Eight write-ups on the machinery behind the playhouse — what each project measures, what it refuses to claim, and what it took to find the difference. Every one of them is also a record of something I got wrong, because in every one of them that is where the interesting part was.
ENGLISH ONLY · 8 WRITE-UPS · 24,000 WORDS · ALL FIGURES MEASURED, NOT ESTIMATED
A human face and an animal face do not live on the same scale, so the first version was measuring head size instead of resemblance.
MediaPipe Face Landmarker · 6 Geometric Features · Weighted Distance
The card layer turned out to have a trivial equilibrium worth nothing at all, which is exactly why the layer above it is worth something.
MCCFR · Bayesian Opponent Modelling · 148,060,000 Iterations
A comeback mechanic that simulated beautifully and collapsed the moment a human was allowed to decline it — and the exact solve that came after.
Exact CFR+ · Bayesian Inference · Empirical-Bayes Shrinkage · Card Counting
An auction game about the winner's curse in which bidding the opening price on everything and thinking about nothing beat playing properly.
Common-Value Auction · First-Price Sealed Bid · Winner's Curse
The classifier had been fine for months. The accuracy figure attached to it was wrong three separate times, each caught only by measurement.
Naive Bayes · Char 2–3gram · Additive Smoothing
Twenty versions of a page that draws your speech melody, measuring no more than version four did — the difference is that it now says so.
YIN F0 Estimation · Viterbi Octave Correction · Final-Slope
Eighty-five green assertions, and then the first human being sang into it and the tool captured two notes.
YIN F0 Estimation · Drift-Gated Sustain · Key Transposition
Seven measurement cycles in one day killed twelve hand-tuned fixes; the thirteenth was pronounced dead and was still quietly flattening the cast.
Gordon-Schaefer Model · Ostrom Institutions · Forensic Reconciliation
All eight are playable. The write-ups are the reasoning; the playhouse is where you go to disagree with it.
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