Here at Sifteo we spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a good neighbor. After all, neighboring is one of the gestures that make Sifteo cubes so unique. We make sure that our gesture detection technology supports the best neighboring experience possible, fine-tuning how quickly neighbored cubes detect each other, the audio and visual feedback they provide when neighbored, and how we can use these capabilities to design the most awesome games.

After so much talk about neighboring (and shaking, flipping, pressing, and tilting, for that matter), we started to wonder if perhaps our understanding of the concept was just a little too narrow. What if Sifteo cubes weren’t the only good neighbors sitting around in our office and we, too, became great neighbors to our surrounding community? And especially to the kids who inspire so much of our work??

Thus, Sifteo’s Neighbor Initiative was born. Some might call this a corporate social responsibility (CSR) program, but we just call it good business. The Neighbor Initiative is officially due to launch next week on Sifteo’s 3rd anniversary, but we can’t help leaking the news a little early to our regular readers.

Basically, the Neighbor Initiative is a program designed to give support where youth, technology, and innovation intersect. It’s a special place where we want to develop opportunities for more young people to be imaginative and create; to cultivate skills and a passion for learning that will last a lifetime.

Like startups tend to do, we’re starting small but dreaming big—as Sifteo grows, we want to ensure that our giving program grows, too. Ultimately, we aspire to make contributions to educational and community-based programs for kids all over the country.

For the immediate future, however, we’re excited to make a donation of Sifteo cubes to a nonprofit organization here in Potrero Hill. Sifteo cubes are filling the computer labs of After School Enrichment Program (ASEP), which is designed to accomodate all grades levels with age-appropriate content, and is offered to students on a need-based sliding scale. We like how many students can benefit from ASEP, which is why we’ve chosen to partner with them to put cool technology in the hands of every student at the three locations their programs serve.

ASEP offers 1-on-1 and small group homework tutorials in addition to a wide range of elective classes, such as African dance and drumming, nutrition, beat-boxing, and Spanish language. They are looking forward to the donation to popularize its class on computational skills and to assist its students’ development in this key curricular field.

“Parents see the potential and always want their children to be exposed to technology in school,” said ASEP program director Grace de la Cruz. “And San Francisco schools are doing a huge push for literacy programs right now, especially to reach English Language Learners (ELL). At Daniel Webster, 90% of our students are ELL—Sifteo cubes will be a huge boost for those students because of the kinesthetic, hands-on experience.”

We think Sifteo is a fun, valuable tool for education because of the Intelligent play concept upon which our system is founded. Games like Mt. Brainiac, Cube Math, WordPlay, and Peano’s Vault have direct application in the classroom; the Creativity Kit has proven to be a tremendous resource for teachers, parents, and DIY game enthusiasts, who can easily create their own puzzles tailored to a specific idea or scholastic need.

And beyond the strictly academic, of course, we’re happy that Sifteo Cubes can offer ASEP students such a fun and unique play experience—after all, play is the best kind of reward for hard work!

We’ll be sure to say more about this in the next week or two to let you know more about the Neighbor Initiative, how you can get involved, and what’s new here in our neighborhood. Thanks for your interest in CSR! We welcome your feedback at neighbor@sifteo.com.

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

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.

A lot of brainpower goes into the development of any single Sifteo game. In fact, we generally believe the more brains the better, and try to welcome as much collaboration as possible. Since many of our users have great ideas about what games they’d like to play and how our system can better suit their imaginations, we like to reach out and connect with them, too.

But most people don’t realize that many of the minds at work on our games are very young. And I’m not talking start-up, Silicon Valley young, but like, elementary school young. At Sifteo, kids are taken very seriously as critics of our work. After all, they’re usually the most enthusiastic and active game players out there!

Some of us are lucky enough to have nieces, nephews, or kids of our own who are eager to test out the latest Sifteo games in development. But most of the very young people we work with hang out at the Innovation Lab of the Children’s Creativity Museum, where children get a hands-on experience with new technology, talk with tech professionals about their jobs, and experiment with the latest innovations.

We really appreciate this opportunity to work with Sifteo’s biggest fans. With the right kind of exposure to technology, we’ve seen students become inspired to pursue a curriculum that could eventually lead to a career in computer science or engineering. And of course, the insights of children at play in the Innovation Lab are tremendously helpful to our game developers, who are in turn inspired by the imaginations of even our youngest users.

“I didn’t intend for Matchination to be playable with 2 cubes; I thought it’d be too simple,” Sifteo Game Developer, Eric Liao, explains. “But I’d forgotten to restrict the game to 3 cubes or more, and then noted that a lot of our younger play testers at the Children’s Creativity Museum were having a blast with 2 cubes. Their engagement really helped me understand what works for different age levels. I immediately made 2-cube play one of the options in Matchination.”

Another Developer, Josh Lee, describes group dynamics in Sifteo game play. “During one of our earliest play tests, I put a set of three cubes down on a table in front of three girls. Each girl took a cube and claimed it as her own. I thought this would make the games unplayable—they were designed with a single player in mind! But the girls naturally cooperated and brought their cubes together to play Chroma Shuffle and Mount Brainiac like a boss (a three-headed, six-handed boss). It really opened my eyes to different forms of collaborative play.”

On the games development team, we’re excited by this congruity of values in our work and play—we have more success and more fun when we work together.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested in having your children participate in the Sifteo PlayLab, please fill out our survey or contact emily@sifteo.com. In the meantime, feel check out ABC 7’s coverage of play time in the Children’s Creativity Museum!

Thanks for the shout out We think you’re pretty great, too!

10 hours of shooting in the Sifteo office and out and about San Francisco paid off! This video by Good.is featuring Sifteo co-founder David Merrill does a beautiful job of telling the Sifteo story.

“Sifteo co-founder David Merrill believes in the power of hands-on thinking. Using digital cubes, he explores how intelligent play and physical exploration with our hands stimulates cognitive learning. Defying the idea that technology creates a passive experience, Sifteo cubes engage users with games and encourage them to play and think nimbly with exploration-oriented problem solving.” See the full article on Good.is