Widespread capital punishment never existed

There's this fancy Western European idea of abolishing death penalty. Wikipedia even has a nice map, with blue countries having abolished death penalty entirely, red still carrying it out, and green/orange having it on the books, but not in practice.
But reality is different than that. Most of the red countries almost never carry out the death penalty, reserving it for extremely unusual cases - in 2008 estimated 5727 people were executed, over 80% of them in mainland China, other than that only Iran and Saudi Arabia doing three-digit numbers. Other big red countries like India, USA, Indonesia, Pakistan, Japan and so on very rarely execute people.

As 59 million people die every year, your chance of getting executed is like 1:10,000, or more like 1:200,000 if you don't like in relatively execution-happy China, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.

Numbers like this are ridiculously uncommon - about 100 people die every year from peanut allergy in just United States. And "accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed", which sounds like a codeword for "BDSM gone awry" causes 327 deaths annually in just USA.

It's not just due to lack of crime - annually, half million homicides take place, and many countries have or had death penalty for lesser things. So if you're a killer, the chance of getting a lethal injection for it are 80:1 (assuming they get the right person), or more like 1500:1 unless you live in one of the three aforementioned countries.

Add to that the usual overconfidence criminals have, and it's clear that fear of death penalty is the least of criminals' concerns. Especially since even in United States you're over three times as likely to die as a result of a shootout with the police than due to legal execution, so we're talking at most 30% extra deaths factor here. The idea that people will stop carrying out crime due to fear of capital punishment is just highly dubious.

History lesson

So is this it? Did the abolitionists win? Not necessarily. Googling indicates that capital punishment for crime was never particularly widespread. Yes, governments killed loads of people - massacres during wars and occupations, killing political opponents, summary executions to quell social unrest, and some such. But legal capital punishment of citizen committing ordinary crimes after proper judicial process? Very unlikely.

Here's some statistics. Stalin killed about 60 million people, and Hitler about 20 million (estimates vary considerably, but let's take those numbers). How many actually received death penalties? Only 40 thousand from Nazis (1 in 500), and 750 thousands from Soviets (1 in 80). And these were mostly political opponents, war and civil war cases and such - not proper criminals.

How about other countries? Czarist Russia averaged less than 60 a year, and remember that many of them were political cases. Between 1770 and 1830 England had allegedly bloodiest criminal code on Earth, with death punishment for "writing a threatening letter", hanging out with gypsies, or "strong evidence of malice" and over 200 other crimes, while still averaging barely above 110 executions annually. Even the infamous Spanish Inquisition barely managed 20 burnings a year (but then, these were mostly religious and political opponents not criminals, so maybe they shouldn't be included here).

It's just really difficult to find any government, that routinely carried out large number of legal executions of criminals during time of peace.

When governments kill

That's not to say governments don't kill. But these killings rarely affect common criminals. Nazis killed people for being of wrong ethnic group. Soviets killed people for being of wrong social class, or just because. The same 18th century United Kingdom which was so cautious with criminals of right ethnicity, killed million people for being poor and Irish (and no, it wasn't any Malthusian bullshit, Ireland was a major food exporter even during this politically caused famine).

Even countries which don't execute criminals at all like Denmark with no executions since 1892, change their mind during and briefly after war time, when 54 people were executed (it's not really a legal capital punishment, as it's all ex post facto). Likewise in Finland, after not executing anyone since 1825, about 550 people were killed during war time (unlike Denmark where it was mostly proper war criminals and people supporting Nazis, here you could get a firing squad for conscientious objection, and without even a real trial).

What does it mean for capital punishment debate?

Other than perhaps in mainland China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, the debate is purely speculative now. There is virtually no capital punishment anywhere. And other than during wars, occupations, major civil unrests and alikes, it was extremely rare for many centuries. Before that, executions might or might not have been more frequent, but it's hard to talk about proper legal proceedings, so they don't count.

People who support death penalty have a big problem, as there won't be any statistics showing serious effects of widespread application of it during time of peace, as it never happened. There are some bullshit statistics, like those in the original Freakonomics book (very entertaining book, by the way), but due to vast non-random annual variations in number of homicides and executions, we're talking about effects of a rounding error, and social science just cannot do anything useful with them.

So it's mostly about what makes you feel better. If you're a real Christian, then you should follow Jesus and be against death penalty. If you're a fake Christian like Southern Baptist, you should support death penalty because you hate black people more than you love Jesus. And if you're an atheist, do whatever you want, it's not like I can convince you.

Here, I solved it for you.

Medieval 2 Total War Concentrated Vanilla 0.07

Here's another release of my Medieval 2 Total War Concentrated Vanilla mod.

Old releases suffered from the too-much-money problem, just like the pre-crash Goldman Sachs, so I decided to scale it down a bit. Instead I introduced massive free garrisons.

Here's the full list of changes relative to vanilla:

• For more dynamic game, all units move 75% faster on strategic map.
• One big problem with vanilla was that money didn't matter. No matter if you had a lot or not, there wasn't all that much to spend it on. So now all buildings take 1 turn to build, but are 50% more expensive. This drastically increases importance of money.
• To add some strategic richness, mines give 2x the profits, and cost 3x as much (x2, +50% like all other buildings). Some settlements with rich mines like Zagreb or Vienna are worth a lot, maybe even worth starting a war over.
• There used to be 50% increase in settlement and merchant trade, and mine profits used to be 3x, but this was a serious overkill. If you manage well, settlements and merchants will give you more money than in vanilla as you can build relevant buildings faster.
• There also no longer double population growth penalty/bonus for tax rates - it was an overkill.
  
• To help small nations, King's Purse increased 2x (that is - free money a nation gets unrelated to its settlements - from 1500-2500/turn to 3000-5000/turn).
• To reduce annoyance with rebels, rebel and pirate spawn rates reduced 10x. (I'm not actually sure if it reduced them as much as the file says it would, but it feels more or less right now).
  
• Cavalry, especially heavy cavalry was seriously overpowered. Small groups of knights could easily crush infantry armies ten times their budget, so infantry was useless other than free militias to patrol cities, and cheap grunts to operate siege equipment. Because with cavalry-centric warfare missile units are useless, this limited army composition even further - and destroyed rich tactical variety that M2TW could possibly have. So all cavalry is now 50% more expensive to recruit and upkeep. Cavalry is still extremely powerful when used right, except now other kinds of armies are useful too.
  
• Bodyguards were particularly overpowered - in early periods they simply destroyed everything, were numerous, self-healing, essentially free (you get new candidates for adoption if you lose old generals all the time), and as every faction has identical bodyguards they severely reduced tactical richness of the game. So bodyguards units are the half size now (upkeep cost is proportional to unit size, and they're cavalry, so mod's bodyguard unit costs 75% of vanilla's). Old versions of the mod reduced their hitpoints from 2 to 1, but it no longer happens, as this made bodyguards overnerfed in late periods. Unfortunately there no way to get the balance right - as bodyguards stay the same, but other units massively improve, either bodyguards will be too strong early on, or too weak late on. I moved the balance point somewhat towards the weakening.
  
• Vanilla sieges are ridiculously easy, with a single unit of ballistae being able to take down large stone walls. This made sieges was too easy, and as a consequence turned the game into a siegefest. So now gates and walls (but not towers) are 5x stronger. Serious artillery will be needed to take anything but the weakest walls.
  
• Towers now have 2x fire rate for normal ammo, and 1x fire rate for flaming ammo. Increasing flaming ammo rate too much as old versions did made siege equipment like siege towers almost useless. But high normal fire rate should help defenders a lot, even for undermanned settlements that AI leaves. This wouldn't be necessary if AI was competent, but we know well it's not, and leaves valuable settlements defended by one unit of Peasants far too often. This balances AI stupidity considerably, and also frees the player to play more strategically by making defense easier (this is not as essential as in old versions of the mod due to increased free garrisons).
  
• Tower activation range is 8x larger (a bit of reversal to Rome Total War). So you cannot shut down towers just by scaring off defenders with some arrows like in vanilla. Strong walls, and massive towers' firepower together mean sieges will be very difficult. Prepare a lot of artillery, or spies, or massively overwhelming force that can take severe loses before giving up. I'm yet to take a well-manned Fortress in this mod (but then AI often mans its settlements insufficiently, and there are other options like waiting their food supplies out, or provoking a sally).
• For consistency with making sieges harder, spies cost 2x to recruit and upkeep. And AI is quite competent at counter-espionage operations, so spy flood doesn't work all that often.
• To help defenders in sieges, missile infantry ammo increased 2x. It very rarely affects field battles, as in those they rarely get to expend even half of their ammo.
• A big change is doubling free garrison in cities. Village 0, Town 4, Large Town 6, Small City 8, Large City 10, Huge City 12.
• The biggest change is introducing free garrison in castles. Motte&Bailey 1, Wooden Castle 2, Castle 4, Fortress 7, Citadel 12. In vanilla castles are either left barely defended, or are massive bleeding money hole - failure both ways.
• Just like with cities, castles' basic infantry units can be free garrison, but not cavalry or expensive infantry. Basic infantry is one with morale up to 5, and cost up to 155. So Peasants up to Armored Sergeants, and Peasant Archers up to Genoese Crossbowmen, Venetian Archers, and Hand Gunners can all be free when garrisoned. On the other hand Dismounted Knights of all kinds, and most faction-specific elite units cannot. I guess it might introduce some faction unfairness, but I can live with it.
  

Overall, what you get is much tactically and strategically richer game, with a lot larger differences between factions, but one that still feels a lot like vanilla Medieval 2 Total War. In the mod defense is easy, so you don't have to mindlessly attack everyone.

The main problem left is the spectacularly stupid AI, about which I cannot really do that much.

I also did some other experiments, that didn't get to the mod:

• Making ocean-traveling ships available from the beginning (well, as soon as you can build sufficient port infrastructure) enables fights with natives. But Americas are disconnected from the mainland Europe, and it doesn't really feel like it's part of the same game. Try it once to see what fighting Aztecs is like, then forget they're even part of the game.
• Making Mongols (or maybe even Timurids) come earlier. It's a lot more fun to fight Mongols, but then if they come very early, they will totally crush AI on auto-resolve. Unfortunately auto-resolve favours stronger armies too much, so they won't even suffer too much loses, and you'll have to deal with them yourself. One full stack of Pavise Crossbowmen and Feudal Knights led by semi-decent General (or equivalent) can defeat one full Mongol stack without that much trouble in field, and well defended settlement with ballista towers completely destroys them. It's another thing to try once. I haven't fought Timurids yet.
• Making Gunpowder available immediately unfortunately counters the effects of very strong walls, and yet good gunpowder infantry and cavalry won't be available until much later. I'm not even sure if gunpowder units are better than plain Pavise Crossbowmen, they don't seem to be from the stats, and I never had an opportunity to play much with them.

Anyway, download the mod here.

Blog posts about previous releases: 0.02, 0.04, 0.06.

Folk Complexity Theory

There's one kind of posts on this blog that get the most hostile reactions. It's not politics (nobody reads those), flaming programming languages, or computer games - the most controversial subject is Big O analysis! Here are relevant posts:

• Modern x86 assembly
  
• Big O analysis considered harmful
  
• Practical O(n) problem impossible to solve even for n=1

Basically I claim that Big O is useless in most practical situations. And I get flamed a lot. At first I tried to explain to the flamers how they are mistaken, then I basically ignored them after explanations proven to be pointless, but now I see that it's all just big misunderstanding. What I call Big O analysis is a fairly precise construct of computer science. But that's not how most people use the Big O notation - they follow Folk Complexity Theory, which I want to describe here.

The Official Complexity Theory

First, here's a brief repetition of Algorithms and Data Structures 201, or whatever your course explaining this was.

An algorithm is O(f(n)) if in a particular model of computations, if there exist some constants n₀, and c, such that for all input lengths greater than n, computation time is less than c × f(n). A problem is O(f(n)) if in particular model of computations there exists a O(f(n)) algorithm that solves it.

Models of computations are things like different varieties of Random access machine, and different models usually only differ by some logarithmic factors. Sometimes you want to assume that adding two numbers takes constant time, sometimes that it takes time proportional to logarithm of their sum, and details like that. If you disregard logarithmic factors, you don't have to be all that precise about which variety of RAM you're using. That's about it.

In particular, if the problem is only defined for constant-sized input, then by definition it has complexity O(1). There exists some c, such that for all possible sizes, running time of the algorithm is less that c × 1.

So breaking AES-128 is O(1). As is breaking RSA-4096. Breaking RSA-n for arbitrary n isn't, but that's entirely unrelated problem. Breaking AES-n is meaningless concept, as AES isn't defined for arbitrary n.

In particular classes like P, and NP, don't depend much on what reasonable computation model you're using. They're defined on Deterministic Turing Machines for reference (which is polynomial factor slower than RAM), but if something is P on DTM, it's P on RAM and vice versa.

How cryptography handles it

As I got a lot of flames about my claim that breaking RSA-4096 is O(1), let me explain how cryptography handles it. So cryptography doesn't use Big O notation much.

Security is measured in bits - a cryptosystem has k bits of security if the attacker must perform 2^k times as many operations as legitimate user to defeat security of the cipher. For some types of security key size and security are related - for block ciphers security = key size, for hash collisions security = key size/2. For public key cryptography these bit measures can be only approximately specified in terms of key size, and whatever formula we have we're completely uninterested in its asymptotic form, as all feasible key sizes are small, and constant factors are of great interest to us.

The Folk Complexity Theory

And now the main subject of the post - The Folk Complexity Theory. When people say some algorithm is O(f(n)), they actually mean that for "normal" sizes of inputs, on actual computers, it's expected running time is between two "small" constants times f(n) times reasonable number of log(n) factors as long as they don't push the constant too high.

• O is used sort of like Θ of the official theory. Folk O(n) algorithm is not considered to be O(n²).
  
• So bubble sort is O(n²), as number of operation tends to be something like 10n². Logarithmic factor for addressing and arithmetic is not considered at all.
  
• Merge sort is O(n×log(n)), as number of operation tends to be something like 10n×log(n). Notice how log factor for number of operations is included here as it's significantly higher than allowed small constants; but log factor for cost of addressing and arithmetic is not, as on normal computers it's constant up to 2³², which is very big n. And only doubles for 2⁶⁴, which is too ridiculously high n to bother. Exactly the same reasoning can be used for both log factors, so this is highly peculiar.
  
• Quick sort is O(n×log(n)), the Folk Complexity Theory always deals with typical case, not worst case.
  
• Breaking AES-128 is O(2ⁿ) because the constant is too big to be allowed. It doesn't matter that there's no n here, and AES is not defined for other key sizes. The problem must be reformulated to have n, no matter if it makes any sense or not. Number of operation like 2¹⁴⁰ is simply "not allowed", while 2¹²×2ⁿ is.
• Breaking RSA-4096 is likewise O(2ⁿ), even though there's no n here at all.
  
• Forging signature of n-byte message signed with RSA-4096 is, uhm... O(2ⁿ). Wait, n is already something else... O(2^k) then maybe? The problem is reformulated as RSA-k because large constants are not allowed, and usually there's no point saying O(2^k+n), as n is too small to matter for all practical n.
• As an added bonus "NP" usually means Θ(2ⁿ), for real or imagined n. This is spectacularly incorrect (most problems are not decision problems; there can be no Θ bounds even for NP-complete problems until NP != P is proven, and every P problem is NP), but doesn't cause much confusion in practice.
  

This is the source of all confusion - I was talking about the Official Complexity Theory, while most Redditors interpreted it as Folk Complexity Theory statements, in which they were obviously untrue.

Is Folk Complexity Theory useful?

It's quite amusing that so many people flame me for saying the Official Complexity Theory is overrated, and don't even know it. But I'm not going to blame them - who needs it once they're past exams anyway? In practice Folk Complexity Theory is actually better heuristic than the Official kind. We program real computers. On real input sizes. ceil(log₂(n)) factors shouldn't be ignored, but ceil(log_4294967296(n)) factors which represent cost of arithmetic and addressing on most 32-bit computers hardware totally can and should. And so should all log(log(n)), which nobody ever bother with past exams.

The Folk Complexity Theory has weird status - it's neither mathematics like the Official theory, nor practice like actual benchmarking. It's just a bunch of heuristics dressed as something much more formal than they are. Often even fairly useful heuristics. Just nothing more than that, and not worth the flames.

The Web 2.0 of Metaphors

After hearing that something is Wikipedia of whatever it is about, and getting slightly annoyed by it, I decided, in interest of science, to compile popularity ranking of "the X of Y" metaphors, by Google counting.

I found quite a few false positives, like "the livejournal of Nikki", and "the Linux of your choice", but upholding the glorious scientific tradition of ignoring every methodological issue that cannot be fixed, I completely disregarded them.

• "the windows of" - 15,100,000
• "the internet of" - 7,790,000
• "the apple of" - 6,470,000
• "the google of" - 3,160,000
• "the youtube of" - 766,000
• "the microsoft of" - 397,000
• "the imdb of" - 307,000
• "the craigslist of" - 303,000
• "the livejournal of" - 290,000
• "the ebay of" - 277,000
• "the amazon of" - 262,000
• "the facebook of" - 237,000
• "the myspace of" - 235,000
• "the linux of" - 197,000
• "the wikipedia of" - 180,000
• "the yahoo of" - 142,000
• "the flickr of" - 124,000
• "the ibm of" - 109,000
• "the blogspot of" - 108,000
• "the web 2.0 of" - 92,900
• "the bing of" - 90,900
• "the firefox of" - 63,200
  
• "the aol of" - 63,100
• "the napster of" - 61,200
• "the msn of" - 52,100
• "the digg of" - 23,600

It seems the most popular activity is explaining one web service as metaphor of another:

• Is Craigslist the "Napster" of the Sex Industry
• YouTube Redesign: Becoming the Google of Video?
• Is Facebook: the Google of Social Networks
• Google Earth Is the AOL of the Geoweb
• MySpace is the AOL of Social Media/Web 2.0
• YouTube.com — the Flickr of Video

There are also some unusual finds:

• The Wikipedia of Slutty Dressing
• The Craigslist of Antibiotic Resistance
• Is Python the Apple of Programming Languages?

Another interesting find is that while I've been expecting a lot of "the X of sex", only Wikipedia (36,200) and Facebook (29,500) have decent number of matches.

"The X of porn" is a lot more popular, here Google (378,000), YouTube (354,000), and surprisingly Napster (22,200) are taking the lead.

The other most popular Internet activity, spam, got almost no hits.

Efficient go hypothesis

Efficient market hypothesis states that you cannot really beat the market by much, all the prices are about right, and everybody behaves it more or less rational way. Yes, treating it too seriously leads to ketchup economics thinking, but it's often a good starting point - if you postulate that some prices are seriously wrong, you better come up with a story why they're wrong.

But let's forget about economics for a moment. Something very similar to efficient-market hypothesis applies to the game of go. Unlike most other games like chess and football, go is extremely balanced.

• Black player, who moves first, pays 6.5 points for the privilege, what makes both players' chances of winning as close to 50:50 as it gets.
  
• If one player is stronger, the weaker player gets as many free stones as necessary to get the chance of winning very close to 50:50.

What's interesting is that during the game, it's impossible to make a move that highly increases your advantage, or "beats the market" - if you could get significantly ahead by playing a stone, then the position was already unbalanced before you've done so due to this possibility. Values of positions consist of complex balance of territory, influence, flexibility, good and bad aji, and many other things - if you ask a computer program like gnugo to estimate balance of the board, you will get widely varying numbers with each moves, each totally ridiculous.

Just like on the market we cannot give correct formula for a price, but we know it's right because people trade at it; in go we don't have a formula for value of a position, but we know it's even if good moves by two players led there. If you postulate imbalance, you better come up with a story telling which move was bad and why.

Go players often perform some complex trades of moves called joseki - standard sequences that lead to more or less even results. Again, why even? Because neither you nor your opponent would purposefully play bad moves to fall behind, and if there are no good moves available it means one of you was already losing earlier.

Joseki example - every single move here and the sequence are about even

This requires significant shift in thinking compared to games where you act to get as far ahead of your opponent. You can play go like an index fund - just try to stay even with each move, and let your opponent make some mistakes and fall behind you.

That doesn't mean there's no room for creativity - sometimes there's only one good move to make, most of the time you have multiple good options with subtly different balances. These tiny variations are enough to win - there is no possibility of draw in go (not counting super-ko and such exceptional situations), so even if you get just 1 point ahead through the entire game, 0.01 point advantage per move, that's just enough. It's kind of like high frequency trades, which earn tiny profits, but with sufficient volume it's worth it.

Most professional games end with just a few points advantage for one side or the other. Or one of the players falls behind just a bit, and then risks it all on a great all-board fight to avoid the few point loss.

So as you can see, go is just like market. Except it never leads to crises costing trillions of dollars.

Practical O(n) problem impossible to solve even for n=1

In computational complexity a fairly popular claim seen in most textbooks equates class P with practically feasible algorithms, and everything not known to be P (but usually within NP, "not known to be P" is an awkward thing we need to say until P!=NP is finally proven, even though we all know it to be true already) with not practically feasible algorithms. While it's often noted that it might be untrue for some cases, with some P algorithms being impractical, and some not known to be P algorithms to be practical, such disclaimers usually consider these cases to be contrived and not worth any further consideration.

Here's a really simple example of a genuinely useful problem in P (linear even) that's not practical at all.

Utterly impractical O(n) problem

Imagine problem of falsifying digital signature for a message in some reasonable digital signature scheme. Inputs are public key of constant length, and message of length n. The algorithm is as follows:

• Extract private key from the public key by brute force, or some other algorithm (constant time)
• Sign the message (linear time in n required just to read the message, and no more than linear time necessary)
  

So we have an O(n) algorithm, and because we need to read entire input to sign the message, no faster algorithm is possible. Therefore the problem is Θ(n).

Yet, unless someone breaks the public key system and provides vastly faster method of extracting private key based on the public key, we won't be able to solve it even for n=1.

This problem is of great practical importance - the entire online banking system would fail, and billions of dollars of fraud would happen if someone could practically solve it. So it's not fair to call utterly unfeasible P problems contrieved.

Google Everything and some alternatives

Do you feel a bit uncomfortable using countless web services all operated by a single company? I can feel your pain. Here's a list of things I use (or tried but didn't like), and some alternatives if I know any.

Google Search

It used to be the case that Google Search was vastly better than anything else. Not longer so.
Don't believe me? Try the Blind Search - it searches the same term in Google, Yahoo, and Bing, then you can vote for the winner. Most of the time the results are extremely similar, and the scores are Google - 41%, Bing - 31%, Yahoo - 28%. Google still leads but not overwhelmingly.

While with text searches there's no reason to switch away from Google, Bing Images and especially Bing Video is quite significantly better than Google equivalents. Bing is simply a better search engine for porn than Google, they know it, and even advertise this fact:


I recommend we start using the word "to bing" as "to search Internet for video porn", just like "to google" means "to search Internet for textual websites".

Google Mail

I tried plenty of other webmail providers, and plenty of offline email programs. Even some Intranet email solutions like Zimbra and Exchange. Google Mail is so overwhelmingly better than anything else it's not even funny.

Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, which I tried as throwaway spam accounts, are just too painful to use. There are no alternatives, it's Google or pain.

Google Maps

Google Maps was quite revolutionary when it first appeared. Unlike with Google Mail, here the competition did catch up quite successfully. Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, MultiMap, StreetMap (well, that one's UK-only), and probably some others, are all quite usable for directions, and all suck for searching local businesses.

I've heard some drivers having preferences for one or the other, but as a public transport user/occasional cyclist, I'm still waiting for the first to offer decent TFL integration.

YouTube

YouTube annoys me considerably - they don't want to host anything even remotely risky. They limit access to videos by geography, remove those that include some copyrighted music in the background to unrelated funny thing.

On the other hand they have no problem hosting this video of a brutal rape (NSFW).

There are some alternatives, none anywhere near the size of YouTube. Not counting the porn tube of course. I have limited experience with them, so no in-depth comparison here.

Google Chrome

It's nowhere near being the most popular browser. I'm also not sure what's its main selling point, other than tab sandboxing, which Firefox badly needs.

Other than that, Firefox is vastly better. It has countless useful plugins. It has Greasemonkey, and Greasefire. It has Firebug. It has AdBlockPlus. Chrome isn't even close.

Not like I'm complaining, if it can get even one user away from IE, it's a win.

Blogger

Let's face it - Blogger is a pretty crappy blogging platform. But then I haven't heard users of any other being happy about theirs, so perhaps all are equally bad. And effort of moving the blog somewhere else (plus losing the URL) seems too big for me to bother.

In particular the way they handle spam comments is simply atrociously bad. I get a notification of a comment, and then it's about ten clicks to remove it if it's spam, instead of just one or two.

Google Reader

It's basically an online RSS reader. What I hate about most desktop RSS readers is that they tend to push notifications onto you, and don't live inside the most natural place possible - the browser.

With Google Reader Watcher, Firefox tells me how many unread items there are, and which website they're for. Which is exactly as much notification as I need.

I think the only thing left to want is "open every new item in a fresh tab" function, but there's probably some Greasemonkey script for that, or if not it would be pretty simple to write it.

I don't see much need for alternatives.

Google Talk

The main problem with IM programs is that everyone is on a different network, so you need way too many programs to talk with everyone. Adium has most of them. Except Skype. And the most basic functionality only - not webcams, no microphones, not even all the icons.

I don't have particular problems with Google Talk, but I'm going to use this unique opportunity to rant about Skype a bit. OSX version of Skype doesn't seem to have any way of disabling text notifications of contacts becoming available or unavailable. So it constantly spams me with irrelevant garbage. It's not possible to use Skype network from other programs even for IM chats. Many networks try this restriction - and abuse their control over access to other users, but Skype seems to be the only one which did it successfully. Would you be happy if you needed an iPhone to call a person using iPhone, a Nokia phone to call a person using a Nokia phone, and basically 20 different phones to speak with everyone you want to? Me neither, so why are we allowing exactly the same thing in the IM world?

Google News

I don't see Google News as solving any real problem. My main problem with news is that they focus on events of the day, while the important things are usually long ongoing processes, with little need for daily updates. And if you're away for a week or two, there's no easy way to look back at this time and see if anything important happened.

As far as I can tell, it's equally true for all alternatives. If you know a good way to follow important news, tell me about it in comments.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a pretty cool webapp for editing documents together. I have irrational hatred towards WYSIWYGs, especially web WYSIWYGs, so don't ask me about fancy advanced features, but it solves the basic need well enough, and I don't see what could be the big selling point for its alternatives.

Google Code

Google Code is a nice hosting service for Open Source projects. It supports Subversion (obviously), and Mercurial, but not git.

Some of the alternatives are SourceForge (both Subversion, and git, also some other VCSs I don't care about), github (only git, duh). I'm not sure how bad github's limitation of 300MB per open source repository is - my personal code repository's .git is easily bigger than that, but then I freely store binaries and stuff in it (like font files for jrpg).

Overall I don't really see any major advantage for Google Code over it's countless competitors, and it's not even particularly big.

Google Analytics

I'm going to be pretty clueless about it, as Google Analytics is the only one I tried.

Good things - it gives you pretty decent overview of traffic, and is really easy to install.

Bad things - no decent API (screen scrapping possible but quite painful), no access to raw data, I'm not a big fan of their interface, which seems to be focused on all the wrong things.

If I started a website these days, I would definitely try something else, if only to see if it's any better. Switching an existing site would probably not be worth the effort, as all historical data would get lost.

Summary

These are just some of Google services and programs I tried. It's scary in two ways. First, a single company has way too much control over the Internet, and over people's often private data. Google has been relatively well-behaved as far as huge soulless corporations go.

Second, and perhaps more important problem is - what the fuck is the entire competition doing? The only reason people use Google Absolutely Everything is because most of everything else sucks so much. Google didn't succeed just once or twice, it had long stream of spectacular successes where everyone else failed (search, maps), and often even failed to catch up years later (webmail, text ads). Seriously, how difficult is it to innovate a bit online? Difficult enough that a single company does most of it? Hardly anything good on the web ever came from Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and countless other huge Internet companies in ages. The only other major company that seems to be doing anything interesting is Amazon. A damn bookstore. A damn bookstore is doing more web innovation than all the software and web giants put together.

Yes, there are still startups doing the cool stuff, but most of them stop as soon as they get bought. Like del.icio.us, which was revolutionary, but then got bought by Yahoo, and is stagnant ever since.

In search for Just Wars

I know people don't really read my political posts. If I wanted to be read, I'd be writing angry rants about video games, programming, and Harry Potter fan-fiction.

Here's a quick post about politics, namely about just wars, and other violence. Right wing nuts are generally pro-war, no matter who's fighting whom. What's surprising is that even left wing nuts are pro-war. Here's some Chomsky, it doesn't get much left-wing-nuttier than that:

ROBERT B. SILVERS: ... Under what conditions, if any, can violent action be said to be "legitimate"? ...

NOAM CHOMSKY: My general feeling is that this kind of question can't be answered in a meaningful way when it's abstracted from the context of particular historical concrete circumstances. Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the consequences of such action are to eliminate a still greater evil. Now there are people of course who go much further and say that one must oppose violence in general, quite apart from any possible consequences. I think that such a person is asserting one of two things. Either he's saying that the resort to violence is illegitimate even if the consequences are to eliminate a greater evil; or he's saying that under no conceivable circumstances will the consequences ever be such as to eliminate a greater evil. The second of these is a factual assumption and it's almost certainly false. One can easily imagine and find circumstances in which violence does eliminate a greater evil. As to the first, it's a kind of irreducible moral judgment that one should not resort to violence even if it would eliminate a greater evil. And these judgments are very hard to argue. I can only say that to me it seems like an immoral judgment.

Oh, really? So, could you please point me to some examples of wars that successfully eliminated greater evils? The criteria are, you can agree that they are sane:

1. Without the war, very large number of people would have died or otherwise suffered.
2. There was no other plausible way of saving them, and all alternatives have been tried.
3. Thanks to the war, most of those people were saved.
4. Few people died or otherwise suffered in the war, especially civilians, but also participants. Some suffering is allowed, but only if it's vastly overwhelmed by suffering prevented.
5. It must have been possible to predict it advance that this success was very likely. Lucky wins don't count. And of course, it must have worked. Failed good intentions don't count.
   

I have really difficult time finding out wars that fit these criteria, even with very liberal grading.

The latest war in Iraq

The latest war in Iraq is easily not anywhere close to a just war. Saddam wasn't a nice guy, but amount of suffering he was causing recently was quite insignificant as for third world dictator standards, so it fails on count one, and automatically two and three.

According to Lancet estimates there were 1.3 million excess deaths due to it. Many other Iraqis suffered in other ways. So fail on count four.

Only fools would have expected an easy win, and being greeted with flowers, it's the Middle East after all. All claims about WMD, Saddam's connections to Al-Qaeda and so on don't count, as they were known lies, and even if Bush believed them, they would fail by count five.

Score: 0/5

The latest war in Afghanistan

This war is slightly better, as number of casualties on all sides is closer to 60 thousand, not counting another 10 thousands or so in the spill-off to Pakistan, what's most likely an underestimate in a poorly researched place like Afghanistan, but still much lower than Iraq's. And Bin Laden was in Afghanistan.

Still, it fails on all counts. There were people who died in Al-Qaeda terrorism, but other than a single well-known case, repetition of which was fairly easy to prevent, their numbers were really low. Even with 9/11 much lower than number of people who could be expected to die in the war, so count one fails.

There were plenty of plausible alternatives for getting or killing Bin Laden, and dealing with terrorism, so fail at criterion two. See IRA and ETA for good examples. Or even Clinton-style targeted killings.

Terrorism increased greatly after the war, so it fails criterion three. Count four doesn't fail that badly, assuming figures are not overly underestimated (they usually are, counting only direct deaths), but it's still pretty large number just to catch one guy. Let's be generous and count it as a point.

Anyone who expected an easy win in Afghanistan must have slept through history classes. And Afghanistan is still in chaos, terrorists still terrorize, and Bin Laden was never caught or killed, so criterion five spectacularly fails.

Score: 1/5

The Second World War

Let's move back in time to World War II, widely proclaimed to be the most just war in history, without any basis in fact.

So first, suffering. This is very likely - if everyone just gave Hitler what he wanted (mostly Central Europe to share with Stalin), millions of people would be reduced to status of second class citizens, and depending on how it would go, hundreds of thousands or even millions would die. It's not certain if large scale death camps would be implemented without the war - it seems Nazis were fine with Jews and everyone else they didn't like just getting out of their country (500,000 or so emigrated from Germany before the war, also see the famous Madagascar Plan), but let's assume they really wanted to perform massive genocide. In any case, the first criterion is quite plausible, so full point.

The second criterion fails. The obvious plausible alternative of letting people persecuted by Nazis emigrate to other countries, most were not terribly happy about letting them in, even through Nazis were quite glad about just kicking them out (first confiscating most of their property). Forced resettlement would suck, but it still beats getting gassed.

Now, the third one fails miserably - Nazis killed pretty much everyone they wanted to kill. Most people who would have suffered living under Nazi dictatorship, were instead forced to live under Soviet dictatorship. Approximately 70 million people have died, most of them outside territories that Nazis would have if the world decided against going to war with them. So it's spectacular failure on the counts three and four.

There could be no expectation of an easy victory - spectacular fall of France might have been unexpected, but World War I style trench warfare with millions of casualties was the primary alternative. It's not even obvious if Allies really cared about defeating Nazis - if they were serious about winning, going after them in September 1939 while they were busy in Poland seemed like the best moment, but they didn't do anything until they were attacked.

Score: 1/5

American Civil War

Here's another "glorious" war - American Civil War. It's really historically inaccurate, but let's grant the common myth that the cause of war was abolition of slavery. There were four million slaves in USA in 1860, to be freed. So a somewhat mythical point, but granted.

As for alternatives being untried, most of the world abolished already or soon after 1860, without getting into any major wars. Even countries highly dependent on slave labour, which quite smoothly transitioned into poor waged labour, with or without compensations for former slave owners. There's no reason why it wouldn't work in United States, sooner or later. No points here.

As for point three, yes, all slaves were freed, so entire point here. Sure, there was a century of discrimination ahead, but let's not get too nitpicking.

Point four utterly fails. 620 thousand soldiers were killed, plus some unspecified number of civilians. It was quite clean as far as wars go, so I wouldn't expect a huge value for civilian excess deaths. Still, that's only 6 slaves freed for one death. I'm sure most abolitionist activists had far better than this number - by collecting money, and buying off slaves' freedom, or by nagging slave-owners' conscience until they agreed to free slaves one person could surely free far more than 6 slaves with lifetime's effort.

As for point five, it was successful, and due to North massively overwhelming South in industrial capacity, military strength, and population, it could be expected to be an easy win. It wasn't all that easy, but point granted.

Score: 3/5

American War of Independence

American Revolutionary War is another big one, but I really don't see why.

First, suffering - there were some extra taxes white protestant elites weren't terribly fond of. That's zero points, or else Washington, D.C. has as much right to rebel right now.

Second, alternatives. It's automatic fail due to lack of significant suffering, but other countries like Canada successfully got as much autonomy as they wanted without armed rebellion.

Third, prevention of suffering. Also automatic fail, but notice how United States kept slavery long after the rest of British Empire abolished it. It's not at all obvious that it was more representative, or more democratic than other colonies.

Four, casualties. There were about 52 thousand soldiers killed, plus unknown number of civilians (but not too many, as it was one of the rare clean wars). Vast majority of those were from disease, most commonly scurvy, a disease that was already known to be easily preventable. Battle deaths were barely over 10 thousand. That's small by modern standards, but not trivial relative to two million people living in rebelling States back then - just about 2%. I'll grant a point, but it's just being generous.

As for point five, expecting an easy victory against British Empire at peak of its power was foolish. It was a lucky win. No points.

Score: 1/5

Cambodian–Vietnamese War

That covers the usual suspects, which I all mentioned mostly to point out how they fail at being just wars. Now let's look at some obscure wars that might actually succeed.

Cambodian–Vietnamese War is my best candidate. Khmer Rouge killed approximately 1.5 million people out of population of 7.1 million, and weren't stopping. They didn't even limit themselves to their borders, but also raided some towns in Vietnam and massacred civilians there. Overall, spectacular victory at point one.

It's hard to tell what alternatives could be tried, but none are obvious, and due to massive urgent suffering we cannot blame the Vietnamese for not looking too hard. A second point.

Pol Pot was successfully overthrown. Guerrilla lasted for another decade, but it was on much smaller scale. Full point.

Point four is not entirely successful, as China attacked Vietnam to stop their Cambodian operation, with wide variety of estimated, but something of order of 100,000 soldiers and civilians killed. Still, that's far less than number of Khmer Rouge casualties, so point granted.

War could be expected to be easy - huge, well equipped, and experienced Vietnamese army could and did easily overwhelm Khmer army, and it did so successfully. Full point.

Score: 5/5

Most other wars of independence

Cambodian-Vietnamese War proves a just war is possible, even if really rare. Let's go back to other wars for a moment. One very popular kind are all independence/liberation wars, and uprisings against dictatorships.

They usually fail on suffering front - most colonial powers don't engage in massive killing, so the suffering is mostly widespread discrimination, and lack of representative democracy.

They fail on the second front, as countless countries succeeded in getting significant autonomy, or independence, by political action. It worked even against the Soviets, so it doesn't depend on the colonial power being "nice".

As for the third point, most governments that get into power after such wars are dominated by military, or otherwise very far from democratic ideal, and hardly much better than previous colonial powers. You might be lucky sometimes, but I wouldn't count on it.

Fourth - there's usually plenty of civilian casualties. Independence wars, unless the colonial power simply decides to give up early, tend to be really dirty. No points.

Fifth - by balance of power, it's really naive to expect a victory here. Yes, sometimes it happens, not that rarely even, but lucky wins don't count. And there's even lower chance of the new government being much better than the one being replaced. No points.

Related reading: From Dictatorship To Democracy.

Score: usually 0/5, occasionally higher score.

Terrorism

If we go even further from guerrilla uprisings to terrorism, it gets even worse.

Now occasionally like in Palestine the suffering is real, so point granted. In many places like Basque Country it's fairly insignificant.

As for alternatives, political methods not involving violence have been quite successful in countless cases. So zero points.

One interesting thing about terrorism, is that is pretty much always fails. Of very long list of organizations employing terrorism, the only totally successful case is Hezbollah, which kicked Israelis out of Lebanon. Tamil Tigers - who had semi-independent state in North Sri Lanka for quite a long time before being defeated recently, and Hamas and other Palestinian groups, which fought out some very limited autonomy for Palestinians, can be counted as partially successful. Everything else was a spectacular failure. Notice how the successful cases are really guerrillas employing some limited terrorism against mostly military targets as a small side activity, so they shouldn't even count as primarily terrorist organizations. Zero points here.

As for random unrelated casualties, they're present by design. Usually they're not terribly numerous compared to a proper war, so actually we could grant half a point here, but that would be stretching it. And that would only count if it worked, what not a single case of terrorism so far did.

As for chances of success - well, so far they're 0 successes in far too many tries, so no points.

Score: 0/5

Bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Let's look at operations like bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

First, suffering. Over 100,000 people died in the war, about half of them civilians, so it was a pretty good cause. Plus millions displaced, usual looting, rape, and what you usually see in dirty wars. Full point.

Second, alternatives. Some effort was taken, and out of three fighting parties, UN managed to get two to agree to stop. There were also attempts to limit civilian casualties by creating safe zones (openly abused for military advantage, but that's a completely different issues). You could argue about lack of fairness by UN, and if really everything that was possible was tried, but I'll grant the full point. Also military action was quite limited, aimed at getting quick political solution, not full annihilation of Serbian military capacity.

Third, prevention of further suffering - that's an easy point, operation was fully successful.

Fourth, no extra casualties - bombing is estimated to kill over 100 Serbian soldiers, a trivial number, and many more of just Serbian soldiers would have died if the fighting continued. Full point.

As for estimating chances of victory... well, wars are rarely won by just dropping a few bombs, but NATO was overwhelmingly stronger than any of the fighting parties in Bosnia, and it was successful, so full point.

Score: 5/5

Kosovo and other operations

While bombing of Bosnia was really successful, other peace enforcement campaigns like one in Kosovo much less so.

There were around 2000 casualties of the war between Serbian military and police and KLA, but no massive genocide ongoing. The best example of war crimes found was Račak massacre of about 40-45 people, and even that isn't really terribly solid. There was killing due to fighting, and large scale displacement, but that's rather underwhelming, so just half point this time.

Alternatives were under-explored. There was some attempt at negotiating, but it's not really obvious if NATO seriously wanted a solution that would be acceptable to both parties, as opposed to just getting some cover. No pressure was put on KLA, even though they would be fairly easy to press. And during the negotiations all sides issued a joint statement agreeing to "substantial autonomy for Kosovo", and "invited international civilian and military presence in Kosovo", so it's not really obvious what the subsequent fighting was about. No points.

Prevention of suffering was also quite unsuccessful, the war erupted even more strongly after bombing started, with some proper massacres this time. 80% of people killed, and 90% of people displaced happened after the bombing started. 250 thousand Serbian refugees never returned to Kosovo. No points.

Bombing as such didn't kill terribly many people, around 500 civilians, but due to massive increase in fighting on the ground huge number of people died. There was also a later spill-over of fighting into Macedonia, but it wasn't that severe. No points again.

I'm undecided if the last point should be granted or not - previous successes like Bosnia suggested that it would be an easy victory, but it worked only so-so, and large scale ground fighting caused a lot more suffering that was prevented. Half point.

Score: 1/5

Summary

According to criteria of successfully and reliably preventing significant suffering, the only good wars I could find where overwhelming force is used to stop already happening war or other large scale atrocities, and they limit themselves to minimalist goals instead of trying major political restructuring.

All wars where one side is not overwhelming, like WW2, and American Civil War, tend to cause massive suffering, comparable or worse than whatever can be prevented, even if one of the sides is clearly doing a lot of evil.

"Wars to End All Wars" are as old as known history, and include not only WW1, and WW2, but events as ancient as civil wars of late Roman Empire, and probably many before it. Success rate - 0%. Using this argument to support any war is just ridiculous.

All fighting from position of weakness - anywhere from terrorism to full scare insurgency - tend to cause massive suffering, and have even few successes at preventing major suffering.

If you know of any other wars that score very high according to my criteria, or have problems with my rating system (ratings are quite subjective, but it's hard to come up with anything much better), post it in comments.

Chomsky is a total idiot

Which all means that Chomsky is a total idiot, as he is a big fan of the kind of unsuccessful wars from position of weakness like Tamils in Sri Lanka (80 thousand or more people killed with nothing to show for it), and a big critic of successful wars like Bosnia (apparently Srebrenica was "not really a massacre" with only 8,000 or so people killed).

Yes, American government engages in many stupid wars, and causes a lot of suffering. But that doesn't mean that everyone who happens to criticize American government is automatically right and entitled to the high moral ground. Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, as my favourite philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky says.

Lasik retrospective

It's been over six month since I had my eye operation, so it's time for a quick retrospective.

I was a fairly atypical patient. Before operation I had mild short-sightedness, about -1.5 in each eye. It wasn't annoying enough for me to ever bother with glasses or contact lenses. I might had some use for them if I ever bothered driving or something like that, but driving in London is a ridiculous idea. And perhaps not even that, I cycled without problems for years.

If you think about it, there are surprisingly few common activities that require highly precise long distance vision. Most of our lives are spent in small rooms, interacting with people and objects no further than a few meters away from us, and the only benefit from long distance vision is knowing that the bus is coming towards you and you should stay off road, not its registration number. Long-sightedness seems like a much worse problem in modern civilization - what use is precise distant vision if you cannot even read what's on the screen, or see faces of people standing next to you clearly?

Anyway, perhaps more due to my transhumanist drive towards self-improvement than an actual pressing need, I decided to go for surgery. To get laser eye correction you need your vision to be stable - unlike with glasses and lenses you cannot change the lasering every couple of years. And you need money, as unfortunately NHS doesn't yet fund corrective eye surgery. What good is socialized medicine, if the only time I needed it I had to pay with my own money? Oh well, that's a rant for another day. Here's the clinic I used.

What operation looks like

Before the operation I underwent a series of eye tests with a lot of fancy machinery. There was obviously the "focus on the picture" machine, looking at letters through a series of lenses, and also machines I haven't seen before - one that puffed into my eyes and observed effects of puffing (I was supposed not to blink), and another that projected rotating light line onto my eye, also no blinking allowed. And there were a few more tests I don't remember too well.

On the day of operation, it went really quickly. First I got anesthetizing eye drops and had to wait there for half an hour or so. Then I was laid on a table, and the operation begun. To prevent blinking some plastic contraption was put around my eye, keeping the eyelid open. Water was poured onto it to clean it up and lubricate, and then some big machine pressed it so it stayed in place. Normally eyes wander around all the time, it feels really weird to have an eye in place and pressed upon. Really weird. It was time for the first laser - it cut a flap in my eye. Then the machine was removed and the flap was moved aside by the surgeon. Of course with a flap removed from my eye, I could barely see anything, it was extremely blurry. I was told to look at a green dot in front of my, while then the second laser reshaped my eye. After a few seconds the lasering was over, and the surgeon put the flap back on its place. I was given a minute of rest, and the same procedure was applied to the second eye. The whole thing lasted perhaps 10 minutes.

After that, I was left in a darkened room to rest for 20 minutes. A good thing I remembered to take my MP3 player with me, otherwise I would be bored to death (of course no reading allowed). Then a quick vision check, I got a bunch of eye drops and was sent home.

First weeks after operation

There was no waiting for the results - I instantly had superclear vision. But obviously that's not the end of story. Eyes after operation are extremely sensitive and fragile - it takes some time for them to heal. I was issued with a long list of activities that I wasn't allowed to do - no Tube on the first day (due to some air pressure issues). Not letting water or sweat into the eyes for the first week. Going outside only with sunglasses. No exercise, no alcohol, no cycling, no make up, no flying, no swimming, no gym, I think the list pretty much implied no sex too, even though it wasn't spelled explicitly. And a complicated schedule of eye drop - lubricating ones to take every 1-2 hours for a week, anesthetic every two hours on treatment day, antibiotic four times a day for 6 days, steroids every 2 hours for 3 days, then every 4 hours for another three days. And sleeping at night only with very uncomfortable eye shields, to make sure they don't touch the pillow.

Fortunately most of the limitations were lifted within a week - the ones that were left for longer were swimming, long list of sports I don't care about like football and skiing, and definitely under no circumstances rubbing, touching, or putting pressure on my eyes. Then a few appointments to check progress (1 day, 1 week, 2 months, 6 months) and that's pretty much it.

There was no pain involved. My eyes were extremely ridiculously oversensitive to sunlight at first - hence the sunglasses - but that passed quickly. They were also very dry, and I had to use lubricating eye drops for a few months. At first it was every 1-2 hours, just as the leaflet said, then it was maybe twice a day, and now I perhaps use them once a week if my eyes feel particularly dry, but usually I don't bother.

After six months

Apparently my vision is "better than 20/20", which is better than human average, but not by a huge margin. No problems left, other than occasional dryness. And I cannot cry, but that's more likely a personality issue than anything related to my eyes.

So it's top human values, not superhuman values yet. But we might get there. Right now, if your vision is bad and unchanging, you should get lasered. But I can imagine that with time we might get to the point when eye lasering with simply be a smart thing to do for pretty much everyone. We are superhumans already. We are resistant to diseases that could kill wild people with vaccination, we have access to ridiculously good memory with Google search, now we can even get superior orientation in unknown territory with Google Maps and a phone. We can communicate with people who are on the other side of the world. We got so far away from our wild state, it would just be another step on the way to get better vision than they had.

What makes a good sniper game

As a big fan of FPS, especially stealthy/sniperish kind, I'm highly opinionated about what makes a good sniper game. Actually, ignore that part. I'm highly opinionated about pretty much everything. Yes, that's more like it. So here are my thoughts on what constitutes a good sniper game.

Realism

First - the game needs to completely and utterly ignore realism.

You know what real war is like? It's basically walking around in large groups, and not killing anyone for years and years. Most deaths are civilians - by way of intentional killing, not caring much if they live or not, and hunger and diseases that tend to accompany war. Just look at one of the cleanest wars ever - American Civil War. There were 3.1M soldiers, and 625k deaths - that's a fairly respectable 20% death rate (lets skip civilians among them), but only 213k combat deaths - barely 6.7% death rate. Yes - even in a clean war like syphilis is far more dangerous than enemy bullets. In other world, you can expect to kill 0.067 enemies in all four years of that war. Wouldn't that make an amazing game? Play 60 years 24/7 to get one kill. How interesting would that be?

This number is of course nonsense - even most combat deaths are artillery, air bombardment, tanks, machine guns, and other big military hardware. An infantryman's chance of killing anyone is just ridiculously low. It's basically years and years of walking around.

Do you want to know what are the chances of a bullet fired killing someone? The world produces something between 10-14 billion rounds of military small arms ammunition a year. Well, we don't have any war now, but using reasonable (within order of magnitude) assumptions that World War II era's ammo production was more or less the same as today's, and that 20% of military deaths were from small arms fire (as opposed to non-combat and big guns), that gives 1 kill per 17,500 rounds shot. And now imagine a typical game where you're given 100 rounds and sent against a hundred or so of enemies. Ridiculous much?


[Probably the best sniper in history]
OK, you might say, but we're talking elite snipers here, not masses of lowly grunts. Then yes, it gets much more interesting indeed. Sniper kill rates are one kill per five round or better. The best sniper in history of the world - Simo Häyhä killed between 500-800 Russians with his sniper rifle, plus over 200 with submachine gun. And he used iron sights, not any fancy hardware.

Still this completely ridiculous number of 700-1000 kills took place over 105 days - that's less that one kill per hour, even assuming he didn't overwork himself and took plenty of rest. And that's so far beyond what a typical sniper can except to get, unless of course it's a video game sniper - those get 5 kills a minute, if it goes well.


[I'm not making up rocket pistols]
Does it mean realism is completely unnecessary, and the games should be using plasma rifles, and rocket pistols instead? Well, that might be cool as well, but reasonably accurate reproduction of battlefield mechanics as an emergent property can also result in reasonably accurate balance of different kinds of weapons, and different strategies, and reproduce richness that would be difficult to program manually.

Hollywood realism

The second thing we should abandon is Hollywood realism. There are so many ridiculous tropes in movies and video games that are repeated over and over again - people shooting without aiming, or shooting machine guns while holding them in their hands, grenades having ridiculously small casualty range (in most games you're safe if 2-3 meters away, and you need to be pretty much hit in your head to die from a grenade). Fragments from real granades can hit you even more than 200 meters away. And of course in movies wounded people either die instantly, or keep fighting. Nobody is ever wounded in need of hospitalization.

I'm not a fanatic of realism. Real war sucks. If you want some, volunteer to Afghanistan. You don't even need to hurry, that war isn't going anywhere. But often just going the easy way and making it realistic does improve gameplay, so why not do it?

Elements of good sniper games

Pretty much the best sniper game ever is Crysis. Now I'll wait for half of the readers to close this tab. Done? All right. So what makes Crysis such an amazing sniper game?

First, it's a PC game. Sniper games pretty much need mouse and keyboard, no controller gets even close to that. Unfortunately more and more crappy FPS games move to consoles-only, or are console games with crappy PC ports like FarCry 2, what's not much better.

Next, you do have peripheral vision. Humans have plenty of senses they can use to know what's happening in their vicinity. In addition to narrow field of view in front of them, our eyes can see large space around us, though quite poorly. The most practical way to represent peripheral vision in game is with some sort of radar view, just like Crysis does it.

And you can stay camouflaged, while moving at reasonable pace - in so many other games you can spend five minutes quietly crawling through grass, and then being instantly killed by an enemy sniper. In Crysis as long as you're in invisibility mode (which lasts only short time between rechargings), behind cover, hidden in vegetation, or sufficiently far away, you'll be safe.

Enemies behave reasonably sanely, as far as games of this kind go, even though I'd hope for a lot more in the future. They try to get cover, and shoot where they think you might be, and if you're not careful you will die. Crysis did not have to resort to giving them ridiculous aiming powers, or other dirty tricks like that as many other games do.

What's wrong with Crysis

Hey, I like a computer game? That doesn't sound much like me, does it? So let's start talking about what's wrong with Crysis.

First, weapons balance. You're most likely to use the assault rifle for everything. It beats everything else at every distance. It has much higher chance of killing a nearby enemy without aiming than either shotgun or SMG; with single fire mode, decent scope, and Maximum Strength mode it's extremely competitive with sniper rifles on long distances; and it's far better for short to medium distance kills from concealment (where silencer is a must) than anything else. For medium distance burst fire shootouts there's no alternative. And it has far more ammo than sniper rifle and the briefly featured gauss rifle. As a bonus you get a good grenade launcher to instantly get rid of enemy vehicles. There's simply no situation where anything except assault rifle is significantly better than it.

I have some more complaints about weapons. First, ammo is ridiculously sparse. You have to salvage ammo from your kills, and each Korean has just one magazine on him, and no grenades. What of course doesn't stop him from firing infinitely many rounds, and throwing as many grenades as he feels like throwing. It's especially bad with sniper rifles - forcing you to use assault rifles on long range - or move to midrange and use assault rifle from cover, what's actually pretty cool.

Another problem I have is that cover is too strong. Yes, you can blow most kinds of cover like metal sheets, but as long as they stand they protect whoever is behind them. Games like Call of Duty 4 get it right, thin cover offers protection, but not terribly much. I blame Hollywood realism. There's also the usual problem with grenades and RPGs being ridiculously underpowered, even if not as much as in many other games.

There are also some Crysis-specific issues. Invisibility mode, while really cool, can be abused - all energy is lost if you shoot while invisible, forcing you to become visible just like with D&D Invisibility spell. But - if you turn it off, headshot, and turn it on back, you can kill someone in a crowded room without losing any energy! It's an useful combo to learn.

Also rather annoyingly many seemingly cool features are pretty much useless. Tranquilizer darts would be useful for quietly taking down enemies, except they get up in 5 minutes, and set up the alarm - making them pretty much useless. Strength mode for melee attack is quite pointless, as you can as well be invisible, and shoot your target. Speed mode can only be used while high on energy - but if you're high on energy you can get invisible for safety, and if you're low on energy and have to escape, well too bad, speed mode won't work either. Vehicles are pretty much suicidal to use - their weapons have ridiculously low accuracy compared to your small arms, low firepower, and while inside you're a sitting duck waiting to be killed.

That's all still pretty cool for a sniper game.

Games that get it wrong

First, FarCry, no matter how much I liked it when it came out. You have sniper rifle which is good for what it says on the tin, except for its severely limited range. So you had a choice of either assault rifle - which instantly killed the enemy on headshot, but you needed to be close (for headshot), and it was loud enough to alert everyone. And MP5 SMG, which is silenced, but it doesn't even kill on headshot. So in either way, you get detected straight away. But the binoculars/radar mechanism is brilliant (and reused in Crysis).

Call of Duty 4 - there are sniper rifles, but because enemies respawn almost instantly, sniping is completely and utterly useless. You cannot clear the building and then move, or even clear the building, and order your team to move. Just forget about sniping and get the assault rifle back.

Then there are sniper games like Sniper: Art of Victory, which gets everything wrong.
Concealment being hit and miss for no reason, retarded AI, no peripheral vision, amazingly crappy grenades (less than 1 meter casualty range), no penetration of even glass windows, missing point blank shots with SMG, ridiculously low ammo, especially SMG ammo (like 10 bullets), and a very long list of bugs. And these are just some of the gameplay mechanics issues. Boring missions and crappy graphics can be ignored if sniping in fun, but the game is atrocious in every possible way imaginable.

And of course every single console FPS gets sniping wrong by using a controller.

That's it. Now you can go and design a good sniping game. Good luck!