Not liking your chances at beating Deep Blue at chess or Watson at Jeopardy?  Here’s your chance to beat a computer – which learns as it goes – in Rock-Paper-Scissors.  There are two modes, Novice and Veteran, the latter being considerably tougher because the computer draws on a historical database of known human patterns to try and statistically predict what move you’ll make.  From the developers:

A truly random game of rock-paper-scissors would result in a statistical tie with each player winning, tying and losing one-third of the time. However, people are not truly random and thus can be studied and analyzed. While this computer won’t win all rounds, over time it can exploit a person’s tendencies and patterns to gain an advantage over its opponent.

Even in Novice mode, the logic isn’t hidebound: it figures out your tendencies pretty quickly and gets smarter ruthlessly.  I won my first game, but I had an 8-1 lead on it early on and it came back within 3 even though I won 20-17.

Give it a shot and post your scores to the comments.  This might be your last chance to beat a computer at something before huddling underground as Skynet rises.

(Click picture to go to game page.)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More nerdery posts.

This is the first year that I have completed my holiday shopping completely online – I have not set foot into a store and actually purchased something on my list from said store.

What’s more, I cranked out my shopping in about 40 minutes – 25% of which was me screwing around looking at things that I found interesting (curse Amazon’s suggestion/CRM engine) – from my couch using my iPad.  I found good deals via Groupon, and a few helpful things from FatWallet, but mainly everything I got flowed through Amazon and its affiliates.

(Think about all the money malls spent this year in decorations, signage, promotions, carolers, creepy elves and Holiday Piano-Playing Guys.  Not a single dollar of that influenced shoppers like me.  Yet, on the web side of things, nearly no investment has been made except to roll out some holiday deals and maybe some more festive colors for banners and buttons.  The infrastructure was already there and imminently flexible.)

I wonder how long it will be before most shoppers do what I did this year: shop from home, never setting tire into traffic, and getting everything done in under an hour.  Imagine if retailers didn’t need to go nuts with redecorating their stores and instead just focused on a smart web experience during the holidays?  How much  money would they save?  How much lower could the overall cost-of-sales be?

Anyway.  Enough about me sitting around on my couch in Adidas trackpants while I look up crazy things like Fitbit on Amazon when I should be ordering GT5.  Let’s get on to the links.

Ninjas unbox a Nexus S smartphone.  Amazing work (albeit in Flash).  Make sure you grab the nunchuks at the bottom of the comments and destroy the page after the video ends.

The 10th Annual Year in Ideas is up on the NYTimes, and it’s amazing.  Especially interesting are the picks from the last nine years that have come to fruition over the course of a decade.

A man has been cured of HIV due to a stem cell transplant.

Filmography 2010.  A mashup of clips from 270 films that were out this year put into a wonderful, actually coherent, stream.  Says its creator: This year’s movies have legitimately transformed my idea of what is creatively possible. To commemorate, I’ve remixed 270 of them into one giant ass video.

Michael Mace (CEO of Cera Technology) on what’s wrong with RIM.  For those of you who think the company is doing just fine because of its recent financial performance, you need to read this article and understand what’s going on behind the curtain.

Finally, here’s the long-awaited (at least by me) trailer for The Tree of Life, due next year.  It’s described as a 1950s period piece, but it’s also about the loss of innocence, dueling life perspectives, and the value of the human soul and unselfish love.  Can’t wait.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Linkology posts.

First, I’d like to thank all our readers for their steady readership.  Last month we had the biggest traffic month (in terms of unique visitors and pageviews) we’ve had since starting this blog back in 2008, and we’re flattered you keep coming back for more.  Hopefully, we can keep this pattern going.  We appreciate you coming along for the ride.

Here’s the past week summed up in tidy links, all of which were deemed interesting by yours truly and not at all objectively measured or ranked within any credible system whatsoever.

For the first time, the TSA meets resistance.

Microsoft changes strategy with Silverlight, acknowledging “…HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.”  The days of  proprietary Rich Internet Application (RIA) frameworks are quickly coming to an end.  See also: Adobe’s own Flash to HTML5 conversion tool.

The #1 most crazy idea Steve Ballmer has ever heard.

MapCrunch: teleport instantly to a Google Street View location somewhere in the world.  More fascinating than I just made it sound.  Seriously.

Blekko: live slashtag search.  (Say what? you ask.  It’s all about a new way to tag information on the web.  Read about slashtags here.)

The NYTimes’s Christoph Niemann nails another one, this time very entertainingly showing us that daily human life is subject to the universal laws of physics.

The hand pause.  In the words of Jim Coudal: “What hands do whilst waiting for devices to catch up with their intent.”  Simple and accurate observation.

Finally, Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie pens a long (3,500 word) missive on the state of the company and the industry – as he departs for greener pastures.  Maybe it’s just me, but this writing is about as opaque as it gets and serves almost no one.  Perhaps this is/was part of Microsoft’s messaging problems to the consumer markets.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Linkology posts.

Every Friday, sophisticated algorithms here at MIPRO’s highly-secure analysis datacenter (me) trawl the entire Internet (what I have starred in Google Reader) to bring to you the best (what I find interesting) links of the week so that you have some nice weekend reading (work interference) to help you wind down into the weekend (which started 24 hours ago).  Please enjoy wholeheartedly (please read the first few lines).

Have a Garmin GPS? Your might be part of a recall involving overheating units.  See here for details.

The Beauty of the Power Game: a series of tennis videos from the NY Times depicting famous women tennis players is super-slow motion.  I can’t quite decide if these are superficial and exploitative or artistic and technically informative.  Regardless, it’s always amazing to watch a top-caliber athlete’s technique in slow-motion.  Anyone remember the famous Tiger Woods Swing Portrait?

Drink till you drop: finally, the magic elixir clinically proven to promote weight loss.  Affordable, too.

Mythbusters: fun with gas. Such a fine moment.

Here’s the kitten mittens scene from a It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia trailer.  Gets me every time.

Astronaut prank on a golf course.  Amazed this doesn’t happen more often.

Finally, Ricky Gervais does the David Brent dance.  Probably one of the most famous (and seriously hilarious) scenes from the UK version of The Office ever.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Linkology posts.

Christoph Niemann presents a wonderful sketch diary documenting a red eye flight from New York to Berlin (with a snazzy layover in London).

See it all here.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More posts about various oddities.

Looks like the iPhone had better bring its game face to WWDC and OS 3.0, because the Pre isn’t kidding around.  It gets high marks for its WebOS, which allows real app multitasking, and reviewers unanimously praise its OS speed, browser, screen and overall user interface/experience.

It gets nicked for a fairly poor keyboard, some random crashing/hanging issues (to be completely expected with first-gen OS and hardware) and a few memory management issues. Not to mention a nearly-nonexistent App Catalog to rival Apple’s App Store.

Bottom line: the Pre – especially once Palm offers an SDK and gets a robust App Catalog going – pushes the high-end touchscreen smartphone market forward in several big ways.  The Pre might not be the iPhone killer (I’ll wait to see what comes out of WWDC before judging that), but it’s the closest we’ve seen so far.

Here is a roundup of the early Pre reviews on the web right now.

Walter Mossberg, WSJ:

All in all, I believe the Pre is a smart, sophisticated product that will have particular appeal for those who want a physical keyboard. It is thoughtfully designed, works well and could give the iPhone and BlackBerry strong competition — but only if it fixes its app store and can attract third-party developers.

David Pogue, NYTimes:

The Pre, which goes on sale Saturday, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it’s the iPhone remixed. That’s no surprise, really; its primary mastermind was Jon Rubinstein, who joined Palm after working with Steve Jobs of Apple, on and off, for 16 years. Once at Palm, he hired 250 engineers from Apple and elsewhere, and challenged them to out-iPhone the iPhone.

Ed Baig, USA Today:

I’ve been testing the Pre for more than two weeks and like it a lot. Pre is easy on the eyes. I can’t think of a more comfortable cellphone in my hand. It has a lovely screen for taking in YouTube videos or browsing the Web. The “always-connected” software foundation at its core, which Palm designed from scratch and calls WebOS, is slick and rife with possibilities.

Peter Svensson, AP:

So webOS makes the iPhone look clunky, which is stunning in itself. It also thoroughly shows up Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile. That operating system has had multitasking for years, but few users have appreciated that. Rather, Windows Mobile has been blamed for making phones clumsy and slow. Now, webOS comes along and does multitasking right.

Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky:

Simply put, webOS is absolutely gorgeous. As far as phones go, it’s not just the only device we’ve seen which competes with the iPhone for looks, but we’d go as far to say that it bests the iPhone in some categories. The selection of fonts and font styling, use of transparencies, unified look of all of the elements, smooth transitions, and detailed application icons tie together in a really elegant way. It’s clear that Palm’s designers took a page from the Apple playbook here, but when something looks this good, you can hardly fault them. As our man Oscar Wilde said, “Talent borrows, genius steals.”

Generally speaking, the Pre’s UI makes sense and makes it easy to get things done rather quickly and painlessly. It is an impressive beast, though a beast nonetheless — and that means taming will be in order. We saw plenty of little glitches: messages that wouldn’t pop up (or go away), transitions that hung for a bit, and we definitely had a crash or two. In particular, it seems like Palm still needs to work on memory management — we noticed the device getting a little laggy after a day of heavier use, so we’re thinking not every process is being killed completely.

Gizmodo’s Jason Chen:

Think of it like this. The software is agile, smart and capable. The hardware, on the other hand, is a liability. If Palm can get someone else to design and build their hardware—someone who has hands and can feel what a phone is like when physically used, that phone might just be one of the best phones on the market.

PC World’s Ginny Mies:

Hardware flaws aside, the Palm Pre made a solid impression on me. Its eye-catching design and smooth operation make this smartphone the most exciting device I’ve seen in a while.

CNet’s Bonnie Cha:

Despite some missing features and performance issues that make it less than ideal for on-the-go professionals, the Palm Pre offers gadget lovers and consumers well-integrated features and unparalled multitasking capabilities. The hardware could be better, but more importantly, Palm has developed a solid OS that not only rivals the competition but also sets a new standard in the way smartphones handle tasks and manage information.

Finally, here’s the Pre’s welcome video, seen upon first boot of the phone.  Very nice, even if it borrows ambiance heavily from Apple’s welcome video for a Mac’s first startup.