One of the things I miss most about the original Machine is watching it work. When I asked The Machine to recommend draft picks or find a trade, I didn't have to sit and stare at a blank screen waiting for an answer. I could actually watch it work through the possibilities, with recommendations appearing as the calculations progressed.
That was a deliberate part of the original user interface design. I wanted managers to see what The Machine was discovering and begin using those results even while it was still working. Now, as we rebuild The Machine, we're bringing that experience back, but with a much more powerful computing architecture behind it.
The Machine Doesn't Have to Finish Thinking Before It Starts Helping
Imagine you're in the middle of your fantasy football draft. You're on the clock, and The Machine is evaluating which players would give your team the greatest improvement in its probability of winning the championship. The calculations can be extensive. Every potential selection affects your team's projected performance, playoff chances and ultimately its probability of winning the championship. But you may have less than a minute to make your selection.
Fortunately, The Machine doesn't have to finish every calculation before it can begin helping you. Its draft recommendations are generally evaluated in the order of their expected value, so the first few results may already give you enough information to make a decision. You might decide to select a player after seeing just three or five recommendations, rather than waiting for the entire analysis to finish.
Trade Finder provides another example. Suppose The Machine is evaluating thousands of possible trades across your league. Rather than waiting for every possibility to be examined, it can begin displaying the best opportunities discovered so far. As additional calculations finish, new opportunities can appear, and earlier recommendations may be displaced by better ones.
You can begin evaluating the results while The Machine continues looking for better possibilities.
That's an important part of what made the original Machine so interesting to use, and something I'm particularly excited to bring back.
From Your Computer to the Cloud
Some of our longtime customers may remember that The Machine already worked this way. So what's different now?
The original Machine was built using Adobe Flash and ActionScript. Its mathematical calculations actually ran on the user's own computer, alongside the user interface. That made it relatively straightforward to display intermediate results as they were calculated. But it also meant that The Machine's computing power was limited by the capabilities of the user's device.
The new Machine is being designed around Microsoft Azure cloud computing. Its mathematical engines will run in distributed cloud application functions, where we can allocate computing resources to demanding calculations and process independent tasks in parallel. This opens the door to more intensive mathematical analysis without depending on whether you're using a powerful desktop computer, an inexpensive laptop or a mobile device.
However, moving the calculations into the cloud introduces a new challenge.
How do we keep the user interface informed about what's happening when the calculations are running somewhere else?
Enter the Message Board
That's where our new Message Board comes in. The Message Board isn't a discussion forum. It's a communication system that allows different parts of our applications to exchange information as work progresses.
When a user requests an optimization, cloud functions can perform the calculations and publish messages containing progress updates, intermediate results and ultimately the completed analysis. Those messages can then be delivered to the user interface. Instead of repeatedly asking the server whether a calculation has finished, the application can receive updates as they become available.
And those updates can be much more useful than a simple progress indicator. The interface can show which stage of processing is underway, how much work has been completed and, most importantly, the actual recommendations discovered so far. The result is an application that feels responsive and alive, even while substantial calculations are taking place behind the scenes.
Building It First in the DFS Optimizer
We're currently implementing this Message Board infrastructure in ASL's DFS Optimizer, replacing an older system that repeatedly polls the server for results. This work is well underway, and it will provide an important foundation for The Machine.
One of the advantages of rebuilding ASL's products around shared technologies is that improvements developed for one product can benefit the others. Our DFS Optimizer and The Machine have different objectives and mathematical capabilities, but they share many underlying technical requirements.
By building and testing the Message Board in the DFS Optimizer first, we're developing infrastructure that The Machine can use when we connect its mathematical engines to the rebuilt interface. We're also laying the foundation for more sophisticated progress reporting and interaction between the user interface and the cloud functions performing the work.
Bringing The Machine Back to Life
In our last update, I announced that we'd completed rebuilding the original Machine's desktop user interface. That was a major milestone, but the screens are only one part of the product. Now we're building the infrastructure that will bring those screens to life.
The Message Board is one piece of that foundation. Other pieces include the APIs connecting the interface to cloud functions, the league data structures, player projections and, of course, the mathematical engines that make The Machine something special.
There's still plenty of work ahead. But each of these improvements brings us closer to restoring The Machine's original capabilities and extending them well beyond what was possible a decade ago.
The original Machine was designed to think through fantasy management decisions using championship probabilities. The new Machine will have considerably more computing power available to do that thinking—and the Message Board will help you see the results as they happen.
I can't wait to watch The Machine work again!
The Machine is coming!
