No, I promise, we play it exactly as I have written it. The fun bit is that when you are mafia, it is very diffucult to not be nervous and make mistakes. In effect, you can carry on with your normal conversation and try to trick people in to slipping up. Give it a go: it really works.
Other people in this thread have suggested other elements to the game, but we really do play it as is. A typical game with eight people will last half an hour or so. The more beer involved the longer the game takes, of course. And the higher the volume.
Thanks so much for that link! I wonder how the game found its way to Europe... One small point, we play with no moderator and no "seer" and no proscribed day and night phases.
Yeah, you are probably right: not suitable for offices unless it is VERY relaxed... Although, I have played in situations where as group of friends we introduce a stranger and it has always been a great way of making them feel less uncomfortable. I've never known anyone to be truly upset. I guess it depends what type of company you have.
I take your point about cultural offence. Real-life mafia are not part of our history in Britain, so please forgive me the transgression... You could choose any name, like Werewolves!
The greatest party game in the world... I'm sure everyone has one tho... It involves logic and psychological games and I think it is great for geeks.
It works best with more than 5 people people - so lets say you have 8. Take 8 slips of paper, write the letter "M" on three of them and "C" on five. The "M"s are mafia and the "C"s are citizens.
Then, on instruction (choose a games-master for this), everyone closes their eyes and when the games-master says "mafia open your eyes", the mafia do just that and see eachother. Everyone then closes their eyes, and then everyone opens their eyes at the same time. The object of this is that the mafia know who is a citizen and who is not, and that the citizens have no idea and consequently live in fear.
Then the game begins. People talk and interrogate eachother until someone announces they beleive that someone else is mafia. They can then call a vote to "kill-off" that person, and if the vote is carried he/she is out of the game and they have to reveal whether or not they were mafia. The object of the game for the mafia is to kill all the citizens, and for the citizens it is to stay alive until all the mafia are dead.
Give it a go - it really works. Lots of tension builds up and all sorts of weird mind-games happen....
There are a surprising amount of input technologies available for phones - or unsurprising if you consider the potential return on something like this: look at AOL's T9, which is available in something like 180 models of phone in 15 languages...
Anyway, a summary, if you are interested, is that of the solutions proposed so far, most of them fall into a few categories:
Chorded keyboards: Think microwriter here, or a court reporter's typewriter. The idea is that you get around the small space available for keys by having a group of keys select each character; The microwriter only had four keys for the whole alphabet. The speed of input achievable is quite fast, but the interface is far from easy to learn.
Full key boards: Usually the complaint is that having all of the keys on one small device is no good for anyone with adult sized fingers.
Soft, or stylus input: This is just a touchscreen solution. You can either use a stylus - which is probably not convenient for a phone, or your fingers, where you are back to the problem of dealing with small or not enough keys.
Reduced keyboards: Where you use some method other than chording to input characters on a keyboard with fewer keys than letters in the alphabet(e.g. T9, multi-tap...)
This new device seems to fit in somewhere between a full keyboard and a chorded keyboard. The novel solution here is that you can fit a full keyboard on by using easy-to-learn chording to signify numbers.
...coincidentally made earlier today by Will Hutton (a British economist and newspaper editor) about the pointlessness of big money mergers like this.
He produces some very interesting statistics about how they almost always lose money, for example;
The management consultant McKinsey's, for example, reviewing 160 mergers between 1992 and 1999, discovered that only 12 of the merged groups succeeded in lifting organic growth above the trends before the merger; the other 148 failed.
The article is really worth a read. Just ignore the, um, inflammatory title!
How about this for a solution. Do away with CourseMaster(the Nottingham automatic marking system), but also do away with the idea of grading code. Give everyone in the first year a personal coding mentor, and have a marking scheme based in the attendance of weekly meetings with the mentor and the completion of weekly assignments.
I say the standard doesn't matter, as long as the mentor has the skill to walk the student through his or her mistakes. This personal contact will also motivate the student to (at least) understand the code they are handing in, for fear of embararrassment.
Have the course a pass/fail, and I reckon that the standard of programs at the end of the course has to be better.
It certainly beats screaming at CourseMaster.
(of course it would be just too expensive to implement:)
Yeah, diff is basically it. There is minimal statistical stuff, they simply strip the comments, change the identifiers to x and check for similarities in the structure. We have it at our uni. Hell, they even mark our programming (beginners stuff) automatically.
This is no news at all. All the students need do is change a few whiles and fors and they are in the clear...
Who cares? If you need to cheat on hello world then you really do have a problem...
Is that an implicit assumption that developers in China and India are unable to perform "creative" software development?
Its not quite the same deal as designing your clothes at Nike headquarters and manufacturing them in a Chinese sweatshop. You have to be a good programmer to do "routine" development as well. Indians are no less creative than Americans!
Not publish your solution, go to the people in the know and use the knowledge to your advantage. Secretly rip of banks all over the world, bring down governments, get yourself in a position of power. The possibilities are endless.
There is also a chance that an agency such as the NSA or the British intelligence services have ALREADY found a solution. Just look at rsa, or how long the Brits kept enigma and their digital computers secret (predating ENIAC). Without a credible alternative to RSA at the moment it would be sensible for such an organisation to keep a solution secret.
You can get these "back chairs" that you sort of kneel on, with your bum perched on a separate platform.
They seem to work - I don't get chronic back pain my self, but I do have a friend that suffers quite badly. His only options are using his special chair or just lying down.
Whilst on this subject, does anyone else feel that their eyesight has suffered from working with computers. What can you do about it?
(directed to hardburn)
Here's how to do it.....!!!!!
A linked list consists of nodes connected by links :
| a |------->| b |------>| c |-->null
shit! that must be difficult!
(well, not really)
Look, if you want to get anywhere in life... just dive right in and work it out for yourself. Don't just look around and be content that because no-one else has a clue, you don't have to try.
Its OK not to have a clue, but its not OK to be content with it.
As it goes, CS undergraduates do learn general concepts like this (they get harder!!). This is so that no-one gets tied into any one technology. A concept can be applied anywhere with a little thought and study, but you can't compile Haskell using javac.
A university education is worth it;
1. for the experience (wine, women, wasting etc)
2. for a good "well rounded" view of the concepts
involved.
Its the old "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime" situation.
Snatch obviously means fanny.
on
'Snatch'
·
· Score: 1
Look, I had to reply...
Snatch obviously means fanny.
Just like I always keep my fags in the same drawer as my pants. (next to my socks)
ithankyou
jb
(P.S "snatch of the day" is a famous folk song in Blighty too. Honest to god, guvnor)
...Better red than dead.
(Its a joke)
It'll be a sad day when films get shown in class instead of real history (ie something closer to the truth). ESPECIALLY when the subject of the film is an event that was as sensitive to Amreican political sensibilities as the Cuban missile crisis. Take it as gospel at your peril, and remember that the Russian account of events is no less and no more valid than your own.
jb
I live in London... maybe not the "huge metropolis" of NYC or LA but I do think you're wrong about impersonality.
OK, in a small isolated community you may know everyone and you may rely on the owner of your local supermarket for you're food, but I argue that you will get to know just as many people if you live in a big city.
Although I don't claim to know everyone who lives within a mile of my house, I do know my immediate neighbors, my friends I met from school and from work, and various other locals. They make up my community, and they are always accessible to me on the phone or if I want to travel to their houses. And sometimes I do meet people in the street that I recognize.
You don't need to recognize anyone to feel like you belong somewhere - you just need to know where you can find your friends.
James Browne
from South London, the "teeming" metropolis
Mate of mine has bought three ps2 games now, but is getting the machine at christmas....to spread the cost....
twat
(Sorry if you're reading Will...;)
jb
Look at the issue of gene patents. The UK government is quite happy to allow biotech firms to patent genes - many British companies stand to make a lot of money from it. As soon as it starts to look like British firms will profit in the long term from software patenting, expect the government to do an abrupt about face.
If you get into this idea take a look at the URL below,
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/Research/ltr/index.html
If you can make our automatic marking systems more efficient ( friendly? ) , Nottingham students for years to come will worship the ground you walk on.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I promise, we play it exactly as I have written it. The fun bit is that when you are mafia, it is very diffucult to not be nervous and make mistakes. In effect, you can carry on with your normal conversation and try to trick people in to slipping up. Give it a go: it really works.
Other people in this thread have suggested other elements to the game, but we really do play it as is. A typical game with eight people will last half an hour or so. The more beer involved the longer the game takes, of course. And the higher the volume.
Thanks so much for that link! I wonder how the game found its way to Europe... One small point, we play with no moderator and no "seer" and no proscribed day and night phases.
Yeah, you are probably right: not suitable for offices unless it is VERY relaxed... Although, I have played in situations where as group of friends we introduce a stranger and it has always been a great way of making them feel less uncomfortable. I've never known anyone to be truly upset. I guess it depends what type of company you have.
I take your point about cultural offence. Real-life mafia are not part of our history in Britain, so please forgive me the transgression... You could choose any name, like Werewolves!
The greatest party game in the world... I'm sure everyone has one tho... It involves logic and psychological games and I think it is great for geeks.
It works best with more than 5 people people - so lets say you have 8. Take 8 slips of paper, write the letter "M" on three of them and "C" on five. The "M"s are mafia and the "C"s are citizens.
Then, on instruction (choose a games-master for this), everyone closes their eyes and when the games-master says "mafia open your eyes", the mafia do just that and see eachother. Everyone then closes their eyes, and then everyone opens their eyes at the same time. The object of this is that the mafia know who is a citizen and who is not, and that the citizens have no idea and consequently live in fear.
Then the game begins. People talk and interrogate eachother until someone announces they beleive that someone else is mafia. They can then call a vote to "kill-off" that person, and if the vote is carried he/she is out of the game and they have to reveal whether or not they were mafia. The object of the game for the mafia is to kill all the citizens, and for the citizens it is to stay alive until all the mafia are dead.
Give it a go - it really works. Lots of tension builds up and all sorts of weird mind-games happen....
Anyway, a summary, if you are interested, is that of the solutions proposed so far, most of them fall into a few categories:
Chorded keyboards: Think microwriter here, or a court reporter's typewriter. The idea is that you get around the small space available for keys by having a group of keys select each character; The microwriter only had four keys for the whole alphabet. The speed of input achievable is quite fast, but the interface is far from easy to learn.
Full key boards: Usually the complaint is that having all of the keys on one small device is no good for anyone with adult sized fingers.
Soft, or stylus input: This is just a touchscreen solution. You can either use a stylus - which is probably not convenient for a phone, or your fingers, where you are back to the problem of dealing with small or not enough keys.
Reduced keyboards: Where you use some method other than chording to input characters on a keyboard with fewer keys than letters in the alphabet(e.g. T9, multi-tap...)
This new device seems to fit in somewhere between a full keyboard and a chorded keyboard. The novel solution here is that you can fit a full keyboard on by using easy-to-learn chording to signify numbers.
...coincidentally made earlier today by Will Hutton (a British economist and newspaper editor) about the pointlessness of big money mergers like this.
He produces some very interesting statistics about how they almost always lose money, for example;
The article is really worth a read. Just ignore the, um, inflammatory title!Jon,
How about this for a solution. Do away with CourseMaster(the Nottingham automatic marking system), but also do away with the idea of grading code. Give everyone in the first year a personal coding mentor, and have a marking scheme based in the attendance of weekly meetings with the mentor and the completion of weekly assignments.
I say the standard doesn't matter, as long as the mentor has the skill to walk the student through his or her mistakes. This personal contact will also motivate the student to (at least) understand the code they are handing in, for fear of embararrassment.
Have the course a pass/fail, and I reckon that the standard of programs at the end of the course has to be better.
It certainly beats screaming at CourseMaster.
(of course it would be just too expensive to implement:)
jb
Yeah, diff is basically it. There is minimal statistical stuff, they simply strip the comments, change the identifiers to x and check for similarities in the structure. We have it at our uni. Hell, they even mark our programming (beginners stuff) automatically.
This is no news at all. All the students need do is change a few whiles and fors and they are in the clear...
Who cares? If you need to cheat on hello world then you really do have a problem...
Is that an implicit assumption that developers in China and India are unable to perform "creative" software development?
Its not quite the same deal as designing your clothes at Nike headquarters and manufacturing them in a Chinese sweatshop. You have to be a good programmer to do "routine" development as well. Indians are no less creative than Americans!
Just imagine a beowolf cluster of Turing machines...
wow.
Not publish your solution, go to the people in the know and use the knowledge to your advantage. Secretly rip of banks all over the world, bring down governments, get yourself in a position of power. The possibilities are endless.
There is also a chance that an agency such as the NSA or the British intelligence services have ALREADY found a solution. Just look at rsa, or how long the Brits kept enigma and their digital computers secret (predating ENIAC). Without a credible alternative to RSA at the moment it would be sensible for such an organisation to keep a solution secret.
Or have I just been watching too many spy films?
Don't look at the sky! You'll go blind and then be at the mercy of invading genetically engineered plants....! Its a ploy!
.....ok, I need some sleep....
Damn
I'll never pass as a yank....
Oh well
You can get these "back chairs" that you sort of kneel on, with your bum perched on a separate platform.
They seem to work - I don't get chronic back pain my self, but I do have a friend that suffers quite badly. His only options are using his special chair or just lying down.
Whilst on this subject, does anyone else feel that their eyesight has suffered from working with computers. What can you do about it?
(directed to hardburn)
Here's how to do it.....!!!!!
A linked list consists of nodes connected by links :
| a |------->| b |------>| c |-->null
shit! that must be difficult!
(well, not really)
Look, if you want to get anywhere in life... just dive right in and work it out for yourself. Don't just look around and be content that because no-one else has a clue, you don't have to try.
Its OK not to have a clue, but its not OK to be content with it.
As it goes, CS undergraduates do learn general concepts like this (they get harder!!). This is so that no-one gets tied into any one technology. A concept can be applied anywhere with a little thought and study, but you can't compile Haskell using javac.
A university education is worth it;
1. for the experience (wine, women, wasting etc)
2. for a good "well rounded" view of the concepts
involved.
Its the old "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime" situation.
Look, I had to reply...
Snatch obviously means fanny.
Just like I always keep my fags in the same drawer as my pants. (next to my socks)
ithankyou
jb
(P.S "snatch of the day" is a famous folk song in Blighty too. Honest to god, guvnor)
Um... Exactly what I wanted to say....
...Better red than dead. (Its a joke) It'll be a sad day when films get shown in class instead of real history (ie something closer to the truth). ESPECIALLY when the subject of the film is an event that was as sensitive to Amreican political sensibilities as the Cuban missile crisis. Take it as gospel at your peril, and remember that the Russian account of events is no less and no more valid than your own. jb
I live in London... maybe not the "huge metropolis" of NYC or LA but I do think you're wrong about impersonality.
OK, in a small isolated community you may know everyone and you may rely on the owner of your local supermarket for you're food, but I argue that you will get to know just as many people if you live in a big city.
Although I don't claim to know everyone who lives within a mile of my house, I do know my immediate neighbors, my friends I met from school and from work, and various other locals. They make up my community, and they are always accessible to me on the phone or if I want to travel to their houses. And sometimes I do meet people in the street that I recognize.
You don't need to recognize anyone to feel like you belong somewhere - you just need to know where you can find your friends.
James Browne
from South London, the "teeming" metropolis
Mate of mine has bought three ps2 games now, but is getting the machine at christmas....to spread the cost.... twat (Sorry if you're reading Will... ;)
jb
Cheers
jb
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/Research/ltr/index.html
If you can make our automatic marking systems more efficient ( friendly? ) , Nottingham students for years to come will worship the ground you walk on.