Want to be entered to win a free pack of Sifteo cubes? Read on!

Back in December, the Children’s Creativity Museum hosted a Sifteo cube giveaway contest—participants were asked to come up with a creative application of Sifteo cubes and submit an illustration to explain their idea.

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been in touch with the big winner, Jackson (8), and his mother, Judith. We found their Sifteo story very inspirational, and we were excited to share it with you when they gave us permission to post it here on our blog.

It started one day when Judith sat down to surf the web; she was looking for ways to encourage her son to do something fun and sociable with technology. Sifteo cubes came up in her search, and coincidentally the contest at the Children’s Creativity Museum was going on.

Judith proposed that Jackson think about how he’d like to use Sifteo cubes, and she was thrilled to see Jackson’s intense interest in the project and the process required to submit his entry.

“During the contest, he was an active participant in all aspects, from concept to drawing, then on to scanning in his drawing to uploading it to the Children’s Creativity Museum’s Facebook page,” she said.

Jackson described his idea (pictured below) to his mother: “I would like to build molecules out of atoms,” and exemplified by saying, “when an H2O molecule bonds, it creates water and that shows up in the cube.” He even considered design elements and explained his illustration: “the water [shown on the cubes] is for decoration.”

We agree with the Children’s Creativity Museum, which selected Jackson as the winning contestant on December 21st, that this was a pretty fantastic idea. Of course, we had to ask—what was it like when Jackson found out the good news??

“When we checked the page and saw that he had won, he was extremely excited and very proud! It was hard for him to wait for the Sifteo cubes to arrive; he kept asking me to check the mail,” Judith said. “This is a huge confidence builder and it has a lasting impact.”

We are so happy to have partnered with the Children’s Creativity Museum to be able to reward Jackson’s ingenuity. And what’s more, it sounds like we’ve inadvertently catalyzed something even bigger for Jackson and Judith, who have downloaded the Software Developer’s Kit since receiving their Sifteo cubes and have both begun to learn how to code. Sounds like they’re well on their way to making Jackson’s molecule game a reality!

When Sifteo heard what was happening, we got to thinking about the awesome, transmissible powers of creativity and enthusiasm—and we wanted to keep the momentum going. Sifteo is hosting its own Facebook contest to give away another set of cubes.

To participate, “Like” Sifteo on Facebook and look on our wall for more information about the contest.

Good luck!

And thank you, Jackson, Judith, and the Children’s Creativity Museum for your inspiration.

As for the molecules game—we can’t wait .

Live in the San Francisco Bay Area? Want to help shape the future of Sifteo? Become a part of the Sifteo PlayLab! PlayLab members get a sneak peek at the latest games and projects in the works at Sifteo HQ by participating in 30- to 60-minute play sessions and providing feedback. Sifteo will use your insights to guide the future development of the cubes. We’re especially looking for smart kids ages 8-12 to check out our product, but everyone is welcome to participate!

To join the PlayLab, please take the following survey: https://docs.google.com/a/sifteo.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGQyOFVCRVl3b3g3WFFzbUw4c0R3X2c6MQ

Want to pick up a full set of 6 Sifteo cubes for a possibly way-discounted price? Read on!

Sifteo has donated 3 sets of cubes to a silent auction in support of the students at the International Studies Academy (ISA), a small public school instructing grades 6 – 12, right here in our neighborhood in Potrero Hill.

ISA is special because it is committed to teaching with international relations and global diversity as core curricular components. With the intention of expanding their students’ perspectives, teachers plan excursions abroad for them each year. These trips are significant and often transformative experiences for the young travelers, most of whom have never left the state, let alone the country.

Chris Cary, ISA teacher of U.S. history, U.S. government, and economics, explained that the proceeds from the auction will help fund these international educational experiences.

“ISA serves a challenging student population. Most of the students live in the Hunter’s Point/Bayview area and experience poverty,” Cary said. “This year, our students will be traveling to Ghana to examine the origins and effect of the slave trade, to Panama to experience Latin American culture and the biological diversity of the tropics, to Germany, where they will reciprocate home stays with the students whom they hosted in October of last year, and to Washington, D.C., where students will see the nation’s capital and meet their representatives.”

When Sifteoans learned about this remarkable program, we agreed that the ISA studies abroad are a worthy cause; we were excited to pitch in and make a donation of Sifteo cubes. We thought it was a nicely appropriate auction item to support such a creative approach to education.

We asked Cary if he will be traveling with the students this year.

“I’m leading the D.C. trip for the second time,” he said. “I’m excited to introduce the travelers, most of whom are recent immigrants, to the government and its institutions.”

Rock on, ISA.

If you’re in the area, we hope to see you at the auction! The fund-raising event is from 6:30-8:30 pm TONIGHT (January 20) at the Rutter Center, USCF Mission Bay Campus. FYI, tasty appetizers and drinks will be served.

In our last blog post, we reported back about Sifteo co-founder Dave Merrill’s contribution to a panel discussion at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The panel was about games on emerging platforms and involved some very interesting, high-tech stuff, like gesture recognition, 3D graphics, and augmented reality. The panelists also covered ground like the history of video games and the changing nature of social gaming today.

While Sifteo loves to talk tech and gaming, we also like to cut loose and have a crazy good time. And since we were nominated for a Mashable award in the Best New Gadget category, we had a great reason to get our party on at MashBash.

First, we have to second the opinion of, well, everyone: the DJs were totally awesome. If you’re in the Bay, check out A Plus D—a.k.a. Adrian and Mysterious D—at Bootie the first chance you get. We’re not trying to give you a case of FOMO or anything, but dancing to their mashups was a seriously fun time.

We also hung out with some really nice people there…

…and felt lucky to be part of such a talented, high-spirited crowd.

To everyone who was able to be at MashBash this year—thanks for making our night!

Along with so many others in the tech community, Sifteo spent a few days last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Co-founder Dave Merrill was a panelist at the Games Summit discussion, “Games on Emerging Platforms: Games on Tablets, Connected TVs and…Refrigerators?”

Dave knows his video game history, and spoke about how groundbreaking new gaming devices, such as the Nintendo Wii or Microsoft Xbox, have created disruption in the industry by radically departing from what their competitors were up to. Periodic, exciting disruptions, he explained, are great for players looking for a new experience, and make the video games industry an exciting place to be.

For example, the Wii was disruptive because it did not try to compete with the PlayStation 3 or XBox360 for the best graphics; instead, it offered a wholly new and physical experience of video games that the entire family could enjoy. The demographics of video game culture expanded radically as a result.

At Sifteo, we admire that kind of ingenuity. Our unique gesture detection technology and approach to hands-on play have potential to revolutionize the future of gaming in just this way.

In the following video, Dave talks about the history of social gaming and the importance of gesture to both the past and the future of play:

We get a lot of questions about how the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Blok 9 works, so today we got the game’s creator to spill a few of his secrets and give a heady explanation of the magic (or mathematics) at work.

First meet Eric:

Name: Eric

Age: 32

Sifteo job title: Game Designer/Developer

Fun fact: I am an expert at opening fruit with my bare hands. Once I opened a pineapple.

Favorite food: pigs’ feet

…and now meet his AI and formidable opponent, The Void:

Name: The Void

Age: 11 months

Sifteo job title: Office Security

Fun fact: I can recite pi in iambic pentameter.  It is beautiful.

Favorite food: Slim Jims

When designing Blok 9, I first had to consider what the goals for the AI were. Obviously, the main goal is to have it be able to play the game. But at what level? It’s surprising to some that the goal of game AI is usually not to be as good as possible. If you’ve ever played a game against an opponent who crushes you every time, you know that’s no fun. In order to result in a fun experience, it must be challenging but seem beatable by the player.

At this early stage of development, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to lay down rules and strategy for how the AI behaved, as I myself didn’t understand what good Blok 9 strategy was (one sign of an interesting game: the designer can’t fully solve the game immediately). So I began to survey my options.

One of the chief ways AIs for board games like chess and Othello work is by using an algorithm called minimax. In this algorithm, the AI will create a branching tree that explores each possible move n turns into the future. It predicts the future by having each player pick the best move possible for that player. Since there are so many branches, the tree becomes too large to compute, and one must rely on a heuristic, or special rule, to decide which parts of the tree to explore. For example, in chess, you could have a heuristic that ignores all moves that involve moving anything but pawns. (Note: That is probably not a good chess heuristic!)

That sounded like a good start, except that Blok 9 has one fundamental difference from those games: it is non-deterministic. What this means is that there is some element of chance involved. Each turn, a player gets one of two pieces randomly; as a result, there’s no way to predict what moves are optimal in the future.

I decided I had enough research under my belt and I wanted to start experimenting. At first, I was curious how an AI would perform if it wasn’t able to look ahead at each move’s outcome, so I programmed it to simply pick the move that gave it the most pieces. This is known as a greedy algorithm. Check it out here:

As someone who grew up in the 80s, this was a real War Games moment for me. It tickled me to no end. But how well did the greedy AI play?

As you might expect, the greedy algorithm doesn’t fare too well. It’s too easy for the human player to trick the AI into making a move that’s only good in the short term, and then steal all the AI’s pieces back and win the game.

So what next? I began looking into what’s called the Monte Carlo method.

The Monte Carlo method

The Monte Carlo method involves simulating many possible games from the current point forward, choosing moves randomly, and choosing the move which results in the most wins.

For example, let’s say the AI has 3 moves available. We could simulate a bunch of games from those 3 moves and look at the results:

Results for 1000 games

Since Move 1 has the most resulting wins, we choose it. Simple, right? Since we are simulating the full games, it takes into account the randomness of the game. I didn’t have to tell it anything about strategy, and if the game changed, the AI would continue to work. It sounded good to me!

And indeed it was—the Monte Carlo AI beating the greedy AI about 70% of the time. Simulating 1000 games is time consuming, however—even for a computer! Each turn took about a minute and a half, which is way too long. I needed a method that would take the AI less than 5 seconds each turn to complete.

It’s easy to think, then, that the solution could be to simulate games for 5 seconds only, right? But one thing about the Monte Carlo method is that it works much better with more data. If your sample size is too small, you might be just hitting a random run. For example, if you flip a coin 1000 times, you’re likely to get very close to 50% heads and 50% tails. But flip it 10 times, you might get something very unbalanced. My computer could simulate only about 50 games in 5 seconds. That was not enough.

Since it was clear that the more games simulated, the better, I worked on speeding up the AI so it could simulate a few hundred games in 5 seconds. That helped, but what helped even more was being smarter about which games to simulate.

Look above at the chart of 1000 games. Move 2 looks like a clear loser. Do we really need to simulate 333 games that follow from Move 2 just to see that it loses 288 times? No. A simple change to prioritize winning moves gave the AI the magic it needed to begin consistently beating me.

And that’s how The Void came to be.

I’m glossing over plenty of details here, but if you’re interested in learning more about the AI concepts mentioned in this post, check out:

• wikipedia entry on minimax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax
• a cool blog post about Monte Carlo, with a playable Connect Four app that shows you the algorithm working: http://beej.us/blog/2010/01/monte-carlo-method-for-game-ai/

So now that you know the Void’s tricks, can you beat it? Try and find out!

Any questions or comments about the Blok 9 AI? You’re welcome to add your comments below or to email me: eric@sifteo.com.

Here at Sifteo, we’ve been enjoying the first couple weeks of the New Year.

The pace has slowed enough for us to catch our breath after the busy holiday season, San Francisco weather has been unseasonably warm, and we’ve just outfitted the lobby with some brand new bike racks.

With a few sun-coated, blissed-out January moments, the engineers tinker. The game designers doodle. Our minds wander and we often find ourselves wondering about the Sifteo customers we’ve connected with over the past several weeks. How did they spend the holidays? What’s new for them in 2012? Do they like their Sifteo cubes? Are they out there somewhere playing a Sifteo game right now, at this very minute?? Trippy.

Every so often, a few answers come to us from out of the blue—an event that causes all respective thought bubbles to burst and all activities to cease. We become very excited!

That’s what happened yesterday when we received the following note and photos from a Sifteo customer. We thought we’d share them here for posterity:

“Cool Uncle Matt gave Sifteo cubes to my kids for Christmas this year. The photo is from New Year’s Eve as my kids were showing their friends all of the games on Sifteo.  My kids are 10, 7 and 4 years old and each found a favorite way to play with the cubes, whether it was code-breaking in Peano’s Vault, competing in math quizzes using Mount Brainiac, or solving puzzles in Chroma.  The favorite app for all the kids was Mount Brainiac, because regardless of difficulty level, the kids could try and beat their own high score, or compete against their friends.   The Sifteo cubes are intuitive (no parenting necessary other than the initial set-up), addicting and fun.  Congrats on creating a very unique and engaging game.” – P.C.

Thanks for the kind words, P.C.! We couldn’t be happier to hear them. Hoping you and yours continue to enjoy Sifteo and have a terrific new year.

We want your holidays to be as happy as possible, so the Sifteo Support Team is on call this weekend! Call us at 855-367-7438 between 11am and 5pm (Pacific Time) on Saturday, December 24 or Sunday, December 25 and we’ll help you get set up. You can also email us at support@sifteo.com.

We have plenty of resources at support.sifteo.com to guide you through the Sifteo universe. Take a look!

Also, check out the video that Emily made to guide you through the set-up process:

Setting up your cubes from Emily Sun on Vimeo.