Peck your way through chicken wire mazes and crack some codes while collecting eggs. Kids 6 to 9 will delight in this romp through a barnyard full of brainteasers, word searches, tongue twisters, picture puzzles, and much more. Rudy and Buttercup, two chickens who know their way around the farm, lead you through this engaging and informative book of chicken-themed fun. Cluck and cackle as you solve one fowl riddle after another.

Chickens make wonderful pets, and Melissa Caughey provides all the information kids need to raise healthy chickens and have lots of fun doing it. Covering everything from feeding, housing, and collecting eggs to quirky behaviors and humane treatment, Caughey’s engaging advice helps children understand the best ways to care for their chickens. Spark enthusiasm with creative activities like chicken forts and a veggie piñata for the flock, and feed more than the imagination with egg-centric dishes like Mexican egg pizza.

Bizarre imagination, originality, trickiness, and whimsy characterize puzzles of Sam Loyd, America's greatest puzzler. Present selection from fabulously rare Cyclopedia includes the famous 14–15 puzzles, the Horse of a Different Color, and 115 others in various areas of elementary math. 150 period line drawings.

Video Games and Comedy is the first edited volume to explore the intersections between comedy and video games. This pioneering book collects chapters from a diverse group of scholars, covering a wide range of approaches and examining the relationship between video games, humour, and comedy from many different angles. The first section of the book includes chapters that engage with theories of comedy and humour, adapting them to the specifics of the video game medium. The second section explores humour in the contexts, cultures, and communities that give rise to and spring up around video games, focusing on phenomena such as in-jokes, player self-reflexivity, and player/fan creativity. The third section offers case studies of individual games or game series, exploring the use of irony as well as sexual and racial humour in video games. Chapter “Emergence and Ephemerality of Humour During Live Coverage of Large-Scale eSports Events” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

From a zoologist and psychologist, an astonishing look at the biological and strategic roots of human decisions Humans, like bacteria, woodchucks, chimpanzees, and other animals, compete or cooperate in order to get food, shelter, territory, and other resources to survive. But how do they decide whether to muscle out or team up with the competition? In The Survival Game, David P. Barash synthesizes the newest ideas from psychology, economics, and biology to explore and explain the roots of human strategy. Drawing on game theory-the study of how individuals make decisions-he explores the give-and-take of spouses in determining an evening's plans, the behavior of investors in a market bubble, and the maneuvers of generals on a battlefield alongside the mating and fighting strategies of "less rational" animals. Ultimately, Barash's lively and clear examples shed light on what makes our decisions human, and what we can glean from game theory and the natural world as we negotiate and compete every day.

Virtual Music is about artificial creativity. Focusing on the author's Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer music composing program, the author and a distinguished group of experts discuss many of the issues surrounding the program, including artificial intelligence, music cognition, and aesthetics. The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a historical background to Experiments in Musical Intelligence, including examples of historical antecedents, followed by an overview of the program by Douglas Hofstadter. The second part follows the composition of an Experiments in Musical Intelligence work, from the creation of a database to the completion of a new work in the style of Mozart. It includes, in sophisticated lay terms, relatively detailed explanations of how each step in the process contributes to the final composition. The third part consists of perspectives and analyses by Jonathan Berger, Daniel Dennett, Bernard Greenberg, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Steve Larson, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. The fourth part presents the author's responses to these commentaries, as well as his thoughts on the implications of artificial creativity. The book (and corresponding Web site) includes an appendix providing extended musical examples referred to and discussed in the book, including composers such as Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Debussy, Bartok, and others. It is also accompanied by a CD containing performances of the music in the text.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2012, San Sebastián, Spain, November 2012. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 6 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theory and aesthetics; authoring tools and applications; evaluation and user experience reports; virtual characters and agents; new storytelling modes; workshops.