Deadlock (novel)

Deadlock is a detective novel by Sara Paretsky told in the first person by private eye (Vic) V. I. Warshawski.

Plot

Vic goes to the Chicago port to find out about her cousin Boom Boom's death. She believes that Boom Boom was killed. The police believe that this ex-Black Hawks hockey player died in an accident. Vic starts digging for motive and evidence. After two attempts on her life, she finally thinks she has the murder solved but needs strong evidence. To get it, she goes to the yacht of a shipping magnate but is caught by the magnate while she is gathering evidence against him. He confronts her and tells her she is going to die. The book, the second in which Warshawski, a crucial figure in a new breed of female detectives in detective literature, appears, is the basis of the film V.I. Warshawski, starring Kathleen Turner in the title role.

The author was given an award by the Friends of American Writers for the book.

External Link

References

Deadlock (Star Trek: Voyager)

"Deadlock" is the 37th episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the 21st episode of the second season.

Plot

Voyager diverts through a dense nebula to prevent detection from two nearby Vidiian planets. As they exit it, the ship hits subspace-turbulence and suffers from power-failures. B'Elanna Torres prepares to begin a series of photon-bursts to keep the antimatter-reaction in the warp-engines alive; however, Voyager is bombarded with proton bursts from an unknown source. The bursts cause systems to fail across the ship, hull ruptures, and casualties, including the loss of Harry Kim through a hull breach and the newborn Naomi Wildman due to failures in her life-support system. Kes, en route to provide medical attention for the wounded, disappears through a space-time rift. As the crew recovers, Torres discovers there is air on the other side of the rift, and believes that it may be possible to rescue Kes. The bridge crew is forced to evacuate the bridge as it is engulfed in flames, but as she leaves, Captain Kathryn Janeway sees a ghostly image of the bridge-crew, calmly at their stations.

Deadlock (game theory)

In game theory, Deadlock is a game where the action that is mutually most beneficial is also dominant. (An example payoff matrix for Deadlock is pictured to the right.) This provides a contrast to the Prisoner's Dilemma where the mutually most beneficial action is dominated. This makes Deadlock of rather less interest, since there is no conflict between self-interest and mutual benefit. The game provides some interest, however, since one has some motivation to encourage one's opponent to play a dominated strategy.

General definition

Any game that satisfies the following two conditions constitutes a Deadlock game: (1) e>g>a>c and (2) d>h>b>f. These conditions require that d and D be dominant. (d, D) be of mutual benefit, and that one prefer one's opponent play c rather than d.

Like the Prisoner's Dilemma, this game has one unique Nash equilibrium: (d, D).

References

Turncoat

A turncoat is a person who shifts allegiance from one loyalty or ideal to another, betraying or deserting an original cause by switching to the opposing side or party. In political and social history, this is distinct from being a traitor, as the switch mostly takes place under the following circumstances:

Historical context

Even in a modern historical context "turncoat" is often synonymous with the term "renegade", a term of religious origins having its origins in the Latin word "renegare" (to deny). Historical currents of great magnitude have periodically caught masses of people, along with their leaders, in their wake. In such a dire situation new perspectives on past actions are laid bare and the question of personal treason becomes muddled. One example would be the situation that led to the Act of Abjuration or Plakkaat van Verlatinghe, signed on July 26, 1581 in the Netherlands, an instance where changing sides was given a positive meaning.

Renegade (BBS)

Renegade is a freeware bulletin board system (BBS) written for IBM PC-compatible computers running MS-DOS that gained popularity among hobbyist BBSes in the early to mid 1990s. It was originally written by Cott Lang in Pascal, based on the source code of Telegard, which was in turn based on the earlier WWIV.

Transfer of control

On April 23, 1997, after the decline of BBS popularity, Lang ceased development work on Renegade and passed it on to two Renegade BBS utility authors: Patrick Spence and Gary Hall. Spence and Hall maintained Renegade for three years, releasing three updates with their new, ordinal date version scheme.

Jeff Herrings, another former third-party software developer, was handed the source by Spence in January 2000 after offering help when he found there was no Y2K-compliant version of the software. Herrings released a public alpha version of Renegade in March 2000 addressing Y2K-compliance problems. He stepped down as active programmer in October 2001 citing lack of time and desire.

Renegade (video game)

Renegade is a video game released in American and European arcades in 1986 by Taito. It is a westernized conversion (including changes to all of the sprites and backgrounds) of the Japanese arcade game Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (熱血硬派くにおくん, which roughly translates to "Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio"), released earlier the same year by Technos. It is an immediate technological predecessor to Double Dragon, and Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun is the inaugural game in the Kunio-kun series (which includes Super Dodge Ball and River City Ransom).

Renegade first introduced several trademarks of the beat 'em up genre, including 4-directional control, punch-jump-kick play action, and enemies which can sustain multiple hits. It is considered to be one of the most influential titles of the video game industry.

Gameplay

In Renegade, the player controls a vigilante (named Mr. K in the NES and SMS versions), who fights a variety of street gangs on his way to save his girlfriend. Unlike Technos' subsequent game Double Dragon, the playing field is limited to one two-screen-wide area (a subway platform, a harbor, an alley, a parking lot and the hideout of a gang) and does not scroll continuously. Out of the four stages in the game, the first, second and third each begin with the player fighting a group made up of two different types of small fry enemies: one with fewer hit points and a stronger attack (usually armed with a weapon) and one with more hit points, but with a weaker attack and the ability to grab the player from behind, making him vulnerable to other enemies' attacks.