Data-diving my way to a winning Gold-league PvZ build

PvZ has been my weak spot for a long time.  Very frustrating, and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing.

I finally buckled down and took a deep dive into the data, looking for a strat that would work for a Gold-league scrub like myself.  In particular, I was looking for a strat that would work from silver/gold up to gold/plat and didn't require an APM over 80.

My site GGTracker has millions of replays, and there are several thousands of PvZs in there played since the last patch (March 1st) and in my league range.  Zergs win ZvP in Gold/Plat about 55% of the time, since March 1st.

Then I split up the games by what time Protoss completes their natural expansion.  The majority of Protoss complete their Nexus at 6:00 or later (meaning they start it at 4:20 or later), and those players lose 60% of the time.

FlatlineSC2's 1 GateFE into 4 Gate Pressure into Immortal/Sentry All-In starts its Nexus at 3:50, finishing at 5:30.  That seemed like fun to me, and the PvZ winrate associated with that timing wasn't as bad.

In that build, the all-in immortal/sentry army moves out around 10:00, so I used that as a benchmark: 45+ workers, 6+ sentries, 2+ immortals.  Of course the GGTracker replays might be a biased sample, but in those 92 games, the Protoss wins 80% of the time.

I like those odds!

After practicing twice against the AI, I played the strat on ladder and...   I won!


I realize that "Immortal/Sentry" is nothing new.  What was new to me was:

• confirming from data that it actually works in the Gold-league range (after all, some strats are solid but require too much multi-tasking or micro to work in Gold)
• confirming that the win rate is relatively APM-independent (at APMs of 60 or above, there is no clear relationship between APM and win rate for this strat)
• being able to watch a bunch of gold-league level replays of people playing this strat, to see exactly how they scouted, protected their expansion, how many gateways, and all the other little details.

In my particular game, the immortal/sentry push at 10:00 did a lot of economic damage, but due to my crappy micro and army positioning I wasn't able to finish the game right then and there.  After another so-so push at 21:00, some proxy zealots spied that he was going broods, so when his brood army showed up, I was ready with voids and stalkers and he had a bad time.

What do you think, is this strat actually viable or am I being fooled by these 92 games?

Superego

"You really do need a system"  —Leonard Shelby, Memento

Until a few months ago, a lot of my evenings went like this: after everyone else went to sleep, I'd fire up the computer, grab a sleeve of crackers and a fresh tub of Nutella, play video games, and read Facebook, Twitter and Hacker News.  I was rolling!  I'd roll straight through to one-thirty, two and beyond.

Basically this

The next day, I'd wake up bleary-eyed with a nasty grumpy brain fog.  Bad, bad, bad, I was mad at myself for being so stupid.  I did the math and on average, I was getting six hours' sleep, not really enough.  And in retrospect, the late nights weren't even that much fun.  Like eating a whole bag of potato chips in one sitting, in recollection, they don't seem so delicious.

I tried to be more responsible, many times, but nothing worked for long.  During the day I wanted to do better; but when night came, I wanted to stay up and play.  I started tracking my sleep with the Jawbone UP; that helped for about two weeks.

A device for measuring my failure

Three months ago, after yet another morning waking up tired and angry, I realized that simply wishing and wanting to do better was not enough.  I put on my thinking cap.  What was actually going to fix the problem for real?   Well, I'm a software programmer; I program things.  I can't program myself, but I can program my computer — to simply kick me off after a certain time of night.

So I built a system, called Superego, which does just that.  It works like this:

A) The Jawbone UP tracks my sleep.

B) Superego sets the day's Computer Curfew time based on how much sleep I've been getting lately.

C) At Computer Curfew time, Superego shuts off all web browsing and games until 6am the next morning.

Now I'm getting seven and a half hours of sleep a night.

Some common questions:

I need this!  Let me have it!

If you've got a Mac, sign up and go for it!

Can't you just work around Superego by using your computer's administrator password?

Yes, and that's why I hid my administrator password.  I made a new password and printed out five copies.  One is at work, one's in the cellar, another's in my wife's nightstand, and there's one in each of my kid's piggy banks.  During the day, I can easily get the password if I need it.  But at night, my wife is a light sleeper, so if I try to open her nightstand drawer, she'll catch me.  If I make the long trip down to the cellar, I'll come to my senses, give up and just go to bed.

Most important, if I do somehow circumvent the system and stay up late, the next day I will do what it takes to prevent a recurrence — for example, hide the passwords in places even more remote.

How is the Computer Curfew time set?

The Computer Curfew time adjusts every day based on how much sleep I'm getting lately.

It's like how you hit a target with a bow and arrow on a windy day.  You aim and shoot; if the arrow falls a little to the left, you aim your next shot a little further to the right.  With the Computer Curfew, the target is seven and half hour sleep.  When I get less sleep than the target, the next day's Curfew is earlier; if more, later.

For example, last night was a good night — eight hours, sixteen minutes, more sleep than I need — so tonight's curfew is 10:25pm, fourteen minutes later than the previous night.

The actual math is nothing too fancy; a weighted average to compute recent sleep, and another to compute the recent curfew.  If recent average sleep is ten minutes more than the target, then tonight's curfew will be ten minutes later than the recent average curfew.

Can't you just stay up late watching TV or reading instead?

For whatever reason, late-night TV and reading are not a problem for me; I don't like TV, and when I read at night, I fall asleep pretty fast.

This would never work for me, my problems are different.

Indeed, people have all kinds of different sleep-related issues.  If you think a modified version of this system could help you, let me know.  I love doing this kind of self-improvement stuff.

Why so much effort and nonsense, why don't you just go to sleep at a reasonable time?

Ha!  If you are one of those "willpower" people who can just decide to do something and then actually do it, good for you.  The rest of us aren't so lucky.

I have more questions!

Please ask away!  I'll add the common ones to this article.

First Peek at My Sleep Data

Last night I attended the New York Quantified Self Meetup.  It was nice to finally meet a bunch of my kind of nerds.

Inspired by the sleep talk, I downloaded my Jawbone Up data and tried to replicate the speaker's finding that deep sleep % is correlated to previous night's sleep duration.  In my case there does not appear to be such a correlation:

Also interesting, the amount of deep sleep seems somewhat unrelated to the amount of total sleep — ~4 hours of deep sleep regardless of whether I'm sleeping 6, 7 or 8 hours:

To put it another way, % Deep Sleep declines somewhat as my # of hours of Total Sleep increases:

Next step is to correlate my sleep to my performance in StarCraft and Chess.  :)

Also, I'm now highly motivated to do a better job of recording my sleep data accurately.  Some of the really short sleep durations are not accurate, and are due to me forgetting to hit the button on the Jawbone UP before going to sleep, or to me forgetting to keep it charged.

How AngularJS Saved StarCraft

1. A Fun Game That's Hard to Watch
2. Charts and Stats
3. Together At Last
4. HTML
5. Javascript
6. Happy Ending

Thoughts on "The Riddle of the Gun"

My friend Matthew read about my exercise wager where the penalty is an NRA donation.


He wrote:

On the topic of firearms, however, I've become an unlikely late-in-life convert.  Flies in the face of my positions on virtually everything else, on which I've become increasingly liberal with age.

I think the best summation of my thoughts on the subject is this Sam Harris article.   Sam Harris continues to annoy me by being able to describe my own thoughts more completely and eloquently than me in a number of realms: 

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-riddle-of-the-gun

So go read the Sam Harris piece!  It is super interesting.

Then come back and let me know what you think.

Here's my take.

First of all, it's very refreshing to engage with a rational mind on an issue that seems only to attract the crazies.

I suppose the good news is that gun deaths are such a small part of preventable death in Amerika.  I wish Sam had tried to grapple with the puzzle of why American gun deaths are so much higher than in other places.

He's an excellent writer, so it was only on the second reading that I noticed him sneaking back and forth between the ideal and the practical as it suited his argument.  It was most noticeable when he pointed out that it's impossible to prevent bad guys from doing bad things by taking their guns away, because there are just so many guns in America.  On the other hand, the only thing keeping us from putting an armed guard in front of every school is "entirely a question of money".

Is it not likewise a question of money (and political will, as with armed guards) to reduce the level of gun ownership among bad guys to whatever level we deem desirable?

However, my interest in achieving a satisfactory resolution to the gun debate pales in comparison to my interest in putting the gun debate in proper perspective among the other national debates.  It ranks about #100 on the list, well below another strong libertarian concern that happens to enjoy strong agreement among anti-fascist citizens of both the red and blue variety: namely, the extent to which our government should be allowed to unaccountably spy on us.

In other news, my buddy failed to exercise enough last week, so I've made my first-ever contribution to the NRA, in his honor, $25.

A Symbol of My Commitment to Personal Excellence

Three Big Mistakes That Make Your Accounts Insecure, and one easy way to fix it

My childhood friend Betsy asked me about how to keep accounts secure on the Internet:

I ask because I believe it's way too easy for anyone who has access to a few basic sites to crack passwords based on finding common password patterns for the user. If you've thought about this, I wonder if you'd share with me what you do to ensure your own password security... I'd like to learn to be a better fortress.

She's right!  Here are the mistakes I see friends making:

1. Using the same password for all their accounts, including important ones like banking and email.
2. Writing down their passwords in a place everyone can see, like on a post-it note stuck to their monitor
3. Choosing short passwords that are easily guessed by a bad guy with a computer.  Most people's intuition about which passwords are good is exactly backwards.


To fix all three problems at once, I use LastPass.  My hacker buddy Marian turned me on to it.  LastPass makes it easy enough to have a different password for every account.  It keeps track of all your passwords on all the different sites you use.  So you only have to remember one master password  - the password to your LastPass account.  Their software can be installed on your computer, into your browser, and on your phone -- I do all three.

LastPass has a neat "generate password" feature that will generate a super-crazy strong password for you and keep a record of it.  They also will keep track of your credit card details if you like, and fill in forms for you on the web.  I use both of these a lot and it's a time saver.

I was a little scared at first about the idea of entrusting all my passwords to LastPass.  After researching them a bit and thinking about it, I realized that all the reasonable alternatives to LastPass are considerably less secure.  What other ways are there?

• keep your own file with all your passwords - how are you securing that file?
• use the same password on every site - hope none of those sites are run by crooks
• remember all your different passwords - good luck!
• keep your passwords on paper - what could possibly go wrong?

What do you think?  Do you have a password system you like?


ps. I should have mentioned one other thing you can do to lock down your important accounts.  It's a simple neat trick with a stupid name -- "two factor authentication".  What it means is that to get into your account, you need two things, for example both your password and your phone may be needed to log in to your email account.  That way, if the bad guy gets your password but not your phone, he's out of luck!  Gmail offers two-factor authentication, as do many banking sites.  Do it!