Alexander Williams

Collective choice systems have been around for a long time. Since at least the birth of democracy in ancient Greece people have made joint decisions about important issues, and since at least the knightly tournaments of the late Middle Age more...

“It was not about escape, I wanted to tell Mr. Spector, thus unwittingly plagiarizing in advance the well-known formula of a (fictitious) pioneer and theorist of superhero comics, Sam Clay. It was about transformation.”

There’s an interesting kerfluffle going on regarding the scaling woes that Twitter.com is going through, especially since it’s built on Ruby On Rails. Here’s the original interview with one of the Twitter coders, the somewhat evasive reply by the lead more...

The basic problem is always the same: you can achieve anything in a MMORPG given enough time. But some people just don't have that much time. Conveniently people with little time usually have not much time to play because they more...

The physics and theory of vortex rings.

When does the good of the player base in general trump your "safety zone" in never failing?