Keith Douglas' Web Page
| About me | Find out who I am and what I do. |
| My resumé | A copy of my resumé and other documentation about my education and work experience for employers and the curious. |
| Reviews, theses, articles, presentations | A collection of papers from my work, categorized and annotated. |
| Current research projects | What I am currently working on, including some non-research material. |
| Interesting people | People professionally "connected" to me in some way. |
| Interesting organizations | Organizations I am "connected" to. (Some rather loosely.) |
| Intellectual/professional influences | Influences on my work, including an organization chart. Here you can also buy many good books on philosophy and other subjects via amazon.com. I have included brief reviews of hundreds of books. |
| Professional resources | Research sources, amazon.com associates programs, etc. |
| What is the philosophy of computing? | A brief introduction to my primary professional interest. |
| My intellectual heroes | A partial list of important people. Limited to the dead. |
| My educational philosophy | As a sometime teacher I've developed one. Includes book resources. |
Book Influences - Gaming
|
Title |
Author |
Purchase / Enjoy Cover |
Comment |
| Games of the World | Spescha | I think this is the UNICEF book I have. Very lavishly illustrated book of games from around the world, including chess, fox and geese, shogi, wari and others. | |
| Rules of the Game | Midgeley | An illustrated description of many of the world's sports. There's a sport called Korfball? Who knew? (Well, I didn't, until I read through this book.) I am not sure if this is the right book I am linking to - it is certainly a much later edition than mine in any case. (The rules for ice hockey, for example, no longer reflect NHL or international rules.) | |
| The Ethics of Computer Games | Sicart | A pioneering work on a welcome topic. Unfortunately, because the work is in a new area, the standards of writing and argumentation aren't up to snuff. A shame; one would want more analysis of specific games, design techniques, etc. and less repetition about what is going to be done. The approaches themselves have some promise, though I have my usual skepticism about hermeneutics being applied outside of literal texts. Here, a game typically has a story, so perhaps the approach isn't far fetched, but the details are sorely missing. The other principle ingredient of the analysis, virtue ethics, fairs a little better, emphasizing the not-quite-duality of the character in the game and the player playing it. | |
| The Hidden Logic of Sudoku | Berthier | This dense monograph examines several "resolution rules" and their effects on the solvability of Sudoku puzzles. The rules are chosen to avoid trial and error and organized roughly in complexity. An interesting (and in my limited experience) novel approach to many of the rules emphasizes how Sudoku is really a three dimensional puzzle (row, column, number). That might explain why I have trouble visualizing some of the principles. Alas, a lot of the book is just illustration and not much analysis. Computational complexity results do come up - stating that the generalized Sudoku resolution is NP complete. But this is of little interest if one is only ever playing the 9x9x9 game. It is also interesting to see how the "resolution rules" change if one changes the (usual) assumption that the puzzle has a solution. If one is agnostic, certain do not apply. In my view, the next work in this area should focus on mistakes in the game, and how they can be characterized logically. This is where the semi-silly idea of "paraconsistent Sudoku" I shared with my dear friend Audrey Yap comes in. |
Finished with this section? Go back to the list of book subjects here.