them by how balanced their trees are etc, but still just excellent. Somewhere I still have my copy of The Cave of Time, maybe in a box somewhere in Spokane. I should dig that out sometime.

In other news, I'm actually pretty excited by some of the last minute thesis results I got yesterday. Kind of as a lark and kind of to fill space, I decided to look at the distribution of sampling windows sizes selected in the randomized tree generation process. There were some slight trends towards certain sizes and offsets, so I did a complete run where the pool of random samples from which the trees get to choose were biased towards these distributions. And it worked! Not only did the output improve by ~0.5% but frame evaluation times dropped by up to a second. AND the evaluation times dropped in a really interesting way that ties into discussion of frame evaluation times from earlier in the thesis. Not bad for such a simple idea.

Comments

[solarbird]

Choose Your Own Adventure books
♥! I published one of those in my first fanzine! No, really! It was a regular issue of the 'zine except along the bottom of every page under a horizontal bar was four lines of the ADVENTURE! There was also a single-full-page entry with a big illustration so people knew where to start. That was fun. ^_^

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

There's a mysterious cave in Snake Canyon where
Temporal strangeness is said to abound;
I walked in today and walked out many years ago,
I'm still not certain of just what I found.

But the way back home lies somewhere inside,
I've come to a fork in the path, it's for me to decide

Just where the cave shall take me,
The Cave of Time shall take me,
Until the dawn shall wake me and carry me home!