sdya Reviews

Ancient Evil 2: Guardian of the Underworld (2005 Video)

lousy act, and cheating in vote ...

[1/10 · 7 April 2005]

It says 4 persons of first 10 voters actually voted for 10/10, unbelievable! It's like those Korean voters, always voted Korean movies the top scores in IMDb, no matter how bad the show it was --- same crap they did in last world cup (soccer). Here is an idea, never trust the IMDb voting score, if the show is Korean.

On the top of this cheating in vote, the whole show is lousy, it could reach no more than 3/10 amongst most of the audience. So, to bring back the balance, I did as what the other did, voted 1/10 only.

Another thing, the plot says the kids unleashed the ancient Egyptian God Anubis in New England, this is the same lousy idea like that one in Constaintine --- a bum discovered the Spear of Destiny in Mexico. Oh, my, why all these Relic of the old continent (Mideast and Africa) all had traveled to Amercia? for the convenience of lousy Hollywod screenplay? or is that because of the fact that the America is the really damned soil, deserving all the evil in the world residing on it?

Breaking Vegas (2004 TV Movie)

lots of nonsense

[2 February 2005]

There is no man-made system that can't be gamed, MIT guys figured out the sequential game methods to win in the beginning, once they were hot, their tricks became a system for casino to make game on, then they lost. What makes you think that the house never cheats?

Computer simulation proves nothing, unless you send a robot to the table w/o being detected, cause we are human with mental and physical limits, and more important, human makes mistakes.

Gaming industry employs so many actuaries (consider it as alternative Ph.D. in applied mathematics), same as the insurance industry. These are the people getting paid to crunch the numbers to make sure the whole deal favors the house, including all the rules. The same idea of the Law of large numbers says: the house always has better probabilities (odds), therefore, in very long run, the house will never lost.

Basically, MIT team follows the doctrine that if you have a good hand, you bet Big to beat the house. All the ricks they developed were based on study of probabilities, and sequential game concepts. However, the house still has the advantages to beat this tactic: a. house only shows the chips, while players must bring in cash, this inequality means the cash from players could not be infinite, and the house always seems to have much deeper pocket, as long as it has billions of chips, then the word 'Big' is never big enough; b. almost all tables in the world have limits, even if you see the 1 of billion chance to bet big, the table limit restricts you to maximize the return, c. like one of the scene, the law also favors the house, that after you lose more than 30k, if you still want to put up more cash, you'd have to show IDs ... that's kinda of restriction bans you from turning around the bad distribution, in terms of statistics.

Combination of the facts suggests: the house always appears to be more resourceful than players, thus with much longer endurance; no mater what mathematical theory, the restrictions on resource and the rules determines the final outcomes; all MIT tricks are based on mathematics and statistics, hence, with much restrictions on resource and rules, one can not even afford a bad distribution of the opportunities - I was amused to hear the complaint about 'Bad Luck' in the last a few months - Luck is not kind of the words that come out from mathematicians, least actuary won't whine as such. I'd rather consider their lost was not Bad Luck, neither Bad Distribution, it'd be as simple as the fact that the casino discovered MIT tricks, and gamed on them - eventually, MIT's counting tricks only directed them into traps instead of gold mines...

Repeat again: There is no man-made system that can't be gamed !

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

logical flaws?

[24 August 2004]

besides all other plot holes mentioned in others' comments, here I have two questions concerning the endings:

1. alien's blood is considerably erosive, then how come that metal chain (human made) could stick into the queen's body forever while the queen was bleeding like hell from its wound?

also about the effectiveness of alien's blood, it erodes predator's armor but not the arms, funny ! given the fact that predator has much advanced technologies than human does, and they must have millions of know-how concerning the alien's characteristics, how it could be possible that they design some erosion unprotected armors but hold erosion protected weapons?

2. predators all have their masks equipped with all sorts of scan methods, then how come they carried a dead body home without any scan to see that pre-alien inside the corpse? Ignorance perhaps? given the nature of any predator, how often do you think a supreme predator would have such quality of stupidity?

after all, the plot, the directing ... all ended up very disappointing !