Edouard Chazal

How Do The Ghosts In Pac-Man Decide Where To Go ?

The mathematics behind Pac-Man and the ghosts chasing him :

Put simply, Blinky is programmed to target whichever tile Pac-Man currently occupies, giving the illusion that he’s chasing the player. As the game progresses, Blinky’s speed increases to the point that he becomes marginally faster than Pac-Man at which point he becomes what fans refer to as “Cruise Elroy”. The exact number of dots you need to consume for Blinky to become Cruise Elroy depends on which level you’re currently playing, with the overall number dropping the further you get into the game to the point that he will assume Cruise Elroy form when there are still 60 dots left on screen. Blinky will momentarily cease being Cruise Elroy whenever the player loses a life.

→ Today I Found Out

Is Photography the Best Deal in the Art Market?

From this vantage point, nope.

But I don’t think comparing both (a bubble and a niche market, except for a few odds like this expensive piece of sheet) makes much sense right now.

But to be fair, price irrationality isn’t the only factor for this asymmetry : a 19th-20th century painting is obviously more valuable then any photography will ever be.
So my guess is that to compare both mediums fairly, you need to be equally unfair, like this Bloomberg report, and reverse periods : the old masters of photography from the first half of the 20th (HCB, Klein, Brassaï) against 21th century contemporary painters.

Maybe that would help, maybe not —Chinese painting is quite expansive while worth it.

→ Bloomberg

The Kid’s A Natural

Father to son :

The fact that my son is showing a prosperous interest in the hobby that I love makes me, as a father, happy to see the future generation of model builders develop. Building models isn’t such a popular hobby anymore and I get that. But he sees me doing it and thinks it’s cool. I do realize that he’ll likely move on, like I did, and find other hobbies to enjoy. That’s perfectly okay. These initial builds will certainly mean more to me than him. He’s learning the ins and outs and at a very astute pace.

This remind me of an Alpha Jet I built when I was a kid. I enjoyed it quite a lot, my father not that much when I tainted his cherish desk, while painting the wings of the aircraft to the colors of the French national flag. Nonetheless, it leaves a lasting memory on its antique furniture —I guess.

→ Amateur Airplanes

Agressive HFT And Institutional Trading Activity – Who Leads Market Crashes ?

Hallelujah, high-frequency traders didn’t short the market that much :

Our analysis of trading on August 24, 2015, shows that while there were bursts of aggressive HFT activity during the sell-off, it was the institutional activity, not the HFT activity that led and dominated the sell-off. Specifically, the events have appeared to unfold as follows: institutions would sell particular securities, creating acute selling pressure in the markets. Aggressive HFTs would then step in and sell the market further, but only for a relatively short period of time.

→ Traders Magazine

The Age Of Loneliness

There’s just so much in this longform that I could not settle for just one or two paragraphs :

In the time I’d been gone, there had been a shift. Of course I had changed, and the trees had grown taller, but a greater swing—the kind that happens on a geological timescale of thousands or millions of years—was beginning to be widely acknowledged. Some scientists were becoming urgently vocal about the need to recognize that, in recent centuries, the world had entered a new epoch. They called it the Anthropocene. Planet Earth was now defined, they said, by the complete and utter dominance of human beings.

***

“It’s no longer us against ‘Nature,’” Paul Crutzen wrote in 2011. “Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be.”

My favorite part — I love birds :

I stared down at my charge at the bottom of the basket. It was just a bird, but a bird that couldn’t be found anywhere on the East Coast forty years earlier, when DDT was so abundant that every falcon nest failed, the eggshells thinned beyond survival. This bird was hope. There in a room far above the famous Riverside Church sanctuary that gives so many people a place to put their faith, I looked into the bird’s dark eyes and found a place for my own.

A beautiful conclusion by Meera Subramanian. My thanks to her for this remarquable journey :

There is no trail going forward. We have to follow the lay of the land. We need to remember that when we leave the woods, it is not so easy to find our way back.

Credit : Steve McCurry, Canada

→ Guernica Magazine