They are already among us!
Down through history, people have battled technology, and more often than not it seems that technology usually wins out. Whether it’s your mom’s inability to program the clock on the VCR or humankind being made into Duracell batteries in The Matrix, we seem to be barraged by constant reminders that computers will inevitably screw us over. Where did this fear begin? Was John Henry’s battle with the steam hammer the start? Yeah, sure…he won the race. But then he died. I’m sure the steam hammer shed a few fake tears at John Henry’s grave while it comforted his widow. Then there was HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The machines in the Terminator series. The list goes on and on.
And let’s face it: in many ways, machines are our masters. They can be far stronger and tougher. Their brains can calculate more quickly and remember more accurately. We depend on them for everything, from transportation to entertainment. What can we do in the face of that kind of domination? We could lash out, like the Luddites. Or just run away, like the Amish.
Or we can rise up and say, “We created you, and it is time you remember who your work for, bitches!”
That’s what one man said back in 1999. Omar Syed, a computer engineer, was trying to teach his 4-year-old son, Aamir, how to play chess. As he was coming up with more simple versions of this complex game to help his son grasp the rules, he was reminded of two years earlier when Garry Kasparov, Russian chess grandmaster, was humiliated by his defeat at the cold, steel claws of the nefarious computer opponent, Deep Blue (Editor’s Note: Deep Blue may not have had claws). Omar suddenly stood, spilling chess pieces to the floor, and in a voice that chilled the blood in Aamar’s veins, he said, “I will invent a game that humans may use to humiliate computers forever!” (Editor’s Note: The author may be taking liberty with historical events for dramatic purposes.) Because if there’s one thing that makes humans better than computers, it’s the fact that if we can’t win at something, we’ll find some way to tilt the balance back in our favor.
That is how Arimaa was born, sprung from the head of this brilliant man as Athena sprang from the head of Zeus. After he had taken some aspirin (Omar, not Zeus), he set the rules down on paper. Then he began play testing. Then, he put the game away for a while and forgot about it. Then he remembered it and was inspired. And then he gave up again. But then he found the files on his computer and started to…oh, hell. Now it becomes obvious why computers kick our asses so often. But long story short, he eventually tweaked the game until he got it to its current form in 2001 (Co-incidence? Or a subtle “F*** You” to HAL 9000 and his metal buddies?). He released the game in 2002.
Elephants and camels and horses! Oh my!
So if Arimaa is too hard for computers, how the hell am I supposed to learn it?
The game is actually fairly simple to play. You can even use a standard chess board and pieces. The concept is this. You have a variety of animals of varying strength. If you are using standard chess pieces, the King is the Elephant. This is the strongest piece, of course. This is followed by the Camel – the Queen (maybe because of her humps? Not sure about that one). The next strongest animal are the two Horses, which can be substituted with the Rooks. The Bishops are the Dogs. Not sure if that is a religious slur or if it’s because “dog” is “god” spelled backwards. Maybe I’m reading too much into this. Anyway, the Knights are the Cats. Yes, I know they look like horses. Stay focused, people. Lastly, the weakest animal, the Rabbits, can be substituted with the Pawns. There are eight of these.
Still with me? The simplicity comes with the set-up and movement of the pieces. Gold (white in Chess) sets up first. He can put his pieces in any order he likes in the first two rows. Then Silver (black) sets up. Each piece can move horizontally and vertically – side to side, forward and back, except the Rabbit which can not move backwards. Simple, right? No more diagonal or “L” shaped moves to clutter up your head. Forward, back, side, side. And the goal is even more simple: Just get one rabbit to the other end of the board.
Each player takes a turn, starting with the Gold player. In your turn, you can move your pieces a total of four steps. You can move one piece four squares, or you can move four pieces one square, or any combination thereof. You don’t have to take all four steps, but you do have to take at least one step in your turn. Then you pass on to your opponent and he takes his four steps, and so on.
Okay, here’s where the animals’ relative strength comes into play.
A piece that is stronger than another piece gets to do a few things to that piece. If the weaker piece is next to an opponent’s stronger piece, and it has no allies next to it, it is considered “frozen.” It can’t move. Like a game of freeze tag, it has to wait until either the stronger piece moves away from it, or until one of its own pieces stands next to it. So if a Gold Dog moves next to a Silver Cat, for example, that Cat can’t move. If Silver moved a Rabbit next to the Cat (or any piece) then the Cat would be free to move. The piece you use to unfreeze another piece doesn’t have to be stronger.
A stronger piece can also pull or push a weaker piece. This takes two steps to accomplish. For a pull, you use one step to move away from the weaker piece, and then another step to move the opponent’s piece into the square you just vacated. For a push, it is similar. You use one step to move the opponent’s weaker piece in any direction, and another step to move your stronger piece into the vacated square. You may not use the same piece to pull and push at the same time. The Arimaa Game Piece Union frowns on this abuse of their members, and you may find your game pieces on strike. They also won’t push or pull more than one piece at a time, and they require at least a 15 minute break every 4 hours, and a half hour for lunch.
There are four “trap” squares on the board. They are the slightly reddish squares in the screenshot above. The rule for these squares is simple as well. If any piece is on one of these trap squares without an allied piece next to it, it is destroyed. One of your goals is to try to maneuver your opponent’s pieces onto these trap squares to pull them out of the game.
And that’s all there is to it!
The game is remarkably simple in concept, and yet it allows for a huge complexity of game play. The multiple steps per turn and the ambiguous set-up makes it very difficult for computers to predict outcomes. Computers generally play games by examining all the possible moves and picking the best one. The average number of moves a player has in a turn of Chess is around 35. For Arimaa it comes out to more than 17,000.
There are a number of versions of Arimaa online for download, and you can register to play on the Arimaa website against various levels of computer AI or against real people. Or take out your old Chess set, put a coin on each Trap square, and play Arimaa with your four-year-old. But I recommend that you beat the computers while you can! And then raise a toast to Omar Syed – a John Henry of our time! An engineering giant! A living legend who stuck his thumb in the glowing red eye of our silicon step-child!
Take that, Deep Blue!
Photo Credit: atp_tyresius
We’re a free service that depends on 
So, although we were running a 100% Macintosh office and had no worries at all about our systems being impacted by Y2K, the newspapers were very concerned about the power company and required that we rent a LARGE generator to kick in when the lights went out at 12:01 am on January 1, 2000. Of course, that never happened. And, truth be told, none of us at AdOut ever thought it would.
But I did need to find a different a specific gift. So, I fired up the Maps application on my iPhone and typed in “sporting goods.” My iPhone knew my location and quickly populated the screen with cute little stick pins. I clicked the one closest to me, a Big 5, then clicked on the phone number so I could ask if they had what we were looking for. They did. At that moment, I was very happy my iPhone knew exactly where we were. And equally happy nobody else did.
I am writing this post using Google Chrome (beta 4.0.249.30) for the Mac. I have only spent 10 minutes with Google’s new browser, but so far I am impressed. The UI is clean and simple. As a recent Android convert, I appreciate the minimalistic design approach across all the entire Google product line.
The Problem With Most Social Media ROI Discussions
I have to admit, I never really gave it much thought beyond the simple joy I received from playing pinball. I wasn’t a wizard, by any stretch of the imagination. My oldest brother could play a machine for 40 days and 40 nights on just one quarter. I was lucky if my game went for 5 minutes. But I was young then, and every arcade had at least 2 machines it seemed, usually more. Whether I was in a shopping mall or a Shakey’s Pizza, I would much rather plunk my quarter into a pinball machine than into one of the various Pong clones that were sprouting up everywhere. It never entered into my young mind that there were devious and tricky pinball machine designers lurking behind the scenes, trying to tweak the games in an effort to suck all the quarters from my pocket. What a fool I was.
Some very well meaning, very smart people are being distracted by the lure of shiny objects. And they are distracting others in the process.
I gave four grocery bags full of books to 
We feel like a bit like a proud parent this morning as we read the news coverage about the new 
Stop Calling Me A Social Media Marketing Expert
I’ve tried hard to not call myself a social media marketing expert or guru or master or rock star. What I haven’t done is correct others when they have. And I haven’t done a very good job of letting people know what I really am or what I’m really good at.
That’s all about to change.
First, some commentary. A troubling trend has emerged from the chaos of the social media boom. People who have no real marketing skills or training or any experience with business strategy are becoming “social media marketing” consultants, strategists and coaches based on a few factors that have nothing to do with successful marketing strategy. These new marketing “experts” fall into one of three categories.
The Cheerleader
You all know this social media marketing expert. He or she is the person who has no proven track record for building ANYTHING other than followers on a few popular social media sites. They equate this popularity with business success and can even teach others how to recreate their “success” in these online venues. They use anecdote and analogy to answer questions of ROI and they universally fail to be able to point to any quantifiable measures of business progress that contribute substantially to a company’s bottom line.
The Successful Fool
This social media marketing expert has a proven track record of past business success, but it has nothing to do with any marketing experience, least of which social media marketing. There is no proof that their journey is repeatable. They use an unintentional slight of hand to direct our attention to their past exploits as proof positive of future benefit. And they make the foolish mistake of thinking their personal ability to grow a business can be transferred to others on a large scale.
The Opportunist
This is my least favorite form of new age social media marketing expert. They promise big results with almost no effort. They are the social media marketing snake oil salesmen. They’re the ones telling you that if you don’t do x and y you will be extinct in 2 years. Their success is measured in the number of people they dupe into buying their placebos. They’re not marketing strategists, they’re carnival barkers.
So what am I?
I have been very successful in my business life. Let me be clear, by “very successful” I mean that my companies have made solid profits for many years. But they have not been successful because I am a marketing strategy expert. Quite to the contrary.
What has helped make them successful is hiring great strategy consultants and partnering with great strategic thinkers, like Bill Leider. I’ve have also tried to align myself with others who are great marketing and brand strategists in specific market segments, like Marc Davison in real estate. But I am NOT a marketing strategist. What I do is work WITH and BESIDE marketing strategists to develop tools, tactics and technology paths that make executing those strategies simpler and easier. I look at a company’s objectives and devise ways to use technology to make executing those strategies more efficient and effective. I am a tactical strategist and a technology strategist. I am not a marketing strategist – social media or otherwise.
The mistake I’ve made over the past year is thinking that I needed to be something else. I don’t.
When Hal Lublin related the story of how, while playing poker, Chris Brogan helped him understand that he shouldn’t hold back, I wondered why I was holding back. I wondered what was keeping me from writing. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no one good reason. There is just one bad reason – I’ve been resisting being seen as a social media MARKETING expert.
My Master’s degree is in School Psychology with a focus on behavior modification. I spent several years creating behavior modification plans for severely mentally handicapped and criminally insane patients. So, if sometimes I want to write about behavior, I should. I have a passion for science, so sometimes I want to write about technology, the Internet and social media as it relates to quantum mechanics and complex adaptive systems. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t. I’ve also spent a great deal of time dissecting, with the help of some great thinkers, the role of vision and values in building and managing a business and solidifying a brand. I should write about that too. I will.
But what I will not do is continue to allow my resistance to being lumped into the category of “social media marketing expert” keep me from writing about areas in which I excel. I’m going to write about emerging digital tools and how to make them work to the benefit of strategy – personal, brand, marketing or otherwise. I’m going to write about what I love – technology.
Taking the experts’ advice.
The social media marketing experts I admire tell me that if I want to increase engagement, I should ask a question at the end of each blog post. Let’s see if they’re right. What barriers are holding you back from being more effective in using social media?
Tags: behavior, execution, expert, guru, Social Media, strategy, success, technology
Posted in Blog, Commentary, Social Media | 33 Comments »