Sifteo is a pretty young company, but we’ve certainly got a history. It’s our anniversary, and a lot has happened in the last 3 years—not to mention in the many years leading up to the founding of Sifteo, Inc. Since people often ask where we came from and how we got where we are today, we thought we’d share the totally uncut Sifteo story, including all the digressions, hyperlinks, and bumps along the way. It goes something like this:

College: the early years

A few years ago in sunny Palo Alto, California, two guys named Dave and Jeevan rolled up for class at Stanford University. Dave was a surfer; Jeevan was into art and design. They had a few things in common, like their major (Symbolic Systems) and a serious enthusiasm for classic NES video games. Dave and Jeevan became friends.

They’re both pretty creative guys, and together they started a band called Wheels. Dave played guitar, Jeevan played bass, and the vision was simple—to be the kind of band that would open for Huey Lewis at the State Fair.

Wheels was pop-meets-classic rock and more than 50% ironic, but also super intense: it’s rumored that Jeevan played until his fingers bled at Battle of the Bands, and they also stole a car—Dave’s—to haul their gear around. It was a ’77 orange Volkswagen Beetle, which was exactly as retro as the Atari 2600 they played in their dorm rooms in their spare time.

College was fun.

The Media Lab

Later, after completing an MS degree in computer science (Dave) and a brief yet successful career as an actor in television commercials (Jeevan), the two friends both decided to go back to school at the MIT Media Lab. The creative duo was reunited—this time playing with circuit boards more often than guitars and Atari. They went to lectures and hung out with designers, engineers, artists, and scientists.

The Media Lab was really fun, and somewhere along the way Dave and Jeevan came up with the idea of Siftables, the Sifteo cube prototype. At his best, Dave-the-graduate-student could solder all the components on an entire Siftable circuit board in 4 hours (!!!).

The excellent TED adventure

One day, Dave’s advisor, Pattie Maes, was invited to give a TED talk about the various projects she was involved with at the Media Lab. TED curator Chris Anderson was especially curious about Siftables, and when Dave heard about the interest in his project, he volunteered to deliver that part of the talk himself.

It was a pretty bold move to say the least, and the next morning it resulted in an email from Anderson. The gist of it was, “you want to give the talk yourself? Prove it.”

In typical grad student fashion, Dave and Jeevan stayed awake for 24 hours drinking coffee and feverishly outlining the talk.

To their own amazement, it worked out: TED was happy to have Dave come to talk about Siftables…

…and not long afterward the talk went viral! It was definitely a galvanizing experience. Four months later, Dave and Jeevan found themselves back on the West Coast, where along with their friend Brent Fitzgerald they established Taco Lab in the dark weird basement of Electric Works, an art gallery in SOMA, San Francisco.

Starting up (AKA dark weird basement)

Taco Lab was the ultimate expression of entrepreneurial leanness. Humble brag? Maybe. It had one tiny frosted window and was located directly beneath an art gallery that doubled as a dance studio after hours, so meetings with corporate execs and venture capitalists often took place to the sound of 30 people prancing on wooden floors overhead:

Nevertheless, Dave and Jeevan founded Sifteo, Inc., raised some funding, and with a growing team of smart collaborators refined the Siftables concept into the current Sifteo cubes.

Then they moved the headquarters as soon as possible:

Other miscellaneous historical Sifteo facts:

• The Wheels 1977 Volkswagen Beetle was narrow enough to drive between the bollards strategically placed to keep cars out of certain parts of the university campus where the band often performed.
• The original Siftables prototypes used the same microcontrollers as game-console-on-chip Uzebox, and they cost about $200 (each!) to make
• A lot of the components of the early ”Siftables” prototypes came from Sparkfun.
• In early 2009, Dave and Jeevan went to China with Nathan Seidle, Eric Schweikardt, and a group of other Makers—led by Bunnie Huang—who were interested to learn how stuff gets made.
• Dave’s college Atari 2600 was played on an old-school, black and white, 10-inch TV with 2 knobs and rabbit ear antenna.
  • Matt Flannery, founder of Kiva, was a worthy (and daily) opponent in the game Joust.

At Sifteo, we’re celebrating!

February 16th is the 3-year anniversary of Dave Merrill’s first viral TED talk that set our founders in motion and resulted in the creation of Sifteo, Inc.

The occasion’s got us thinking: things are going really well here at Sifteo. We’ve got a bright, sunny office in the Dog Patch area of San Francisco, 23 fabulous employees, and 19 games for our ever-expanding game library. Everyday we get to connect with enthusiastic Sifteo users and every week we attend conferences and events, meeting the cool kids who are playing or developing on Sifteo cubes.

But of course, we also keep in mind that it hasn’t always been so good. In fact, it wasn’t so long ago that Dave and Jeevan started Sifteo in a dark, wonky basement in SOMA. It’s taken a lot of hard work and team effort to get where we are today and, looking back, we realize we’ve learned a lot along the way.

So considering our 3^rd anniversary is a pretty big milestone, we decided to ask Dave and Jeevan what the most important lessons have been and what advice they’d give to other startup companies going into business today. The following list represents the collected wisdom of some people our founders really admire—including Sifteo advisors, the founder of MakerBot, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Jeevan’s mom.

Startup Advice from the founders of Sifteo

10.  Ordinary efforts yield ordinary results.

9. The cult of done: Done is in the engine of more. –B. Pettis of MakerBot

8. Be open to being wrong about anything at anytime. You have to be flexible and willing to change your mind.

7. Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. –Dwight D. Eisenhower

6. When in a leadership role, be the best version of yourself. It’s not your job to make everyone happy; rather, it’s to listen to them and make a reasonable decision as quickly as you can.

5. Make time for people to interact in ways that aren’t specifically about work.

4. Employees must know they can come up with ideas they can put into action.

3. If you have to do something, do it right then and there. (Jeevan’s mom’s critical advice we’d all like to be a little better about following…)

2. Great people are infinitely more important than great technology. Involve everyone on your team in the problem solving effort.

1. Treat your customers like you would treat your friends.

Have your own words of wisdom for fellow startup businesses and entrepreneurs? Please share by leaving your comments below!

Some days we Sifteons wake up in the morning to go to work—say it’s still dark out and possibly raining, or it’s wintertime and it’s a Monday—and we’re grumpy about it. Some days we get the same idea that everyone does, which is that it might be better to just unplug the alarm and stay in bed until noon (or Saturday or June?).

But we also realize we have a slight motivational advantage, which is to remind ourselves of what we do. It goes something like, “Whoa, I make games for a living. It’s my job to make games—AWESOME!!” And then we caffeinate or eat breakfast or whatever and come down to the office recharged and ready to go.

In short, the Sifteo team is stoked about the work we do. From Game Night to PlayLab to tech events and Game Developer conventions, we sort of live and breathe our day jobs, and we’re crazy about it. But, as hard as it is to believe, we also realize that not everyone’s as ramped up about tech and gaming as we are. Fair enough. We try to shoot for socially acceptable levels of enthusiasm when possible, but sometimes it’s an awkward struggle.

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!

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.