Relativity as video game

Willy Chyr is turning MC Escher's Relativity into a video game.

MC Escher's work has been referenced and remixed countless times in popular culture, from The Simpsons to The Matrix, including other Escherian video games like Monument Valley. How do you respond to these other Escher remixes in Relativity?

One work that has had a big influence on Relativity is Inception, specifically the scene where Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ariadne (Ellen Page) are walking through Paris in the dream world, and Cobb is teaching her how to manipulate dreams. Ariadne then asks “What happens when you start messing with the physics of it?” and proceeds to fold the city in half. A little later, you see Cobb and Ariadne walk up a street that’s 90 degrees to their original plane.

When I saw this scene for the first time, I immediately had a ton of questions. What if you took an object from the world on the ceiling? If you let go, would it fall back towards the ceiling because that’s where its respective gravity is pointed? And if so, could you place an object from your gravity on top of that ceiling object, and have them balance in midair? I was imagining all these crazy possibilities. Unfortunately, Inception didn’t really dive into that apsect of that world. But that’s where Relativity comes in. I want to put players in the world shown in that scene, and let them play with objects from different gravities, and see what happens.

More about the game at its website. Speaking of gravity, if I knew how I'd insert Matthew McConaughey into the animated GIF above.

The interview with Chyr concludes with asking him what he has planned after he finishes the game.

I’m thinking of going to culinary school.

Mark Woollen

I had never heard of Mark Woollen until I read this profile, but then I realized I knew him from his work, which I love. Among the movie trailers he has cut:

A much longer list of movies whose trailers are covered with his fingerprints reveals a guy with particular taste. In what is usually a vulgar craft, Woollen is an artist. He has a trademark style: no voiceovers, an occasional expository text card (perhaps his one concession to the advertising imperative), heavy reliance on a musical track to carry the emotional through line. Watching his work, it's clear he understands that it's not just about conveying the outline of the plot but the mood of the thing.

Like Woollen’s most impressive trailers, Birdman hinges on music. Early on, editors tried scoring the trailers to David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” and “Heroes.” Both felt overfamiliar. Iñárittu suggested Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” but Woollen had the same reservations. Then someone in the office found a live version Cee Lo had recorded for British TV, singing to a drum machine. It synced beautifully with the shorter “teaser.” Still, the video “wasn’t feeling special enough,” Woollen recalls. Then he remembered a long shot, 32 seconds of Keaton stalking down a hallway. It could be the perfect introduction to a movie that feels like one continuous shot. An editor ran it for only five seconds, but “I said, ‘Let’s just put the whole thing in.’ And it clicked — the feeling we’d been looking for.”

Birdman and Gone Girl are about as commercial as Woollen gets. Summer blockbusters are neither his interest nor his strong suit. Woollen helps sell what 12 Years a Slave producer Dede Gardner calls films without an “obvious headline,” crossovers with the potential to expand the mainstream. “For movies that are elliptical or episodic, you need someone who really understands tone and mood, because the story isn’t going to help you sell tickets. Mark makes something that is not commercial seem absolutely watchable.”

Multiple testing

One of the potential pitfalls that arises now that it's easier and easier to test hundreds of variables to try to find correlations is the problem of multiple comparisons or multiple testing. 

The term "comparisons" in multiple comparisons typically refers to comparisons of two groups, such as a treatment group and a control group. "Multiple comparisons" arise when a statistical analysis encompasses a number of formal comparisons, with the presumption that attention will focus on the strongest differences among all comparisons that are made. Failure to compensate for multiple comparisons can have important real-world consequences, as illustrated by the following examples.

  • Suppose the treatment is a new way of teaching writing to students, and the control is the standard way of teaching writing. Students in the two groups can be compared in terms of grammar, spelling, organization, content, and so on. As more attributes are compared, it becomes more likely that the treatment and control groups will appear to differ on at least one attribute by random chance alone.
  • Suppose we consider the efficacy of a drug in terms of the reduction of any one of a number of disease symptoms. As more symptoms are considered, it becomes more likely that the drug will appear to be an improvement over existing drugs in terms of at least one symptom.
  • Suppose we consider the safety of a drug in terms of the occurrences of different types of side effects. As more types of side effects are considered, it becomes more likely that the new drug will appear to be less safe than existing drugs in terms of at least one side effect.

In all three examples, as the number of comparisons increases, it becomes more likely that the groups being compared will appear to differ in terms of at least one attribute. Our confidence that a result will generalize to independent data should generally be weaker if it is observed as part of an analysis that involves multiple comparisons, rather than an analysis that involves only a single comparison.

For example, if one test is performed at the 5% level, there is only a 5% chance of incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis if the null hypothesis is true. However, for 100 tests where all null hypotheses are true, the expected number of incorrect rejections is 5. If the tests are independent, the probability of at least one incorrect rejection is 99.4%. These errors are called false positives or Type I errors.

A recent NBER paper argues that this problem invalidates most finance papers claiming to have found some formula for investing success. The abstract:

Hundreds of papers and hundreds of factors attempt to explain the cross-section of expected returns. Given this extensive data mining, it does not make any economic or statistical sense to use the usual significance criteria for a newly discovered factor, e.g., a t-ratio greater than 2.0. However, what hurdle should be used for current research? Our paper introduces a multiple testing framework and provides a time series of historical significance cutoffs from the first empirical tests in 1967 to today. Our new method allows for correlation among the tests as well as missing data. We also project forward 20 years assuming the rate of factor production remains similar to the experience of the last few years. The estimation of our model suggests that a newly discovered factor needs to clear a much higher hurdle, with a t-ratio greater than 3.0. Echoing a recent disturbing conclusion in the medical literature, we argue that most claimed research findings in financial economics are likely false.

Gaze deeply enough into the noise and you'll see some pattern.

[via Vox]

RELATED: Spurious correlations

Robots take all the jobs (composer edition)

Xhail is a new service that offers a unique, custom score for your movie.

Here's the rub: the score is written by software, using real instrument stems. Instead of talking to a composer about what you want, you simply type in keywords like “fantasy” or “melancholy” and the software returns a score which you can customize using the interface provided. Add instruments, take out sections, add percussive emphasis at key timecode to match action on screen. The demo video gives a good sense of how it works.

Lots of details are still missing, like how much does it cost? Still, it's an impressive demo. The track composed for the fantasy short at the end of the demo video and the interface for modifying the video both were much better than I expected. You'd expect nothing less from a scripted demo video, and we'll have to wait for a public release to see if it's all that, but I'm intrigued.

I suspect many will rush to dismiss this service, especially my friends in the filmmaking world, just as people tend to do with any computer-generated art, but some of that, as always, comes from either a general technophobia or reverence for human creation.

If you can afford a real composer, this isn't a service targeted at you. Facetious title of my post aside, I suspect this is a less a case of replacing our existing composer supply than adding supply at the low end of the market.