Toni Westbrook dot Com

The Joy of Computer Science and Engineering

A Fun Activity to Share

One of the interests my girlfriend and I share is our love of gaming, specifically retro gaming. She did a lot of Genesis gaming when she was a kid, while I was exposed mainly to C64 and Nintendo gaming, so we have a fun time sharing our favorites with the other and playing through them together. It’s a pretty relaxing and fun way to spend a rainy Saturday. Recently, we decided to tackle Sega’s Quackshot.

Quackshot Specifications

Quackshot was released in 1991 for the MegaDrive/Genesis. It’s a single player game featuring Donald Duck and many of Disney’s Ducktales characters in a platform style adventure.

The game was also released in 1998 for the Sega Saturn. We played the Genesis version on the Fusion Genesis emulator.

Overview

The story of Quackshot features Donald finding a treasure map in one of Scrooge McDuck’s old books, and deciding to set out to find said treasure. Big Bad Pete overhears this and decides to try to stop/steal the treasure from Donald. Donald flies from location to location with the help of Huey, Duey, and Louie who pilot the airplane (why not Launchpad I wonder?). The game is definitely reminiscent of Indiana Jones, and features many of the same scenes (Running from boulder ala Raiders, making a leap of faith across a chasm ala Last Crusade, mine carts ala Temple, etc).

Donald makes use of a plunger he fires from a gun as a weapon, which later can be upgraded to provide different abilities, such as sticking to walls. He also has a popcorn gun which can destroy enemies, and a bubble gum gun that can destroy blocks (makes sense!).

Thoughts

I’m a fan of side-scrolling platformers in general – especially old school 2D ones, just because they’re simple but can be challenging, especially when crazy pit jumping or enemy dodging is involved. I enjoyed this one as well – the difficulty level wasn’t bad (though we were using a game genie code), we cleared it under an hour or two (can’t remember exactly), but it wasn’t an overly long time. I both like Ducktales characters and Indiana Jones as well, so this game made the perfect combination.

There wasn’t a lot going on in this game – which is not a bad thing. There was a little puzzle solving, but one part I found especially annoying was the Maharajah’s Palace stage, in which you’re trapped in a maze of rooms connected by mirrors. You need to choose the right combination of mirrors to advance to the boss or else you’ll just keep retracing your steps over and over. Maybe the correct sequence was mentioned somewhere in the game, but we missed it – we had to look it up.

The last boss wasn’t bad – if you know his strategy he’s extremely easy to beat, especially as there’s a location on the screen you can’t be hit if you know the pattern. This is either good or bad depending on if you like a big challenge for the last guy. I thought he was pretty cool though, a knight just like at the end of Last Crusade.

Overall

I recommend this game if you’re looking for a fun little platformer to play and enjoy Disney characters. There’s nothing revolutionary going on in this game, but it’s colorful and fun, and the music is not bad – it’s enjoyable. And if Donald eats a bunch of Chili peppers he goes nuts and runs across the screen, invincible to enemies, that part is a HOOT. And there were a few other Disney games released by Sega at this time (reviews on those later!) so you can keep filling that cartoon video game hunger when you’re done with this one. Hurray!

Lots of exclamation marks up there!

The Big Project Done

First off, I’m back to blogging after a 2-3 week hiatus finishing up fairly large programming project for work. The site has launched and things have (mostly) wrapped up. I’m glad to have done it for the experience, both the project itself and the issues that can go along with a large project, but I can’t explain how relieved I am to be done with it as well. I’ve read many horror stories concerning crunch time at dev houses (some of my favorites concerning projects at Commodore in On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore, READ this book if you haven’t) – and while this one wasn’t a “pitch a sleeping bag under your desk for two weeks” kind of scenario, it was definitely a working into the wee hours of the morning for a while kind of deal. But it’s over, I had a very relaxing weekend of some serious video game playing, and I’m rested up for…

My New Job!

I will be starting as network administrator for Manchester Boston Regional Airport next week. I’m sad to be leaving friends at work, but I’m extremely psyched for the job. I’m a programmer and CS guy to the core, but there is a huge piece of me that misses network administration and working with a team managing infrastructure, and an airport seems like such an awesome environment to do it in. Plus, programming all day, sometimes you can get a little burnt out by the end of the day and not want to look at code at all. This has been a bummer in the past, because there are a lot of times when I want to work on private projects or blog related stuff, but have just been too pooped. Hopefully this will help that a bit. Trying to find the perfect balance.

PSX64

Lastly – I had opened up the Synthetic Dreams store to sell a small batch of PSX64s left over from conventions, and they sold out before I got a chance to advertise them. I will be putting in an order with the fab house on Wednesday, and soldering them up as soon as I get them. Look for the store to reopen with stock in the next 4 weeks. I apologize for the long wait, unfortunately it’s tough to turn out the boards as fast as I’d like to with full-time work and the time it takes to make the boards. But they are indeed coming!

Hanging on the wall of my cubicle at work, I have quite a number of geek related items, from web comics involving SQL jokes to a detailed mechanical diagram of K-9 from Doctor Who. Always in my field of vision, though, are some small photos of my computer science heroes. It’s not surprising that many non-geeks haven’t heard of these people – but it is sad. Most people know media stars like Tom Cruise, Eminem, and Michael Jordan, who are rightfully talented in their fields – but mention John von Neumann, Max Planck, or Kurt Gödel, and most won’t have heard of them. This is a shame, because it is the mathematicians, scientists, and engineers of history who have made many things we now enjoy possible. Given that we live in a place that gives an average salary of 2.7 million dollars to baseball players, it’s nice to at least recognize the people that make an incalculable impact on life.

The Man, The Legend

One of these people, regarded as the father of Computer Science, is one of my biggest heroes, and goes by the name Alan Turing. Born in 1912, Turing started life off in a world that had never seen a finished computer. The field of mathematical logic was new and fresh, with the work of mathematicians like Boole, De Morgan, Peano, and Hilbert (among others) paving the way for computation theory and algorithms.

WWII Work

Turing made contribution after contribution not only in this new field of Computer Science, but also to the world as a whole. During World War II he was a cryptanalyst, designing a device and doing work that would decipher encoded German communications, giving the Allies a key advantage.

Artificial Intelligence

Turing also had a keen interest in the ideas of computation and intelligence, and how the two related, ideas that would later found the area known as Artificial Intelligence. He developed the Turing Test which addresses, at its roots, that there is no distinction between intelligence and something that acts truly intelligent. It was a concept that is still not even truly accepted today by all; an effort in logic to dispel the idea that intelligence is somehow ineffable.

The Turing Machine

From pattern work with the mathematics of biology, to theory of computation, Turing gave more and more to the community. One of his biggest contributions (and my favorite part of his work), an idea that continues to pervade every inch of a computer from hardware to operating system to software, from a word processor to a video game emulator, is that of the Turing Machine. Some (like myself) would go so far as to say it pervades every aspect of the Universe.

More on This Concept

To give some background, the idea of a Turing Machine is a simple machine that can perform algorithms to compute a value. The idea of a Universal Turing Machine is one that can compute any Turing Machine, and hence anything computable, including OTHER Universal Turing Machines. This is what a computer is – it is a device that can, given enough time, compute anything that can be computed. Not only that, but since computers are themselves computable (i.e. computers work algorithmically), any computer can emulate any OTHER computer. This is proven all the time, from video game emulators, to Java, .NET, and virtual machines (including my Gruepal project!). The Turing machine speaks to the heart of Functionalism, which is that it is not the “stuff” that matters, but the function the “stuff” performs. E.g. you can make a calculator out of silicon chips, steam through pipes and valves, or virtually on a computer (e.g. doesn’t physically exist at all), but it still adds 2+7 the same, as long as the functionality is intact.

I won’t jump too far off course from Turing, but I can’t stress how important this concept is, and one that I guarantee we will continue to discover more about in the decades to come. In a sense, the human brain is very much a Universal Turing Machine (though fallible), as you could, mentally or on paper, emulate any computer or machine algorithmically – as many programmers do constantly every day in their line of work. And with the Universe giving rise to everything, all Turing machines, and having a tendency to recurse, there is a good chance (some will say), that this whole great ball of wax is just one big Universal Turing Machine recursing over and over into other Universal Turing Machines. It is one of the reasons I tell people that Computer Science has more to do with the Universe itself than any pile of microchips.

The Final Years

Regardless of how deep or far the philosophy goes though, there can be no denying the role Alan Turing played in the mathematics behind computability and computers. His absolutely life changing work was rewarded by his government giving him the choice of imprisonment or estrogen injections when it was found out he was homosexual. Homosexuality was still illegal in the UK at this time, and though he had literally helped save the world only a few years before, this meant nothing in the light that he was attracted to men. After the effects of the hormones and ostracism from the life he knew, he committed suicide by eating an cyanide laced apple.

I remember the first time reading the details about Turing’s death, and how just pissed off and horrified I was about the whole thing. You’d think times had changed since Galileo, but they were still going strong in 1952. It is a relief, though, that since then he has become such an honored person, with a prestigious award and many memorials named after him.

Respect

So here’s a most humble, awe-filled, respectful shout out to my hero, Alan Mathison Turing. I would be proud to be 1/100th the Computer Scientist he was.