Genius Level 2

[Do Kieu]

Ilook to maximize every hotel stay with both the benefits I receive on-property and the hotel points I earn for my booking. Typically, that means booking directly with a large hotel chain on its website to ensure I earn elite status-qualifying nights, enjoy elite-status benefits and earn points. For those reasons, I haven't delved much into the Booking.com loyalty program called Genius.

That said, it does exist. While it might not be as rewarding as some of the other third-party booking sites, such as Hotels.com Rewards, it is an option. Here's everything you need to know about the program.

Booking.com is an online accommodation booking platform with more than 28 million total accommodation listings. The site is available in 43 languages and has almost 200 support offices in 70 countries. It's not a hotel chain, and nor does it have its own properties. Instead, it just lists hotel properties that you can book, similar to Skyscanner or Google Flights for flights.

If you complete any two stays booked through Booking.com within two years, you will earn Genius Level 1 for life. While this is a very low threshold to meet, and lifetime membership sounds awesome, the only benefit of Genius Level 1 is a 10% discount on select properties that are part of the Genius program. Booking.com promises that these properties that have joined the Genius program have a rating of at least 7.5/10, so you can expect a quality property.

Where you see a Genius logo next to a property, you can claim the discount. I logged in to my Genius account to check how many select properties were included that 10% discount. On a sample search for properties in Westminster, London, only 14 of the 36 available included the Genius discount. I also performed the same search without logging into my Genius account and the prices for those 14 Genius properties were around 10% higher when not logged in, so this is a genuine discount where available.

Though I don't use Booking.com much, my account says I'm Genius Level 2. I logged in to my account to perform a search to see just how many properties included these listed benefits. Using the Westminster, London search, of the 14 out of 36 with Genius benefits:

While only a small sample size, I would expect a 10% discount on some of the properties with Genius Level 2 with the very occasional room upgrade, 15% discount or free breakfast, though this will be rare and unexpected. I would not consider these to be regular benefits you can rely on receiving.

There are only two levels of "status" with Genius: Genius Level 1 and Genius Level 2. Even if you use the program much more than five stays within two years, your benefits will be capped to the above at the Genius Level 2 tier.

If you're going to stay regularly at large hotel chains like Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott and Radisson, then I believe it's still best to book directly with those properties and earn hotel elite status, benefits and points. It's best to use Booking.com when looking at remote destinations, if you want to book a boutique hotel or a unique property or you know you have a one-off stay at a chain you'll never (or almost never) utilize again. Also, if you're a "free agent" with no loyalty to any one particular hotel chain or program and will never stay enough to earn elite benefits with an individual hotel loyalty program, Booking.com can be a good way to receive some benefits (like that 10% discount) at lots of different, unaffiliated properties.

Remember, if you're looking to book a luxury property, it could be best to utilize a Virtuoso agent or Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts and compare the benefits you'll receive over any savings toward a future stay with Booking.com.

If you book enough of the big-box chain hotels to carry elite status and earn hotel points, Booking.com may not make sense for you. Remember that for bookings made with online travel agencies like Booking.com, in most cases, you won't earn hotel points or elite credit, and the properties don't have to honor your existing elite status (though some do anyway). I also find upgrades to be less generous and room assignment poor when booking through online travel agencies compared to booking direct.

I do like the very low thresholds to reach the two different Genius levels, though note that unlike with the Hotels.com Rewards program where you can receive your 10% discount on virtually all properties (via its 11th-night-free deal), the discounts as a Genius are only on a limited number of properties. Genius Level 2 additional benefits like room upgrades and free breakfasts are a bit misleading, as not every property actually offers them, so this should be looked at as an occasional perk.

That story about Carmack applying cutting-edge academic research to video gameshas always impressed me. It is my explanation for why Carmack has become such alegendary figure. He deserves to be known as the archetypal genius video gameprogrammer for all sorts of reasons, but this episode with the academic papersand the binary space partitioning is the justification I think of first.

The BSP tree is a solution to one of the thorniest problems in computergraphics. In order to render a three-dimensional scene, a renderer has tofigure out, given a particular viewpoint, what can be seen and what cannot beseen. This is not especially challenging if you have lots of time, but arespectable real-time game engine needs to figure out what can be seen and whatcannot be seen at least 30 times a second.

Why do I think VSD is the toughest 3-D challenge? Although rasterizationissues such as texture mapping are fascinating and important, they are tasksof relatively finite scope, and are being moved into hardware as 3-Daccelerators appear; also, they only scale with increases in screenresolution, which are relatively modest.

In contrast, VSD is an open-ended problem, and there are dozens of approachescurrently in use. Even more significantly, the performance of VSD, done in anunsophisticated fashion, scales directly with scene complexity, which tendsto increase as a square or cube function, so this very rapidly becomes thelimiting factor in rendering realistic worlds.1

In an object-first renderer, one easy way to solve the VSD problem is to use az-buffer. Each time you project an object onto the screen, for each pixel youwant to draw to, you do a check. If the part of the object you want to draw iscloser to the player than what was already drawn to the pixel, then you canoverwrite what is there. Otherwise you have to leave the pixel as is. Thisapproach is simple, but a z-buffer requires a lot of memory, and the renderermay still expend a lot of CPU cycles projecting level geometry that is nevergoing to be seen by the player.

In the early 1990s, there was an additional drawback to the z-buffer approach:On IBM-compatible PCs, which used a video adapter system called VGA,writing to the output frame buffer was an expensive operation. So timespent drawing pixels that would only get overwritten later tanked theperformance of your renderer.

Since writing to the frame buffer was so expensive, the ideal renderer wasone that started by drawing the objects closest to the player, then the objectsjust beyond those objects, and so on, until every pixel on screen had beenwritten to. At that point the renderer would know to stop, saving all the timeit might have spent considering far-away objects that the player cannot see.But ordering the objects in a scene this way, from closest to farthest, istantamount to solving the VSD problem. Once again, the question is: What can beseen by the player?

One of the most significant problems that must be faced in the real-timecomputation of images is the priority, or hidden-line, problem. In oureveryday visual perception of our surroundings, it is a problem that naturesolves with trivial ease; a point of an opaque object obscures all otherpoints that lie along the same line of sight and are more distant. In thecomputer, the task is formidable. The computations required to resolvepriority in the general case grow exponentially with the complexity of theenvironment, and soon they surpass the computing load associated with findingthe perspective images of the objects.2

The following diagram shows the construction and traversal of a BSP treerepresenting a simple 2D scene. In 2D, the partitioning planes are insteadpartitioning lines, but the basic idea is the same in a more complicated 3Dscene.

Step Two: The half-spaces on either side of D are split again. Wall C is theonly wall in its half-space so no split is needed. Wall B forms the newpartitioning line in its half-space. Wall A must be split into two walls sinceit crosses the partitioning line.

This framing ignores the history of the BSP tree. When those US Air Forceresearchers first realized that partitioning a scene might help speed uprendering, they were interested in speeding up real-time rendering, becausethey were, after all, trying to create a flight simulator. The flight simulatorexample comes up again in the 1980 BSP paper. Fuchs, Kedem, and Naylor talkabout how a BSP tree would be useful in a flight simulator that pilots use topractice landing at the same airport over and over again. Since the airportgeometry never changes, the BSP tree can be generated just once. Clearlywhat they have in mind is a real-time simulation. In the introduction to theirpaper, they even motivate their research by talking about how real-timegraphics systems must be able to create an image in at least 1/30th of asecond.

How do we as music teachers (I am talking as a Band Director here) help inspire out students to study and become more proficient at naming notes, using the correct fingerings, understanding rhythms better and comprehending music theory?

They way my kids do it is they simply have the chance to play once or twice a week. I will start the iPad at the start of the classroom and they play once per class then pass it on to the next student. Since kids are sharing an iPad they can see the high scores for their instrument which inspires them to beat other students as well as letting them know where they rank in their class.

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