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Late last year I released the first version of this tool. It was a nice data project that I thought would fill a rainy afternoon and be of benefit to others. Earlier this month Chris Laudermilk left a comment that lead to a significantly improved v1.0.
When I placed my last order with Essex I decided to buy a few extra figures to add some variety to the long slog of painting a 15 mm Hellenistic army. I ended up with commanders for three of my Art de la Guerre (ADLG) collections: Hellenistic, Arab Empire, & Ilkhanid Mongol.
The figure is based on a magnetised 40 mm plywood base which is the same size as my 15 mm ADLG command bases. My plan is to use them as CinCs during competitions. Afterwards they will be retired and placed in my display cabinet.
In April last year I posted a second article about the Art de la Guerre (ADLG) Mega Table (or the table on page 22 as it's otherwise known). In it I described my reverse engineering of the combat factors in an attempt to hammer them into my head.
This afternoon I was musing on how complex the first round of combat is compared to the subsequent rounds. Whilst using my reworked table of combat factors to check a few things I spotted something amiss.
I'm sure we have all noticed the torrent of news about AI. I've remained sceptical, but I've found some of the AI image processing tools to be well worth the trouble. Many of my recent images have been processed with the help of such tools. But that's not the subject of this post.
I recently, stumbled across www.perplexity.ai: billed as an AI assisted search engine. I started using it to research costume details for my Hellenistic project and I was impressed. The results are delivered in sentences with reference links and images (if appropriate). It also says if it doesn't know the answer; a nice touch.
Being curious, I created a few other searches including some related to Art de la Guerre (ADLG). Of course, they all contained a reference to the hub of Tim Porter's burgeoning mega-media-empire: www.madaxeman.com.
Much later, I was looking at Tim's latest battle reports when I spotted a link to his 2021 appearance on the God's Own Scale podcast during which Tim describes the history of www.madaxeman.com. So, whilst painting, I listened to the episode again. The portion where Tim describes the somewhat random (haphazard?) genesis of his site was particularly interesting as was the description of his scatter gun approach to content creation and social media adjuncts.
Now Tim's been very influential in promulgating ADLG both in person and through his website. So, putting two unrelated topics together, I wondered how the AI would go about rating the influence of www.madaxeman.com on ADLG and whether it (?) could identify any important factors underpinning Tim's influence.
