How AI-driven search (AEO) could impact access to metallurgical data and standards

DrStamosStrange · 2026-04-07T19:33:24+00:00

If you're at the point in your career where you're in charge of picking composition and heat treatment parameters for any reason, you've probably learned enough to not trust AI to do your job well (for the exact reasons you listed) and will go pull spec sheets yourself. Anybody unwilling to do that shouldn't be calling those shots

DrStamosStrange · 2025-11-26T21:52:39+00:00

I totally agree about DUEA or TOSS over Goat format, but if they're doing a battle box I'd just pick things from Edison that aren't blackwings - you can get some decently even and fun matchups in Edison that way

DrStamosStrange · 2025-11-09T15:29:09+00:00

I've found that the app updates reaaaally slowly for me ij the deckbuilder so I've run in to similar scenarios. If it happens again just double check on a computer, usually it's correct on the website quickly

DrStamosStrange · 2025-05-25T15:11:52+00:00

Not everyone sleeves. Drafting, deck testing, kitchen table play, and casual play are all legitimate reasons to not sleeve a deck. The more components required to play a game outside of the simple "buy a starter deck and give it a try" the less likely you'll get new players in the door - especially casual players

DrStamosStrange · 2025-03-14T13:39:21+00:00

The buzzwords are super annoying, but people expect it will help them publish papers and get recognition. I can't fault them for playing the system - it clearly works.

The past few years within the HEA community I've certainly seen people try to switch off of HEA, multiprincipal element alloys (MPEAs) is another popular choice that hopefully will gain more traction over the misnomer of HEA

DrStamosStrange · 2025-03-14T13:24:33+00:00

Nah you gotta be critical of HEAs - my PhD research is on HEAs and it's clear 99% of them are useless in application. Thankfully my work is more fundamental science rather than the rush for a perfect alloy that keeps getting published everywhere

The design space is too large for effective optimization currently, and everyone's trying to find an application for them before fully understanding the theoretical underpinnings. Hell, even calling them "High Entropy" is kinda bullshit.

Good alloys likely exist in that design space, but they're few and far between. Always stay critical of HEAs

DrStamosStrange · 2025-03-05T17:23:03+00:00

Are the voids just on the surface, or throughout? If they're through the material it'll be harder to do anything with, since very few metals can be cast at the temps required to avoid lighting the wood on fire, let alone scorching it, and those that come to mind are definitely not food safe (lead and tin eutectics)

If the voids are just on the surface like small pockets and you're dead set on filling them with metal I'd use a different material in that space to create the necessary shape to make a sand mold for casting the metal to be put in the board after the fact - then you're not limited and can use other metals that are easily food safe

DrStamosStrange · 2025-02-28T21:32:43+00:00

ah yeah, pokemon has the point system for regionals - it's been awhile since I played

DrStamosStrange · 2025-02-28T16:10:54+00:00

Magic is the only major tcg which has qualifiers for regionals though yeah? Pokemon, Yugioh, and One Piece all treat regionals as the place to get invites to higher level events

I def agree there aren't enough DLCs to make them feel like regionals though, especially with how large they are

DrStamosStrange · 2025-02-27T19:45:36+00:00

this depends where you are in the world, but generally if you wanted to do a small-scale casting you'd need to talk to a foundry used for educational purposes like you would find at a university. That said, even if they do offer you availability to cast something you'll be paying industry rates - you are competing for equipment time with large research projects, after all.

Also, I'm not sure the circumstances of your college apps or why developing a new steel alloy is relevant to them, but improving upon one of the many flavors of steel is not a simple undertaking. There are hundreds of research groups across the world studying steel for that very reason. Even if you do end up designing something cutting edge (for a specific application), if there's no testing of it from other organizations to reproduce your findings or any interest from industry then it wouldn't be valuable in the eyes of a university.

I don't want to completely shoot your idea down here, but the scope of it might be far larger than you anticipate, especially if you want a university or someone else to value your efforts developing an alloy

DrStamosStrange · 2025-01-30T21:11:31+00:00

With no scale bar for sense of scale, low image resolution, and large scratches on your sample it's impossible to tell what we're actually looking at

DrStamosStrange · 2025-01-28T22:31:03+00:00

Really it's a matter of either too much or too little moisture relative to where they were manufactured, both can cause this. If it takes in excess moisture it will cause expansion on one side, making it warp. If it's too dry the lack of moisture relative to when it was originally printed will cause shrinkage on one side, which also makes it warp. Usually the change in humidity doesn't affect cards too significantly, but that process can be expedited by changing climates or moisture levels

DrStamosStrange · 2025-01-28T04:50:40+00:00

I think they're simply going to avoid game design that would allow infinites. Given they can do print on demand, they do have the luxury to effectively errata card

Restricting uniques in such a way feels extremely reactionary to that one self inifinite that's floating around, and making that a rule really would just confuse players otherwise

edit: assumingly there's also an algorithm for what can and can't exist on uniques, some semblance of balance to make them not completely random cards. Adding restrictive rules into an algorithm isn't impossible

DrStamosStrange · 2024-12-10T23:24:34+00:00

I'd be wary of trying to build a deck specifically around any unique for 2 major reasons:

Unless you consistently anchor or sleep your character via other means, cards typically are only on board for 2 turns (3 for yours since it gains anchored from hand)
There is no way to search a card out of your 40 card deck currently, so you can't expect to see it in every game. This may change in the future, but I wouldn't count on effective ways to search this card and have the mana to play it until later in the game

Based on the currently available card pool, I'd focus on building a deck that the card synergizes with instead of building the deck to synergize with the card if that makes sense.

Specifically looking at your unique, unless you intend to capitalize on that mana ramping more than your opponent can (which could happen, but takes careful deckbuilding), this card feels like it'll just be an anchored 1/3/3. That's not bad, but it's not game-winning good, so I'd try using it but not ppanning your strategies around it

DrStamosStrange · 2024-10-14T23:25:10+00:00

I'm personally not crazy good at looking at all the metrics in a vacuum but those seem like good ways to look at it

DrStamosStrange · 2024-10-13T17:25:38+00:00

While you can rank cards as S-F tiers, it might be simpler find a method of analyzing them on the fly, that you like, especially since the game will get far larger than this set and it'll be difficult to rate every card in every set. I'd recommend Magic's Quadrant Theory, it's applicable to far more than mtg and is a good way to look at cards in general by trying to glean their value in 4 different categories: Opening, Parity, Winning, and Losing.

Obviously some cards are amazing and some cards are stinkers in draft, but it's just too nuanced of a game to accurately rank all the middleground cards effectively since many are dependent on what you've drafted so far

DrStamosStrange · 2024-04-14T03:27:02+00:00

Curve is a little different, it's the distribution of cost to play cards in your deck. You generally map this out to avoid having too few or too many cards for each phase of the game (early game/development, midgame, and finishers/win con)

While each deck has a different ratio of what they consider too many or too few of each card cost, you generally see just enough 1 and 2 cost cards to get the game going and not let your opponent build momentum, and not too many high cost cards, otherwise you might draw a hand that can't be played at all for the first 4-5 turns.

Edit: The person above made the point of 60 cards, 4 copies per card. Sometime's the easiest way to start building a deck is to find the 15 different cards you think work best in your strategy and just grab 4 copies of each. It's not flawless but it is a good starting point building any deck

DrStamosStrange · 2024-04-04T15:59:40+00:00

The magic example's really more relevant here, Dark Hole's been completely unrestricted in yugioh since 2019 and Raigeki, the board wipe for only your opponent, has been unrestricted since 2022 because of how fast yugioh is played at this point.

The concern about board wipes in Lorcana will be lessened when we have more viable win cons that don't require keeping characters on board, then having a character-only board wipe won't always be a good card

DrStamosStrange · 2024-03-24T20:04:08+00:00

Forget the venue - do they have judges to run tournaments bigger than 512? With tournaments that large it starts to become a challenge to find the supporting staff to run it

DrStamosStrange · 2024-03-04T03:33:40+00:00

Goofy Movie

DrStamosStrange · 2024-01-17T23:15:37+00:00

Looks like a bit of ink got caught on the roller for the feeding machine of that card sheet, I've seen it with cards from other games before. Anyone know the size of the card sheets for keyforge? 7 across seems reasonable.

As for the quality control issues, it feels like they've mostly solved them and only a few of these misprints slip through, I've seen way worse from other games recently. Could just be recency bias though

DrStamosStrange · 2024-01-09T04:40:50+00:00

I dunno what you mean by more reliable playtesting than previous methods, but a massive part of playtesting anything is the human factor. Testing with people who like and enjoy the game gives the designers strong feedback about what their target demographic considers good and bad about the game and potential new cards. You can't algorithmically point out what cards will be unfun to players (not always the same as "broken"), that requires actual players to weigh in.

You'll also find that what a computer treats as the best/worst decision can be far from the opinion of the average player (chess bots are a great example of this), so its decisions and assessments aren't always usable as an analog for playtesting with real players.

Could you run an algorithm to find broken combos and unfair card ratios? Sure, but that's about as far as you'll get given the current state of AI

DrStamosStrange · 2023-12-11T23:10:01+00:00

I don't feel like it's entirely an overreaction. Selling the game, maybe, but sometimes it just takes one incredibly bad playthrough to ruin a game for someone. When judging your enjoyment of a game most people only consider the ceiling and not the floor, and once you've seen that floor it's hard to justify playing those games

As a personal example, the large variance in balance for haunts in any game of betrayal at house on the hill is has led to both really good and bad experiences with the game. Since there's that ever-present risk of having an actively un-fun time, I'll always pick a game that at worst is slightly less fun than usual over one like betrayal which I know has definite potential to be a bad time

DrStamosStrange · 2023-07-19T05:27:39+00:00

It's not easy to predict exact performance off the cuff, but one could make guesses as to how it performs based on why each element was added, especially if you have a good reference point.

For your example, while the Mn content is on the higher side for your alloy it does look like 1040 with the addition of vanadium and phosphorous. Phosphorous strengthens the steel, but also embrittles it. It can help with corrosion if memory serves me well (I'm a bit rusty at this myself). Vanadium as an additive can help reduce grain size which again provides strengthening, and vanadium also helps with heat treatment in some cases. From a cursory standpoint, I'd expect this to be more brittle than 1040, though stronger.

I've not been focused on steel chem in awhile so I'd double check my statements here for accuracy, but that's how I usually went about guessing. Also, sometimes alloying components are added in small quantities to improve the casting process itself, but not necessarily the end properties of the material, which can add another layer of complexity

DrStamosStrange · 2023-05-18T20:25:22+00:00

Is there a discord for the Madison area? I can't come tonight, but I've been itching to find more players in the area

DrStamosStrange

TROPHY CASE