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stretchjournalemerson · 6 years ago

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Turn and Face the Strange: Academia’s Failure to Account For Changes in Current LGBT+ Culture

By Matt Pifko

In the world of academic writing, there is no dearth of queer writing. Whether coming from authors belonging to the LGBT community or focusing on the community itself (such pieces often inhabit both spaces), this sort of academic discourse is prevalent. Countless journals are entirely dedicated to sexuality, queer communities, queer texts, and the general study of queer culture. Despite all of this writing, I see a gap in the academic sphere. I see a blank space, a disparity between the world I see every day and the world represented in these journals. There are essential modern queer texts almost entirely absent from the conversation, iconic figures that have yet to be mentioned by slothlike academia, and important features of the community mentioned only by non-scholarly pop culture magazines and niche community websites. In other words, these academic journals that proclaim to deep dive into queer communities with authority and accuracy appear to fail to illuminate and investigate the vibrant, ever-evolving community.

To explain the gap I perceive, I must first explain the other half of the equation. In other words, I must explain the life experiences I have had over the course of the past year. After graduating from my small, homogenized, exceedingly white and conservative high school, I was thrust into that age-old, all too familiar cliche - a wacky arts school in a major city. Emerson College, despite its notorious lack of racial diversity, was a culture shock to me, mostly due to its famous inclusive and vibrant queer community. Here, I was introduced to people of all kinds of sexualities, genders, philosophies, and nationalities. It was here that I was educated in a new language - that of queer culture.

I had been familiar with the LGBT community’s most beloved celebrities and most popular terminology, thanks to the internet and the widespread appropriation of this terminology (which is an entirely different and important discussion best saved for another occasion), but Emerson gave me a whole new vantage point. Here, I could watch other queer people discuss celebrities, films, TV shows, literature, and all varieties of pop culture that they valued. Thus, when I entered the academic sphere, which seemingly includes so many queer voices, I was perplexed to find very few voices discussing the same “icons” I had heard about in person at Emerson.

To understand this relationship between the current LGBT culture I perceive and the culture discussed in academic journals, we must first establish the context in which this relationship exists. The context, in this case, would be LGBT culture of the past, and the general concept of this culture. This culture is both incredibly storied and often hidden/undocumented, a result of the stigma around homosexuality and other “deviant” sexualities in almost every historical society. Given that LGBT individuals existed throughout history in every time period and every region, there has been a lot of lost culture.

It is most useful to examine LGBT culture in the last few decades, in that it is the most similar to the culture of today’s community, and additionally, most information available pertains to this period. LGBT “culture” is not merely a underground collection of gay-themed media, but rather, more like a vast web of mainstream media that is selectively chosen and incorporated into the community, combined with certain works that directly deal with LGBT

themes. Historically, music has been particularly important to the community. In his extensively researched article about gay and lesbian music tastes in the Belgium queer community, Alexander Dhoest (and his assistant researchers) gives some background, explaining that “music contributed to the evolution of lesbian and gay cultures on several levels... it not only provided means to meet other lesbians and gays, whether belonging to a community and the construction of lesbian and gay identities” (e.g. Chauncey, 1994; Taylor, 2012)” (Dhoest et al., 208).

Furthermore, Dhoest notes that lesbian and gay tastes can vary from one another, but there are certainly overlapping artists and sensibilities. Particularly important to the LGBT community is “camp”, a style connected to gay culture that can be described, in the briefest, simplest terms, as a heightened parody of the feminine and “tasteful” society. Such culture is showcased in drag queens and the worship of pop divas. Dhoest elaborates, claiming “In a musical context, camp can be identified not only at the level of the performer and their stage performance; it is also audible through lyrics and musical execution.” Examples of such campy divas include Judy Garland, Madonna, and Whitney Houston (Dhoest et al., 209). LGBT culture is vast and dense, and campy pop singers constitute a small fraction of the bigger picture. Other genres can fall under the lens of camp, such as punk and disco. Additionally, from observations and life experience, I have noted there is a historical admiration in the community for female performers in all musical genres, such as Bjork, Blondie (Debby Harry), and Fleetwood Mac (Stevie Nicks). Historically, camp has also existed in the world of film, in everything from What Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) to the more overtly queer John Waters “Trash Trilogy” (Pink Flamingoes) (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and Desperate Living (1977) (Snider).

So, where has queer culture gone since the 20th century? In an age where the community has been increasingly more accepted and visible, especially in western culture, what content has emerged? In Lauren McInroy and Shelley Craig’s article “Perspectives of LGBTQ Emerging Adults on the Depiction and Impact of LGBTQ Media Representation,” a valuable cross-section of early 2010s LGBT culture is illuminated. As the title suggests, the researchers interviewed various self-identifying members of the community whose ages ranged from 18 to 22 (all located in a Canadian city where McInroy works as a professor) on the subject of LGBT representation in media, particularly TV and film.

In terms of representative shows, the researchers found the following to be the most commonly mentioned/popular among LGBT interviewees: Queer As Folk, The L Word, Degrassi, and Glee. Movies included Brokeback Mountain (2005), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), A Single Man (2009), and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) (mistitled “Hedwig and the Angry Itch” in the article). Already, it is clear that LGBT culture in the 2000s and early 2010s revolved much more around properties with actual LGBT characters in the narratives. Moreover, the musicians the community supported more openly supported the community in return, as is the case with musician Lady Gaga. Gaga was a favorite due to her larger-than-life media persona and biting wit, but she affirmed the community in return, notably premiering the LGBT pride centered track “Born This Way” in 2011. In these interviews, the LGBT emerging adults (who, it

must be said, were overwhelmingly white and LGB) noted the improved media representation but struggled to name a character or show/film they consumed that displayed queer people in a completely accurate light. Many of the emerging adults preferred new media, i.e. blogs and social media, for LGBTQ representation, because on these platforms the community can represent itself authentically and not be forced to appeal to mass audiences (McInroy). Unfortunately, the 2016 article fails to mention specific new media or new media celebrities, leaving the reader to guess at what exactly the subjects consume.

Regardless of in which era LGBT individuals consumed media, what they consumed, or why they consumed it, it is very clear that this media has an enormous impact, especially when it features some kind of direct representation. In a 2011 study at the Austin Pride Festival, an overwhelming amount of GLB individuals identified media figures as instrumental in their coming-out process (Gomillion et al.). In other words, through these storylines and characters, members of the community can see their own stories, which in turn legitimized and clarified their own hidden experiences and emotions. In a community like the LGBT community, where members typically grow up isolated in heteronormative households/communities, media representation is absolutely essential - for many, including myself, it is a bridge to understanding and acceptance.

Thus, the discrepancy I see between the current LGBT youth culture and the academic sphere does not have anything to do with this underlying understanding. Academic writers understand and have proven through empirical research that media is important to the LGBT community - it’s just that they fail to keep up with, or rather, fail to process this constantly evolving culture in meaningful ways. Each of the academic pieces I have cited contain valuable information, and yet, they all have significant shortcomings. Namely, they are out of date. To a degree, this cannot be helped, as the articles were published in 2015, 2016, and 2011, respectively. That said, the articles do not reference any representative films that were released post-2009, and the most recent TV show referenced began in 2010. Furthermore, these articles are some of the only LGBT-centered academic writing I could locate that deals with the actual community. After scouring the internet and using all the means provided to be as a student at a well-funded communications college, I found that almost all the well-researched, quantitative data on LGBT media and its impact on the community dated back to 2016 or earlier.

To a degree, this is not so much an issue specific to queer academic writing as much as it is emblematic of the faults of the academic genre as a whole. The peer-reviewed, extensively examined processing of academic papers serves as quality assurance, but it also ignores factors such as urgency or influence. This is not to say that academic writing is completely ineffectual in its antiquity and specificity - rather, I believe academic writing is incredibly important, and that the haste with which new material and new research is released should reflect that. In the case of research on LGBT narratives and their effects on the community, perhaps these articles need to be released more expeditiously and become more readily available to the LGBT youth who are

concerned with such matters. Articles like “Radical Love in a time of Heteronormativity: Glee, Gaga, and Getting Better” simply lose relevance in only a few years time.

Therefore, when the cultural items that are examined are no longer essential topics of conversation in the LGBT community, much of the research loses its teeth, and conclusions reached about the community itself can seem inaccurate or outdated. This is not to say that the history of the community cannot be documented, nor are older cultural items like “Glee” unimportant to the visibility of the community. Rather, these simply do not reflect the current values and shared culture of the community, especially for LGBT youths who joined the community long after Madonna and Glee had phased out of popularity. Even in the academic world, timing must be considered. Research regarding an evolving world has to evolve with it and remain relevant, or else the authority of academia will wane further.

Moreover, in the world of academic writing, specifically that which was available to me through my liberal arts style institution, I see two misguided avenues which queer academia often heads down. The first is that of the misguided research. If academic research is to illuminate the influences of media on LGBT individuals, it is essential that the researchers actually interact with LGBT individuals. It is not enough for the researchers to be queer themselves (as is the case with many of the aforementioned articles) - the subjects must be as well. In the piece “Sexuality and Teen Television: Emerging Adults Respond to Representations of Queer Identity on Glee” by Michaela D.E. Meyer and Megan M. Wood, an empirical study is conducted by interviewing various students at a college about their experiences with the TV show Glee. In their opening statement, the authors stress that while previous research has established that queer media can have an impact on emerging adults, they wanted to focus on how these adults are impacted, and in what ways their identities can benefit. This is a valuable vein of research that has yet to be touched, and yet, the researchers miss the mark by solely interviewing straight-identifying individuals. In a study about LGBTQ representation in a show famously important to the community, the researchers allowed for their 97 fans of Glee to be unanimously heterosexual. While the data itself is well organized and analyzed, this oversight renders the data useless in terms of LGBT impact. When the world of academic writing is already so exclusive and, for lack of a better term, narrow, a journal like “Sexuality & Culture: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly” in which this study was published should be providing more accurate and insightful data.

On the other hand, academic writing can miss the mark by focusing too much on the thematic analysis of queer media. After finding article after article about the state of the community written in 2015 or earlier, I began to look for specific articles about current LGBT cultural items of which I knew, those that I had heard in conversations with actual LGBT emerging adults. Researching these items, I found some peer-reviewed entries (there were significantly more entries on queer film/TV as opposed to queer music, despite music’s aforementioned important role in the community), and yet, these were almost always a thematic analysis of the text. Specifically, “Beating Hearts: Compassion and Self-Discovery in Call Me By Your Name” by Joanna Di Mattia and “Call Me By Your Name: Not Pedophilia, Still Problematic” by Renee Sorrentino and Jack Turban are examples of such analytical articles about a relevant LGBT cultural item. Call Me By Your Name, a 2017 film based on the book of the same name, has been immensely popular due to its sensitive and visually splendorous take on gay romance, and therefore, would be a fantastic artifact to conduct research on. That said, these authors, despite writing for publications such as “Screen Education” and “Psychiatric Times,” offer up little more than their review of the material through slightly different lenses. The articles vary in their opinion on the quality of the representation, but each neglects to investigate the actual effects of the material on the represented people. “Beating Hearts” almost purely focuses on the technical and narrative elements of CMBYN, while Sorrentino and Turban’s article makes a surface level connection between modern LGBT youths who use hookup apps and the main character of the film’s experiences. Thematic analysis and opinion based evaluation is not without merit, but there are plenty of conversations on film analysis and queer themes already going on outside of the academic sphere. In order for academia to be necessary and essential in today’s world, it must differentiate itself by providing the kind of empirical data and findings that art journalism cannot cover.

If the goal of the academic sphere is to educate other academics, then researchers must make an effort to reach out of the academic world and learn about things outside of their domain. If the goal of the academic sphere is to educate students my age, then research that is genuinely reflective of the world in which we live must be made available to us. Many of these articles are valuable in certain respects, and on the whole, this body of research constitutes a wealth of useful information when cross-referenced with one another to fill in the gaps. Nonetheless, we, as a community and as young people with a thirst for information, deserve better. Ultimately, the most crucial oversight in the queer academic community is simple - there is a lack of new voices with new information. Whether in the form of impactful texts or influential figures within the community, these perspectives must be addressed and must be heard. Meaningful research must be done that intimately involves these voices in the process itself. It is not easy to change gears within the academic community, to ask a sloth to move faster, but valuable change is never easy. Strong academics do not teach and communicate because it is easy, but rather, because they understand that knowledge and perspective is unimpeachably important. Perhaps, academics can understand that communicating with the current culture themselves is the first step towards communicating this knowledge to others.

Works Cited

Bingman, Andrew. Influence of Media on Gay and Bisexual Identity Formation. 2016.

EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.D7683790&site= eds-live.

Boyer, Sabrina, and Erin Brownlee Dell. Â€ ̃Pop Culture Is Our Religionâ€TM: Paulo Freire, LGBTQ Rights and Radical Love. 2015. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.EED4E14&site=e ds-live.

Dhoest, Alexander, et al. “Into the Groove: Exploring Lesbian and Gay Musical Preferences and ‘LGB Music’ in Flanders.” Observatorio (OBS*), no. 2, 2015, p. 207. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edssci&AN=edssci.S1646.595420150 00200011&site=eds-live.

Di Mattia, Joanna. “BEATING HEARTS: Compassion and Self-Discovery in Call Me by Your Name.” Screen Education, no. 91, 2018, p. 8. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.576220095&sit =eds-live.

Kies, Bridget, and Thomas J. West, III. "Queer nostalgia and queer histories in uncertain times."

Queer Studies in Media & Pop Culture, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017, p. 161+. Contemporary Women's Issues, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496450962/CWI?u=ecl_main&sid=CWI&xid=b2c 1e0b. Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.

Meyer, Michaela D. E., and Megan M. Wood. “Sexuality and Teen Television: Emerging Adults Respond to Representations of Queer Identity on Glee.” Sexuality & Culture, vol. 17, no. 3, 1 Sept. 2013, pp. 434–448. PsycINFO, Emerson College, doi:10.1007/s12119-013-9185-2.

Mcinroy, Lauren B., and Shelley L. Craig. “Perspectives of LGBTQ Emerging Adults on the Depiction and Impact of LGBTQ Media Representation.”

Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 19 May 2016, pp. 32–46. Taylor & Francis Online, Emerson College, doi:10.1080/13676261.2016.1184243.

Snider, Sarah. “The John Waters Trash Trilogy.” Culture Wars, 19 June 2007,

www.culturewars.org.uk/2007-06/trash.htm. Sorrentino, Renee, and Jack

#academia #lgbtq #research #matthew pifko #stretch2019

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devotedlytinystudent · 8 years ago

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Capstone Project: Methodology

Capstone Project Title:The Association between climate change and economic indicators in World Bank Collated Countries.

Note that I have modified my project title a little bit. I initially choose the title “The Association between climate change and economic indicators in low, medium and high income countries”. The intention was to bin the dataset into 3 subgroups of countries (low, medium and high) and then perform separate statistical analyses on each subgroup. But this will make my sample sizes to be too small for proper statistical analyses. This may introduce more errors into my analyses when I further divide the sub datasets into training and test samples. However, my response variable and predictors remains unchanged

Methods

Sample

The sample (N=248) is from the World Bank Survey on developmental indicators, the main World Bank collection of development Indictors (WDI), compiled from officially-recognized international sources. It presents the most accurate global development data available, and includes national, regional and global estimates. Participants/population (N=198) represented 248 countries and regions of the world with about 168 indicators, including gross domestic product, total employment rate, and estimated HIV prevalence in 2012 and 2013. The sample (N=248) comprises of

Investigating the relationship between economic activities and climate change will help:

a) poor countries to channel their scarce resources to help develop resilience strategies.

b) middle income countries to balance between economic activity and emission control strategic and

c) high income country countries research and develop energy efficiency technologies and shift towards low carbon economy.

Measures

The Co2 damage was measured for each country by multiplying $20 per ton of carbon (the unit damage in 1995 U.S dollars) and the number of tons of carbon emitted.

Predictors included 1) an annual percentage growth of GDP at market price based on constant local currency, 2) export of goods and services and other markets provided to the rest of the world (include the value of merchandise, freight, transport, travel, business and government services 3) import of goods and services and other markets received from the rest of the world (include the value of merchandise, freight, transport, travel, business and government services 4) industry added as a separate net output of the industrial section, 5) annual population growth rate and 6) urbanization growth rate. There are inherent activities in all the predictors that can spur climate change through the emission of more Co2 into the atmosphere.

Analyses

The distributions for the predictors and the carbon dioxide damage response variable were evaluated by performing descriptive statistics for categorical variables and calculating the mean, standard deviation and minimum and maximum values for quantitative variables.

Scatter plots were also examined, and Pearson correlation and Analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to test bivariate associations between individual predictors and the carbon dioxide damage response variable.

Lasso regression with the least angle regression selection algorithm was used to identify the subset of variables that best predicted carbon dioxide damage. The lasso regression model was estimated on a training data set consisting of a random sample of 60% of the total dataset (N=149), and a test data set included the other 40% of the total dataset (N=99). All predictor variables were standardized to have a mean=0 and standard deviation=1 prior to conducting the lasso regression analysis. Cross validation was performed using k-fold cross validation specifying 10 folds. The change in the cross validation mean squared error rate at each step was used to identify the best subset of predictor variables. Predictive accuracy was assessed by determining the mean squared error rate of the training data prediction algorithm when applied to observations in the test data set.

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neurotribe · 7 years ago

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“Beware Greeks bearing gifts”, or “Love the Lord your God with ... all your mind”.

During the course of this semester, I have been bumping into the students that have been taking a class in the lecture room directly beneath the one in which I teach my class. Then I bumped into the lecturer. It turns out that they are Biblical Greek B. I had an idea.

Yesterday we invited Biblical Greek B to join us in our lecture room over the break. My class provided the food and nibbles. I organised some of my students to talk about the kinds of things that we do in our class, and then we asked the Greek B class to give us an idea of what they get up to. After the students gave us some idea as to what Greek B was like, their lecturer (who’s name is also Stephen) busted out some Greek moves on the biblical text that we had just looked at prior to the break. Really briefly, Stephen showed us what he teaches the students to do in terms of getting into the Greek of the New Testament, and as is often the case, my class’ understanding of the passage that we had looked at deepened.

As we wrapped up, I was chatting to Stephen and he made an observation. He was contrasting the tools available today to explore the original language of the biblical text with the availability of similar tools only just 15 years ago when he was a student. When he was a student, the cost and difficulty involved in trying to obtain obscure software tools seemed like a world removed from the present day where you can download an app within seconds that can help you explore the words of the Greek New Testament on the fly. Before I had the opportunity to make some humorous comment about the convenience available to spoilt students “these days”, Stephen went on to talk about how dangerous the prevalence such tools in the hands of those lacking a disciplined process could be. He was of the opinion that someone using one of these tools without appropriate context can and do use the original Greek to make arguments supporting whatever point it is that they may be trying to make, therefore denying the texts ability to bring a critique to the reader or indeed the community in which the text is being read.

I immediately began to reflect upon not just the toxic nature of political debate (which is part of the subject that I teach), but also how political and social “discussions” between Christians seem to be even more destructive as Christians of all persuasions get lost somewhere along the “left” and “right” of the political spectrum, a spectrum I find increasingly less helpful as we attempt to navigate the difficult local, national and international issues that intrude upon our parochial lives.

I have written previously about my attempts to actively work against the “echo chamber” that is “social media” therefore I regularly see posts and links to things that I may not necessarily agree with in my various social media feeds. Last week, whilst scrolling through my Facebook feed, I saw an article posted that not only didn’t seem accurate, but was also quite inflammatory. It seemed obviously aggressive and antagonistic. I did the quickest of searches and within a minute I had found some other articles debunking the first one. These articles highlighted the selective reporting used in the original article. I posted links to these articles. I was fascinated as subsequent comments continued to remark on the original article, with no reference made to the articles I posted in response countering the claims of the original one.

I considered this in light of Stephens comments regarding the danger of insta tools in the hands of those lacking some kind of disciplined approach. It made me consider the idea of accessing news as an activity that requires a disciplined approach. With this in mind, I thought of a practice that I want to share.

One of the ways in which I try to counter the hyper personalised media algorithm world that wraps me in articles that algorithms think I want to see, is to try to select a wide variety of news sources outside of my bias.

One of the tools that I use on a regular basis is the Media Bias Chart. The Media Bias Chart is an attempt to place news sources along two axes, the first being accuracy of reporting and the second being political bias. I am aware of the irony of constructing such a chart (ie: what is the bias of the organisation putting together the bias chart?) however if we are to meaningfully be of any use in this world, I believe we must attempt to develop some kind of discipline as we seek to understand what is transpiring around us prior to responding.

Attempting to use our minds in this kind of discriminating way, assuming we have bias and trying to do what we can to conscientise ourselves to our own worldview and the limits it places on interpersonal interactions reminds me of Jesus' interaction with the young lawyer sent to discredit him in Luke chapter 10. When pressed on the core aspects of religious life by the lawyer, Jesus responds with “Love the Lord your God with ... all your mind”.

I don’t know if I am reading too much into it, when the last part of our humanity Jesus instructs us to love God with is our mind, then following it up with loving our neighbour as ourselves. Of course the hidden challenge in the command to love neighbour as self is the explosive notion that loving neighbour as self unambiguously requires loving our enemies.

I suspect that if we open ourselves up to other news sources, particularly ones that challenge our bias, it will immediate help us understand where our would be ideological and political “enemies” are coming from, and and in the process of “seeking first to understand before we are understood”, hopefully lead the interaction into hospitable territory where transformation may occur.

If you haven’t already, maybe take some time to have a think about your regular sources of “news” input, reflect upon how helpful they are in seeking change and transformation, and, I don’t know, maybe shake it up a little. After all, what have you got to lose?

#Theology #Politics #Media #Discipleship

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wepositivepsych · 7 years ago

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The Confirmation Bias

Previously in one of my posts I referenced a task designed by Peter Wason in the 1960’s that showed participants 3 numbers and then asked them to find a rule that these 3 numbers followed. An excellent video can be found here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA4w2O61Xo.

Wason’s experiment highlighted a prevalent bias that impacts us all, The Confirmation Bias. The Confirmation Bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one's pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses (Plous, 1993). It works such that imagine you are putting together a jigsaw puzzle, you have in your head what the jig saw puzzle should look like and therefore you jam the puzzle pieces together, so they match your predetermined imagined image.

According to American Psychologist Raymond Nickerson, ‘if one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration’ (1998).

In a literature review conducted by Rassin (2008) it discusses how our perception is influenced by the Confirmation bias. For example, the expectation that a certain stimulus is present can lead us to see that stimulus, while, in fact, it is not present at all (an illusion). Also, ambiguous stimuli are perceived in a hypothesis-congruent way (Risinger et al, 2002). Lastly, confirmation bias can lead us to concentrate so strongly on confirming evidence that disconfirming and peripheral information is literally overlooked (Deffenbacher, 1980).

It has also been found that the Confirmation bias influences judgement and decision making. A study by Lord, Ross and Lepper (1979) concluded that if people cannot avoid disconfirming evidence, they tend to give less weight to such information than to the confirming information. In this study, 24 students in favour of the death penalty and 24 against it were exposed to a number of short research reports. The reports were fabricated for this study in a way that they were all of equal quality. Some of the reports produced results supporting the crime-reducing effect of death penalties, whereas others produced opposing findings. Participants were instructed to rate the quality of all research reports. Indeed, participants rated reports producing results in line with their personal opinion to be better than those describing conflicting findings. In addition, at the end of this study, participants were even more pronounced in their opinion compared with the beginning of the experiment. Hence, the confrontation with disconfirming evidence was not merely ineffective but even counterproductive.

Another manifestation of the confirmation bias dictates that it is very hard for people to change their opinion, even when faced with clear counter-evidence. Ross, Lepper and Hubbard (1975) asked 60 participants to differentiate between 25 actual suicide notes and 25 fabricated ones. Participants subsequently received false feedback about their accuracy. Some of them were told that they had performed well, while others were told they had performed badly. After a short delay, participants were informed that this feedback was false and that it was part of the experimental procedure. Participants were asked to verify that they understood that the feedback had in fact been false. Nonetheless, participants’ responses to subsequent questions indicated that the feedback still influenced their self-perceived accuracy as well as their self-efficacy as to future performances in similar assignments. In other words, the original feedback could not be undone by subsequent overriding information.

In understanding the origin of the confirmation bias there are many viewpoints. From a cognitive perspective it can be due to the reliance on heuristics (brain short cuts) such as the availability heuristic that leads to easy retrieval of confirming information. From a motivational perspective it can be the desire to have pleasant thoughts (confirming our beliefs) opposed to unpleasant thoughts (disputing our beliefs). From an evolutionary perspective it could be the result of weighing up the cost of accepting a false hypothesis opposed to rejecting a true hypothesis (eg. I can see my partner is selfish, but I see her as altruistic to preserve the relationship).

Looking for falsification of every perception, judgment and decision we make is time and resource consuming. Whilst it’s our best defence against the confirmation bias it is just not practical in all situations. An efficient but not always accurate process coined “positive test strategy” by Klayman & Ha (1987) reasons that a scientific test of a hypothesis is one that is expected to produce the most information. This means that a positive test or a falsification can be useful, just depends on the circumstances and what is going to yield the most data.

In the current information climate, the confirmation bias has never been so prevalent and powerful. As we transition to a personalised technological future where social programming employs algorithm to target users with deliberate information, we see that objectivity can quickly become eroded. As the amount of confirming evidence becomes overwhelming we have to consciously take time to look for falsifications as often a “no” is much more revealing than a yes”.

Reference

Deffenbacher, K A. (1980) Eyewitness Accuracy and Confidence - Can We Infer Anything About Their Relationship? Law and Human Behavior Vol. 4 (4): 243-260.

Klayman, Joshua; Ha, Young-Won (1987), "Confirmation, Disconfirmation and Information in Hypothesis Testing" (PDF), Psychological Review, American Psychological Association, 94 (2): 211–28, doi:10.1037/0033-295X.94.2.211, ISSN 0033-295X, retrieved 2009-08-14

Nickerson, Raymond S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises, Review of General Psychology Vol. 2, (2): 175-220.

Plous, S. (1993). The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. p. 233

Rassin, E. (2008). Individual differences in the susceptibility to confirmation bias.Netherlands Journal of Psychology, 64(2), 87-93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF03076410

Risinger, D Michael; Saks, Michael J; Thompson, William C; Rosenthal, Robert. (2002) The Daubert/Kumho implications of observer effects in forensic science: Hidden problems of expectation and suggestion California Law Review; Berkeley Vol. 90 (1): 1-56.

Ross, L; Lepper, M R; Hubbard, M; (1975) Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. National Library of Medicine. Journal of personality and social psychology Vol. 32 (5): 880-892

#Confirmation Bias #Townsville #Psychologist #@psychology #Psychology

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itsworn · 8 years ago

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HOT ROD Rescue: Wrong Bellhousing Causes Hard Shifts on 1966 El Camino

The Muncie Four-Speed in Jeff Smith’s 1965 El Camino Won’t Go Into Gear. He’s Gonna Fix It.

Not a long-lost identical twin brother: Just veteran auto tech writer Jeff Smith rescuing himself. He had serious clutch release issues on his personal 1965 El Camino equipped with a one-piece rear-main-seal GM 350-HO crate motor. Turns out, there were multiple issues, including the wrong bellhousing, bent linkage, a thin flywheel, and insufficient pedal free-play.

The Combo

Jeff Smith has been writing about and working on hot rods just about forever. His squadron of first-generation Chevrolet A-bodies is a legend among fellow automotive journalists. But even legends have to deal with real-world problems. Smith recently had trouble getting the Muncie four-speed manual trans in his 1965 El Camino to go into gear. Judging from the volume of mail I get, shifting and clutch-engagement issues seem to touch a nerve with many of our readers. Here’s how Smith ultimately rescued himself.

Jeff Smith has a whole fleet of early Chevy A-bodied intermediates, including this 1965 El Camino that’s he’s owned for over 30 years.

The Problem

Several years ago, Smith installed a brand-new GM 350-HO crate engine in the El Camino. The late-style, one-piece rear-main-seal motor requires a different flywheel than earlier blocks that use two-piece rear main seals, both because of the late unit’s reduced flywheel-to-crank flange mounting-bolt circle and its 23.4 oz-in external balance weight. Like earlier flywheels, one-piece-seal units come in both 153-tooth/12¾-inch-OD and 168-tooth/14-inch-OD variations. Behind his previous two-piece-seal 327 motor, Smith had been using a 153-tooth flywheel.

But a friend just happened to have a used, 168-tooth one-piece-seal flywheel “lying around.” Unfortunately, Smith’s old “small bell” wouldn’t clear the larger diameter flywheel. But then another friend had a large aluminum factory bell for sale. After reassembly, Smith’s clutch wouldn’t release properly, especially after the engine warmed up. “The issue was bad enough that the trans would grind heavily going into reverse,” relates Smith. “After 10 to 20 miles, the only way to get it into first gear at a stoplight was to shut the engine off, put the shifter into first, and restart the engine! The trans did seem to shift decently once the vehicle was moving.”

After Smith replaced the original early 327 with a late GM 350-HO crate motor, he had trouble getting his Muncie four-speed into gear.

Clutch and shift-linkage adjustments failed to resolve the problem. For five years, Smith just lived with it, driving the car infrequently. Eventually, he decided to pull the motor and change the cam. That also provided him the opportunity to engage his clutch issues.

The Diagnosis

Visual inspection revealed bent clutch linkage and a loose Z-bar-to-frame retaining nut. Smith replaced the damaged parts with spares from his shop stash of old Chevelle components to see if it made a difference. It didn’t. Smith then performed a quick test recommended by Modern Driveline’s Bruce Couture that checks for an “energized driveshaft” condition—whether the trans’ input shaft is bound-up into the crank pilot bushing. “If that’s the case, the input shaft continues spinning with the engine even with the disc released,” explains Smith. “Obviously, that won’t work! The test indicated the El Camino probably had this condition and would require an invasive procedure.

Test for an energized driveshaft: Rotate the driveshaft by hand with the trans in direct-drive (1:1) and the clutch pedal depressed. If it turns hard and you can hear the clutch dragging, the trans’ input shaft is bound up into the crank’s pilot bushing. It can’t fully release the clutch from the flywheel and pressure-plate even with full travel of the plate’s release arms (fingers).

“Sure enough, after disassembly, we found a wiped-out pilot bearing, even though the car had barely 2,000 miles on the new engine. Other clues were heat marks on the flywheel and pressure-plate where the clutch was slipping because it was not fully releasing. The heat marks also indicated the flywheel was not flat since the revealed marks were more prevalent on one side.” Smith also found abnormal wear on the pressure-plate and disc: “The clutch was toast.”

Among the clues the clutch wasn’t fully releasing were this heavily scorched flywheel, a wiped-out pilot bushing, and borked linkage.

Smith had built his own spherical clutch linkage, but one bearing had bent. “Obviously I used somewhat soft bearings. It’s also possible the bearings threaded end extended too far out from the sleeve, and excess leverage caused it to bend. The solution would be a slightly longer sleeve to keep the exposed threads to a minimum.” For now, he replaced the damaged part with a stock pushrod (arrow) and release fork.

Typical energized driveshaft culprits include a worn release bearing, a damaged or cracked input shaft, or (as it would turn out to be in Smith’s case) bad bellhousing alignment. As Smith pondered his next step, he says, “A friend happened to call me about something else. One thing led to another, and we started talking about my clutch problems. He said the same thing had happened to him once, and it turned out he had been using a truck bellhousing on his car.” Can we say light-bulb moment? Smith set an original GM Chevelle big-block bellhousing on the floor next to the bell he’d just removed from the El Camino. “I could immediately see the truck bell’s input shaft pilot hole was larger than the one in the car bell. No way it could accurately line up with the pilot bushing.”

Smith’s 1970s’ Chevy truck 11-inch bellhousing (right) had a 5.125-inch trans bearing retainer collar hole, 0.440-inch larger than a car bellhousing’s 4.685-inch hole (left). Without a snug fit, the trans was hanging on the bolts, allowing it to slip down at least 0.030-inch off-center. One easy ID clue: Note the differently-shaped lower halves (arrows).

Problem solved? Not quite. Smith installed the big-block car bell on the El Camino’s 350, and—exercising due diligence—checked its alignment by mounting a magnetic dial indicator base on the flywheel, with the indicator’s plunger tip positioned against the pilot hole’s lip at the housing’s back end. The base and indicator tip must be able to freely rotate around the circular hole’s full 360 degrees without interference.

Before checking bellhousing runout, Smith advises you first check the parallelism of the block mounting surface “With a magnetic base on the flywheel, we checked the block bellhousing flange on the engine, and then mounted the bellhousing. The surfaces were 0.008 inch off!”

To remove any high spots, Smith whetstoned the engine block’s rear face, the bellhousing’s front block-face and rear trans-mounting face, and the transmission’s front mounting face. After cleaning off old paint, rust, and a couple of errant nicks, the out-of-parallel number dropped to 0.003 inch.

Smith usually zeroes the gauge at the 12 o’clock position, then takes readings at 3, 6, and 9 o’clock while rotating the crank. The observed needle movement is known as “total indicator runout” or “TIR.” The indicator is measuring around a circle, so the actual misalignment amount will be half the observed TIR. For example, if the dial indicator is set at 0 at the top and the TIR is 0.020 at 6 o’clock, the offset needed to bring the bell into vertical alignment would be 0.010. In the real world, the dialing-in process may take several passes, because the bell can be off both vertically and horizontally.

Even with a “correct” GM car bell installed behind a never-rebuilt block, the alignment was still way off. “The bellhousing was still down by 0.026 inch in the 7 o’clock position,” Smith says. “Next, I checked that bell on a 2002 LS iron 6.0L block; it was off only 0.009 inch. Later, we put the bell on yet another LS block, and its numbers were off by 0.020 inch. So now we have three different blocks with three different readings! The point here is that you can’t assume the block you are using has accurately located dowel pin locations, even if it’s brand new. It also made clear we were looking at variables where both the block and the bellhousing were off.”

The Fix: Bellhousing and Dowel Pins, Plus a New Starter

Old-school hydroformed aftermarket scattershields have a dubious accuracy reputation. But Quicktime’s new-tech, 22-pound, spun, SFI 6.1, NHRA-legal, bellhousing was, Smith says, “the most accurate bell we tested. It had just 0.005-inch runout, mainly because the engine dowel pins were off that much.”

Smith’s numbers-matching big-block bell was really intended for a future resto, so he checked out what the aftermarket had to offer. Available new bells range from affordable stock-replacement aluminum housings through pricey explosion-proof steel racing bellhousings (often called “scattershields” because they’re designed to contain flywheel and clutch debris in the event of catastrophic failure). Smith checked the alignment on examples from both ends of the price scale, installing and aligning both Summit Racing’s affordable repro unit plus a high-end Quicktime SFI 6.1, NHRA-legal, bell. Smith found the precision QuickTime required no correction. Summit’s cost-effective bell needed some correction, but it’s less than half the price.

Smith replaced his truck bell with Summit Racing’s economical reproduction aluminum housing. On the El Camino’s motor, it had 0.028-inch TIR. Smith brought it into alignment with a pair of 0.014-inch offset RobbMc offset dowel pins that brought total runout down to 0.004 inch.

To correct bellhousing alignment, the factory-installed dowel pins are replaced by aftermarket offset pins. Smith used a pair of adjustable RobbMc 0.014-inch offset pins that previously had brought the used big-block bell’s 0.026-inch misalignment down to 0.006. The same dowels brought the Summit unit to within 0.004 inch.

Smith prefers RobbMc adjustable dowels for correcting misalignment. “They fit easily into the stock block dowel-holes. Once positioned, all you have to do is tighten the Allen bolt to lock the dowel in place.” RobbMc pins are available with offsets of 0.007, 0.014, and 0.021 inch.

Early GM 11-inch bells (including Summit’s) won’t clear aluminum GM starter drive-noses (on floor); use a cast-iron 10MT drive for an 11-inch clutch, or (as Smith did) opt for a modern design like Tuff Stuff’s permanent magnet unit (on motor). It’s much lighter, fits well, and offers more cranking torque. Smith says Quicktime’s bell does clear early GM aluminum drives.

More Diagnosis

Smith reassembled the existing clutch and clutch linkage inside the now-aligned Summit bell. “We found that by having a small amount of free play at the top of the clutch pedal, the clutch would finally release. But as the disc wears, the pressure-plate release levers become taller and reduce free play, so this still wasn’t a fully acceptable solution.”

Resurfacing Smith’s scoured flywheel would only make things worse. According to Centerforce’s Will Baty, “A new GM flywheel for a traditional Chevy V8 engine is 0.960-inch thick as measured from its crank-flange surface to the friction surface. If it’s thinner than stock, this moves the pressure plate release levers away from the release bearing, which moves the outer part of the release lever toward the rear of the car, increasing the lever’s arc of travel—much like rocker arm travel issues across the top of a valve.”

While not a problem on the Elco, make sure the diaphragm pressure-plate’s release fingers are all the same height. On this new pressure plate, the release fingers aren’t all at the same height. This causes erratic clutch engagement and release that will lead to premature failure.

Due to design variations in bellhousing length and pressure-plate finger-height differences, the optimum clutch engagement characteristics, fork travel, and amount of pedal free-play can also vary. Ideally, you should end up with the release arm 90 degrees to the levers on the pressure plate at 50 percent of pressure plate release travel. In some cases, a different-length release bearing or adjustable fork pivot-ball-stud may be needed.

The Fix: Flywheel and Clutch

Centerforce’s Dual Friction clutch pressure plate and disc combo kit includes the disc, pressure-plate, clutch-mounting bolts, pilot bearing, release bearing, and alignment tool. Centrifugal-assist weights on the plate’s fingers keep the clutch from going over-center. It mates to a new SFI-certified Centerforce billet-steel flywheel mounted to the crank with ARP bolts.

Ultimately, the clutch travel, flywheel thickness, and free-play issues were resolved with a coordinated combination of a Centerforce 168-tooth/14-inch-od billet-steel flywheel and Dual Friction clutch assembly. The pressure plate’s fingers feature centrifugal weights that raise the clutch’s torque capacity by harnessing centrifugal force as engine rpm increases. Using centrifugal force and leverage on the clutch diaphragm is also said to increase clamp load as engine rpm and power rises. The dual-friction disc has a full facing on the pressure plate side for driveability and longevity; the flywheel side has a carbon composite puck-style facing for positive engagement and increased holding capacity.

This is how you measure flywheel thickness (don’t forget to subtract any straightedge’s thickness). The new Centerforce flywheel was right on the button: 0.960 inch for most classic GM units. Smith’s old, scoured flywheel was thinner. Thicker is better because it moves the release levers back toward the rear of the assembly while moving the fork arm forward.

These parts plus careful clutch-pedal free play adjustment were just what the doctor ordered. Smith explains, “According to Centerforce’s Will Baty, the new clutch it sent me only requires 0.275-inch release-finger travel to generate full release with a 0.025-inch air-gap. My clutch fork travels 1¼ inches, and develops a 2:1 ratio: 3 inches from the ball-stud to the center of the release bearing and 6 inches from the ball-stud to the centerline of the actuator from the Z-bar. That means the lever at the throwout bearing is moving at least 0.625 inch—more than enough.”

Always use the proper pressure-plate with its intended flywheel. Older clutch assemblies use shouldered bolts like these to accurately locate the pressure-plate on the flywheel. Newer assemblies have small dowel pins pressed into the flywheel that locate on matching holes in the pressure plate. Use standard (nonshouldered) bolts with “dowel-pin” flywheels and plates.

Another multiplier is the diaphragm clutch’s Belleville spring (the clutch “fingers”). “The fingers on the new clutch multiply the engagement force about 5:1,” Smith explains. “That means for every 0.010 inch the clutch wears, it will move the fingers higher by 0.050 inch. This is why you need plenty of free play to compensate as the clutch disc wears. Baty says the clutch disc thickness is 0.310 inch compressed and 0.333 inch free. I adjusted the new clutch so the disc engages with the flywheel at roughly mid-pedal travel.”

This is the proper way to install the release (throwout) bearing on a GM clutch release fork. The two lever-like springs must fit below (not above) the lip as shown.

To install the trans, Smith uses ½-inch studs or bolts with their heads cut off and filed smooth. “We put them in the two upper mounting-bolt holes to guide the trans into place, which also prevents hanging the transmission on the clutch and possibly bending the [disc] hub.”

The Results

Several issues “stacked-up” to beat the shift out of the trans. Turning in a clutch performance, tech writer Jeff Smith rescued himself.

Smith’s El Camino now shifts smoothly, and the setup has plenty of leeway to permit future adjustments due to wear. The new flywheel has sufficient “extra” material to permit future resurfacing without throwing everything out of whack. Bottom line: The trans now shifts cleanly into and out of all gears.

Oh, what a release it is: Definitely a gear-change for the better, post-rescue the El Camino happily cruises the streets of Los Angeles.

Lessons Learned

Multiple issues required multiple solutions, including a Summit bellhousing plus Centerforce’s steel flywheel and Dual-Friction clutch.

Chevy V8 truck bellhousings and manual transmissions don’t interchange with car bells and trannys. “Tribal knowledge” claims new, untouched GM blocks and bellhousings don’t have runout problems (so there’s no need to check them)—but maybe it’s time for a new chief. Regardless of its pedigree, ensure your clutch assembly, flywheel, ball-stud height, release bearing, and mechanical linkage develops reasonable geometry and has enough overhead to develop adequate free play at the pedal both initially and after normal in-service wear. Check everything!

Need Junk Fixed?

If your car has a gremlin that just won’t quit, you could be chosen for Hot Rod to the Rescue. Email us at [email protected] and put “Rescue” in the subject line. Include a description of your problem, a photo, your location, and a daytime phone number.

Contacts

Amazon.com Inc.; Seattle, WA; 866.216.1072; Amazon.com

AMSOIL Inc.; Superior, WI; 800.956.5695 (orders), 715.399.TECH (tech), or 715.399.6490 (customer serivce); Amsoil.com

Automotive Racing Products (ARP); Ventura, CA; 800.826.3045 or 805.339.2200; ARP-Bolts.com

Centerforce (Midway Industries Inc.); Prescott, AZ; 928.771.8422; Centerforce.com

Dorman Products Inc.; Colmar, PA; 800.523.2492 (customer service) or 866.933.2911 (tech support); DormanProducts.com

Modern Driveline Inc.; Caldwell, ID; 208.453.9800; ModernDriveline.com

Original Parts Group Inc. (OPG); Seal Beach, CA; 800.243.8355 or 562.594.1000; OPGI.com

Pioneer Automotive Industries LLC; Meridian, MS; 601.483.5211; PioneerAutoInd.com

Quick Time, A Holley Performance Brand; Bowling Green, KY; 866.464.6553; Holley.com/brands/quicktime

RobbMc Performance Products; Carson City, NV; 775.885.7411; RobbMcPerformance.com

RockAuto LLC; Madison, WI; RockAuto.com

Summit Racing Equipment; Akron, OH; 800.230.3030 (orders) or 330.630.0240 (tech); SummitRacing.com

The Timken Co.; N. Canton, OH; 234.262.3000; Timken.com

Tuff Stuff; Cleveland, OH; 800.331.6562 or 216.961.1800; TuffStuffPerformance.com

The post HOT ROD Rescue: Wrong Bellhousing Causes Hard Shifts on 1966 El Camino appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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bethestaryouareradio · 8 years ago

Text

From Outside In

“I went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” John Muir

As summer draws to a close, it’s natural to want to grab the last rays of outdoor living. With temperatures in the three digits, however, unless we are splashing in a pool, many people are staying indoors with the air conditioner turned on high. I tend to march to a different drum, preferring to sweat through the heat to enjoy the hazy, hot days of the season al fresco.

Since harvest time is quickly approaching, I tromped through the hills with Andrea Wood, a former financial broker turned entrepreneur who in 2010 purchased twenty-two acres above Campolindo High School with the dream of planting a vineyard, olive orchard, and building a local winery. A few years ago, she planted 125 olive trees but, alas, in June, a fire blazed to the top of her property burning many of her young trees. As we hiked her hills, we were surprised to witness the resiliency of the olive as new shoots sprouted from the trunks of the scorched trees. Three cheers for Mother Nature’s ability to rebound from devastation. Trees that were untouched are filled with fruit which will ripen and be harvested in November by her family. From the top of the drive, olive trees sway in the wind with views of Mt. Diablo in the background. In May of 2018, she will plant her southern facing hillside with Cabernet Sauvignon in a manner reminiscent of Tuscan vineyards. Plans for her winery are forthcoming. In the meantime, deer and turkeys call her hillsides home.

With this hot and dry weather, there is a high danger of fire. Be proactive and remove flammable objects, debris, brush, and wood from around the perimeter of your dwelling. The National Weather Service has been issuing red flag and heat wave warnings projected to continue through the month of September. Stay hydrated, wear a hat when outdoors, provide plenty of water to your pets, and watch your plants for signs of stress.

It’s been extremely enjoyable watching the colorful sunsets from the comfort of my patio chairs. Although I maintain my distance, observing the plethora of wildlife that prance and glide through my own landscape is mesmerizing. Deer, turkeys, skunks, raccoons, lizards, snakes, hawks, hummingbirds, and even coyotes and foxes are constant visitors, not all welcome.

Striped skunks have been increasingly bold, coming right up to my back door. These nocturnal mammals, although adorably cute from afar, should not be approached as they can spray as a defense mechanism their strong musk several times with an accuracy of twelve feet. In addition, skunks are carriers of rabies. As much as their smell is disgusting, skunks are beneficial for reducing rodents and pesky insects. However, once they take up residence in your yard, garage, shed, or deck, they are problematic. Do your best to secure entry holes in and under buildings and decks. Skunks can burrow as they forage to go from outside to in. If skunks are bothering you, call Vector Control at 925-771-6190 to request a skunk inspection.

In case your pet is sprayed, try this homemade neutralizer recipe:

STINK REMOVER RECIPE 1 quart 3% hydrogen peroxide ¼ cup baking soda 1 teaspoon dishwashing detergent

Mix together and wash your pet keeping the concoction out of the eyes, nose, and mouth. Rinse with water. If necessary, wash again. Do not bottle or store this solution as a chemical reaction could cause an explosion.

Blue tailed lizards, also known as skinks, have provided hours of entertainment as the sprint from rock to rock. Some veterinarians state that skinks may be poisonous to pets, specifically cats, although there are no concrete published studies. Having bright coloring on the skin often indicates that an animal is venomous or unpalatable but in the case of the blue tailed skink this quality is a useful decoy inviting birds to attack the tail and not its vital organs. Lizard tails regenerate. Lizards are excellent garden protectors eating many of the bothersome insects that plaque our landscapes. Welcome them.

Grapes are ripening on the vine as the sun kisses the clusters. Bunches resemble still life paintings with their colors of blue, purple, absinthe, and rose. (Next month be on the look out for my article on our Lamorinda grape harvest!) Hydrangeas that were originally a deep vermillion are showing florets of lime green mottled with pink. Green is the most prevalent color in nature. It’s enlightening to take time to truly immerse your senses in the multitude of shades and hues before the leaves turn amber, gold, crimson, and red.

When the weather allows, get outside to enjoy the call of the wild. Bring the breath of the earth into our souls by soaking in nature outside. Out is in. Inhale deeply.

Cynthia Brian’s Gardening Guide Tips for September

FEED Monarchs with enriching nectar for both the caterpillars and butterflies by planting Swamp Milkweed, Pink Common Milkweed, Asters, and Liatris.

EAT ugly and imperfect fruits and vegetables. About one-third of all food produced worldwide, worth around $1 trillion, gets lost or wasted in food production and consumption systems. Deformed produce tastes the same and is as nutritionally viable as perfect pieces. For bruised fruit or vegetables, cut off the bad bits, make a sauce, or a soup.

WATER deeply when your garden is thirsty in the early morning or evening. Do not water during the heat of the day or you’ll be wasting H20 and may burn your plants.

TAKE 20% off new season vegetable seeds from Renee’s Garden. Enter code 18INTRO at checkout. Offer ends 9/15/17. Receive 50% off 2017 seeds. www.reneesgarden.com

USE vegetable stems and trimmings for sauces, sautés, and soups. Broccoli stalks can be shaved for a salad, potato peels baked for chips, carrot and cilantro tops made into a pesto. Get creative and don’t waste any part of an edible vegetable. Note, do not eat the leaves of rhubarb as they are toxic.

AVOID aches and pains while gardening by stretching before and after your work.

CHOOSE plants for color, shape, size, visual texture, and foliage when planning your garden.

VISIT the Pear and Wine Festival on September 23 at the Moraga Commons. Make sure to stop by the Be the Star You Are!® booth for fun activities for the kids. Thanks to Michael VerBrugge Construction, The Lamorinda Weekly, and MB Jessee painting for making the booth possible. Consider making a donation to Operation Hurricane Harvey Disaster Relief to help the displaced in Texas. http://www.bethestaryouare.org/events

DIVIDE crowded perennials once they have finished blooming. This includes Naked Ladies.

FERTILIZE your acid loving plants including roses, rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias, fuchsias, ferns, and begonias.

PICK Asian pears and apples that are ripe.

The best way to get in contact with me is via email at [email protected]. As much as I appreciate your questions and concerns, I am unable to respond to the numerous phone calls. Thanks for understanding!

Happy Gardening and Happy Growing! Read More: https://www.lamorindaweekly.com/archive/issue1114/Digging-Deep-with-Cynthia-Brian-Outside-in.html

Photos and Info at Press Pass: http://vapresspass.com/2017/09/12/outside-inside/

Cynthia Brian

Cynthia Brian, The Goddess Gardener, is a New York Times best selling author, actor, radio personality, speaker, media and writing coach as well as the Founder and Executive Director of Be the Star You Are1® 501 c3. Tune into Cynthia’s Radio show and order her books at www.StarStyleRadio.com Available for hire for any project. [email protected] www.GoddessGardener.com

#lizards skunks olives wildfires wild life deer turkeys pink raccoons skunks cynthia brian starstyle lamorinda august gardening digging deep

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goddessgardener · 8 years ago

Text

Outside In

“I went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” John Muir

In case your pet is sprayed, try this homemade neutralizer recipe:

STINK REMOVER RECIPE 1 quart 3% hydrogen peroxide ¼ cup baking soda 1 teaspoon dishwashing detergent

When the weather allows, get outside to enjoy the call of the wild. Bring the breath of the earth into our souls by soaking in nature outside. Out is in. Inhale deeply.

Cynthia Brian’s Gardening Guide Tips for September

FEED Monarchs with enriching nectar for both the caterpillars and butterflies by planting Swamp Milkweed, Pink Common Milkweed, Asters, and Liatris.

WATER deeply when your garden is thirsty in the early morning or evening. Do not water during the heat of the day or you’ll be wasting H20 and may burn your plants.

TAKE 20% off new season vegetable seeds from Renee’s Garden. Enter code 18INTRO at checkout. Offer ends 9/15/17. Receive 50% off 2017 seeds. www.reneesgarden.com

AVOID aches and pains while gardening by stretching before and after your work.

CHOOSE plants for color, shape, size, visual texture, and foliage when planning your garden.

DIVIDE crowded perennials once they have finished blooming. This includes Naked Ladies.

FERTILIZE your acid loving plants including roses, rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias, fuchsias, ferns, and begonias.

PICK Asian pears and apples that are ripe.

Happy Gardening and Happy Growing! Read More: https://www.lamorindaweekly.com/archive/issue1114/Digging-Deep-with-Cynthia-Brian-Outside-in.html

Cynthia Brian

#lizards skunks olives wildfires wild life deer turkeys pink raccoons skunks cynthia brian starstyle lamorinda august gardening digging deep

0 notes

meadowsland · 8 years ago

Text

HIGH FIDELITY

BY KARL KULLMANN

Drone mapping fills a missing link in site representation.

FROM THE MAY 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

In many ways, the satellite has been instrumental for landscape architecture. As the apex of two centuries of progressively higher aerial reconnaissance, the satellite’s view reveals landscape associations and patterns that remain concealed at lower altitudes. Through these revelations, satellite imagery played a key role in the reinterpretation of cities as complex ecological systems instead of mere assemblages of buildings. Ultimately, online satellite mapping applications confirmed that the entire planet is composed of landscape. Through the convenience of GPS-equipped mobile devices, we now seamlessly integrate the satellite’s landscape into our everyday lives.

A world tuned in to the synthesizing role of landscape is undoubtedly empowering for landscape architecture. But as enlightening and convenient as the satellite’s all-encompassing gaze may be, the tyranny of distance coupled with a downward viewing angle also undermines its potency. As landscape architects are abundantly aware, the nuances and details that enrich the landscape are often camouflaged from 450 miles above Earth within shadowed, interstitial, and underneath spaces. Even with familiarization and steadily improving image resolutions, abstract planimetric forms routinely fail to resonate with an individual’s perception of his or her place in the world. The recurring popularity of more immersive angles such as the archaic bird’s-eye view is probably a reaction to this lingering apprehension.

These shortcomings are revealed at the site scale, at which a significant portion of landscape practice occurs. At this scale, the substitution of feature surveys or commissioned aerial imaging with freely available satellite-derived GIS data often lowers the quality of spatial information. GIS mapping data interpolated from much larger data sets trades site specificity for expansive coverage, and its accuracy typically has not been verified on the ground. Given that landscape architecture relies on maps in one form or another to interpret, abstract, conceptualize, and ultimately reconfigure the ground, this demotion of ground proofing is highly significant to the discipline.

Enter the drone. Initially introduced to the public as enigmatic appliances of remote warfare, drones rapidly became synonymous with the multirotor camera-equipped consumer devices that increasingly permeate the sky. Despite unresolved privacy concerns, civilian drones now fulfill everyday roles ranging from flyovers of photogenic landmarks to promotional real estate bird’s-eye views. Likewise, many landscape architects routinely deploy drones for site overviews, design visualization, and completed project documentation. And, as previously reported in LAM, drones are also being fitted with experimental payloads that include seed dispersal and fire ignition for forest fuel load management.

The drone’s-eye view: orthomosaic of the Albany Bulb landfill in comparison with satellite and aerial imagery. (Drone image captured with 3D Robotics Solo drone equipped with Sony UMC-R10C camera flown at 200 feet.) Image courtesy of Karl Kullmann.

Whereas this first generation of civilian drones required active piloting, the next generation of the technology incorporates automated navigation. By integrating GPS with onboard avionic sensors, automated navigation enables predefinition of virtual flight paths and autonomously tracks the ground-dwelling operator from the sky. Automated navigation also streamlines and systematizes the process of landscape imaging. Georeferenced drone imagery is digitally composited into extremely high-resolution orthomosaics, and converted through a sophisticated form of photogrammetry into three-dimensional topographic models. From these models, detailed contour elevation maps are generated.

Based on current battery technology, areas of up to 100 acres can be captured in optical, near-infrared, or thermal formats. Flying at practical altitudes of 200 feet with high-definition cameras results in image pixel resolutions of less than one inch. To place this in context, imagery at this resolution is more than 600 times sharper than typical online urban satellite imagery, and where available, about 15 times sharper than aerial imagery captured and hosted by aircraft-based imaging vendors. Compared to the fidelity of Google Earth and GIS maps, the results are astounding. For the first time in cartographic history, topographic features are mapped down to a level of clarity comparable to the world that we perceive from on the ground.

In practice, the various features of next-generation drones are intended for different user groups, with topographic mapping principally calibrated for commercial use, and self-tracking primarily directed at the consumer market. But befitting of its diverse identity, landscape architecture straddles both of these professional and consumer domains. The applied aspects of drone mapping are most directly relevant to landscape architecture’s ongoing search for new methods with which to represent the complexities of landscape. And as a social art, landscape architecture also has a vested interest in the cultural implications of the more consumer-oriented drone features.

How might this technology affect landscape architecture? First off, the usability of automated drone navigation is primed to increase the prevalence of the bird’s-eye view in landscape design visualization. Once prominent in landscape architecture before falling out of favor in the latter part of the 20th century, this oblique angle is already enjoying a digitally propelled resurgence through applications such as Google Earth (with terrain and 3-D buildings activated), Google Maps 45°, and Bing Bird’s Eye. Combining a structural overview with close range immersion in the landscape, the cyclical allure of the bird’s eye is a product of its capacity to communicate design visions to a general audience. Insofar as we imagine the future to arrive from over the horizon, there is something inherently aspirational about looking at, over, and through the landscape.

The bird’s-eye view: contemporary landscape architectural visualization of the Salton Sea. Image courtesy of Richard Crockett.

In addition to reviving the bird’s-eye view, the drone heightens the landscape architect’s interaction with the site. Current regulations and technologies require drone operators to escort their equipment to (or nearby) the mapping target. The act of launching the drone upward from the ground reverses the downward zoom of satellite imagery, and places the landscape architect on the site and in the frame of the map. Granted, future developments in long-range drone dispatching may well dilute the practice of the operator’s having feet physically planted on the site. But for the time being, a sweet spot exists between the technique and the technology. Landscape architecture is likely to be enriched by this return to the field from which it became progressively insulated in the digital age.

Even in the advent of remote drone dispatching (or the assimilation of drone imagery into Google Earth), the drone’s close relationship with the ground reintroduces a form of fieldwork to the site mapping process. From a near-ground aerial perspective, this thickened fieldwork fulfills the original terms of site surveying, whereby an overview of a landscape is established by working from the inside out (as opposed to from the top down). In rediscovering the role of surveyor—as opposed to mapper—the landscape architect is embedded into the whole process of site delineation. Whereas designers engaged in mapping typically mine satellite, aerial, and spatial data provided by agencies and corporations, drones facilitate unfiltered on-site engagement in the creation of content.

That said, the optical basis of drone mapping is no substitute for the precision of the surveyor’s theodolite. But although inappropriate for design documentation and construction, drone mapping is relevant to many of the other roles in which landscape architects are routinely invested. For preliminary design, community advocacy, or speculative work, the technology provides an accessible window into spatiality and materiality at the scale of the landscape site.

Can this newfound fidelity actually be harnessed in the design process, or does it lead to a form of design determinism? It is possible that drone mapping delivers an information overload at the site scale that mirrors the critiques leveled at Ian McHarg’s regional mapping method of the 1960s. Although the new wave of GIS-based creative mapping sought to reconcile this “analysis paralysis” of too much data with the “fantasy fatigue” of whimsical design, an inflection point remains between the gathering of information and projecting of ideas. At this decisive moment, landscape architects may become transfixed by site-mapping fidelity that surpasses the fidelity at which they are able to conceptualize form. Mesmerized by ephemeral and variable landscape phenomena that are freeze-framed in high definition, a designer may be tempted to trivialize this information into mere pattern making.

These consequences remain possible, though my initial observations from coordinating a graduate design studio project over several iterations suggest more constructive outcomes. This design studio challenge involves transitioning an overgrown dump site situated on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay into a public park. Named the Albany Bulb, the site comprises a highly complex topography of concrete and rebar outcroppings interspersed with self-seeded thickets. Over the bulb’s short history, these features supported clandestine off-grid encampments and inspired creative activities.

In earlier iterations of the studio, the students’ aspirations to engage these physical and cultural characteristics sensitively through design were curtailed by the coarse fidelity of available site data. With off-the-shelf satellite imagery, GIS data, and feature surveys all failing to systematically capture the topographic “texture” of the site, students tended toward overscaled and overbearing design interventions. With this site texture now represented in high fidelity, the design proposals are noticeably more specific in their engagement with the complex qualities of the site. Moreover, much as landscape architects have always done, intermittently placing the detailed mapping aside and simplifying the site into key features and tectonics avoids any risk of data overload.

The capacity to spatialize nuanced landscape characteristics evidently affects the designer’s ability to engage these qualities through design. If we extrapolate this and assume widespread participation in drone-based fieldwork, an increase in landscape design strategies that focus on retaining and incorporating the preexisting qualities of a given site is a likely consequence. This is particularly relevant to the integration of culturally appropriated urban wasteland sites (such as the Albany Bulb) into the public realm.

But this is not to suggest that a renewed focus on site specificity will or should displace the past two fruitful decades of emphasis on large-scale associations, systems, and infrastructures. Rather, the drone and the satellite are most productive coexisting as overlapping scales of engagement with landscape. This is particularly relevant to addressing the persistent division within the discipline between site design and regional planning, cities and regions, and between gardens and landscape. Moreover, the drone’s eye is potentially instrumental in grounding the satellite approach to urbanism that has prevailed over the past 15 years and that arguably overlooks the placemaking aspects of dwelling.

Hypothetically, aerial access to the scale at which humans interact with the public realm also creates a platform for other innovations within landscape architecture. The reinvigoration of the human behavioral side of landscape architecture is one such possible by-product. When coupled with recent advances in mobile technology and the social sciences, it is conceivable that behaviorally based design might undergo a similar digitally propelled renaissance, as occurred with ecologically based design a decade and a half ago.

Drone modeling as fieldwork: 3-D mesh of rough terrain and vegetation at the Albany Bulb landfill. (Captured using 3D Robotics Solo drone equipped with GoPro HERO4 camera.) Image courtesy of Karl Kullmann.

Intentionally capturing the natural and cultural landscape in high fidelity is only one half of the drone story for landscape architecture. The other aspect is the wider cultural assimilation of the drone’s near-ground perspective. Clearly, our distaste at being visibly surveilled remains fervent. But in the same manner that individuals turned the cameras in smartphones back onto institutions of power and eventually back onto themselves, the use of drones as appliances of personal vanity is likely to outstrip the use of drones as deliberate instruments of surveillance and cartography. Whether we agree with it or not, drones are destined to become personal mirrors in the sky, enabling operators to witness (and share) themselves in the third person, positioned within the surrounding landscape.

But there is potentially a silver lining to this looming aerial narcissism. Once the drone operator’s personal vanity is satisfied, attention invariably turns to the surrounding landscape that fills out the majority of the scene. Landscape architecture has a vested interest in how this circumstantially imaged landscape is used and interpreted. It is unlikely to remain inert, since by its very nature the drone’s-eye view implies a certain degree of envisioning of alternative futures. It also provides a degree of instrumentality for enacting those visions. Given that imagining and actuating landscapes is traditionally the task of landscape architects, everyday participation in drone mapping injects core landscape ethics into the existing culture of image sharing. With their horizons extended to include the near landscape, creators and consumers of drone imagery and mapping inadvertently advocate for landscape architecture.

Karl Kullmann is an associate professor of landscape architecture and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley.

from Landscape Architecture Magazine https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2017/05/25/high-fidelity/

#Landscape Architecture Magazine

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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By Jamey Pittman

[What design and AI lessons can we learn from Namco's seminal Pac-Man? From history through behavior, Gamasutra presents a comprehensive Jamey Pittman-authored guide to the classic game.]

In 1999, Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida became the first person to obtain a perfect score of 3,333,360 at Pac-Man, eating every possible dot, energizer, ghost, and bonus on every level without losing a single life in the process.

But perhaps what is most amazing is the fact he can play without using any memorized routines widely known as "patterns".

Instead, he relies on his familiarity with how each ghost behaves as it moves through the maze, using that knowledge to keep Pac-Man one step ahead of his enemies at all times.

Unlike Mitchell, most players are only able to rack up high scores with the aid of multiple patterns that take advantage of the game's deterministic nature.

These patterns require perfect memorization and recall to be of any real use - a single hesitation or wrong turn during execution can make the remainder of a pattern useless.

Not surprisingly, an over-reliance on these routines leaves many a player clueless as to how to effectively avoid the ghosts and finish off the remaining dots in the higher levels once a mistake occurs.

Most Pac-Man strategy guides available on the internets today are very similar in content to the books that used to be sold back in the early 80s

A summary of gameplay and scoring is provided first, followed by a list of patterns to be memorized by the reader, but very little insight is offered on how the game works or how the ghosts make decisions.

Therefore, the purpose of this guide is to give the player and game designers a better design understanding of Pac-Man by taking a closer look at gameplay, maze logic, ghost personalities, and the mysterious "split screen" level.

All information provided has been extracted from or verified with the disassembly output from the Midway Pac-Man arcade ROMs along with controlled observations of actual gameplay. As such, I have a high confidence in its accuracy.

That said, if you notice an error or omission, please contact me so it can be corrected as soon as possible. I hope you find the information just as interesting and useful as I did for gaining a better understanding of this classic game.

Special thanks to Don Hodges (www.donhodges.com) whose invaluable contributions to this guide can be found in every chapter.

"I don't have any particular interest in [computers]. I'm interested in creating images that communicate with people. A computer is not the only medium that uses images; I could use the movies or television or any other visual medium. It just so happens I use the computer."-Toru Iwatani

It was 1977 when a self-taught, capable young man named Toru Iwatani came to work for Namco Limited, a Tokyo-based amusement manufacturer whose main product lines at the time were projection-based amusement rides and light gun shooting galleries.

He was just 22 years old with no formal training in computers, visual arts, or graphic design, but his creativity and aptitude for game design were obvious to the Namco executives that met with Iwatani. They offered to hire him-with assurances they would find a place for him in the company-and he accepted.

Iwatani eventually found his place designing titles for Namco's new video games division. His limited computer skills necessitated his being paired with a programmer who would write the actual code while Iwatani took on the role of game designer for the project.

This was a new job for the game industry in 1977 when most games were designed by the programmers who coded them. In addition to a programmer, Iwatani's team would usually include a hardware engineer to develop the various devices and components, a graphic artist to realize his visual ideas, and a music composer for any music and sound effects needed in the game.

Iwatani had initially wanted to work on pinball machines, but Namco had no interest in the pinball business. Perhaps as a concession, his first game design, called Gee Bee, was a paddle game similar to Atari's Breakout but with a decidedly pinball-inspired slant to the gameplay.

Released in 1978, it was Namco's first original video game-they had only ported existing Atari games to the Japanese market up to this point-and it enjoyed moderate success in the arcades.

But the paddle games were losing ground fast to a new genre. The unprecedented success of Taito's Space Invaders in 1978 caused an industry-wide shift toward space-themed, shoot-'em-up games (as well as a national coin shortage in Japan).

Game manufacturers scrambled to match Taito's success with space shooters of their own. Namco was quick to follow suit, assigning a team to start work on a Space Invaders clone at once. It was around this time that Toru Iwatani began thinking about designing a different kind of game. He felt the shoot-'em-up craze was destined to fade away like the paddle games before them.

Rather than make another space shooter, Toru wanted to take his game design in a completely new direction that did not focus on violence or conflict, and would appeal to both male and female audiences.

He took inspiration from a children's story about a creature that protected children from monsters by eating them. One of Iwatani's design methods included taking key words associated with a story to aid in developing his ideas. The kanji word taberu ("to eat"), became the premise for the game.

The word kuchi ("mouth") has a square shape for its kanji symbol and provided the inspiration for the game's main character-the better-known legend of Iwatani receiving his inspiration from a pizza pie with a slice missing was, by his own admission, not entirely correct:

"Well, it's half true. In Japanese the character for mouth (kuchi) is a square shape. It's not circular like the pizza, but I decided to round it out. There was the temptation to make the Pac-Man shape less simple. While I was designing this game, someone suggested we add eyes. But we eventually discarded that idea because once we added eyes, we would want to add glasses and maybe a moustache. There would just be no end to it.

Food is the other part of the basic concept. In my initial design, I had put the player in the midst of food all over the screen. As I thought about it, I realized the player wouldn't know exactly what to do: the purpose of the game would be obscure. So I created a maze and put the food in it. Then whoever played the game would have some structure by moving through the maze.

The Japanese have a slang word-paku paku-they use to describe the motion of the mouth opening and closing while one eats. The name Puck-Man came from that word."

-Toru Iwatani

The monsters from the children's story were included as four ghosts that chase the player through the maze, providing an element of tension. Attacks on the player were designed to come in waves (similar to Space Invaders) as opposed to an endless assault, and each ghost was given an unique personality and character.

The children's story also included the concept of kokoro ("spirit") or a life force used by the creature that allowed him to eat the monsters. Toru incorporated this aspect of the story as four edible power pellets in the maze that turn the tables on the ghosts, making them vulnerable to being eaten by the player.

With a name and a basic design in place, Iwatani was ready to begin work. The team Namco assigned Iwatani to bring Puck-Man to life included a programmer (Shigeo Funaki), a hardware engineer, a cabinet designer, and a music composer (Toshio Kai).

Development got underway in early 1979. In the course of that year, two new pinball-themed designs from Iwatani-Bomb Bee and Cutie Q-were both released during Puck-Man's development cycle. Both games were similar to Gee Bee but with stronger gameplay and improved visuals.

The Namco team working on the Space Invaders clone for the past several months had just achieved a technological coup for Namco: the first game to use a true, multi-colored, RGB display instead of the monochrome monitors with colored cellophane tape so prevalent at the time.

Thanks to the breakthrough of the other team, Iwatani now had the new promise of color to enhance his design. Mindful that he wanted the game to appeal to women, he immediately decided to use it on the ghosts, choosing pastel shades for the bodies and adding expressive, blue eyes. Dark blue was used for the maze itself, while Puck-Man was drenched in a brilliant yellow.

The look and feel of Puck-Man continued to evolve for over a year. A large amount of time and effort was put into developing the ghosts unique movement patterns through the maze and tweaking the game difficulty variables as boards were cleared.

Bonus symbols (including the Galaxian flagship) were added into the mix at some point, and the ghosts were finally given names: Akabei, Pinky, Aosuke, and Guzuta. Sound effects and music were some of the final touches added as development neared an end along with constant tweaking of the ghosts' behavior.

Puck-Man's creation was a year and five months in the making-the longest ever for a video game to that point. Finally, on May 22nd, 1980, it was released to arcades in Japan. Initially, the game did moderately well, but was no overnight sensation.

In fact, Namco's multi-colored Space Invaders clone, called Galaxian, was much more popular with the gaming public-the predominately male, game-playing audience in Japan was unsure what to make of Puck-Man with its cartoon-like characters, maze, and pastel colors, whereas Galaxian was more immediately familiar to them with its shoot-'em-up space theme.

Midway was a distributor of coin-operated video games in the U.S. that was always looking for the next big hit from Japan to license and bring to America. They opted for both Puck-Man and Galaxian, modifying the cabinets and artwork to make them easier to manufacture as well as providing a more American look and feel.

Puck-Man went through the majority of the changes: the cabinet was modified slightly, changing the color from white to a bright yellow to make it stand out in the arcade. The detailed, multi-colored cabinet artwork was replaced with cheaper-to-produce, three-color artwork illustrating an iconic representation of Puck-Man (now drawn with eyes and feet) and one blue ghost.

English names were given to the ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde), and the Namco title was changed to Midway. The most significant change to Puck-Man was the name. Midway feared it would be too easy for nasty-minded vandals to change the P in Puck-Man to an F, creating an unsavory epithet.

Not wanting their product associated with this word, Midway renamed the game Pac-Man before releasing it to American arcades in October 1980.

But the situation in America was reversed from Japan for these two titles. Galaxian got lost in the shuffle of the shoot-'em-up craze that blanketed America's arcades and, by the fall of 1980, it was already competing with more advanced video games like Defender.

In the end, Galaxian enjoyed moderate success in America and in Japan, but was never the smash hit the original Space Invaders was. Pac-Man was another story. There were no games to compare it to-it was in a genre all by itself. The bright yellow cabinet, visuals, and sounds drew a great deal of attention. No one had seen a game quite like this before.

The addictive gameplay and challenge of increasing levels of difficulty kept the die-hard gamers more than happy, while the simplicity of the game appealed to younger children. The lack of war-like motifs and violence did as Iwatani had hoped and attracted a sizable female audience-a first for a video game. Even the parents wary of the violence-themed arcade games had no problem with their kids playing as cute and innocuous a game as Pac-Man.

Pac-Man went on to capture the world's imagination like nothing before or since. It was a genuine phenomenon on a global scale, selling over 100,000 machines in its first year alone. Easy to learn but notoriously difficult to master, everyone from school children to Wall Street executives dropped quarter after quarter into an ever-increasing number of waiting Pac-Man machines.

By 1982, Pac-Man merchandise was literally everywhere: t-shirts, hats, keychains, wrist bands, bedsheets, air fresheners, wall clocks, drinking glasses, trading cards, stickers, cereal boxes, comic books-even a Saturday morning cartoon.

A novelty song called "Pac-Man Fever" received significant radio play, reaching number nine on the U.S. Billboard charts. Many books were written offering tips and tricks used by the best players to achieve high scores-the first-ever strategy guides published for a video game.

Fast-forward to nearly thirty years later: Pac-Man remains the best-selling coin-operated video game in history. Still considered the most widely-recognized video game character in the U.S., his likeness has been licensed to over 250 companies for over 400 products.

His namesake has been adopted by the business world to describe a way to defend against a hostile takeover (the defending company swallows up the larger company instead in a move known as the "Pac-Man defense"). There is even an upright Pac-Man machine on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Unlike the majority of his early-80s contemporaries, new Pac-Man games are still in development today. Most recently, Pac-Man Championship Edition was released in 2007 for the X-Box 360 console with the aid of Namco game designer Toru Iwatani.

Interest in the original coin-op title has never completely faded, thankfully. Thanks to Namco's re-release of Pac-Man and other arcade classics for modern home consoles, new generations of Pac-addicts have worn their hands out playing a game often older than themselves.

Many classic titles are also kept alive thanks to the advent of high-quality arcade emulators available for the home computer (like MAME) that use a software copy of the arcade ROM chips to recreate the game with 100% accuracy. Several web pages with information about the original Pac-Man arcade game can be found online including Wikipedia and the Killer List Of Video Games.

"As Pac-Man was originally conceived to appeal to women players, it is a very easy and approachable game. I believe that is an ingredient in the longevity of the game."-Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man

The Basics

The premise of Pac-Man is delightfully simple: using a four-way joystick, the player guides Pac-Man-up, down, left, and right-through a maze filled with dots for him to gobble up. Four ghost monsters are also in the maze and chase after our hero, trying to capture and kill him.

The goal is to clear the maze of dots while avoiding the deadly ghosts. Each round starts with the ghosts in the "monster pen" at the center of the maze, emerging from it to join in the chase.

If Pac-Man is captured by a ghost, a life is lost, the ghosts are returned to their pen, and a new Pac-Man is placed at the starting position before play continues. When the maze is cleared of all dots, the board is reset, and a new round begins. If Pac-Man gets caught by a ghost when he has no extra lives, the game is over.

There are 244 dots in the maze, and Pac-Man must eat them all in order to proceed to the next round. The 240 small dots are worth ten points each, and the four large, flashing dots - best known as energizers - are worth 50 points each.

This yields a total of 2,600 points for clearing the maze of dots each round. Players have two ways to increase their score beyond what is earned from eating dots:

The first way to increase your score each round is by turning the tables on your enemies by making them your prey. Whenever Pac-Man eats one of the four energizer dots located in the corners of the maze, the ghosts reverse their direction and, in early levels, turn the same shade of blue for a short period of time before returning to normal.

While blue, they are vulnerable to Pac-Man and can be gobbled up for extra points providing they are caught before the time expires. After being eaten, a ghost's eyes will return to the monster pen where it is resurrected, exiting to chase Pac-Man once again.

The first ghost captured after an energizer has been eaten is always worth 200 points. Each additional ghost captured from the same energizer will then be worth twice as many points as the one before it-400, 800, and 1,600 points, respectively. If all four ghosts are captured at all four energizers, an additional 12,000 points can be earned on these earlier levels. This should not prove too terribly difficult to achieve for the first few rounds as the ghosts initially remain blue for several seconds.

Soon after, however, the ghosts' "blue time" will get reduced to one or two seconds at the most, making it much more problematic to capture all four before time runs out on these boards. By level 19, the ghosts stop turning blue altogether and can no longer be eaten for additional points.

The second way to increase your score each round is by eating the bonus symbols (commonly known as fruit) that appear directly below the monster pen twice each round for additional points. The first bonus fruit appears after 70 dots have been cleared from the maze; the second one appears after 170 dots are cleared.

Each fruit is worth anywhere from 100 to 5,000 points, depending on what level the player is currently on. Whenever a fruit appears, the amount of time it stays on the screen before disappearing is always between nine and ten seconds. The exact duration (i.e., 9.3333 seconds, 10.0 seconds, 9.75 seconds, etc.) is variable and does not become predictable with the use of patterns. In other words, executing the same pattern on the same level twice is no guarantee for how long the bonus fruit will stay onscreen each time.

This usually goes unnoticed given that the majority of patterns are designed to eat the bonus fruit as quickly as possible after it has been triggered to appear. The symbols used for the last six rounds completed, plus the current round are also shown along the bottom edge of the screen (often called the fruit counter or level counter). See Table A.1 in the appendices for all bonus fruit and scoring values, per level.

Ghosts have three mutually-exclusive modes of behavior they can be in during play: chase, scatter, and frightened. Each mode has a different objective/goal to be carried out:

CHASE - A ghost's objective in chase mode is to find and capture Pac-Man by hunting him down through the maze. Each ghost exhibits unique behavior when chasing Pac-Man, giving them their different personalities: Blinky (red) is very aggressive and hard to shake once he gets behind you, Pinky (pink) tends to get in front of you and cut you off, Inky (light blue) is the least predictable of the bunch, and Clyde (orange) seems to do his own thing and stay out of the way.

SCATTER - In scatter mode, the ghosts give up the chase for a few seconds and head for their respective home corners. It is a welcome but brief rest-soon enough, they will revert to chase mode and be after Pac-Man again.

FRIGHTENED - Ghosts enter frightened mode whenever Pac-Man eats one of the four energizers located in the far corners of the maze. During the early levels, the ghosts will all turn dark blue (meaning they are vulnerable) and aimlessly wander the maze for a few seconds. They will flash moments before returning to their previous mode of behavior.

Reversal Of Fortune

In all three modes of behavior, the ghosts are prohibited from reversing their direction of travel. As such, they can only choose between continuing on their current course or turning off to one side or the other at the next intersection. Thus, once a ghost chooses which way to go at a maze intersection, it has no option but to continue forward on that path until the next intersection is reached.

Of course, if you've spent any time playing Pac-Man, you already know the ghosts will reverse direction at certain times. But how can this be if they are expressly prohibited from doing so on their own? The answer is: when changing modes, the system can override the ghosts' normal behavior, forcing them to go the opposite way. Whenever this happens, it is a visual indicator of their behavior changing from one mode to another.

Ghosts are forced to reverse direction by the system anytime the mode changes from: chase-to-scatter, chase-to-frightened, scatter-to-chase, and scatter-to-frightened. Ghosts do not reverse direction when changing back from frightened to chase or scatter modes.

When the system forces the ghosts to reverse course, they do not necessarily change direction simultaneously; some ghosts may continue forward for a fraction of a second before turning around.

The delay between when the system signals a reversal and when a ghost actually responds depends on how long it takes the ghost to enter the next game tile along its present course after the reversal signal is given (more on tiles in Chapter 3). Once the ghost enters a new tile, it will obey the reversal signal and turn around.

Scatter, Chase, Repeat...

Ghosts alternate between scatter and chase modes during gameplay at predetermined intervals. These mode changes are easy to spot as the ghosts simultaneously reverse direction when they occur. Scatter modes happen four times per level before the ghosts stay in chase mode indefinitely.

Good players will take full advantage of the scatter periods by using the brief moment when the ghosts are not chasing Pac-Man to clear dots from the more dangerous areas of the maze. The scatter/chase timer gets reset whenever a life is lost or a level is completed. At the start of a level or after losing a life, ghosts emerge from the ghost pen already in the first of the four scatter modes.

For the first four levels, the first two scatter periods last for seven seconds each. They change to five seconds each for level five and beyond. The third scatter mode is always set to five seconds. The fourth scatter period lasts for five seconds on level one, but then is only 1/60th of a second for the rest of play. When this occurs, it appears as a simple reversal of direction by the ghosts.

The first and second chase periods last for 20 seconds each. The third chase period is 20 seconds on level one but then balloons to 1,033 seconds for levels two through four, and 1,037 seconds for all levels beyond-lasting over 17 minutes! If the ghosts enter frightened mode, the scatter/chase timer is paused.

When time runs out, they return to the mode they were in before being frightened and the scatter/chase timer resumes. This information is summarized in the following table (all values are in seconds):

Mode

Level 1

Levels 2-4

Levels 5+

Scatter

Chase

Scatter

Chase

Scatter

Chase

1033

1037

Scatter

1/60

Chase

indefinite

Frightening Behavior

Anytime Pac-Man eats one of the four energizers on the level, the ghosts reverse direction and, on earlier levels, go into frightened mode. Frightened ghosts turn dark blue and wander about the maze for a few moments, flashing briefly as a warning before returning to normal. Ghosts use a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) to pick a way to turn at each intersection when frightened.

The PRNG generates an pseudo-random memory address to read the last few bits from. These bits are translated into the direction a frightened ghost must first try. If a wall blocks the chosen direction, the ghost then attempts the remaining directions in this order: up, left, down, and right, until a passable direction is found. The PRNG gets reset with an identical seed value every new level and every new life, causing predictable results.

This is why the frightened ghosts' movements are repeatable in the context of a memorized pattern or sequence. As the levels progress, the time ghosts spend in frightened mode grows shorter until eventually they no longer turn blue at all (they still reverse direction). Refer to Table A.1 in the appendices for the frightened time in seconds and number of flashes, per level.

Speed

The game starts with Pac-Man at 80% of his maximum speed. By the fifth level, Pac-Man is moving at full speed and will continue to do so until the 21st level. At that point, he slows back down to 90% and holds this speed for the remainder of the game. Every time Pac-Man eats a regular dot, he stops moving for one frame (1/60th of a second), slowing his progress by roughly ten percent-just enough for a following ghost to overtake him.

Eating an energizer dot causes Pac-Man to stop moving for three frames. The normal speed maintained by the ghosts is a little slower than Pac-Man's until the 21st level when they start moving faster than he does. If a ghost enters a side tunnel, however, its speed is cut nearly in half.

When frightened, ghosts move at a much slower rate of speed than normal and, for levels one through four, Pac-Man also speeds up. The table below summarizes the speed data for both Pac-Man and the ghosts, per level. This information is also contained in Table A.1 in the appendices.

PAC-MAN SPEED

GHOST SPEED

LEVEL

NORM

NORM DOTS

FRIGHT

FRIGHT DOTS

NORM

FRIGHT

TUNNEL

80%

71%

90%

79%

75%

50%

40%

2 - 4

90%

79%

95%

83%

85%

55%

45%

5 - 20

100%

87%

100%

87%

95%

60%

50%

21+

90%

79%

95%

50%

Cornering

Pac-Man is able to navigate the turns in the maze faster than his enemies. He does not have to wait until he reaches the middle of a turn to change direction as the ghosts do (see picture below). Instead, he may start turning several pixels before he reaches the center of a turn and for several pixels after passing it.

Turns taken one or more pixels before reaching the center are "pre-turns"; turns taken one or more pixels after are "post-turns". Players learn to consistently move the joystick in the direction Pac-Man should go well before arriving at the center of a turn, ensuring each pre-turn is started as many pixels away from center as possible.

This technique is known as cornering and is one of the first skills a new Pac-Man player should master. For every successful pre-turn maneuver, Pac-Man puts a little more distance between himself and any ghosts following close behind.

Such a small gain in distance may not seem terribly significant at first, but cornering through a quick series of turns will shake off even the most determined pursuer. It is a vital tool for survival in the higher levels of the game.

Whenever Pac-Man makes a pre-turn or post-turn, his orientation changes, and he starts to move one pixel in his new direction for every pixel traveled in his old direction, effectively doubling his speed as he moves at a 45 degree angle. Once he reaches the centerline of the new direction's path, he starts moving purely in that direction and his speed returns to normal.

The greatest distance advantage is thereby gained by making the earliest pre-turn possible. The illustration below shows the layout of pre-turn pixels (shown in green), center point pixels (shown in yellow), and post-turn pixels (shown in red) for each of the four possible directions a turn can be approached. Each example shows Pac-Man entering the same four-way intersection from a different direction.

When entering from the left, there are three pre-turn pixels before the center of the turn, and four post-turn pixels. Conversely, entering the same intersection from the right yields four pre-turn pixels and three post-turn ones. Entering from the top as opposed to the bottom exhibits the same property.

For any turn that is made later than the earliest possible pre-turn, Pac-Man will be one frame behind where he would be for every pixel of "lateness" in the turn. Basically, it pays to move the joystick well before reaching a turn to maximize your speed.

(click image for full size)

Turning at the earliest pre-turns possible is also required to successfully execute most any pattern. Patterns are meant to be played with perfect cornering because it removes the human element of uncertainty as to when Pac-Man will turn. Without cornering, it would be nigh-impossible to reproduce the exact timing of every turn as made by the pattern's author, thereby increasing the possibility of unpredictable ghost behavior due to Pac-Man not being in the exact same tile at the exact same time anymore.

Typically, the most popular patterns have been those that tend to "hold together" well when small input timing flaws occur (turning three pixels away from center instead of four when approaching a turn from the right is a timing flaw, for example). Other patterns-especially those that bring Pac-Man very close to the ghosts late in the sequence-tend to "fall apart" unless every turn is perfectly cornered.

During a long Pac-Man session, even the best players will make occasional timing mistakes during a fast series of turns and have to deal with the possible consequences. As such, one should aim for perfect cornering at all times but remain alert for unexpected ghost behavior from subtle input timing flaws creeping into the pattern.

Home Sweet Home

Commonly referred to as the ghost house or monster pen, this cordoned-off area in the center of the maze is the domain of the four ghosts and off-limits to Pac-Man.

Whenever a level is completed or a life is lost, the ghosts are returned to their starting positions in and around the ghost house before play continues-Blinky is always located just above and outside, while the other three are placed inside: Inky on the left, Pinky in the middle, and Clyde on the right.

The pink door on top is used by the ghosts to enter or exit the house. Once a ghost leaves, however, it cannot reenter unless it is first captured by Pac-Man-then the disembodied eyes can return home to be revived. Since Blinky is already on the outside after a level is completed or a life is lost, the only time he can get inside the ghost house is after Pac-Man captures him, and he immediately turns around to leave once revived.

That's about all there is to know about Blinky's behavior in terms of the ghost house, but determining when the other three ghosts leave home is an involved process based on several variables and conditions. The rest of this section will deal with them exclusively. Accordingly, any mention of "the ghosts" below refers to Pinky, Inky, and Clyde, but not Blinky.

The first control used to evaluate when the ghosts leave home is a personal counter each ghost retains for tracking the number of dots Pac-Man eats. Each ghost's "dot counter" is reset to zero when a level begins and can only be active when inside the ghost house, but only one ghost's counter can be active at any given time regardless of how many ghosts are inside.

The order of preference for choosing which ghost's counter to activate is: Pinky, then Inky, and then Clyde. For every dot Pac-Man eats, the preferred ghost in the house (if any) gets its dot counter increased by one. Each ghost also has a "dot limit" associated with his counter, per level.

If the preferred ghost reaches or exceeds his dot limit, it immediately exits the house and its dot counter is deactivated (but not reset). The most-preferred ghost still waiting inside the house (if any) activates its timer at this point and begins counting dots.

Pinky's dot limit is always set to zero, causing him to leave home immediately when every level begins. For the first level, Inky has a limit of 30 dots, and Clyde has a limit of 60. This results in Pinky exiting immediately which, in turn, activates Inky's dot counter. His counter must then reach or exceed 30 dots before he can leave the house.

Once Inky starts to leave, Clyde's counter (which is still at zero) is activated and starts counting dots. When his counter reaches or exceeds 60, he may exit. On the second level, Inky's dot limit is changed from 30 to zero, while Clyde's is changed from 60 to 50. Inky will exit the house as soon as the level begins from now on.

Starting at level three, all the ghosts have a dot limit of zero for the remainder of the game and will leave the ghost house immediately at the start of every level.

Whenever a life is lost, the system disables (but does not reset) the ghosts' individual dot counters and uses a global dot counter instead. This counter is enabled and reset to zero after a life is lost, counting the number of dots eaten from that point forward.

The three ghosts inside the house must wait for this special counter to tell them when to leave. Pinky is released when the counter value is equal to 7 and Inky is released when it equals 17. The only way to deactivate the counter is for Clyde to be inside the house when the counter equals 32; otherwise, it will keep counting dots even after the ghost house is empty.

If Clyde is present at the appropriate time, the global counter is reset to zero and deactivated, and the ghosts' personal dot limits are re-enabled and used as before for determining when to leave the house (including Clyde who is still in the house at this time).

If dot counters were the only control, Pac-Man could simply stop eating dots early on and keep the ghosts trapped inside the house forever. Consequently, a separate timer control was implemented to handle this case by tracking the amount of time elapsed since Pac-Man has last eaten a dot. This timer is always running but gets reset to zero each time a dot is eaten.

Anytime Pac-Man avoids eating dots long enough for the timer to reach its limit, the most-preferred ghost waiting in the ghost house (if any) is forced to leave immediately, and the timer is reset to zero. The same order of preference described above is used by this control as well. The game begins with an initial timer limit of four seconds, but lowers to it to three seconds starting with level five.

The more astute reader may have already noticed there is subtle flaw in this system resulting in a way to keep Pinky, Inky, and Clyde inside the ghost house for a very long time after eating them. The trick involves having to sacrifice a life in order to reset and enable the global dot counter, and then making sure Clyde exits the house before that counter is equal to 32.

This is accomplished by avoiding eating dots and waiting for the timer limit to force Clyde out. Once Clyde is moving for the exit, start eating dots again until at least 32 dots have been consumed since the life was lost. Now head for an energizer and gobble up some ghosts. Blinky will leave the house immediately as usual, but the other three ghosts will remain "stuck" inside as long as Pac-Man continues eating dots with sufficient frequency as not to trigger the control timer.

Why does this happen? The key lies in how the global dot counter works-it cannot be deactivated if Clyde is outside the house when the counter has a value of 32. By letting the timer force Clyde out before 32 dots are eaten, the global dot counter will keep counting dots instead of deactivating when it reaches 32. Now when the ghosts are eaten by Pac-Man and return home, they will still be using the global dot counter to determine when to leave.

As previously described, however, this counter's logic only checks for three values: 7, 17, and 32, and once those numbers are exceeded, the counter has no way to release the ghosts associated with them. The only control left to release the ghosts is the timer which can be easily avoided by eating a dot every so often to reset it. Click on the YouTube video below to see a demonstration of this curious behavior:

The last thing to mention about the ghost house is how to determine whether a ghost will move right or left after exiting the home. Ghosts typically move to the left once they get outside, but if the system changes modes one or more times when a ghost is inside, that ghost will move to the right instead of the left upon leaving the house.

Areas To Exploit

The illustration above highlights four special "zones" in the maze where ghost behavior is limited by certain conditions which can be exploited to the player's advantage. The two red zones represent the areas where ghosts are forbidden to make upward turns. Once a ghost enters either of these two zones, it may only travel from right-to-left or left-to-right until exiting the area.

Thus, only Pac-Man has access to these four, upward-facing tunnel entrances. It will serve the player well to remember the ghosts can still access these tunnels from the other end! The red zone restrictions are enforced during both scatter and chase modes, but in frightened mode the red zones are ignored temporarily, allowing the ghosts to turn upwards if they so choose.

The pink zones are in the two halves of the connecting side-tunnel. As mentioned previously, any ghost that enters the tunnel will suffer an immediate speed penalty until leaving the zone. This slow-down rule is always enforced and applies to ghosts only-Pac-Man is immune.

We need to take a look at how ghosts are able to move through the maze in pursuit of a goal. All pathfinding logic described in this chapter is shared by the four ghosts - it is important to understand what they have in common before we get into what makes them different.

Before we proceed, let's see how the game tracks the location of Pac-Man and the four ghosts (herein referred to as actors for brevity's sake). The visible game screen should be thought of as a regular grid of tiles, each eight pixels square.

The actual pixel dimensions of the screen are 224 x 288, so dividing each value by eight yields a grid that is 28 x 36 tiles in size.

Each tile is either in legal space or dead space. In the picture above, legal space is shown as the gray-colored tiles; all other tiles are considered dead space.

Actors only travel between the tiles in legal space. Each dot sits in the center of a tile, meaning they are exactly eight pixels (one tile) apart-this is useful for estimating distances during gameplay:

What Tile Am I In?

As the actors move through the maze, the game keeps track of the tile each one occupies. An actor is only associated with a single tile at a time, although its graphic will overlap into the surrounding tiles. The location of the actor's center point is what determines the tile it occupies at any given time. As the actors can move at pixel-level precision, they are often not centered directly on top of the tile they are in. Consider the following example:

(click image for full size)

The transparent red ghost is moving left-to-right across a row of tiles in legal space. In frame one, its occupied tile (shown in bright red) is near the left side of the picture. It does not matter that some of the ghost's graphic is not in the tile-what matters is that the ghost's center point is in the tile.

By frame two, it has moved far enough for its center point to be in the adjacent tile to the right and its occupied tile is updated accordingly. The ghost continues to be associated with the same tile until frame six where its center point has now crossed over into the next one.

The underlying concept of tiles is essential for understanding the ghosts' pathfinding logic as it only cares about the tile an actor occupies-not its per-pixel location within that tile. To the logic routines, the five actors look very much like the picture below.

Each actor is defined by the tile it presently occupies along with its current direction of travel. Distances between actors are also measured in tiles (the pink ghost is five tiles away from Pac-Man horizontally and one tile away vertically, for example).

Just Passing Through

It wasn't too long after the release of Pac-Man when word began to spread of players occasionally passing straight through a ghost unharmed, seemingly at random. This rumor turned out to be completely true as most die-hard Pac-Man players can attest.

If you play the game long enough, you will eventually see Pac-Man run into one of the ghosts and come out unscathed on the other side-it doesn't happen very often so enjoy it when it does! Some players have even gone so far as to incorporate this mysterious pass-through oddity into their patterns.

The root cause of this elusive peculiarity lies in the way the game detects collisions between Pac-Man and the four ghosts. Any time Pac-Man occupies the same tile as a ghost, he is considered to have collided with that ghost and a life is lost.

It is irrelevant whether the ghost moved into Pac-Man's tile or Pac-Man into the ghost's-the result is the same either way. This logic proves sufficient for handling collisions more than 99% of the time during gameplay, but does not account for one very special case:

The above picture illustrates the conditions necessary to produce this curious behavior. There are five consecutive frames showing Blinky and Pac-Man passing through each other. Below each frame is the same scene represented by the tiles they currently occupy and the per-pixel location of their center points. Pac-Man and Blinky are at just the right position and speed relative to one another to cause them to swap tiles with each other simultaneously.

In other words, Pac-Man's center point moves upwards into Blinky's tile in the same 1/60th of a second that Blinky's center point moves downwards into Pac-Man's tile, resulting in them moving past each other without colliding. Note that Pac-Man's origin point is centered on the top edge of his tile in frame four; this is still considered to be inside the bottom tile, but moving up one more pixel will push him over the edge into the next one.

Pac-Man and Blinky have now swapped tiles with each other in frame five, and Pac-Man can go on his merry way because he never "collided" (i.e., shared the same tile) with Blinky at all! Click on the YouTube video below to see an example of the pass-through bug (it happens 40 seconds after playback begins):

Target Tiles

Whenever a ghost is in chase or scatter mode, it is trying to reach a target tile somewhere on (or off) the screen. A target tile is merely a way to describe the tile a ghost would like to occupy at any given moment.

This tile can be fixed in place or change location frequently. Whenever the ghosts scatter to the corners of the maze, for example, each ghost is striving to reach a fixed target tile located somewhere near its home corner.

In chase mode, the target tile is usually (but not always) related to Pac-Man's current tile which changes often. Although it may not be obvious at first, the only difference between chase and scatter mode to a ghost is where its target tile is located. The same pathfinding logic applies in either case.

Looking Ahead

Ghosts are always thinking one step into the future as they move through the maze. Whenever a ghost enters a new tile, it looks ahead to the next tile along its current direction of travel and decides which way it will go when it gets there.

When it eventually reaches that tile, it will change its direction of travel to whatever it had decided on a tile beforehand. The process is then repeated, looking ahead into the next tile along its new direction of travel and making its next decision on which way to go.

When a ghost looks ahead into the upcoming tile, it must examine the possible exits from that tile to determine a way to proceed. In the picture below, the red ghost has just arrived at tile A and is moving right-to-left. It immediately looks ahead to tile B (the next tile along its direction of travel).

Each tile has four potential exits to be considered: right, left, up, and down. In the case of tile B, the up and down exits are blocked by walls and must be discarded as potential candidates. The right exit is also discounted because it would only take the ghost back to tile A again, and ghosts never voluntarily reverse direction. With three of the four possible exits eliminated from tile B, moving left is the only remaining choice.

This example is the most simple to explain as the ghost has but one way it can legally move. As such, we did not have to worry about where its target tile was located. The majority of game tiles in legal space are similar to this one, but things get more interesting when a ghost approaches a tile with more potential exits to choose from.

Intersections

When a ghost arrives one tile away from an upcoming intersection, it must choose between several possible directions in which to proceed. Consider the following example:

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In the first picture, the red ghost has just reached tile A and is seeking its target (shown as the green tile). It immediately looks ahead to the subsequent tile along its present direction of travel (up). In this case, that tile is a four-way intersection. As this intersection tile has no walls blocking off any of the exits, the ghost can only discard his reverse direction (down), leaving three exits open for travel.

It looks one tile beyond the intersection in each of the three remaining directions, collecting "test tiles" (shown as the tiles with dashed, white lines). In the middle picture, the ghost triangulates the distance from each of these test tiles to its target tile.

Whichever direction's test tile has the shortest distance to the target becomes the direction the ghost will take upon reaching the intersection tile. In this case, the right test tile has the shortest distance to the target, and the ghost updates its chosen direction for the intersection tile accordingly.

Sometimes a ghost is presented with two or more test tiles that have the same distance to the target tile. In the example below, the red ghost must choose between moving down or left at the upcoming intersection tile. Unfortunately, both test tiles have the same distance to the target (bottom left).

To break the tie, the ghost prefers directions in this order: up, left, down, right. Up is the most preferred direction; right is the least. Therefore, the ghost chooses to go left at the intersection because left precedes down in the preference list. Although it may seem obvious to a person that going down was the better choice to reach the target, ghosts are not that smart. They cannot see more than a few tiles ahead and, as a consequence, cannot recognize the disparity between these two options.

Scatter Targets

As mentioned before, each ghost has a fixed target tile it is trying to reach in scatter mode. The picture below shows the actual tile used by each ghost. Notice each target tile is in dead space on either the top or bottom edge of the screen. As such, the ghosts will never be able to reach them.

Luckily, a ghost does not care if its goal is attainable or not-the A.I. routines are very short-sighted. All a ghost cares about is following the pathfinding logic described above to make the best choice it can on which way to turn at the next tile.

As a result, it will simply make circles in the area of the maze nearest its target tile until the target is set to some other location. That's all scatter mode really is. The only reason a ghost has a "favorite corner" of the maze at all is due to the location of a target tile it will never reach.

"First, you've got to learn how to control the monsters. See how the red, pink and blue are grouped together? It's easier to control two monsters than four."-Billy Mitchell, champion Pac-Man player

In the last chapter, we learned how a ghost follows a target tile through the maze. Now we will take a closer look at Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde to better understand why they behave so differently when in chase mode. They all share the same pathfinding logic for chasing a target tile, so how is it each one behaves differently when following Pac-Man?

The answer is delightfully simple: Pac-Man's tile is not always the target. Every ghost has a distinct method for calculating its target tile in chase mode, resulting in their unique personalities. Some of the ghosts use Pac-Man's actual tile as the target; others only use it as an intermediate step to find another tile.

Sometimes a ghost is targeting a tile that has absolutely nothing to do with Pac-Man at all! Regardless of where a ghost's target tile is at the time, Pac-Man will still be killed if he gets in that ghost's way.

Rumor has it Toru Iwatani and his team spent months doing nothing but tweaking and refining the ghost A.I. routines before releasing Pac-Man to the world. Their efforts show in the final product: Itawani's team created the illusion of complex pathfinding by using very simple logic and very little code.

Blinky: The red ghost's character is aptly described as that of a shadow and is best-known as "Blinky". In Japan, his character is represented by the word oikake, which means "to run down or pursue". Blinky seems to always be the first of the ghosts to track Pac-Man down in the maze. He is by far the most aggressive of the four and will doggedly pursue Pac-Man once behind him.

Of all the ghosts' targeting schemes for chase mode, Blinky's is the most simple and direct, using Pac-Man's current tile as his target. In the pictures above, we can see Blinky's target tile is the same as Pac-Man's currently occupied tile. Targeting Pac-Man directly in this way results in a very determined and tenacious ghost who is tough to shake when he's right behind you.

All ghosts move at the same rate of speed when a level begins, but Blinky will increase his rate of speed twice each round based on the number of dots remaining in the maze. While in this accelerated state, Blinky is commonly called "Cruise Elroy", yet no one seems to know where this custom was originated or what it means.

On the first level, for example, Blinky becomes Elroy when there are 20 dots remaining in the maze, accelerating to be at least as fast as Pac-Man. More importantly, his scatter mode behavior is also modified to target Pac-Man's tile in lieu of his typical fixed target tile for any remaining scatter periods in the level.

This causes Elroy to chase Pac-Man while the other three ghosts continue to scatter as normal. As if that weren't bad enough, when only 10 dots remain, Elroy speeds up again to the point where he is now perceptibly faster than Pac-Man.

If a life is lost any time after Blinky has become Elroy, he will revert back to his normal behavior and speed when play resumes, heading for his home corner during the initial scatter period. But once the last ghost (Clyde) has left the ghost house in the middle of the board, he will turn back into Elroy again.

Keep in mind: he is still in scatter mode the entire time. All that has changed is the target tile-he will still reverse direction when entering and exiting scatter mode as before. As the levels progress, Blinky will turn into Elroy with more dots remaining in the maze than in previous rounds. Refer to Table A.1 in the appendices for dot counts and speeds for both Elroy changes, per level.

Pinky: Nicknamed "Pinky", the pink ghost's character is described as one who is speedy. In Japan, he is characterized as machibuse, meaning "to perform an ambush", perhaps because Pinky always seems to be able to get ahead of you and cut you off when you least expect it.

He always moves at the same speed as Inky and Clyde, however, which suggests speedy is a poor translation of the more appropriate machibuse. Pinky and Blinky often seem to be working in concert to box Pac-Man in, leaving him with nowhere to run.

In chase mode, Pinky behaves as he does because he does not target Pac-Man's tile directly. Instead, he selects an offset four tiles away from Pac-Man in the direction Pac-Man is currently moving (with one exception). The pictures below illustrate the four possible offsets Pinky will use to determine his target tile based on Pac-Man's orientation:

If Pac-Man is moving left, Pinky's target tile will be four game tiles to the left of Pac-Man's current tile. If Pac-Man is moving right, Pinky's tile will be four tiles to the right. If Pac-Man is moving down, Pinky's target is four tiles below.

Finally, if Pac-Man is moving up, Pinky's target tile will be four tiles up and four tiles to the left. This interesting outcome is due to a subtle error in the logic code that calculates Pinky's offset from Pac-Man. This piece of code works properly for the other three cases but, when Pac-Man is moving upwards, triggers an overflow bug that mistakenly includes a left offset equal in distance to the expected up offset (we will see this same issue in Inky's logic later).

Don Hodges' website has an excellent article giving a thorough, code-level analysis of this bug, including the source code and a proposed fix-click here to go there now.

Pinky is the easiest ghost to exert control over thanks to his targeting scheme. By changing direction, you can dictate where Pinky will turn next when he is nearby (see above picture). If you are facing off closely with Pinky, he will turn before he reaches you if he can. This happens due to the fact Pac-Man has come close enough to Pinky for Pinky's target tile to now be behind him.

In the picture above, Pinky chooses to turn up at the intersection because moving left would have taken him further away from his target tile. The longest-lived example of this is the technique known as "head faking". This is where the player shakes the joystick to cause Pac-Man to rapidly change direction back and forth, hopefully causing a ghost to change course in the process.

As it turns out, the shaking is not necessary-one well-timed, quick reversal of direction towards Pinky just before he decides what to do at an upcoming intersection is all that is needed to get him off your tail.

Inky: The light-blue ghost is nicknamed "Inky" and his character is described as one who is bashful. In Japan, he is portrayed as kimagure, meaning "a fickle, moody, or uneven temper". Perhaps not surprisingly, Inky is the least predictable of the ghosts.

Sometimes he chases Pac-Man aggressively like Blinky; other times he jumps ahead of Pac-Man as Pinky would. He might even wander off like Clyde on occasion!

In fact, Inky may be the most dangerous ghost of all due to his erratic behavior. Bashful is not a very good translation of kimagure, and misleads the player to assume Inky will shy away from Pac-Man when he gets close which is not always the case.

Inky uses the most complex targeting scheme of the four ghosts in chase mode. He needs Pac-Man's current tile/orientation and Blinky's current tile to calculate his final target. To envision Inky's target, imagine an intermediate offset two tiles away from Pac-Man's tile in the direction Pac-Man is moving (shown as the dashed, green tile in the picture above), then draw a line from Blinky's tile to that offset. Now double the line length by extending the line out just as far again, and you will have Inky's target tile as shown above.

For the same reasons already discussed in Pinky's case, Inky's offset calculation from Pac-Man is two tiles up and two tiles left when Pac-Man is moving up (shown above). The other three orientations have the expected offset of two tiles in the direction Pac-Man is moving.

Inky's targeting logic will keep him away from Pac-Man when Blinky is far away from Pac-Man, but as Blinky draws closer, so will Inky's target tile. This explains why Inky's behavior seems more variable as Pac-Man moves away from Blinky. Like Pinky, Inky's course can often be altered by Pac-Man changing direction or "head-faking". How much or how little effect this will have on Inky's decisions is directly related to where Blinky is at the time.

Clyde: The orange ghost is nicknamed "Clyde" and is characterized as one who is pokey. In Japan, his character is described as otoboke, meaning "pretending ignorance", and his nickname is "Guzuta", meaning "one who lags behind".

In reality, Clyde moves at the same speed as Inky and Pinky so his character description is a bit misleading. Clyde is the last ghost to leave the pen and tends to separate himself from the other ghosts by shying away from Pac-Man and doing his own thing when he isn't patrolling his corner of the maze.

Although not nearly as dangerous as the other three ghosts, his behavior can seem unpredictable at times and should still be considered a threat.

In chase mode, Clyde's target differs based on his proximity to Pac-Man. When more than eight tiles away, he uses Pac-Man's tile as his target (shown as the yellow target above). If Clyde is closer than eight tiles away, he switches to his scatter mode target instead, and starts heading for his corner until he is far enough away to target Pac-Man again.

In the picture above, Clyde is stuck in an endless loop thanks to his targeting scheme. Outside of the dashed area, Clyde acts exactly as Blinky would, heading straight for Pac-Man, but upon entering the dashed area, Clyde will change his mind and head for his scatter target instead.

Leaving the eight tile perimeter surrounding Pac-Man causes his target to change back to Pac-Man's tile and results in Clyde circling the island indefinitely until Pac-Man moves elsewhere or a mode change occurs.

Clyde's targeting method results in him not being particularly dangerous unless you get in his way as he runs back to his corner or before he can reach an intersection to turn away. Extra care should be taken when Pac-Man is in Clyde's home corner as Clyde is less likely to get out of the way.

"This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but with a whimper." —T. S. Eliot

On The Edge Of Forever

Pac-Man was always meant to be a game with no ending. The developers at Namco mistakenly assumed the game's increasing difficulty was sufficient to prevent anyone from playing indefinitely. Of course, within a few years of Pac-Man's release, players had discovered that every level beyond the 21st was identical.

Patterns were quickly created to exploit this fact and, for any player able to get past the first 20 levels, the game now became a test of endurance to see how many points you could rack up before losing focus and making a mistake. High scores soared into the millions and most players agreed the game simply went on forever.

Eventually, a few highly-skilled players were able to complete 255 consecutive levels of play (scoring over three million points and taking several hours to accomplish) and found a surprise waiting for them on level 256. It was a surprise no one knew about-not even the developers at Namco.

The 256th level displays the left half of the maze correctly, but the right half is a jumbled mess of randomly colored letters, numbers, and symbols. Notice the bonus counter in the lower-right of the screen is also malfunctioning.

The left side of the maze plays normally, but the right side is a different story. Although both the player and the ghosts can navigate through the right half of the screen, the original maze walls no longer apply.

Instead, Pac-Man must be guided through a confusing series of open areas, tunnels, one-way intersections, lone walls, and pass-throughs-all invisible to the player-while four ghosts are in hot pursuit.

Why does this broken level happen in the first place? The culprit is the routine responsible for drawing the bonus symbols along the bottom edge of the screen. Here's what happens: when level 256 is reached, the internal level counter is incremented to 255 (the level counter starts at zero - not one) and the routine for drawing the bonus symbols is called.

The routine loads the current level counter value (255) into a CPU register and increments that register by one. Unfortunately, 255 is the largest number that can fit in a single byte which is the size of the Z-80 CPU registers, so when the value is incremented the overflow is discarded leaving a zero in the register instead of the expected value of 256. This zero value leads the routine to believe this is an early level since its value is less than seven.

The routine starts drawing bonus symbols using the confused register as a counter. At the end of every drawing loop, the register is decreased by one and then checked to see if it is zero (the signal for the routine to stop drawing symbols). Since the register already has a zero in it to start, the first decrement will roll the value back to 255. It will keep decrementing the register and drawing symbols until the register is reduced to zero again, causing the loop to run a total of 256 times.

This means that memory locations outside the bounds of the bonus symbol table are drawn to the screen at increasing locations in video memory. This half-broken level was named the "split screen" by players; developers refer to it as a "kill screen".

Playing The Level

There are 114 dots on the left half of the screen, nine dots on the right, and one bonus key, totaling 6,310 points. When all of the dots have been cleared, nothing happens. The game does not consider a level to be completed until 244 dots have been eaten, so there is nothing left to do but sacrifice Pac-Man to a hungry ghost.

Interestingly, every time a life is lost, the nine dots on the right half of the screen get reset and can be eaten again, resulting in an additional 90 points per extra man. In the best-case scenario (five extra men), 6,760 points is the maximum score possible, but only 168 dots can be harvested-not enough to change levels-so we are stuck. There are no more dots to gobble or energizers to eat.

There is no final victory waiting for Pac-Man, only an empty half-maze full of ghosts. The game has an ending after all-just not a very happy or exciting one.

Four of the nine dots on the right half of the screen are invisible, but can be heard when eaten. The picture on the left shows all nine dot locations. Dots 1, 5, 6, and 9 are invisible; the rest can be seen but some are a different color than normal.

Anyone reaching this level quickly realized: to safely map out the right side of the screen something had to be done about the ghosts. After much tinkering, it was discovered that a ghost would get "trapped" on the right edge of the screen if he got too close to it.

Once trapped, a ghost can only move up or down but never right or left again. By leading ghosts near the edge of the screen, a skilled player could eventually get the ghosts out of the way and concentrate on exploring the right half of the maze and collecting the dots.

There are many methods for trapping the ghosts. One of the easiest ways to trap the three important ghosts is shown in the picture to the right. The yellow line shows Pac-Man's path from the start of the level to a spot near the bottom-right.

The exact instructions are as follows: begin by going right until you reach a blue letter 'N', then go down. Keep going down until you reach a blue letter 'F', then go right. Keep going right until you reach a yellow 'B', then go down again. When executed properly, Pac-Man will hit an invisible wall almost immediately after the last turn is made. Now we wait.

The red ghost will get stuck first. The pink ghost follows a few seconds later. The blue ghost will continue to move freely for several moments until the next scatter mode occurs. At that point, it will try to reach some location near the right edge of the screen and get stuck with the pink and red ghost instead.

Now the orange ghost is the only one still on the loose (bottom-right). Clyde is no real threat, however, since he runs to his corner whenever Pac-Man gets close (see Chapter 4), making it relatively easy to clean up all the dots. Be sure to take care around the lower-left corner of the maze-the orange ghost will have nowhere left to run to and will be much more aggressive.

Click on the YouTube video below to watch this ghost-trapping method in action:

Believe It Or Not

Some versions of the Pac-Man ROMs have a "rack test" feature, allowing the cabinet owner to skip ahead to the next level of play whenever they want. To date, the only known way to legitimately get past level 256 is by using the rack test switch inside these machines.

The result is that the game loops back around to the first board, but with the score intact and the ghosts still behaving as though it were level 21 or above. Many of the Pac-Man ROMs available for use with the MAME emulator also have this rack test feature, making it relatively easy for those without an arcade version handy to quickly get to the split-screen and beyond.

For decades, Pac-Man enthusiasts worldwide have heard the whispers about a "secret trick" allowing a player to get past level 256 and continue playing without using the aforementioned rack test. Several players have boasted having acquired this holy grail of Pac-Man knowledge over the years, but no one has been able to make good on their claims by actually proving it.

This topic became so hotly debated in the upper echelons of the arcade gaming community that Billy Mitchell-who was convinced it was impossible-offered a $100,000 cash prize to the first player to prove they could legitimately get past level 256, leaving the challenge open for a full year. The prize money went unclaimed.

In spite of the evidence against there being a way to get past level 256, rumors still persist and can occasionally be found in classic gaming forums online, yet no one has been able to back up their words with indisputable proof. It's hard to imagine why anyone who could legitimately get past the level did not collect Mr. Mitchell's prize money to be sure.

Still the occasional whispers can be heard. Perhaps it is simply natural for people to want to believe in the possibility as opposed to not-like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Then again, maybe there is some middle-aged Pac-Man junkie out there who is withholding secrets to a 30 year-old amusement device for his or her own unfathomable reasons. Stranger things have happened. You be the judge.

Splitting Apart The Split Screen, Don Hodges

Pac-Man's Ghost Behavior Analyzed And Fixed, Don Hodges

Pac-Man Source Code With Comments, Chris Lomont

Pac-Man Emulation Guide, Chris Lomont

The Virtual Pac-Man Museum, Chuck and Vicki Gill

Pacman: The Phenomenon - Part 1, Marty Goldberg

The History of Pac-Man, Doug Trueman

Pac-Man Entry At Arcade History, Alexis Bousiges

Pac-Man ghost behavior revealed, Twin Galaxies forum topic

Pac-Man ghost AI question, AtariAge forum topic

Reawakening The Sleeping Giant: The Pac-Man CE Interview, Christian Nutt

(click image for full size)

Table A.2 - Difficulty Specifications

There is a small spot on the Pac-Man PCB where you can solder two pads together to set the game to "hard" difficulty. The only difference in hard difficulty is that five of the levels (1, 3, 6, 19, and 20) are eliminated from play. The system does not eliminate any of the bonus symbols, however, causing much confusion as to what level you're really playing.

Level two is the first board in hard difficulty for example, but the cherry symbol is used instead of the strawberry. It's still level two in terms of gameplay, but with cherry symbols in place of the usual strawberries. Also, the bonus point values are changed to match the current symbol being used. You can determine the difficulty setting of a machine by observing which ghost kills Pac-Man during the attract mode demo game.

In normal difficulty, Pac-Man gets captured by Inky in the lower-left area of the maze. If the difficulty jumper has been connected, however, he is captured by Clyde near the same location.

Normal

Normal Bonus

Hard

Hard Bonus

Cherries

Strawberry

Cherries

Peach 1

Peach 2

Strawberry

Apple 1

Peach 1

Apple 2

Grapes 1

Peach 2

Grapes 2

Apple 1

Galaxian 1

Apple 2

Galaxian 2

Grapes 1

Bell 1

Grapes 2

Bell 2

Galaxian 1

Key 1

Galaxian 2

Key 2

Bell 1

Key 3

Bell 2

Key 4

Key 1

Key 5

Key 2

Key 6

Key 3

Key 7

Key 8

21+

Key 9

21+

Key 4+

This section is meant to contain not only the easter egg below, but also tricks-interesting ways players have found to create unexpected behavior in Pac-Man. I have seen a few of these curious abuses of a Pac-Man machine before, but I don't know how to recreate them.

As such, I am asking for any help the readers of this guide can provide towards expanding this section. Please send any Pac-Man tricks you may know me for inclusion in the guide; full credit will be given for your altruism and ingenuity.

NAMCO Easter Egg

There is a secret message hidden in Pac-Man by the developers at Namco. To see it, put the machine into service mode and wait for the settings screen to appear. Now quickly toggle service mode off and on (an alignment grid will appear on the screen).

While holding down the player 1 and player 2 buttons, toggle service mode off and on again very quickly (if done properly, the grid will stay on the screen), and then push the joystick in the following directions: UP x 4, LEFT x 4, RIGHT x 4, DOWN x 4. The message "MADE BY NAMCO" will appear sideways on the screen, spelled out using energizers.

Specifications:

Platform - NAMCO 8-bit PCB

CPU - Z80A at 3.072 MHz

ROM - 16K in four, 4K chips

RAM - Almost 2K

Display - Raster

Orientation - Vertical

Resolution - 224x288

Colors - 16

Attributes - Eight 16x16 hardware sprites

Refresh rate - 60.61 Hz

Sound - Custom monophonic 3-voice waveform sound generator chip

Controls - One 4-way leaf joystick, 1P/2P buttons

Models - Upright, Mini, and Cocktail

Midway Operator's Reference Books:

apple: The bonus symbol for levels five and six. Worth 700 points.

bell: The bonus symbol for levels eleven and twelve. Worth 3,000 points.

Blinky: The red ghost. Also known as “Akabei” or “Macky” in Puck-Man.

bonus symbol: The often fruit-related symbol that appears twice per level below the ghost house and can be eaten for additional scoring. The point-value depends on the specific symbol and can range anywhere from 100 to 5,000 points each. Also known as fruit.

cherries: The bonus symbol for the first round of play. Worth 100 points.

Clyde: The orange ghost. Also known as “Guzuta” or “Mocky” in Puck-Man.

cornering: The technique of moving the joystick in the direction one wishes to go well before reaching the center of a turn, ensuring Pac-Man will take the turn as quickly as possible.

Cruise Elroy: When a certain number of dots are all that remain in a level, Blinky (red ghost) will change “gears”, speeding up as well as chasing Pac-Man even in scatter mode. He speeds up yet again when half the dots remain from the first change.

dots: The 244 objects in the maze Pac-Man must eat to move on to the next round. There are 240 small dots worth 10 points each, and 4 energizer dots worth 50 points each. Also known as pills.

energizer: One of four, large, flashing dots located near the corners of the maze worth 50 points each. When Pac-Man eats an energizer, the ghosts simultaneously reverse direction and, on earlier levels, turn dark blue. Pac-Man can then eat the blue ghosts for additional points, scoring more for each consecutive ghost eaten from one energizer: 200, 400, 800, and 1,600 points respectively. Also known as a power pills, fuel tanks, and vitamins.

flipping: “Flipping the machine” refers to when a player earns one million points. The game is unable to display a score larger than 999,999, so the score readout “flips” over to zero and keeps counting. Also known as rolling the machine.

fruit: See bonus symbol.

galaxian: The bonus symbol for levels nine and ten. Also known as a tulip or a thunderbird. Worth 2,000 points.

ghost house: The rectangular area in the middle of the maze where the ghosts start each new level and new life, returning to the house whenever they are captured by Pac-Man. Also known as the monster pen.

ghosts: Pac-Man's four enemies in the maze are typically referred to as ghosts or monsters.

grapes: The bonus symbol for levels seven and eight. Also known as a grenade. Worth 1,000 points.

grenade: See grapes.

head faking: Changing Pac-Man's direction back and forth in quick succession in an attempt to affect the turning logic of one or more ghosts in play. Blinky and Clyde do not use Pac-Man's current direction in their chase logic, so they are unaffected by head faking.

Inky: The blue ghost. Also known as “Aosuke” or “Mucky” in Puck-Man.

intersection: Anywhere pathways in the maze intersect, yielding more than one option on which way to proceed.

key: The bonus symbol for levels 13 and above. Worth 5,000 points.

monster pen: See ghost house.

monsters: See ghosts.

orange: See peach.

pattern: A memorized series of turns associated with a particular level or levels that, when repeated, clears the maze of dots without getting Pac-Man captured by any of the ghosts. Also known as a routine.

peach: The bonus symbol for levels three and four. Also known as an orange. Worth 500 points.

pills: See dots.

Pinky: The pink ghost. Also known as “Micky” in Puck-Man.

power pill: See energizer.

routine: See pattern.

side tunnel: The connecting tunnel between the right and left edges of the screen. Entering this tunnel will “wrap” the player around to the other side of the screen. The monsters always suffer a speed penalty while in the tunnel while Pac-Man does not. Also known as The Tube, The Time Warp, and The Scoot.

split screen: The 256th level of the game, where the right half of the screen is filled with garbage instead of the usual maze.

strawberry: The bonus symbol for level two. Worth 300 points.

thunderbird: See galaxian.

tulip: See galaxian.

Q: How do I get past the split screen?

A: The only known way to get past the split screen is via the “rack test” feature available on some Pac-Man ROMs (see Chapter 5).

Q: What is a “perfect score”?

A: A perfect score in Pac-Man is 3,333,360 points, which can only be attained by playing a perfect game. This requires catching all four ghosts at every energizer, gobbling down every bonus fruit, and never once losing a life for 256 consectutive levels of play.

All extra lives are needed once the split screen is reached to eat the nine dots hidden on the right side of the screen the maximum number of times—they respawn every time a life is lost. This was first achieved by Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida in 1999.

Q: Is it true that some of the ghost A.I. routines examine the joystick directly to make decisions?

A: This is false. The memory-mapped IN0 joystick port is completely removed from the pathfinding and logic routines in the code.

Q: What other games from the Pac-Man family will this ghost logic work with?

A: Pac-Man Plus and Ms. Pac-Man both use the same basic pathfinding/targeting logic as the original Pac-Man. Many popular bootleg ROMs like the Atlantic City Chip and Hanglyman also use this logic.

Q: Why are all of the bonus symbols food-related except for the galaxian, the bell, and the key?

A: The galaxian was added as a nod to the Namco space-shooter title, Galaxian, which was under development at the same time as Pac-Man. No one knows why Toru Iwatani chose a bell and a key for the final two bonus symbols.

It has been theorized the bell may actually be some sort of food like an Asian cashew or even a blancmange dessert, which would make it consistent with the food theme. The bell at least has the possibility of being something else—no one has any theories on the key being anything but ... well ... a key.

Q: Why are some members of the NAMCO development team listed by name but not others in Chapter 1?

A: I have not been able to find out these persons' names—I'm sure they are documented somewhere but I have yet to find that information. If you know of any reliable sources for the names of the full NAMCO development team, please let me know ([email protected]).

[NOTE: The latest version of the Pac-Man Dossier is available at Jamey Pittman's website, and he can be contacted at [email protected] with questions, comments, and updates. Gamasutra will be working with Jamey on new dossiers for other games to be published in the future.]

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