Review: Transformers - War for Cybertron Siege: Episode 6

Will the robots zombies defeat the Autobots?  Will Optimus be able to reach the Allspark?  Will Bumblebee, Arcee and Cog escape from Soundblaster with their stolen energon?  Will they even survive with their lives intact?

It was cliffhanger city at the end of the last episode, so let's jump straight in.

The Autobots do indeed take some damage from the robot zombies, the so-called "Sparkless" and their seemingly unmotivated attack; while Optimus focuses on the Allspark, which is tantalisingly out of reach. No, wait, it's actually within reach, and just considerably smaller than it appears.  Moonracer (AKA Sergeant RedShirt) makes the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.  Optimus reaches the Allspark, and his contact with it causes all the Sparkless to disintegrate to dust.  Too easy, much too easy.

Impactor, Sideswipe and team have to protect the spacebridge from the Decepticon seekers.  Will they make it?

And will Bumblebee's heist succeed, or will Soundblaster's army of mercenaries get them?  Well, Cog is fast enough and accurate enough to take out Soundblaster's troops, while they suffer from Stormtrooper Syndrome and collectively fail to hit the heroes once.  Bumblebee gets another vision from the Alpha Trion protocols and is inconveniently incapacitated while they try to make their getaway.  No problem, Arcee pulls him out of the driving seat of the escape vehicle (because they can't transform into vehicles of their own, obviously) and sets off at speed.

This massively convoluted plan might just work.  The Ark, fully charged up with the energon that Bumblebee stole, flies to the Spacebridge.  I've given up trying to understand what's going on here, except that maybe they're going to rescue the team that was fixing it?  The spacebridge activates just in time, while Elita-1 (who, I'm sorry, but she permanently sounds like she's complaining) 

Optimus delays the inevitable Decepticon attack, while he and Megatron have a philosophical debate.  Optimus is going to destroy Cybertron; Megatron is going to enslave it.  Megatron steals the Allspark from Optimus; Bumblebee immediately steals it back.  The Decepticons mount their attack (they have a recurring problem with their shooting accuracy which is laughable, when they even remember to fire their weapons) and it takes the arrival of Omega Supreme to help the Autobots launch the Allspark into the Spacebridge, and get the Ark off the planet.  Elita-1 (still complaining) says she must stay behind to protect the launch of the Ark, while Omega Supreme seems to be doing a perfectly good job of that himself, towering over the Decepticons.  The Ark also has a wide range of weapons which have been sitting idle all through the series, and which are also fully capable of keeping the Decepticons at bay.

So:  Optimus throws the Allspark into the Spacebridge, and then the Autobots (including Optimus) fly the Ark into the Spacebridge, abandoning Cybertron to the Decepticons, and a fraction of the Autobots (including Elita 1, Chromia, Red Alert and Jetfire).

This was a chaotic and strange episode:  it did draw all the previous storylines together and make them work together, but it had some very strange gaps in it:

- Why didn't the Autobots take the Allspark with them in the Ark?  Why launch it separately?  Flinging it into the spacebridge and then flying after it in the Ark makes as much sense as firing a bullet up (or throwing a ball) into the air, and then trying to run and catch it, instead of just carrying it with you and running.  It made no sense.

- The Decepticon virus incapacitated all Autobot systems but didn't damage the Autobots themselves?  And didn't affect the Ark?

- The Sparkless robot zombies?  Why, oh why?

Overall, I have to say that I did enjoy this series.  The visuals were as good, or even better, than any other visualisation of the Transformers that we've seen - with the exception of the Bumblebee movie.  The characterisations were good, although I'd have given Elita-1 slightly more personality other than cynical pessimistic moaner.  Megatron was very well written, and actually derives sympathy for his cause (compared to Ultra Magnus who was such an optimist that he thought he could go and speak with Megatron and expect to leave Decepticon HQ alive, and instead ended up helping Megatron's plans).

The new series starts on 30 December, which is a few days away from now (hence I'm writing this in readiness for the new episodes).  The final episode here ends with Teletraan 1 detecting an alien space vessel.  Opinions are divided in our household, between either Earth space vessels, or the Decepticon Nemesis.  Hopefully it'll be more than meets the eye.

Review: Transformers War For Cyberton: Siege: Episode 5

At the end of the last episode, we saw Bumblebee receive the Alpha Trion protocols, meaning that he'll be a prominent character in this series (although I truly wish he wasn't).  However, things improve for the storyline overall with Soundwave making a valuable contribution; I wish they'd kept his voice closer to the original 1980s cartoon series, but the new version will suffice.  Soundwave tracks the Alpha Trion protocols and the network they used to move around the planet.  Shockwave has a 'secret experiment' which can use this network and bring it down.  The virus will destroy all processors and mainframes that use the Autobot code; this would deny the Autobots one of their key advantages (although the collateral damage will be significant).

Will the Decepticons go ahead with a plan to destroy an Autobot advantage, even if it causes widespread damage to Cybertron's infrastructure?  Did they wreck Sherman Dam??  You may not enjoy the story, but the visuals remain outstanding.

Say, "Cheese!"

Meanwhile, Jetfire is trying to defect to the Autobots, having realised that Megatron is bent on genocide, and that's too strong for his taste.  Jetfire's ideals conflict with Megatron's, and Megatron has gone too far by murdering Ultra Magnus.  We all know Jetfire ends up as an Autobot, and we can see how this should work out, although it's not going to be a smooth ride.

Wheeljack and Bumblebee partner up to try and get the Alpha Trion protocols out of Bumblebee's brain, in an attempt to write him out of the storyline.  Nobody was in a rush to get them out of Ultra Magnus's head, so I like this idea (although I know it won't work).  The Allspark, according to the map, is in the Sea of Rust (so why didn't Ultra Magnus point this out?  Just saying).  Elita-1 continues to needle Optimus Prime at every opportunity, "We're as low on hope as we are on energon."  Honestly, she's just becoming too much of an irritation to be helpful.  They might be able to traverse the Sea of Rust with Jetfire's help - what a coincidence that he's just decided to join the Autobots in their fight.  Elita 1 says of course that this is tactically unwise, but then says they need to carry on anyway.  She really isn't bringing much to the party, except some unwanted negativity.

Elita-1, Chief Autobot Naysayer

We left Impactor, Ratchet and their uneasy group repairing the Space Bridge.  The repairs are a success, and Mirage generates a large-scale hologram to hide it.  

Wheeljack, meanwhile, needs raw energon to get The Ark up and flying - so Bumblebee again takes the lead.

It's not all wins though, as Megatron and his cronies are able to infiltrate Ultra Magnus's brain and start destroying the Autobot network.  I am becoming increasingly unimpressed with Ultra Magnus's decision to try to negotiate with the Decepticons, way back in Episode 2.  He was storing the Alpha Trion protocols; he's got access to this Autobot network; he knows Megatron can't be trusted... his decision was naive at best, and utterly misguided.  He's done more damage to the Autobot cause than Elita 1, and that's saying something.

On the Autobot side, the plots are getting complicated.  There's the Space Bridge, which has been reactivated because... it's there.  There's the Ark, which is the Autobot's main base, which Optimus wants to use to possibly flee the planet, although I'm not sure.  Whatever ity is, it all has to happen at the same time, because Optimus says so.  I really  miss the decisive, confident Optimus Prime of the 1980s cartoon; this version is a wet lettuce by comparison.

On the Decepticon side, the aim is simple:  defeat the Autobots through propaganda; destroying their assets, and direct physical confrontation whenever politically possible.

Who's going to win?

The Autobots go off with two aims:  get the raw energon from the Mercenary Soundblaster, and retrieve the Allspark from its safe location in the Sea of Rust.  This involves driving through lightning storms, dust storms and a multitude of other natural obstacles (if this was Earth; I don't recall Cybertron ever being dusty); and eventually reaching the site of the Allspark.  Optimus has, "A feeling, as if the Matrix itself sends a warning," and the next thing you know, they're engaging - sigh - in hand-to-hand combat with robot zombies.  We had similar zombies in the early episodes of Transformers Prime, and they are just as out-of-place here as they were there.  What's the point?  Can't we have some imaginative jeopardy between our heroes and the Allspark?  No, it's recycled robot zombies.   Will the heroes survive?

Here come the robot zombies... again...

The plan to obtain raw energon from Soundblaster also seems to be going off the rails: Soundblaster's guards scan Bumblebee, Arcee and Cog for weapons.  Cog transforms into a huge arsenal of weapons... but no, he's clean.  But wait, Soundblaster knew that all along... this isn't looking good for our heroes.

All-in-all:  a convoluted plot starts to take shape.  The Autobots want the Space Bridge, and the Ark (and the energon to power it), and the Allspark, in order to get the Allspark off Cybertron, and presumably flee themselves (in a chase to retrieve it from deep space).  It seems unnecessarily complicated, but it is what it is.  The Decepticons, on the other hand, are out to destroy the Autobots no matter the cost, and to seize the Allspark for themselves, in order to turn all the remaining Autobots into Decepticons.

It's not clear how all this will turn out in the end, but it's clear that the temporary jeopardy of Bumblee and the Energon Gang, and Optimus and the Allspark Gang is entirely temporary, and should be resolved very quickly in the next - and final - episode!

A/B testing without a 50-50 split

Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I [try not to] launch off into a little speech about how I improve website design and experience by running tests, where we split traffic 50-50 between test and control, and mathematically determine which is better.  Over the years, it's been refined and dare I say optimized, but that's the general theme, because that's the easiest way of describing what I do.  Simple.

There is nothing in the rules, however, that says you have to split traffic 50-50.  We typically say 50-50 split because it's a random chance of being split into one of two groups - like tossing a coin, but that's just tradition (he says, tearing up the imaginary rule book).

Why might you want to test on a different split setting?

1.  Maybe your test recipe is so completely 'out-there' and different from control that you're worried that it'll affect your site's KPIs, and you want to test more cautiously.  So, why not do a 90-10?  You only risk 10% of your total traffic, and providing that 10% is large enough to produce a decent sample size, which risk a further 40%?  And if it starts winning, then maybe you increase to an 80-20 split, and move towards 50-50 eventually?

2.  Maybe your test recipe is based on a previous winner, and you want to get more of your traffic into a recipe that should be a winner as quickly as possible (while also checking that it is still a winner).  So you have the opportunity to test on a 10-90 split, with most of your traffic on the test experience and 10% held back as a control group to confirm your previous winner.

3.  Maybe you need test data quickly - you are confident you can use historic data for the control group, but you need to get data on the test page/site/experience, and for that, you'll need to funnel more traffic into the test group.  You can use a combination of historic data and control group data to measure the current state performance, and then get data on how customers interact with the new page (especially if you're measuring clicks on a new widget on the page, and how customers like or dislike it).

Things to watch out for

If you decide to run an A/B test on uneven splits, then beware:

- You need to emphasise conversion rates, and calculate your KPIs as "per visitor" or "per impression".  I'm sure you do this already with your KPIs, but absolute numbers of orders or clicks, or revenue values will not be suitable here.  If you have twice as much traffic in B compared to A (a 66-33 split), then you should expect twice as many success events from an identical success rate; you'll need to divide by visit, visitor or page view (depending on your metric, and your choice).

- You can't do multivariate analysis on uneven splits - as I mentioned in my articles on MVT analysis, you need equal-ish numbers of visits in order to combine the data from the different recipes.

The Numbers of a UK Vaccination Program

Today's news of the regulator's approval of a COVID-19 vaccine is extremely good news, and the light at the end of the tunnel is drawing closer on a daily basis.  Thoughts are now moving from "If..." to "When..." and "How..." - and this is an important question:  how will we all get vaccinated?  I'm not going to answer the political questions, I'm looking at this entirely from a logistical perspective.

*  There are, according to UK Census data from 2019, just over 66 million people in the UK.  If we assume that children won't be vaccinated, that brings the number down to around 55 million (source: York University)

*  Each of these 55 million people will require vaccination, and the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine (and the Oxford-Astra Zeneca vaccine also) require two injections to be given.  That's 110 million doses.

*  The UK government has promised to vaccinate everybody who wants to be vaccinated, and has already contracted to purchase 40 million doses of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine (enough for 20 million people).  It also has contracts out with other potential providers: totalling over 357 million vaccines doses through agreements with several separate vaccine developers at various stages of trials, here's the full breakdown, sorted from largest to smallest quantity: (source, UK gov website)

100 million doses of University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine – pending MHRA approval
60 million doses of Novavax vaccine – phase 3 clinical trials
60 million doses of Valneva vaccine – pre-clinical trials
60 million doses of GSK/Sanofi Pasteur vaccine – phase 1 clinical trials
40 million doses of BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine – approved by MHRA
30 million doses of Janssen vaccine – phase 2 clinical trials
7 million doses of Moderna vaccine – phase 3 clinical trials

So, assuming the Oxford vaccine is approved, the UK government will already have secured sufficient vaccine for the UK population who will need it.  The others could be considered a safety net.

*  How will it be distributed?
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) have set out their independent advice on how the population should be prioritised, in an article they published today.  They recommend starting with the elderly in care homes, and with health and social care workers. , moving on to those who have been shielding due to being Clinically Extremely Vulnerable, and then in phases from older people to younger, down to teenagers last.  Some groups are recommended to be excluded from the vaccination program, including pregnant women (due to lack of data) and children under 16, who are asymptomatic (i.e. they don't become very ill with COVID).  

The logistics:  distribution will have to be decentralised (i.e. regional, and probably by district - possibly on the scale of a Parliamentary constituency) because the vaccine has special storage requirements (-80C).  There have already been discussions of sports halls, football stadia and leisure centres being used - that's the scale of the operation that's being planned.  It will be fascinating to see how it all rolls out, and something I'm looking forward to (around Easter, probably).