Software development

Woodchuck Translation with Amazon Translate

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This article is an attempt to have fun with Amazon Translate, and is not intended to be taken as any sort of serious review.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) includes a machine translation service called Amazon Translate:

“Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Neural machine translation is a form of language translation automation that uses deep learning models to deliver more accurate and more natural sounding translation than traditional statistical and rule-based translation algorithms. Amazon Translate allows you to localize content – such as websites and applications – for international users, and to easily translate large volumes of text efficiently.” — Amazon Translate homepage

Sounds pretty cool. If you log into the AWS Console and select the Amazon Translate service, it gives you an interface where you can easily play with it:

If we hit the “Swap languages” button, this translates the result back to the original language. In this really simple case, it matches perfectly:

However, this is not always the case. Translating back and forth will often result in things being “lost in translation”, for various reasons ranging from context to linguistic differences.

Since we all know machine translation isn’t perfect, I could not resist being a complete bastard and testing AWS Translate against none other than… How much wood would a woodchuck chuck:

Translating back and forth for each of the supported languages yields some interesting and often hilarious results before the translation converges (translating back and forth starts giving you the same thing every time). Let’s take a look at the results of this little experiment.

English <-> German

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. Wie viel Holz würde ein Holzfutter, wenn ein Holzfutter Holz abwerfen könnte?
  3. How much wood would a wood fodder if a wood fodder could drop wood?
  4. Wie viel Holz würde ein Holzfutter, wenn ein Holzfutter Holz fallen könnte?
  5. How much wood would a wood lining if a wood lining could fall wood?
  6. Wie viel Holz würde eine Holzverkleidung, wenn eine Holzverkleidung Holz fallen könnte?
  7. How much wood would a wood panelling if a wood paneling could fall wood?

It’s easy to see how, as we translate back and forth, we not only lose the sense of the original question (if it ever had any), but the result also makes no grammatical sense. However, what really catches my eye is the two different spellings of “panelling”/”paneling” in the same phrase.

English <-> French

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. Combien de bois un mandrin de bois serait-il un mandrin de bois si un mandrin de bois pouvait mander du bois ?
  3. How much wood would a wood mandrel be a wood mandrel if a wood mandrel could mandrel wood?
  4. Combien de bois un mandrin de bois serait-il un mandrin de bois si un mandrin de bois pouvait mandrin de bois ?
  5. How much wood would a wood chuck be a wood chuck if a wood chuck could wood chuck?

What’s really interesting about this one is that after going on a nice big detour (becoming a “wood mandrel”), the English phrase eventually returns to something relatively close to the original (even if still wrong).

English <-> Portuguese

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. Quanta madeira uma marmota manteria se uma marmota pudesse atirar madeira?
  3. How much wood would a groundhog keep if a groundhog could throw wood?

This one’s pretty good – it got the animal right. The only mistake is on the first translation of “chuck” becoming “keep” – you’ll notice that all other translations also interpret the different “chuck”s differently.

English <-> Spanish

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. ¿Cuánta madera haría un Woodchuck si un Woodchuck pudiera tirar madera?
  3. How much wood would a Woodchuck make if a Woodchuck could throw wood?
  4. ¿Cuánta madera ganaría un Woodchuck si un Woodchuck pudiera tirar madera?
  5. How much wood would a Woodchuck gain if a Woodchuck could throw wood?

The Spanish Mr. Woodchuck is a businessman, apparently.

English <-> Arabic

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. كم من الخشب يمكن أن تشوك الخشب إذا كان الخشب يمكن أن يرمي الخشب؟
  3. How much wood can a wood fork if the wood can throw wood?
  4. كم الخشب يمكن شوكة الخشب إذا الخشب يمكن رمي الخشب؟
  5. How much wood can a wood fork if wood can throw wood?

Okay, this is starting to get pretty weird.

English <-> Chinese

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. 如果木头可以木头卡住木头,木头卡住多少木头?
  3. If wood can be stuck in wood, how many wood is stuck?
  4. 如果木头可以被卡在木头上,有多少木头被卡住?
  5. If wood can be stuck on wood, how many wood is stuck?
  6. 如果木头可以卡在木头上,有多少木头被卡住?
  7. If the wood can be stuck on the wood, how many wood is stuck?

Uhhh…

English <-> Japanese

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. ウッドチャックが木材をチャックできるなら、どのくらいの木材をチャックしますか?
  3. If a Woodchuck can chuck wood, how much wood would you chuck?
  4. もしウッドチャックが木材をチャックできるなら、どのくらいの木材をチャックしますか?
  5. If the wood chuck can chuck wood, how much wood would you chuck?
  6. 木材チャックが木材をチャックできるなら、どれくらいの木材をチャックしますか?
  7. If a wood chuck can chuck wood, how much wood do you chuck?
  8. 木材チャックが木材をチャックできる場合、どれくらいの木材をチャックしますか?
  9. If a wood chuck can chuck wood, how much wood do you chuck?

I don’t know… how much wood would you chuck?

English <-> Russian

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. Сколько дров будет завалить, если дрочак сможет заправлять древесину?
  3. How much wood will it fill if the wok can fill the wood?
  4. Сколько древесины она заполнит, если вок сможет заполнить дерево?
  5. How much wood will it fill if the wok can fill the tree?
  6. Сколько дерева она заполнит, если вок сможет заполнить дерево?
  7. How much tree would she fill if the wok could fill the tree?
Image credit: source

Sounds like one of Google’s interview questions.

English <-> Traditional Chinese

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. 如果一個木頭能扔木頭的話一個木頭會扔多少木頭
  3. How much wood would a wood throw if one could throw wood?
  4. 如果能扔木頭的話木頭會扔多少木頭
  5. How much wood would it throw out if we could throw it?
  6. 如果我們能扔掉的話會丟多少木頭
  7. How much wood would we lose if we could throw it away?
  8. 如果我們能把它扔掉我們會損失多少木頭
  9. How much wood would we lose if we could get rid of it?
  10. 如果能除掉它我們會損失多少木頭
  11. How much wood would we lose if we could get rid of it?

I think we’ve found the Spanish woodchuck businessman’s rival.

English <-> Italian

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. Quanta legna manderebbe una marmotta se una marmotta potesse buttare legna?
  3. How much wood would a groundhog send if a groundhog could throw out wood?
  4. Quanto legna manderebbe una marmotta se una marmotta potesse buttare la legna?
  5. How much wood would a groundhog send if a groundhog could throw out the wood?
  6. Quanto legna manderebbe una marmotta se una marmotta potesse buttare via la legna?
  7. How much wood would a groundhog send if a groundhog could throw away the wood?

This one is interesting as there are a lot of very subtle changes before convergence.

English <-> Turkish

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. Eğer bir dağ sıçanı odunları çöpe atabilseydi, bir dağ sıçanı ne kadar ağaç gönderirdi?
  3. If a groundhog could throw wood away, how many trees would a groundhog send?
  4. Eğer bir dağ sıçanı tahta atabilseydi, bir dağ sıçanı kaç ağaç gönderirdi?
  5. If a groundhog could throw a throne, how many trees would a groundhog send?
  6. Eğer bir dağ sıçanı tahtı atabilseydi, bir dağ sıçanı kaç ağaç gönderirdi?
  7. If a groundhog could throw the throne, how many trees would a groundhog send?

It is really bizarre to see how “wood” transitions into “throne” and “trees” in two different parts of the same question.

English <-> Czech

  1. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  2. Kolik dřeva by dřevorubec sklízl, kdyby dřevorubec mohl sklíčit dřevo?
  3. How much wood would a lumberjack harvest if a lumberjack could deceive the wood?
  4. Kolik dřeva by dřevorubec sklízel, kdyby dřevorubec mohl klamat dřevo?
  5. How much wood would a lumberjack harvest if a lumberjack could deceive wood?
Image credit: source

Conclusion

I had fun playing around with Amazon Translate and seeing how the woodchuck tongue-twister degenerates when translated across different languages. I hope it was just as much fun for you to read this.

Please do not make any judgements about the accuracy of Amazon Translate based on this, for the following reasons:

  1. This is a very specific case and certainly doesn’t speak for the accuracy across entire languages.
  2. Translation isn’t easy. We’ve all heard of situations where things got “lost in translation”. Translation depends very much on context and linguistic differences. Hopefully the varying performance across languages is an illustration of this.
  3. Machine translation isn’t easy either. There’s a reason why it’s considered a field of artificial intelligence.
Software

Spinning up a Windows Virtual Machine in AWS

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In this article, we’ll go through all the steps necessary to set up a basic Windows virtual machine (VM) in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In AWS, the service used to manage VMs is called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Thus, the first thing we need to do is access the EC2 service from the AWS Console homepage:

This brings us to the EC2 dashboard. We can click Instances in the left menu to get to the page where we can manage our VMs (note that we can also launch a VM / EC2 Instance directly from here):

The Instances page lists any VMs that we already manage, and allows us to launch new ones. Click on one of the Launch Instance buttons to create a new VM:

The next step is to select something called the Amazon Machine Image (AMI). This basically means what operating software and software you want to have on the VM. In our case, we’ll just go for the latest Windows image available:

The next thing to choose is the instance type. Virtual machines on AWS come in many shapes and sizes – some are general-purpose, whereas others are optimised for CPU, memory, or other resources. In our case we don’t really care, so we’ll just go for the general-purpose t2.micro, which is also free tier eligible:

Since we’re just getting started and don’t want to get lost in the details of complex configuration, we’ll just Review and Launch. This brings us to the review page where we can see what we are about to create, and we can subsequently launch it:

One thing to note in this page is that the instance launch wizard will create, aside from the EC2 instance (VM) itself, a security group. Let’s take note of this for now – we’ll get back to it in a minute. Hit the Launch button.

Before the VM is spun up, you are prompted to create or specify a key pair:

A key pair is needed in order to gain access to the VM once it is launched. You can use an existing key pair if you have one already; otherwise, select “Create a new key pair” from the drop-down list. Specify a name for the key pair, and download it. This gives you a .pem file which you will need soon, and also allows you to finally launch the instance.

Once you hit the Launch Instances button, the VM starts to spin up. It may take a few minutes before it is available.

Scroll down and use the View Instances button at the bottom right to go back to the EC2 Instances page. There, you can see the new VM that should be in a running state. By selecting the VM, you can see its Public DNS name, which you can use to remote into the VM (though we’ll see an easier way to do this in a minute):

 

Before we can remote into the machine, it needs to have its RDP port open. We can go to the Security Groups page to see the security group for the VM we created – remember that the instance launch wizard created a security group for us:

As you can see, the VM’s security group is already configured to allow RDP from anywhere, so no further action is needed. However, in a real system, this may pose a security risk and should be restricted.

Back in the Instances page, there is a Connect button that gives us everything we need to remote into the Windows VM we have just launched:

From here, we can download a .rdp file which allows us to remote into the machine directly instead of having to specify its DNS name every time. It also shows the DNS name (in case we want to do that anyway), and provides the credentials necessary to access the machine. The username is Administrator; for the password, we need to click the Get Password button and go through an additional step:

The password for the machine can be retrieved by locating the .pem file (downloaded earlier when we created the key pair) and clicking on the Decrypt Password button. Note that you may need to wait a few minutes from instance launch before you can do this.

The password for the machine is now available and can be copied:

Now that we have everything we need, let’s remote into the VM. Locate the .rdp file downloaded earlier, and run it:

You are then prompted for credentials:

By default, Windows will try to use your current ones, so opt to “Use a different account” and specify the credentials of the machine retrieved in the earlier steps.

Bypass the security warning (we’re grown-ups, and know what we’re doing… kind of):

And… we’re in!

If you’re not planning to use the VM, don’t forget to stop or terminate it to avoid incurring unnecessary charges:

The VM will sit there in Terminated state for a while before going away permanently.

Software development

Microsoft Orleans 2.0.4 Released

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Those using (or learning about) Microsoft Orleans, especially the newer 2.0.x releases that target .NET Standard and are cross-platform, might be interested to know that version 2.0.4 has just been released.

This release includes a couple of important bugfixes:

  • A number of Orleans users observed grain calls getting really slow after the silo has been running for around 12 hours. The long issue discussion reveals a lot of collective findings and ultimately provides the means to reproduce the problem. The root cause was traced to a bug in BlockingCollection<T> in .NET Core, which can lead to memory leaks and even lost items (Orleans messages in this case). A workaround has been implemented to sort this out.
  • Another issue prevented Orleans build-time code generation from being built when targeting .NET Core 2.1. This has also been fixed.

If you’re using Orleans 2.0.x, it’s therefore a good idea to upgrade to 2.0.4, especially if you are running Orleans in production.

Software development

Microsoft Orleans Use Case: Reservations System

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Microsoft Orleans is an implementation of the actor model, and many people have leveraged it to build highly scalable distributed systems while completely avoiding the pain of multithreaded programming.

The actor model is still not a very mainstream thing, and people who come across it are often confused about what it is and why it is useful.

In order to address this, .NET contractor Jakub Konecki (Twitter | GitHub) has kindly agreed to share with us how he has been using Microsoft Orleans in his own particular use case. You can also learn more about his project from the Orleans Virtual Meetups in which he presented (Meetup #1: Event Sourced Grains, and  Meetup #12: Deploying Orleans).

DD: What is the problem you’re addressing with Microsoft Orleans?

JK: Currently I’m working for a company in the hospitality domain that manages bookings for a number of luxury resorts in the Caribbean.

I’m responsible for designing and delivering a greenfield system for a multi-tenant system for managing reservations.

The main features of the system are:

  • ability to register resort accommodation,
  • ability to manage pricing: rate plans, special offers,
  • integration with third-party marketplace used by tour operators
  • integration with third-party systems for flight searching and ticket purchasing
  • integration with property management systems used by resorts
  • a bespoke website that resort customers can use to search for and make their reservations.

The non-functional requirements include elastic scaling to allow for easy onboarding of new tenants and allow flexibility for existing tenants – for example the traffic may change drastically when special offers are introduced.

DD: How did Microsoft Orleans help you develop a solution?

Image taken from Orleans Virtual Meetup #12 presentation and used with permission.

The system is designed using DDD principles and benefits from event sourcing and event-driven architecture.

An actor framework is a good fit for this kind of system – mapping between actors and aggregate roots is natural, and implementation of event sourcing is quite straightforward and encapsulated by actors.

The Microsoft Orleans framework was selected as it was the most advanced actor framework implementation at the time that used technologies familier to the team (C#, Azure), was battle-tested, and was implicitly backed by Microsoft. Open-sourcing Orleans (and an active community that emerged shortly after) was another argument for using it.

DD: What benefits did Microsoft Orleans provide, and what challenges did you face?

JK: The most important benefits for using Orleans are scalability and programming model. Scaling an Orleans solution is as easy as moving a slider in the Azure portal. The ability to specify auto-scaling triggers in Azure means that changes in load can be handled with ease. We haven’t run into any problems related to scaling – there is no difference between running a cluster in Azure and a single node on local machine during development.

This brings me nicely to Orleans’ programming model, which makes development of distributed systems straightforward. Orleans handles a lot of complexity allowing developers to concentrate on business logic within essentially single-threaded grains. On the other hand Orleans doesn’t go to the other extreme and pretend the issues inherently related to distributed systems do not exist. That balance allows for rapid development – we’ve seen senior developers being able to pick up Orleans fundamentals and be productive within a day or two.

Games

The King who Forsook his own Virtues

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Bias

As I write this, I can’t help but be conscious about bias. I’ve been a fan of the Ultima series of games since childhood. In 2001, I joined the Ultima Dragons Internet Chapter (UDIC) – an online fanclub dedicated to the series – and I’ve been a part of this community longer than I haven’t. In July 2002, I launched my first website, Dino’s Ultima Page, which was a leading site in the Ultima community for about a decade, and it will turn 16 years old in less than two weeks from now.

Left to right: Dr. Cat, Starr Long, Denis Loubet facepalming, and Richard Garriott at the Ultima Dragons Internet Chapter 25th Anniversary Bash

Last year, that same UDIC fanclub turned 25 years old, and a big party took place in Disneyland, Anaheim. I travelled all the way to California to be part of it, and like the rest of the people there, I was thrilled that several of the people who worked on the game – essentially our childhood heroes – were present to hang out with their fans.

The Kickstarter

There was similar enthusiasm a few years before that party, in March 2013, when Richard Garriott’s latest company, Portalarium, set up a Kickstarter campaign to fund a spiritual successor of Ultima called Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. The fans, starved for years of the creativity and entertainment by Electronic Arts (who currently owns the rights to the Ultima intellectual property), and sick of the failures it produced in an attempt to make money off its existing fanbase, readily poured their coin into a new game that would be made by some of the same people behind Ultima. The Kickstarter alone raised $1.9m, with additional funding secured after that.

Starr Long and Richard Garriott, speaking at the Ultima Dragons Internet Chapter 25th Anniversary Bash

Faced with this exciting prospect, what do you think a long-standing fan such as myself did?

I simply ignored it.

One reason was that I seldom had time to play games any more. But more importantly, it felt like madness to put money into a game even before it had started development, no matter who was involved. Coming from a country where customer service is abysmal, the last thing I’m going to do is give people my money to do whatever they want with it, without even being able to check some reviews first.

The trainwreck

In hindsight, I’m glad I did that. A recent lengthy review by taxalot at RPG Codex (with additional post-mortem insight by the author in the article’s comments) exposes the game as unfinished, buggy, and all round underwhelming in just about every aspect.

Most notable is that Portalarium tried to appeal to both the existing Ultima fanbase by promising a single player experience, while also going the MMORPG direction for those who wanted that.

“And sold they did. The first consequence of this was that if you backed the game for the single player experience… well, you probably gave up hope the moment your bank account was debited. To someone who was looking for a great single player adventure, the monthly emails focused solely on player housing were utterly depressing, an obvious sign that Portalarium had taken your money and were doing whatever the hell they wanted with it. Month after month, the studio unveiled new kinds of houses that you could buy with real money. But why stop at a house? Why not buy a castle? Or a whole town? You could do that too, as a solo player or as a guild to have your own place to regroup. The emphasis on this aspect of the game was truly puzzling. Between that and the monthly dance parties thrown by “DJ Darkstarr” (executive producer Starr Long’s alter ego), one might wonder whether the point was to have exciting adventures or just to create some sort of virtual renaissance fair for everyone to LARP in. In many ways, it felt like Portalarium were increasingly less interested in selling a game than a medieval Second Life service.” — RPG Codex Review: Shroud of the Avatar

Even more maddening is the concept of buying virtual houses with real money, and have to pay regular taxes on them. As if real-life housing weren’t bad enough – all we needed was to have the same problems in our games.

As you can imagine, this enraged several fans who backed the game based on the promise of Richard Garriott going back to his roots. One of these, who pledged $1500 for the game, was permanently banned from Shroud of the Avatar forums for questioning the direction of the project in this regard. He recently published the comments he was banned for, along with all the email correspondence that ensued, exposing what seems to be blatant abuse of power and excessive censorship.

The Future of Portalarium

While this whole mess is still unfolding, Portalarium laid off half their team just a few weeks ago, mainly laying off people in their art and design department. Which is ironic, because seeing that review on RPG Codex, it appears that these are the areas where help is most needed.

Meanwhile, in reaction to same review, Ultima Dragons have been discussing whether the resulting game is the fault of incompetent developers or incompetent management. While this is difficult to ascertain without having inside information, one may take a hint from the single Glassdoor review about the company (to be sure, a single review isn’t a very good sample, but it gives an idea):

The email correspondence about the aforementioned banning incident also rings alarm bells.

“It can also be hard to be confronted with your own misbehavior. In fact it can be so hard that many people, like yourself, cannot even face it and instead choose to focus on everything but your own actions.” — Starr Long, email correspondence

Given that this whole incident was a result of trying to stifle criticism, let’s just say I wouldn’t have been too happy to get this kind of response myself, especially from an Executive Producer.

History Repeats Itself

Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues was fully released in March 2018 (even if in the pitiful state that the aforementioned review shows). That means it’s taken five years of development, and a whole lot of money. If you’ve been following the history of Ultima, you’ll find that it’s strangely reminiscent of Ultima 9, the last Ultima game that was released in 1999. Ultima fans generally consider the game to be a disaster, and often blame EA for the turnout.

Another thing EA is blamed for is the general fate of the Ultima intellectual property. After Ultima 9, there was pretty much no activity whatsoever for years. In more recent years, EA decided to reuse the Ultima intellectual property, resulting in a series of failures that were cancelled either even before being launched, or afterwards.

Ultima fans, for instance, generally agree that Lords of Ultima had nothing to do with Ultima other than the name. Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar similarly has a few names that fans will remember (including “Lady British”), but little else that feels familiar in terms of story or gameplay. This practice is called name-dropping, and guess what other game does this? That’s right. Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues.

One would think that veteran game developers would learn from past blunders (theirs or otherwise), but after all this, the advice to management from that earlier Glassdoor review seems to hit the nail on the head.

Forsaken Virtues Indeed

Ultima 4 received critical acclaim because it brought ethics into an RPG genre that was principally dominated by “kill the bad villain” storylines. The virtues, conceived by Richard Garriott, would be central to all the mainstream Ultima games after that, except for a couple set on different words. Ultima 5, for instance, showed what happens when virtues are taken to the extreme.

“Thou shalt not lie, or thou shalt lose thy tongue.” — Ultima 5

If Shroud of the Avatar got nothing right, it has a great name. Forsaken Virtues very much reflects its overall direction. Honesty, for instance, was thrown out the window along with the Kickstarter promises. Compassion is shot down once you read the aforementioned email correspondence. Sacrifice is done by Portalarium only insofar as other people’s money and their own staff are involved.

As for humility, there are multiple aspects to this. One is that the game tried to be everything (scope creep anyone?), and thus failed to be stand out (or even be decent) in any one department. Another is that the top people behind the game need to get off their pedestal and start listening to their fans.

"You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over." — Richard Branson