Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Mods, Books, Checkmate
Quick, Danny, write faster! Danny Yee has written additional reviews of Jessica Litman's Digital Copyright , Naomi Klein's No Logo , and John Sundman's Acts of the Apostles . (You might want to flashback to earlier reviews of these by Michael Sims and Jon Katz, Warren A. Layton, and Hemos.)
From the Persian for "King" Frederic Friedel of Chessbase contributed some links which are especially interesting in light of the recently announced match between Deep Fritz and Vladimir Kramnik. He points to this link and this other link, saying "The latter has some nice quotes from Kramnik."
In addition, Frederic has links with more on Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, and Fritz in Space.
But the name is already perfect for a MAD parody ... RFINN writes: "If you haven't heard by now, Lucasfilm announced the name of Episode II. It's going to be called 'Attack of the Clones.' If you're like me, this stirs up pictures of Jedi running from giant red tomatoes and such. Do your civic duty and help change the name that has become the laughing stock of the sci-fi movie going community (and some of the actors themselves) by signing a petition to be sent to George Lucas."
Sold! to the man with the large contingent of lawyers!
ncmusic writes "For all of you readers that have been following Bid For Power the DragonballZ Q3 mod. Funimation has issued a cease and desist order to the group. Funimation has excluse rights to DBZ in the US (and EU I think) and has sold exclusive video game rights to Infograms. Below is the announcement made on the site about the order. My question to the slashdot community is do you think this is fair? BFP is a FREE mod to an already existing game. Have their been any other precedence set for making mods based on characters from copyrighted work? And what advice do you have for the Bid For Power group?
'As many of you know Funimation owns the copyrights to Dragonball Z in the USA and has sold the exclusive rights to publish video games to Infogrames. On December 1st, 2000, the Bid For Power team received a cease and desist order from Funimation.
However, they seemed receptive to the notion of allowing Bid For Power to be released so long as certain conditions were met. We were put in touch with Infogrames who asked us, among other things, to recreate Bid For Power on Wild Tangent, a java-based engine, which would then be posted on the Dragonball Z website for people to play. This engine is incapable of running something as detailed as Bid For Power and we would have had to start work from scratch. Most of the team rejected the idea and talks went downhill from there. Without contact with Infogrames or Funimation the progress of Bid For Power slowed down even though we were sitting on a finished product and had been for some time.
We began dealing with Funimation directly in April when they asked us to send videos of gameplay to them so that they could have TOEI Japan review it. We sent the videos and heard nothing until we emailed them in July asking that we be allowed to release in August, since no objections had be made from TOEI Japan that we knew of. We were then sent another Cease and Desist order by way of Funimation.'"
So the confirmed-as-rumor rumor has become real? This is the sort of thing that would be best kept in the realm of rumor.
WildTanget ( http://www.wildtangent.com ) Is not a necesarrily a Java engine. It is a graphics module useable in just about any programming language, this includes C++ and Visual Basic. The team wouldn't have to start from scratch, they'd just have to clone the Q3A engine. The WT object is very flexible and could very well make a game like Quake3. It just wouldn't be as fast. Don't diss the WildTangent =P
Hey, d'you know how highly customised these processors are for chess? And how highly optimised the code is to do the solving? Trying to split it over multiple processors with different architectures and serious latencies between them is a losing bet, at least for a real-time solution.
I believe their main concern is getting it done in real time. Like weather forecasting or 3-D graphics, the techniques for solving the problem have been identified many years ago - the only problem is seeing how much processing power (and algorithm optimisation) you can put in to reach a certain level of "good".
Grab.
It wouldn't work for a real chess game, the latency between the "nodes" is too large for a realtime chess game. I wrote a parallel chess implementation (parallelised the AB game tree search) on a Beowulf and that was pushing the latency requirements (I got down to 50msec). :)
What Dnet would be good for is move searches and end game tables, tables that specifiy a board position and the final outcome of that game
Been there, done that:
e ct %20FAQ.htm
ftp://cap.connx.com/pub/Chess%20Analysis%20Proj
Building something that actually plays chess
over such a network is not going to work. Latency
is critical for all current parallel chess algorithms.
--
GCP
There are better things to petition than the name of the next star wars. Sorry, but they screwed you on the last one -- now is the time to give in.
What might be better? Well, for one:
Anti-DMCA Petition:
http://www.dibona.com/dmca/
Programmers speak in Code.
http://www.anti-dmca.org
You really need to start acting or there won't be any net...
...why would anyone think that he'd listen to fans about the name. It's probably been focus-grouped to death by yes-men MBAs from various toy companies. Face it. Lucas is losing his touch. He has little of Akira Kurasawa's work left to plagiarize -- or worse still, chooses not to. Each film has been worse than the previous. I'm expecting Attack of the Clones to be about as good as, say, the average Star Trek Voyager episode.
Heh. Really. So you believe that simply because a corporation bullys you you should believe everything they say? There *is* a legitimate question here as to whether they have the legal right to control in any way the actions non-profit, free mod of an existing computer game. Saying that they have a legitimate claim is like saying that someone who wrote a school essay on Microsoft Windows deserves to be sued by Microsoft for using their "copyrighted" material in the essay. It falls under fair use. They are not profiting from it. They are not "photocopying" original material. They are simply designing a free mod using ideas that have been aired on television. I believe there are also laws that anything aired over public airwaves becomes fair game. So just because Funimation claims they have the right to stop these people doesnt mean that in fact they do.
Everyone complained about Episode 1, and now everyone is complaining about Episode 2. I know that movies often tremendously differ from books, but how similar are the books and movies in the Starwars series? Is there a JarJar in Book 1? Pod Racing? Force-o-meters ?
it's incredible how people are always bitching about StarWars! First you complain about The Phantom Menace title, next about JarJar, next about Attack of the clones. Since the SW prequels resurfaced, the only thing people are doing is critisizing George on every thing he does. You really think The Empire Stikes Back was such a great title?? Come on! If I was George Lucas I would stop right after Attack of the clones and NEVER make the 3rd one. How cruel would that be?
They have four options:
1) Change the game to a Dragonball Z like mod. All they would have to do is change the faces of the characters. Just so they are not immediately recognizable. They would also have to change a few maps (like Kami's house).
2) Ask for donations. Check out the forums over there (links at the top of their page) and if everyone only sent $5 dollars they'd probably have enough for legal defense. Some lawyers might take it pro bono for publicity.
3) Get whichever company makes Quake (don't own it so I don't know) to help them. This is a mod for an existing game, so Funimations licensing may not cover it.
4) "Sneak" a copy or several hundred thousand out to the general public. Once it's out (and I've heard copies are already floating around) what is Funimation going to do? I envision an ICQ/ email/ etc distribution campaign. This is what I would do.
No sig for you.
IMHO, if there is no profit involved then the courts, society, and all of us should be giving people wide latitude when it comes to these kinds of creative endevours.
So if I take something of yours and give it away, but I don't charge for it, that's ok, right? Because there's no profit involved, right?
Something tells me this viewpoint is just a little bit simplistic.
There are an astronomical number of possible board configurations in chess, but they are finite. A distributed system could play every possible chess game, attempting every possible move and every possible countermove, and find out what lines result in white win, black win, or draw. By building that sort of database, a computer would be able to play by rote memory to the best possible outcome.
Once that was done, chess would be as "boring" to computers as tic-tac-toe is to adults, and for the same reasons.
--The basis of all love is respect
The Phantom Menace
The Clone Wars
The Fall of the Jedi
A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
The Return of the Jedi
That would truly be awesome.
I once read somewhere (how's that for specific? :-) that it was calculated that if every electron in the universe were pumping out thousands of chess moves every second, it would still take many times more than all the time that has existed so far to compute all the possible chess moves there are. Maybe if we used a beauwolf cluster of universes...
beep