Fifth Aeon – A.I Competition and Balancer

Collectible Card Games (CCG) are one of the most popular types of games in both digital and physical space. Despite their popularity, there is a great deal of room for exploration into the application of artificial intelligence in order to enhance CCG gameplay and development. This paper presents Fifth Aeon a novel and open source CCG built to run in browsers and two A.I applications built upon Fifth Aeon. The first application is an artificial intelligence competition run on the Fifth Aeon game. The second is an automatic balancing system capable of helping a designer create new cards that do not upset the balance of an existing collectible card game. The submissions to the A.I competition include one that plays substantially better than the existing Fifth Aeon A.I with a higher winrate across multiple game formats. The balancer system also demonstrates an ability to automatically balance several types of cards against a wide variety of parameters. These results help pave the way to cheaper CCG development with more compelling A.I opponents

Negotiating with a logical-linguistic protocol in a dialogical framework

This book is the result of years of reflection. Some time ago, while working in commodities, the author felt how difficult it was to decide the order in which to use arguments during a negotiation process. What would happen if we translated the arguments into cards and played them according to the rules of the Bridge game? The results were impressive. There was potential for improvement in the negotiation process. The investigation went deeper, exploring players, cards, deals and the information concealed in the players´ announcements, in the cards and in the deals. This new angle brought the research to NeuroLinguistic Patterns and cryptic languages, such as Russian Cards. In the following pages, the author shares her discovery of a new application for Logical Dialogues: Negotiations, tackled from basic linguistic structures placed under a dialogue form as a cognitive system which ‘understands’ natural language, with the aim to solve conflicts and even to serve peace

A geometric protocol for cryptography with cards

In the generalized Russian cards problem, the three players Alice, Bob and Cath draw a,b and c cards, respectively, from a deck of a+b+c cards. Players only know their own cards and what the deck of cards is. Alice and Bob are then required to communicate their hand of cards to each other by way of public messages. The communication is said to be safe if Cath does not learn the ownership of any specific card; in this paper we consider a strengthened notion of safety introduced by Swanson and Stinson which we call k-safety. An elegant solution by Atkinson views the cards as points in a finite projective plane. We propose a general solution in the spirit of Atkinson's, although based on finite vector spaces rather than projective planes, and call it the `geometric protocol'. Given arbitrary c,k>0, this protocol gives an informative and k-safe solution to the generalized Russian cards problem for infinitely many values of (a,b,c) with b=O(ac). This improves on the collection of parameters for which solutions are known. In particular, it is the first solution which guarantees $k$-safety when Cath has more than one card

Your money matters evaluation: money management for older people

The National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy (NRDC) was commissioned by Help the Aged to evaluate Your Money Matters, a free, confidential and impartial money advice service for older people run by Help the Aged in partnership with Barclays. Your Money Matters was launched in 2006. The three-year funding partnership with Barclays ended in April 2009

The use of the "Once-Upon-A-Time…" Test in treatment outcome assessment

In an era in which the advent of managed health care is questioning the value of traditional psychological assessment, we discuss the role of the "Once-upon-a-time…" Test in treatment outcome assessment. The "Once upon a time..." Test (Fagulha, 1992, 1997) is a storytelling projective technique whose purpose is to describe the way children deal with the emotions of anxiety and pleasure. In psychodynamic theories, these emotions have an important adaptive function for psychological development (Freud, 1926/1978; Klein, 1932/1969). The “Once upon a time..." Test task is to complete seven stories which are presented as pictures in a cartoon format. Each story depicts common situations in the life of any child that evoke emotions of anxiety and of pleasure. Five cards refer to anxiety provoking situations and two refer to pleasurable experiences. For each card there are nine scenes that represent different possible ways of dealing with the emotional experience evoked by the card. These scenes are grouped into three categories of three scenes each – the Anxiety category (A), the Fantasy category (F) and the Reality category (R). The child is asked to complete the story drawn on the card by selecting and then placing three of these nine scenes in sequence. The categories of the scenes chosen by the child and the sequences organized with these scenes reflect the way children deal with their emotions, anxiety and pleasure, in a transitional space (Winnicott, 1971/1975) between fantasy and reality. After selecting and placing the scenes in sequence, the child tells the story that he/she has just invented. Although the majority of the studies done on the "Once upon a time..." Test have been centered on the analysis of the chosen scenes, according to their category (Anxiety, Fantasy and Reality) and their placement in sequence (in the first, second or third position), a complementary coding system was developed afterwards. This system involves the study of the arranged sequences based on the nine scenes available for each card, and not only the three categories (Pires & Fagulha, 2001). According to this system, the arranged sequences based on the nine scenes available for each card correspond to four different possible ways of facing anxiety and confronting with it. There is a strategy that represents the non-recognition of the painful emotion – Denial –, and three strategies that involve the recognition of this disturbing affect, corresponding to two distinct ways of coping with it – Operational Adaptive Strategy and Emotional Equilibration Strategy – and to one other that proves to be inefficient in dealing with it – Impossibility. The studies done with both coding systems have come to the same conclusion: the patterns of answers reflect differences in ages. As children mature they are able to master anxiety in a more active and efficient manner. In the coding system category of the scenes chosen and their position in the sequence, this developmental achievement is seen through a tendency to respond to anxious situations by choosing scenes that show either anxiety or reality in the first position of the sequence. There is also a progressive decrease in choice of anxiety scenes for story endings corresponding to an increase in the choice of reality or fantasy scenes. As children mature, fantasy scenes in first position of the sequence are less chosen because they reflect the denial of the distress reflected in the card (Fagulha, 1992, 1997, 2000) Regarding the complementary coding system sequences of scenes, the higher degree of emotional stability allows children to deal with anxious situations through adaptive strategies, such us Operational Adaptive Strategy and Emotional Equilibration Strategy. Denial of the anxiety and Impossibility to deal with it are strategies less used by mature children (Pires & Fagulha, 2001) In view of these empirical data is our aim to analyze and discuss a child pattern of answers to the "Once upon a time..." Test at two different moments of her psychotherapeutic process, at treatment initiation and then again to make a decision about treatment termination. We expect to give an account of the "Once upon a time..." Test potentialities to the objective evaluation of the results of child psychotherapy

The Dutch Underground in Barneveld—Occupation to Liberation

This is an account of the activities of the Dutch Underground in the area of Barneveld as given to Captain R.T. Currelly, 1st Canadian Field Historical Section, by the District Commander of Barneveld and another official in the same area in May 1945

Spartan Daily, October 10, 1941

Volume 30, Issue 12https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/3332/thumbnail.jp