Ender’s Game

Author: Orson Scott Card

One of the classic sci-fi novels, Ender’s Game is the first of novel in the Ender saga. The novel is probably more suitable for younger readers but it is a fun, quick read and there are certainly some interesting takeaways.

The novel follows Ender, a child prodigy as he is trained to command the human army against an alien species called the buggers. He is put through taxing trial after trial, either intentionally as part of his training or inadvertently by his peers (who are all older than him and prone to bullying). Throughout his supervisors watch him cope with stress and constant fatigue, but never intervene so that he learns he cannot count on anyone looking out for him. Ultimately, Ender flourishes, and potentially one can learn a lot from his experiences, i.e. how he deals with fatigue, antagonistic peers, and high-pressure situations.

I think there are a lot of useful leadership skills that can be learned from Ender. He quickly gets placed in charge of several cadets and has to deal with internal dissent, egotism and a general bad attitude toward him as a leader. He learns how to lead by example, and while many of his cadets despise him, it is clear that they all respect his abilities as a soldier. Later, when he is places in charge of a team of novices, he instills in them a strong drive to improve their fighting skills. In part this is because he is such a talented fighter (leading by example) but also because he uses psychological tactics to motivate his team. In this way, the novel was a interesting lesson in leadership, which I think carries over from fiction to reality.

Some thoughts on Academic Publishing

With the wide-spread adoption of the internet, the traditional academic publishing system has become somewhat antiquated. This has caused a lot of uproar within the academic communities, and many prominent researchers have been thinking about alternative publishing systems. There’s a lot of material about this floating around the internet, but in this article I will outline some of my thoughts and ideas.

The Problem
If you are familiar with the problem, you might want to skip down to the next section where I talk about some proposals that I and others have thought about.

To start out: What is wrong with the current system? It is actually quite complicated, but the main idea is that publishers (Elsevier, Springer, etc.) no longer seem to be adding any value while continuing to exorbitantly charge both authors and readers. Traditionally, the role of the publisher was to aid in distribution of academic material, and when this was legitimately a service, I completely understand them charging for it. However, now that almost all content can be obtained electronically, the role of distributor is no longer necessary. Yet publishers continue to charge ridiculous fees for journal subscriptions, which are required for an institution to obtain even electronic access to journal articles. I remember reading somewhere that university libraries spend the majority of their budget on journal subscriptions.

So why do researchers continue to publish in these journals? Well it is well known that academia is instilled with a publish-or-perish mentality, and moreover the specific venue in which you publish influences how your peers regard your work. Journals are scored by impact factor and publishing in journals with high-impact factor indicates that I am a good researcher. The quality of journal in which I publish plays a significant role in hiring decisions and other career opportunities and this, at least to me, is the primary reason why researchers continue to submit to these closed journals. There are some other factors, that motivate researchers to publish in journals, such as the peer-review system and the fact that publication is a sanity check that the work is correct and reasonable. However, I think the main motivation is to demonstrate one’s research ability. Noam Nisan talks about some other reasons and more details about this problem here.

To summarize, as it stands, the publishers provide no real value, but they restrict access to the elite journals. This motivates researchers to stick with their clearly flawed system. If we could introduce an open system to score and critique papers, with a mechanism for recognizing outstanding papers, it seems like we could break free of the existing system.

A Popular Solution
One popular solution to do this is a combination of Reddit and the ArXiv for academics. Researchers can post their papers online and then other people can leave comments and reviews of the paper. Everyone has a reputation score and the influence of one’s comments depends on their reputation. Maybe papers can get assigned scores, so anyone can score the paper, but the weight of their score depends on their reputation. That way, on my CV I can write down all of my papers along with their scores, so that others can quickly glance at my CV and get an idea of how important my research is. This is the basic idea but obviously there are a lot of details so that one cannot game the system. I’ve spent some time thinking about this and I think that if you implement it carefully in enough you can make it work. Timothy Gowers also seems to think so and he has thought about many of the details. If you are interested, please read his blog post, here.

One of the comments left on the Timothy Gowers’ blog post is that we might not want to turn life into a game, where reputation points mean everything. I really agree with this; some black-box is calculating my reputation on this website and the score output by this has serious consequences on my life in terms of career opportunities, etc. It makes academic life too much like a game, where everything I am trying to do revolves around increasing scores on my papers and increasing my reputation. So while I still think the system could work, it may not be what all academics want.

A less popular proposal
Gowers briefly talks about another idea, or at least an extension to his existing proposal that I think merits some additional discussion. The idea is this: anyone can start, edit, and curate their own online journal about whatever they want. They assemble a team of reviewers, who could be peers, friends, collaborators, or really anyone else they know. The editor of a journal and the team of reviewers is public information, and their reputation (not necessarily based on a scoring system) is what helps determine the quality of the journal. When I write a paper, I can submit it to one of these online journals, where it will go through the peer-review process, and possibly be accepted. Submissions and reviews can potentially be done anonymously, to allow for double-blind reviewing. Acceptance into someone’s online journal is a stamp of approval of a paper, and on my CV I would list which online journals my papers were accepted into. As in the other system, once a paper is accepted somewhere, maybe anyone should be free to comment on and score it.

There are several ways this system can account for journal quality/impact factor. A simple one is to use the editor’s and reviewers’ reputations as a proxy for the quality of the journal. Another is to allow journals to have reputation scores, based on the scores of that journal’s papers. This second solutions presents a startup problem, but I think you could bootstrap by using the first solution until the journal has a substantial number of articles. Also note that this same problem arises when I want to start a real journal. Again there are some details that need to be worked out but I do believe this sort of system could be made to work.

As a sort of aside, Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) is an example of some of these ideas at work. The journal is open, providing free online access of all of its articles, and it still has a fairly high impact factor. In 2004, apparently it had the second ISI impact factor of any computer science journal (source). This small-scale experiment suggests that this sort of idea might actually work.

In Conclusion
If anyone reads this, I’d be interested to know what you think about these proposals. Do you see any serious complications/problems? Do you have any alternative proposals?

Mr. Yuk at Fall Easterns

I’m a little behind on this one but a couple of weeks ago Mr. Yuk made the 11 hour drive down to Wilmington, North Carolina to compete in Fall Easterns, a highly competitive tournament featuring some of the best teams in the Atlantic Coast and Ohio Valley regions. The tournament got a lot of coverage on skydmagazine (see here, here and here) and here is the official results from score reporter.

We came in seeded somewhere in the bottom 4 out of 16 teams (I heard that they didn’t snake the last round of the pools, so it’s not obvious exactly what seed we are) and finished 4th over all, losing the 3rd place game by forfeit only because we had to start driving home. Here’s a quick game by game recap:

1. University of Delaware — After getting into Wilmington after 3am the night before, we clearly weren’t ready to start playing at 9am and this showed as we quickly went down 7-1 against Delaware. It was incredibly windy (20-30 mph winds) and our offense couldn’t seem to break their zone. Meanwhile they adopted a “punt and play-D” strategy that seemed to work quite well as we gave them great field position over and over, allowing them to convert easy scores. We came out a lot more fired up in the second half, but had already dug ourselves into too deep of a hole to win this one. Delaware wins 15-7.
2. University of Virginia — If it’s at all possible, winds seemed to increase for the second round of the day, and this lead to a really sloppy game. However we came out strong. We adapted to the wind, playing the same style of field position game that was successful for Delaware against us and this allowed our O-line to convert. At the same time our D-line’s zone generated turn after turn, and we accumulated a couple of breaks. CMU wins 6-10 on hard cap. Some video footage of this game is here.
3. William and Mary — We played W&M at Hucks of the Hilltops a few weeks before Easterns (I wasn’t there hence no recap here), and lost to them on universe point after being up for most of the game. Coming off a big win against UVa, we were hungry to bring it to these guys. We started off really well, converting our O-points and punching in a couple of breaks, eventually taking half, but afterwards we started to slip. If I remember correctly soft-cap went on when we were up 12-9 and W&M broke over and over again to tie it at 13s and bring it to universe. They would come out ahead again, leaving us on one hand dejected, but on the other, excited to play regional rival Ohio State in our cross over game. William and Mary wins 14-13.
4. Ohio State — OSU knocked us out of regionals last year in a very close game, and our veterans were looking forward to facing them in the crossover game. To start out, I think they were playing a lot of their tryout players, but we took a pretty substantial lead, forcing them to put in their veterans for the second half. We kept bringing the pressure and came out with a comfortable win and a berth into the Championship bracket on sunday. CMU wins 14-8. Footage of this game is here
5. University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) — Our first game on Sunday was the quarterfinal matchup against UNC. As we did on Saturday morning, we came out slow, allowing UNC to take half 8-3. The second half however, was a completely different story. We generated break after break, with big defensive plays, winning the half 10-7, but losing the game 15-13. UNC is a very good team (they ended up winning the tournament) and I was very impressed with how we played, particularly in the second half. Footage of this game is here
6. North Carolina State — Losing in quarterfinals, we dropped into the 3rd place bracket. I don’t remember too much of this game, except that we had a lot of momentum from the UNC game and kept rolling. CMU wins 13-9.
7. University of South Carolina — The Skyd report from day 1 suggested that USC was the story of the tournament, because of their unexpected success, despite our similarly unexpected success. As a result, we thought of this matchup as a way to prove that we were just as memorable as they were. I don’t remember too many details of this game either, except that it wasn’t ever particularly close. CMU wins 15-7, earning us a berth in the 3rd place game.
8. University of North Carolina Wilmington — The third place game was set to start at 3:45. With a 11 hour car ride in front of us, we simply couldn’t push off leaving for a couple more hours and were forced to forfeit to UNCW.

For the most part, we played much better than I expected. This made me really excited to be a part of Mr. Yuk this year and I’m hopeful that we make some noise in the spring and going into the college series. The win against OSU was especially satisfying because we’re going to see them again at regionals and it shows that we can compete against some of the better teams in our region. Our success has also motivated me to do work over the winter, so that I can contribute in the spring.

On the positive side, for the most part our offense was silky-smooth. In the USC game they only had three turnovers and gave up no breaks. I, in part, expected this, as we only graduated one O-line player, and two of our starting handlers have returned from serious injuries, but it was definitely reassuring to see. It’s really nice to play for a team where you can count on the O-line to score. Our D-line, after losing several seniors, also impressed me for the most part. Holes were filled by rookies who really stepped up, and despite our lack of offensive-minded players, we managed to convert after generating turnovers. We can certainly improve in this area, because it was clear that our defensive offense was run by three or four players, and most everyone else didn’t really have an idea of what to do after the turnover.

Of course there are many things we need to work on. Most patently obvious is that we need to start playing when games actually start. We can’t afford to give up insane leads in the first half as we did against Delaware and UNC. I don’t really know how to fix this, because it is mostly a mental thing and something that I don’t know how to teach people. More tactically, William and Mary discovered that they could keep hitting up-the-line dump cuts, and this helped the go on their run towards the end of the game. UNC broke our marks over and over again, resulting in a lot of fairly easy scores. These are two sort of little details that will haunt us in the spring if we don’t fix them.

Fall Easterns wrapped up our fall season and hopefully gives us a lot of momentum as we go indoors for the winter. Our next tournament will be sometime in late February or March. I’m really looking forward to an exciting spring season.