Game Face. Photo By: Phillip Toledano

A branch of the AI research crowd are interested in games both as a testbed for theoretical work and as a market for applied AI. Unfortunately, these are conflicting goals.

People play games to be entertained, and any AI present in the game must contribute to this. I personally think that AI enhances player enjoyment when it is both surprising and relevant. That is, it should result in an experience which feels new, yet which is consistent in the current context.

This regrettably suggests that AI is synonymous with NPCs, which is a mistake that both game players and researchers make. There are plenty of opportunities for non-NPC AI in games, and yet there is scant research being done in these areas. I’m referring to things such as

• a cinematic camera that responds realistically to game world events and player movement;
• dynamic set pieces, including chase sequences and fights;
• story events that fit the overarching narrative but which adapt to a sandbox environment;
• an audio score that foreshadows unscripted events and announces the presence of hero characters;
• large-scale crowd and vehicle simulation;
• adaptive character animation and movement;
• accurate matchmaking algorithms for multiplayer online games;
• elegantly handling dropouts with automatic AI takeover;
• automatic navmesh generation from a polygon soup;
• predicting player behaviour to counteract controller and network lag; and
• automatic exploit detection and prevention.

The problem is that the role of the (usually lone) AI programmer on a game development team often involves many tasks that get in the way of performing research, including asset acquisition, audio and animation integration, data production, tool implementation and support, multithreading support, optimisation, debugging and so on, leaving a perfect opportunity for academia to supply the research chops. What’s needed are robust, efficient, designer-tweakable techniques that are easy to debug, and which scale with available CPU and memory. Sadly these requirements are not a priority for researchers, and yet researchers remain perplexed that game developers don’t use some of the inefficient, unpredictable techniques that they develop.

You see, the problem is that your neat little algorithm might perform well 95% of the time, which may be a great improvement over the state-of-the-art, and which may justify publication, but 95% is not good enough when you have an audience of 5 million game players (as hundreds of thousands of them will see broken behaviour).

But the biggest point of contention between game developers and researchers is that we gamedevs think that cheating is acceptable. After all, a game is just a Turing Test, with the player deciding whether intelligence exists based on the behaviour they perceive, so why not use all available information to deliver on that promise, instead of placing artificial restrictions on what data can be used based on whether or not it would be available to a human player? It just doesn’t matter how the behaviour is achieved – we’re not looking for insights into how the human brain works – it’s all down to player experience. This behavioural approach is out of favour with researchers (and has been ever since Chomsky defeated Skinner), but is the core of pragmatic game design. Perhaps never the twain shall meet.

As far as games are concerned, cleaning is a common metaphor. Tetris is perhaps the best example, as are match-3 games such as Bejeweled. In Tetris you interlock falling tetrominoes in very pleasant, satisfying ways in order to remove rows of blocks, while in Bejeweled et al you remove gems of the same colour by shifting them around. In both cases, the essence of the game is arrangement and removal. There’s something addictive about sorting like stuff into groups, identifying patterns, planning for what may happen next and progressing by removing groups of stuff to leave behind smaller collections of stuff.

Postal Worker, the game that I was intending to work on at the beginning of this year (and which suffered ludus interruptus due to the Global Game Jam and the Interzone Fiasco, and is yet to fully recover) was based around this concept of sorting things into groups. I do plan to return to it eventually, once I finish the Kranzky Engine for iPhone. But, I digress.

I started writing this blog post because I was thinking of two important issues that both involve cleaning in some form, and which are both inspired by recent events. I don’t want to make a federal election out of it, but I have been thinking about both the government’s proposed mandatory ISP-level filtering of RC content, and of the shelved emissions trading scheme.

I first learned about carbon trading about seven years ago when I read, I think, “The Armchair Economist“, by Steven Landsburg, which is a study of how incentives change behaviour (with famous examples including the fact that mandatory seatbelt laws result in an increased number of car accidents – you’d minimise accidents by requiring everyone to mount a metal spike on their steering wheel which is aimed directly at their heart). In essence, the intent of carbon trading is to incentivize individuals and corporations to look for alternatives to their energy supply by creating a marketplace that will inflate the cost of carbon-producing energy to the end user. That is, the operators of coal-fuelled power plants will need to pay more to continue polluting the environment, and will pass this cost on to their customers, who will then have an incentive to consider other means of fulfilling their energy needs. This will create a market for greener (in the sense of lower CO2-emitting) energy production. Along similar lines, wouldn’t it be interesting to introduce a cholesterol trading scheme, to improve the overall health of the population and thereby to reduce the strain on the health care system? I kid.

The proposed Internet filter has proven unpopular, as so many of us are opposed to censorship of any form. It is difficult, however, to have a proper discussion around a subject that threatens to raise the spectre of child pornography (which is a core reason for wanting to implement a filter in the first place). Child pornography is quickly replacing Godwin’s Law as a means of nipping any debate in the bud. It’s similar to accusations of racism making any measured debate of policy regarding asylum seekers difficult. The truth is that censorship simply limits exposure to offensive material that needs to be deliberately sought out anyway, and won’t prevent those who deal in such material from continuing to do so. In fact, it may make it onerous to identify and bring to justice those who produce such material, as it will only serve to encourage them to go deeper underground, obscuring any handy evidence that would have been left behind had they traded the stuff online. The fact that the production of images of child abuse is a multi-billion dollar criminal industry is under-reported, and the success rates of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice are unknown. I want to know; we should all be in the business of protecting children everywhere. Just not  via censorship.

Enough with the depressing thoughts. Just cleaning out my brain. Please don’t get all Nazi on me in the comments :)

Classification exists to allow consumers to make informed choices. The Classification Website states that games are classified to “provide consumers, especially parents, with classification information to help them choose a … game to play”. This implies that game classification exists to help us protect our kids, which makes it especially annoying when games clearly only intended to be played by adults are banned from sale in this country. Besides which, I believe that these kinds of recommendations are of limited benefit, and are often ignored by consumers. When deciding whether or not to allow my child to play a particular game, I’d much prefer to base my decision on my previous experience with the game, or on the recommendations of my friends and family.

The Classification Website states that “every film and computer game, whether produced locally or overseas, has to be classified before it can be made legally available to the public”, which means that most of the games I’ve ever created, including my GameJam entries, and the iPhone and iPad games released on the App Store by RocketHands, are illegally available in Australia.

Apart from causing some titles to be banned, this mandatory classification system, which requires game developers and publishers to pay to have their games classified, has resulted in some content just not being available at all in this country (presumably because publishers/developers choose to forego the expense of getting a game classified if it is not forecast to generate a large return in this market). This robs us from experiencing small, independent offerings which, for mine, are where the fun’s at. These classification requirements mean that many smaller WiiWare and Virtual Console titles don’t get a release down here, and have prevented Microsoft from making the Indie Marketplace on XBLA available to Australians. This is a regrettable state of affairs.

On the other hand, countless downloadable games and online Flash games are readily available, and, due to their entirely unregulated nature, sometimes contain highly objectionable content. The behaviour of the Australian Government makes it easy to accuse them of revenue-raising (by fining Apple, and requiring them to pay for classification) rather that performing their stated duty of protecting the kiddies (although I’m presuming that they assume their proposed Internet Filter will take care of everything else).

I think Apple should be applauded for flaunting the letter of the law, allowing countless applications and games to be available to Australians via the App Store, while satisfying the spirit of the law, by policing the App Store themselves, ensuring that violent, pornographic content is not available, and rating all games and applications to allow consumers to make an informed choice. Rather than complying with the Australian Government, Apple needs to fight for a shake-up of our classification laws. At the very least, games should be treated the same as TV, where the commercial stations self-regulate based on an industry code of practice (which is essentially what Apple has been doing until now).

What I’d like to see happen is for the classification process itself to be deregulated and crowd-sourced, with each game initially released as unclassified (and, therefore, unavailable to minors), and for adult users to submit the age threshold that they deem appropriate after experiencing the game for themselves. I’d predict a wide standard deviation of responses (which begs the question of why we allow one or two public servants to make these decisions for us), but it’d be great to be able to see the average recommended age for a game as taken from members of my social circle.

P.S. Note that “Plants vs Zombies” has been classified as 9+ by Apple, but that I’m still happy for my 4+ daughter to play it :)

Introduction

My fascination with Solresol began when I recently watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. My PhD research is focused on Language Processing, and I found the concept of a musical language interesting. I wondered whether Spielberg had made the whole thing up, or whether such a language existed.

I read all of the reviews on the Internet Movie Database, and I was surprised to find that none of them mentioned the musical language at all. Strange, given the part it plays in the movie.

Coincidentally, I picked up the “Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language” the day after watching the film, and read a paragraph on an Artificial Language called Solresol which uses musical notes as elementary symbols. My fascination had begun.

A web search turned up scant information. The only web page dedicated to Solresol didn’t exist anymore, and its author, Greg Baker, had changed jobs. After a few email exchanges with his former work colleagues, I tracked Greg down. Most of the information in these pages is based on the email he sent me.

History

Solresol, or “Langue Musicale Universelle”, was invented at the beginning of the 19th century by Jean Francois Sudre (1787-1864), a music master who realized that the seven-note diatonic scale could provide elemental symbols for a universal language.

The French versions of these seven symbols are do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and si, although in this document I use so in preference to sol, and ti instead of si. So, in truth, Julie Andrews should have sung:-

Do, a deer, a female deer
Re, a drop of golden sun
Mi, a name I call myself
Fa, a long long way to run
Sol, the closest star to Earth
La, the note that follows sol
Si, the Italian word for “yes”
Which brings us back to Do!

The words in Solresol are short melodies. I’ll represent words as a sequence of characters taken from the set {D, R, M, F, S, L, T}. For example, the word solresol will be written as SRS, which corresponds to the three notes so, re and so. The word itself translates as “language”.

Solresol may be spoken, sung, whistled or played on a musical instrument. It may be written compactly, simply by representing each symbol by its first letter. It may be signed, which is reminiscent of “Close Encounters” yet again; it may even be represented with the seven colours of the rainbow.

As with all a priori languages (languages which use an invented set of elements which stand for basic concepts and are grouped into supposedly universal logical classifications, based on scientific and philosophical issues), Solresol is difficult to learn. Even so, it became very popular in the mid-19th century, and won several prizes.

It was so popular, in fact, that the French army toyed with the idea of using Solresol as the official means of communication when on the battlefield. This is presumably due to the fact that pure tones may be broadcast over further distances than articulated speech, and the confusion it would cause the enemy!

Design

The words in Solresol consist of sequences of notes. Sudre planned to use seven words of one note, 49 words of two notes, 336 words of three notes, 2268 words of four notes, and 9072 words of five notes.

Words need to be separated in some way if they are to be decoded uniquely; for this reason Sudre decided that word boundaries would be denoted with brief pauses. This requirement tends to break up the “melody” in an unpleasant way.

It is also interesting to note that Sudre didn’t use all combinations of three and four notes. It has been suggested that this was intentional, in order to avoid repititious sequences of notes. In fact, in the information I have, only 42 two-note words are defined—the seven repititious ones are omitted.

Combinations of one or two notes form the participles and pronouns, while three-note words are used for the most frequent words. There are seven classes of four note words, called keys, according to the initial note. For example, the key of do contains words which represent the physical and moral aspects of man. Finally, combinations of five notes furnish the names of the three categories: animal, vegetable and mineral.

To allow future expansion, Sudre included an encoding of the letters of the alphabet.

Grammatical categories may be distinguished by the position of an accent over the notes, which means the note should be lengthened to indicate stress. The verb is unstressed throughout, the noun is stressed on the first note, the adjective on the next-to-last, and the adverb on the last. The feminine is also marked by final stress.

The opposite of an idea is often expressed by reversing the order of the notes in a word.

Dictionary

This copy of the Solresol dictionary began with a version sent to me by Greg Baker. I HTMLised it, and converted the representation of Solresol notes to an unambiguous one. I also changed the ordering of the words to Solresol order, which makes their grouping into classes more obvious.

One Note Words

These seven words cover the most frequently used words in the English language.

Two Note Words

Although Sudre planned on using 49 two-note words, this list omits the seven repititious ones. These words form the particles and pronouns.

Three Note Words

Sudre planned on using 336 three note words; this list has only xxx of them. These words are used for common words.

Four Note Words

The four note words are divided into seven classes, called keys, which depend on the initial note of the word. Each class represents some philosophical category. Sudre planned on designing 2268 four note words, although there are only xxx listed here.

Key of Do: Physical and Moral Aspects of Man

Key of Re: Family, Household and Dress

Key of Mi:

Key of Fa:

Key of So:

Key of La: Industry and Commerce

Key of Ti:

Five Note Words

Sudre planned on using 9072 five note words, although there are none known at this stage.

Acknowledgements

Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which got me interested in the idea of a musical language in the first place.

Some information about Solresol was obtained from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language.

Greg Baker was kind enough to pass on to me all the information he had about Solresol, after I found that his web page on the language no longer existed.

My recent work on Solresol has been aided by the information made available by Steven Rice, including his English translation of Boleslas Gajewski’s Grammaire du Solrisol.

John Schilke has mailed me hardcopies of all the information he’s obtained about Solresol in 20 years of searching.

I loved Inception, and I’m convinced that, unlike many movies that leave questions unanswered, there exists a single correct explanation of what happened (I reckon Nolan does know the answer, and will have placed enough evidence throughout the movie to allow others to find it). Here’s my theory. I plan to re-watch the movie to see if this holds water, and I’ll update this post as I gather more evidence (and perhaps change my mind entirely).

Is Reality a Dream?

I say yes! Cobb’s “reality” is a dream of his own making. There are lots of clues during the movie that this is the case, from Miles (his father-in-law) telling him to “wake up” to Saito appearing out of nowhere to pull him into a car in Mombassa to the chase that saw him squeezing through a narrowing gap to him suddenly appearing in different places and so on. It’s a popular theory, and I’m subscribing to it. The entire movie is a dream.

The only time we see Cobb actually having a dream of his own, rather than entering someone else’s, is when he visits Mal (his wife) in their apartment. Ariadne follows, and chides him for recreating reality. Because that’s exactly what his “reality” is; a perfect recreation within his own dream, so believable that he’s convinced himself it is real.

But What About the Totem?

Cobb proves to himself that he’s not dreaming by using a totem (a spinning top) and watching it fall over. This reality test seems to suggest that he’s not dreaming. But that’s a red herring!

You see, we’re told that a totem is something personal that nobody else should hold, and that you need to be familiar with its weight and feel. Throughout the movie Cobb uses the spinning top, which was his wife’s totem. The clue is that we’re also told that other people’s totems won’t work, so the spinning top cannot be trusted. Remember that Cobb has presumably never held his wife’s totem “in real life”; he’s only held his imagined version of it in his dream. Therefore, it will behave exactly as he expects it to behave, because he can control what happens (subconsciously or not – think about the level of control Ariadne has over her dream world).

So where is Cobb’s true totem? He must have had one once. I think it’s his WEDDING RING (an object that’s intimately familiar to him, and which nobody else has held). In each of the dream levels, Cobb is wearing his ring, but, in his “reality”, he wears no ring (I never spotted this while watching the movie, but I’ve seen many forum posts that mention it). We are never told why he has no ring in “reality”. The big hint is what his wife does with her totem; she hides it from herself to prevent herself from realising that she is dreaming. Cobb has done the same thing with his totem.

Because Cobb uses his wife’s totem in a dream of his creation, he is able to control it, causing it to fall by concentrating hard (notice how he really focuses on it each time he performs a reality test). At the end of the movie his attention is distracted, which explains why it doesn’t fall (he’s in his own dream, and isn’t concentrating on the spinning top, so it keeps on spinning).

How Will Cobb Wake Up?

So Cobb is stuck in his own dream. Ariadne and Miles are attempting to rescue him. In “proper” reality the three of them are dreaming together. When Cobb witnessed Mal commiting suicide, he created a complicated dream world in which he was on the run, exiled from his country and unable to see his children. Ariadne and Miles (and perhaps others) need to make him realise he’s dreaming by leading him to his real totem. They do this by constructing an elaborate scenario that allows them to perform inception on Cobb – making him truly believe that he is able to finally return home.

Once Cobb finds his wedding ring, he’ll be able to prove to himself that he’s dreaming, and will wake himself up (presumably by suiciding). The wedding ring must be with his children at his home (either that or his children are another reality test – this is hinted throughout when he glimpses them in the various levels). This is why Miles so triumphantly reunites him with his children at the end of the movie – he and Ariadne have succeeded in their mission, and Cobb is about to discover that he is actually dreaming.

I’d love it if Cobb’s daughter was wearning a necklace with his ring on it at the end of the film, when she turns around. I must watch out for that next time I see the movie.

Why Doesn’t Mal Appear?

All of this begs the question why Mal, Cobb’s wife, never appears in his “reality” to let him know that her suicide worked. She appears in each of the levels as a projection of his, but never in his “reality”. Why doesn’t she just enter his dream and fix everything directly? Well, this is because his “reality” is a dream world of his own creation, and, as he believes it so deeply, and believes that Mal is dead, he simply cannot abide her presence. That is, if the real Mal entered Cobb’s dream, he would not allow himself to see her.

However, we know it is possible, with practice, to appear in a dream as somebody else. Therefore, I believe that ARIADNE IS MAL, in a different form. Cobb’s wife has entered his dream, with her father, and they are working throughout the movie to guide him out of it. This explains why Ariadne is constantly attacked by the projection of Mal. And it explains why Ariadne works her way so deeply into Cobb’s subconscious, ultimately convincing him to let go of the projected Mal.

I remember the moment when Ariadne used the mirrors to create a bridge that Cobb recognised (quick flashbacks showed him on the bridge with Mal – perhaps they met there). This scene is also evidence of the “Ariadne is Mal” theory. In that scene, Cobb warns Ariadne that building places from memory is the quickest way to lose track of what’s real and what’s a dream, and she says something like “is that what happened to you”. At that point, Mal’s projection knifes her (because Cobb, subconsciously, cannot accept the fact that Ariadne might be telling the truth).

Phone Call

One really fascinating moment is when Cobb receives a call from his kids. This is a man who’s on the run, yet his infant children can manage to call him up when he’s in some unknown location? What’s more interesting is that the kids on the phone sound older than those we see at the end of the movie, and that there’s someone else present during the call: their grandmother (Cobb’s mother-in-law, Mal’s father and Miles’ wife). We never meet her, but we can hear that she has a French accent. How about this for blowing your socks off:

• Mal and Cobb live in America with their two kids.
• Mal’s parent’s live in Paris, where her father lectures at the University.
• When Cobb doesn’t wake up from his dream, he’s admitted to hospital in a “coma”, and Mal’s parents travel to America to help.
• While Mal’s mother minds the kids, Mal and Miles stay at the hospital where they enter Cobb’s dream to attempt to wake him up.

So far, that all fits in with my theory. Now, imagine this. While Cobb is sleeping, the kids either talk to him Cobb directly, or over the phone (imagine Mal holding it to his ear). Cobb can hear his kids within his dream when they speak to him, in the same way that Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien is used as a signal to the dreamers (they hear the song within their dream when headphones are placed on them in real life). Within his dream, Cobb explains away the fact that he can hear his kids by imagining that they call him on the phone.

Further evidence in support of this theory (that Mal’s parents are helping to rescue Cobb): Miles, the father-in-law, seems to exhibit no emotion at all over his daughter’s death. He’s happy and friendly and helpful, not resentful of Cobb at all, even though he could rightly blame Cobb for her death. Not to mention the fact, of course, that he pleads with Cobb to “come back to reality”.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. Cobb is dreaming, and Mal (in the form of Ariadne) and Miles are working to wake him up (and they succeed). I think it’s a pretty consistent and believable explanation, and, like I said, I plan to watch the movie again to see how much evidence there is in support of this theory. Keep an eye on this post for updates!

Also, yes, I’m a tad obsessed with this movie.

A society consists of equal numbers of males and females. Each female knows all the males and vice versa. Each female has a priority list of the males she would like to marry, and vice versa. The task is to marry them all off with the least shortfall in expectations, that is, with maximum of priorities being satisfied.

Let’s say that there are X males in a village, and, as luck would have it, there are also X females. Assuming monogamy, each and every bloke is guaranteed a partner, although she may turn out to be more of a ball-and-chain (and vice-versa—let’s not be sexist).

Being of a well-organised race, the villagers carry around with them, at all times, a stone tablet, onto which they carve the names of their favourite members of the opposite sex. In fact, they’re so fastidious about this that they keep the names of *every* member of the opposite sex, ranked from most desirable (assigned a ranking of 1), to the least desirable (assigned a ranking of X).

Whenever two villagers of the opposite sex meet, they compare notes (so to speak). Each quotes the rank they’ve assigned the other, so that both parties know their Mutual Attractiveness Factor, which is defined as the sum of the two separate ranks.

Hundreds of years ago, a rather forward-thinking village chief built a chess-board in the centre of the village, containing X*X squares in total. Each row of this board is inscribed with the name of a male villager, while the columns are reserved for the females. Whenever a couple meet, they make a pilgrimage to the board, and place upon the square at the intersection of their names a number of pebbles. The number they choose is always exactly the same as their M.A.F. (due to some ancient tradition, no doubt).

Each spring, when a man’s fancy turns to… chess, the village idiot stops playing with his dead rats, and instead sweeps the chess board free of pebbles. He does this with a straw broom, babbling all the while, about such things as “en-pee-’ard” and “low-cal-mini-mah”. The village idiot who, fortunately, is hermaphrodite, sweeps the board free of pebbles in a very strange way (using a process which he refers to as a “seaweed-with-musical-timing”).

What he does is this: he first looks for a pile of pebbles which, if it were to be swept away, would cause either the row or column which intersects it to become pebble-free. If such a pile is found, it is carefully gathered up and transferred to a leather sack, and the names associated with the row and column are recorded on a list. The row and column are then rather haphazardly swept clear. On the other hand, if no such pile is found, then the largest pile of stones on the board is swept into the forest. In the case when more than one such pile exists, the village idiot selects between them at random (there isn’t space here to describe how he makes the selection; suffice it to say that the process involves a chicken, several lengths of twine, and boundless patience).

This process, or “algae-rhythm”, is repeated until the board is free of rocks. When this happens, the village idiot hands his list to the local clergyman, who promptly marries all of the couples on it. The idiot then divides his bag of pebbles into 2X evenly-sized groups (which, more often than not, involves smashing the pebbles into bits). The number of pebbles in each group represents the average rank assigned to a person by their partner in marriage (which explains the low divorce rate, perhaps).

Once the weddings have taken place, the village idiot is given a bag of gold by the grateful couples, which he promptly spends on beer and rats.

I’d like to think that I’m still learning and embracing new ideas, so it makes me frustrated when people my parent’s age choose not to. Sitting on the sofa watching television and wondering out loud about some piece of trivia is fine and all, but did you know you can find the exact answer in the next ten seconds if you want to? The degree of effort is so low (visit Google, type in question) compared to the value (satisfying your curiosity) that it frustrates me that you think it’s “too hard”. And digging out the Yellow Pages from the top shelf of the pantry to look up a phone number for a store that you plan on visiting is equally as ludicrous.

Did you know that Google has been around for a decade? That we were surfing the web fifteen years ago? That email was in widespread use twenty years ago? That you could buy an affordable home computer thirty years ago? Computers are central to our way of life. Many occupations involve using a computer in some capacity, yet the average competence of a computer user is depressingly low. And it’s not because it’s “too hard”, it’s just that people haven’t bothered to learn through experience. Computers are just so alien to them that they prefer not to use them at all, meaning that they don’t pick up the nuances and patterns that you need to be a confident user.

Those of us who work with computers daily aren’t smarter, and we don’t think differently. We’ve just learned the ins and outs. When we fix your computer for you, we don’t magically know the answer, we just go through the obvious steps, and you should be able to do that yourself. I’m just sick and tired of people rolling their eyes and blaming their problems on the computer, “oh it’s the computer”. No, it isn’t. It’s YOU. You just haven’t bothered to educate yourself.

I mean, imagine if you treated cars this way. You were in your twenties when you started hearing about these car devices, but you couldn’t grasp exactly why someone would want one (I mean, I can walk to the shops and get some fresh air and exercise, and I’m quite happy catching the bus to visit friends). You had kids, and they got cars, and drove you places, and they seemed happy with them. You were happy to be a passenger, but didn’t really grasp how the darned things worked. Then you retired, and went out and bought a car yourself. The man delivered it and showed you how to turn it on and off. You’d seen your kids do this, so you hopped in, started it up, drove across the lawn, took out the mailbox, floored the accelerator in your panic and crashed through the neighbours garden and into your house. “Damned new-fangled vehicles”, you complain. “Gargh, they’re always doing that”.

Well, I’m sorry. Driving a car is second nature to you because you studied them, you took lessons, you passed a test (after several attempts, probably), and you spend the last thirty years using one for several hours a day. You learned all of the nuances and tiny patterns that allow you to pilot one without really thinking about what you’re doing. You know that pouring a solution of water and vinegar into the tank when the petrol runs our ain’t going to work, and you didn’t need to perform an experiment to find this out. You know what to do when you get a flat tire, and when the fuel warning light goes on. You know how to take care of it, you know how to negotiate your route with other vehicles on the road, and you even know what to do when something unexpected happens. Cars are no less complicated, it’s just that they seem easy because you use them so much. So, please, do the same with your computer.

Probably best to read in full-screen, or click through to Issuu and download the PDF.