Good point! I guess it's easy to think of the brain as a straight computation device, but it's really a learning device. Rather than the strong vs. weak AI issue, if we want to compare computing devices to our brains, we really need to look at machine learning instead.
Not really. I don't know why people think the human brain is so pathetic that we'll be able to best it someday. It's just not true; offloading simpler problems to computers has only let us dedicate more of our brains to more interesting problems. Just because a computer is equipped with an algorithm to play a game well, or even to create mathematical proofs doesn't mean it's a 'smarter' computer than one equipped with, say, OpenOffice, which is just as much an algorithm as Chinook. Strong AI is a much much harder problem, as you basically have to create an AI that could come up with the idea for, design, then implement Chinook. If strong AI ever gets to the point that it can perform in any way comparable to a human brain, then we may find that, being able to offload so many processes to AI, we'll be able to dedicate ourselves to far more interesting problems. Our brains will never be obsoleted, because they will evolve as we stop needing to use certain parts of them.
users have started hooking up multiple monitors to their PC
Yeah, I do dual monitors with one video card, wasn't sure how easy it was to do dual monitors with two video cards. Cheers for the link to SLI though, that's really what I was most curious about.
I have a question, maybe a somewhat simple one, but I'll ask it nevertheless. What's the point of multiple PCI Express slots? I'm not aware of any devices other than video cards using PCI Express (though I could very easily be wrong). It's not possible to use two video cards at the same time, correct? Is this just looking towards the future when more devices will need to throughput offered by PCI Express?
Why do normal human faces look distinctive? Let's face it, there are less distinctive shapes of nose/eye/mouth/etc in real life than the Mii's get to choose from. Of course, there are infinite variations in real life, but we're all generally made up of the same components with slight variations and layed out slightly differently. Yet we can see a face we haven't seen in years and recognize it instantly. Check out this article on wikipedia.
I find that sometimes if I try to remember someone's face, I just remember the features that particularly stick out; it seems like what I store about that face is more a caricature than an accurate image. The Mii creation tool is about making caricatures, not photo-realistic faces. You will be surprised.
I agree with you to great extent, however, I do want to make a note that developing for multiple consoles is a time-consuming endeavour that can result in some sacrifices to game quality. In the last generation, developing for GC, PS2 and XBox was not as difficult, as the specs of each machine were close enough that properly designed modular code wouldn't need to be changed, just added on to. Yet even then, you would be limited in each area (CPU, memory, graphics, etc.) by the lowest-performing system in the bunch, meaning you might not take advantage of each system's strong points.
Things have shifted towards rewarding exclusivity. PS3's cell architecture is certainly very powerful, but taking advantage of the cores takes specialized code. Certainly no game that runs on the PS3 or XBox 360 would run well on the Wii without significant changes, regardless of the control scheme. Perhaps it's time that consoles start differentiating even more; I have no doubt that great, innovative games will come out for the Wii that take advantage of its differences. Games will come out for the PS3 that look and feel amazing because they take advantage of its power. Already we see games on the XBox 360 that use XBox Live so successfully that playing it on another system is unsatisfying. Yes, it means gamers have to spend more for systems. But with any luck, we will be rewarded with more interesting games. *crosses fingers*
Cheers, you've given me some more stuff to ponder! For other people's interest, Bartle's classification of players can be read about here, and is a very good read. Indeed, the success of MMORPG's (which have almost no learning even from the start) and meta-games like XBox Live's Achievement system definitely point towards the more general idea of rewards. I think Koster's book is still an interesting read, but I definitely agree that it is nowhere near a comprehensive explanation of what makes games fun.
If serious games aren't fun, people won't play them. It's really that simple. As TFS mentions, games not labelled as serious are learning tools as well; in fact, Raph Koster theorizes that we find games fun because we are learning, and constantly challenged (see his book's website). People in "serious" games (a moniker that I despise) have a lot of work to do before their games will be as widely played as mainstream games. I hope they succeed though; games have such a great potential to teach, and people are more willing to learn than they think.
This article is interesting, despite their wide generalizations of gamers, many of which are not really true. If you take out their focus on mentioning video games and gamers every sentence, the article is really about two things.
People aren't having a whole lot of fun in libraries. They suggest: Hold LAN parties, after hours, in libraries. In effect, make the library somewhere that people associate with fun, instead of... not. I don't think this will ever work: people come to the library to find books. If people enjoy reading, they'll enjoy the library. If they just come to do work, then they probably won't. Nothing wrong with that. In my opinion, if you want to make libraries seem like a more fun place, they should have more sections that don't stress silence so much. Of course, people who are trying to work or read quietly, perfectly understandable, but if I'm just leisurely reading and I see someone reading an interesting book, I might want to have a chat with that person. If you go to any bookstore, especially one with a cafe attached, you'll see tons of people reading, drinking coffee and chatting. Why? Silence isn't an enforced rule.
The real substance of the article, though, is about usability. It's not really true that no gamer reads the manual before playing, but the reason that it's not mandatory is because games (especially console games) have a common interface. If you're playing on the 360, you know the controller layout, it's just a matter of pushing a button and seeing what it does. PC games can be a bit more complicated, and I would argue that most people tend to read the readme or look at the Controls option in the game to find out what the controls are. Libraries without a doubt could use a usability overhaul. A requisite link for talking about usability is Don Norman's publications.
As a sidenote, I really hate the term "Digital Natives". I hope it doesn't catch on.
There's a big difference between carrying a guide book and speaking basic phrases like "Hello! Where is the bathroom?" and being able to cope with a normal conversation, much less a high-pressure situation like dealing with the police (especially if they are being belligerent). If you had been stopped by the police in one of those 40 countries, would you have been able to explain your situation clearly? Like you, I lived in a foreign country for a year; in my case Japan. Unlike you, I had studied Japanese for a few years before arriving there, and after that year specifically studying the language, I still would not have trusted my language abilities to clearly explain myself in a situation where subtleties are very important, such as dealing with law enforcement.
Whether or not you've actually been around the world, my statement that you sound like someone who hasn't still stands. I've known people like you before; you take the moral high ground by being able to spout a few phrases in a language and claim that those who don't take that effort are 'intolerant racists' and culturally insensitive. Yet you've never put in the effort to understand what people around you are saying. You will do anything to make the people around you think that you're smart; hence why you care more about being able to speak than understand. Even a quick check of your blog dealing with fine wines shows this quite clearly. Really, truly understanding a language is very difficult (near impossible for someone who starts after puberty), and to ridicule and attack someone who's just learning shows how self-centered you are.
Shame on whoever modded parent a troll. Grandparent is an asshole; if anyone deserves the troll mod, it's him.
1. The officers were very rude and were completely intolerant of the individual's lack of English skills. I realize I live in a state where people find KQRS' resident racist Tom Bernard "entertaining", but the cops should at least be a little more understanding.
Don't ever visit France, you'd hate it (unless you speak French).
There would be absolutely no travel industry if being fluent in the language of your travel destination was necessary to enjoying it. It's also ludicrous to think that someone can learn a language fluently without first being immersed in it for some time; people go places to learn, you see. Not everyone lives in their little box and mocks those outside of it.
2. They were obviously mocking the individuals that they pulled over because they spoke very little English. Waving (princess style) and "shooing" with their hands while saying "bye bye" and "adios" was ignorant as can be.
Yeah, you kind of covered this behavior in pt. 1. Though I wonder if you consider it equally ignorant to move to a country and not even attempt to learn the language? (Strictly speaking, the cops were not "ignorant" in their behavior, though the non-English speaker was ignorant of English. Though I realize that "ignorant" has certain connotations in some parts of the US apart from its literal meaning.)
That's bullshit. You don't know anything about the situation, or how good the driver's English actually was. Maybe he didn't even want to be in the US, but was there for business reasons outside of his control. You don't even know if he actually has moved to the country. Visitors can rent cars and hold international driver's licenses, you know.
3. When they told the driver that "if you put your tongue in front of the mouthpiece one more time we will take you to jail without question", I wasn't surprised when the drunken driver was more than a little confused when they spun him around and cuffed him.
What would you have done differently, if presented with a drunk driver who had zero command of the common language of your country? How do you expect the cops to behave in a situation like this? Really, I'm curious.
The cops can do their fucking job: determine if the driver was drunk, and take the necessary actions based on that judgment. You don't need to speak English to blow into a breathalyzer, and you don't need to threaten or ridicule someone because you're so incompetent that you can't explain something by showing instead of barking orders.
Grandparent sounds like someone who's never been outside of his hometown of Buttfuck, Texas. Go live a little and learn how to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Parent deserves props for calling him out and not hiding under anonymity.
Is this post a joke? Maybe my sarcasm-radar is on the fritz, but if you're serious, you and that developer are off your respective rockers. Maybe different consoles have different standards for games they licence; I don't know, I've not developed for a console before. But to think that their different standards have something to do with the country they're based in is ludicrous. The forum thread you linked to discusses differences in Resident Evil 4 between various versions; one poster noted: You got it wrong. The japanese version has bouncy tits, the american don't. And its the japanese Playstation 2 version. Look at the textures. I suspect that the difference is the console the game is on, not the country the game is released in (which, according to that post, is backwards from what you describe anyway, assuming that poster is correct).
Just to put things in perspective, the primary console (not including the PC) that the AV and H productions publish their games on is the Dreamcast, what you would consider a Japan-based console. People also like to reference the Dead or Alive series when talking about bouncing tits, a series that lived until recently primarily on Sega's and Sony's consoles.
We need to stop obsessing over and searching for differences between cultures. There are so many more similarities than differences, obsessing over what sets us apart only serves to keep us apart. I, for one, am glad at how much international collaboration happens in the game industry as opposed to other media; we need to keep this train rolling forward, as we still have a long way to go.
I am also Canadian, and while we can be pretty sure that we (probably) won't be taken to court over these issues, we still have the same absurd copyright laws, and there are some institutions that will enforce them, whether it's out of fear or some false sense of justice. At the moment, I am a visiting student at the University of Alberta and my access to the internet service in my residence has been suspended because of 'copyright infringement'.
While these laws still exist in their current form, we can't rest on our laurels whether we're in a country that regularily enforces these laws with legal action or not.
Assembler beats C every time by a large margin for both size and speed. What C/C++ etc beat assembler on is speed of development and, sometimes, ease of maintenance.
How large a margin are we talking here? It's definitely true that good assembly code beats good C code most if not all the time, but not all assembly programmers are good. Design choices make far bigger a difference than optimizations you can make through programming purely in assembly.
...most compilers generate code that can be improved by hand by even fairly average assmbly-language programmers.
I will definitely agree with you here. For most programs it's not worth the time, but for an OS, I should hope that an assembly programmer optimizes compiler generated code on frequently run sections of code. I don't have any experience with programming an OS though; I'm curious if any OS devs can shed some light on how much coding is done in assembler?
When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.
I don't think anyone's stopping him from typing up his article on a Mac Plus, but I'm guessing he didn't. If we look at what he's really comparing, which is System 6.0.8 and Windows XP (not the hardware, which would yield some non-surprising but real results), the differences are not terribly surprising; you would likely find similar results comparing System 6.0.8 and any iteration of MacOS X. The difference between newer OS's and System 6.0.8 is choice. If you're annoyed with boot up times or how slow certain tasks are, there are usually ways to speed it up; disable some services, disable visual effects, etc.
System 6.0.8 is not only a lot more compact since it has far fewer (mostly useless) features and therefore less code to process, but also because it was written in assembly code instead of the higher level language C. The lower the level of the code language, the less processing cycles are required to get something done.
The majority of slashdot readers should be raising their nose at the scent of bullshit from this comment. Just some pithy statement that most people will believe to lend credence to the results they were searching for before they even started testing. This isn't news, it's Fox news.
I'm really surprised that your comment was moderated so highly... It may be interesting, but it is incredibly off-topic. Let's not confuse the issue here: the article is about Game AI. Do animators play a big part in creating realistic games? I would argue no. It's easy to get immersed in a well written book, and yet a crappy wooden romantic comedy doesn't pull me in at all. But aren't actors people, providing the most human-like interaction you could hope to achieve through animation? A poorly written script, where characters get in wacky situations and manage to crack a joke at least once a minute just isn't engaging to me because people don't act that way. Game AI could give two shits how nice its graphical representations look, the point (at least for the AI that is discussed in the article) is to make characters behave in a realistic fashion. If I shoot my gloriously animated team-mate in the crotch in "Excellent New FPS Game 3," I want them to turn on me! If they stand there and take it, then I lose that sense of immersion, and any tension I've built up from the realistic ambiance is lost.
So, in response to the quote (I suspect that consultation with and evaluation by psychology departments may become relevant to game AI in the coming years, given that they're the most comprehensive resource in existence on human behavior), yes, psychology will play a large role as we are able to dedicate more computing resources to AI. This isn't conjecture; I and many other researchers are already consulting with psychologists in designing games.
Hey, guess what, all narratives can be classified if you abstract it enough; there's the 36 Dramatic Situations, and a lot of games follow the Monomyth to some extent. Should all games go away? Maybe. To say that there's a lack of originality in storywriting for games is an unfortunate truth, but it by no means is limited to the Final Fantasy series. In fact, the situation you described applies to a whole host of console RPG's, churned out because a lot of people love it and (more importantly) will pay for it. The Final Fantasy series, however, has at least made strides towards improving (or at least varying) their gameplay mechanics--just look at Final Fantasy XII.
In my opinion, better storywriting is the future of games. Chris Crawford talks about this in a somewhat old Gamasutra interview. *Shameless plug alert* I'm also involved in a project that aims to tailor stories to the player.
I'm curious about a few things... I'm from Canada, where I'm told our Walmarts are generally inferior; is there a difference between a Super Walmart and a normal Walmart?
Also, I used to frequent an Itoyokado for my weekly groceries, so I'll join in you in praising their variety of goods. But it seems to me like it exists for a different purpose than Walmart. Itoyokado offers convenience by being a one-stop-shop, but you pay for it (250 yen for an apple!?), Walmart endeavours to have the best price on pretty much everything they sell. It's like Itoyokado and a 100yen store in one! That's my opinion anyway. Plus, Itoyokado expands up while Walmart just widens;)
It sounds like the writer of this article does not really grasp the reason why Brain Age, and for that matter, all games, are fun. Brain Age is fun because we learn as we play. Halo is fun because we learn as we play. Brain Age does this transparently; openly offering challenges to the player that test certain skills. Games like Halo do the same thing: we are constantly seeing new challenges that test our skills to navigate, aim, conserve ammo, etc. Games are not fun when they are too hard, as there is too much noise and we can't get a worthwhile signal out of it without excessive effort filtering out the noise. I don't particularly like FPS's, nor do I enjoy jazz music, and you could say it's because I don't understand it enough to learn from it. Games are not fun when they are too easy, as we feel that we've grokked the game, and there's nothing else to learn from it. After you hit the glitch level in Pac-man, what's the point in continuing?
The author clearly shows his lack of understanding in this quote: It is a game of chores, really, not of challenges. Games like speed arithmetic and number tracing actually become maddeningly dull after only a short time, but many players persist because they want to have the sensation of keeping their minds sharp. [...] [It] makes people feel as though they are improving their long term mental health. It satisfies a mundane need for personal upkeep.
I played Brain Age daily until I unlocked the final challenge-dealie (I think it's the one where you say the numbers instead of write them?). Then I stopped. Along the way, it was nice to see improvement in each challenge over time, but after a while I would plateau, and that game would stop being fun to me. I kept playing so that I could unlock the other games, as they would offer me new situations to learn. If all the games had been available to me at the start, I would have stopped playing far earlier, and that unlock system is one of the great ideas that other games of Brain Age's ilk have adopted. I would love to know how many people keep playing regularily after all challenges are unlocked and they are not seeing significant improvements.
Of course, all of this is not something I thought consciously as I was playing. I realized it after reading A Theory of Fun for Game Design. A great read, and really has made me think twice about why I enjoy some games and not others.
I think the most interesting part of transhumanism is life extension. Trying out new modifications is risky no doubt, but if I can upload my mind before that, I might be a lot more cavalier in what I decide to do with my squishier vessel. It would bring me one step close to fulfilling my life-long dream of being able to save my game in real life.
Article should read At home, using a cheap Chinese device, the chip is activated and sends an electrical pulse through the coating, turning it clear and making the disc playable. China thanks you for creating another black market for it to thrive in.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point! I guess it's easy to think of the brain as a straight computation device, but it's really a learning device. Rather than the strong vs. weak AI issue, if we want to compare computing devices to our brains, we really need to look at machine learning instead.
Not really. I don't know why people think the human brain is so pathetic that we'll be able to best it someday. It's just not true; offloading simpler problems to computers has only let us dedicate more of our brains to more interesting problems. Just because a computer is equipped with an algorithm to play a game well, or even to create mathematical proofs doesn't mean it's a 'smarter' computer than one equipped with, say, OpenOffice, which is just as much an algorithm as Chinook. Strong AI is a much much harder problem, as you basically have to create an AI that could come up with the idea for, design, then implement Chinook. If strong AI ever gets to the point that it can perform in any way comparable to a human brain, then we may find that, being able to offload so many processes to AI, we'll be able to dedicate ourselves to far more interesting problems. Our brains will never be obsoleted, because they will evolve as we stop needing to use certain parts of them.
Only on slashdot is the solution to tic-tac-toe considered informative... once kids in the second grade figure it out, they tend to get bored of it.
Yeah, I do dual monitors with one video card, wasn't sure how easy it was to do dual monitors with two video cards. Cheers for the link to SLI though, that's really what I was most curious about.
I have a question, maybe a somewhat simple one, but I'll ask it nevertheless. What's the point of multiple PCI Express slots? I'm not aware of any devices other than video cards using PCI Express (though I could very easily be wrong). It's not possible to use two video cards at the same time, correct? Is this just looking towards the future when more devices will need to throughput offered by PCI Express?
I think you misposted -- you should be at http://blog.us.playstation.com/
Red cross on heat-related illnesses
Still, I agree with you.
Why do normal human faces look distinctive? Let's face it, there are less distinctive shapes of nose/eye/mouth/etc in real life than the Mii's get to choose from. Of course, there are infinite variations in real life, but we're all generally made up of the same components with slight variations and layed out slightly differently. Yet we can see a face we haven't seen in years and recognize it instantly. Check out this article on wikipedia.
I find that sometimes if I try to remember someone's face, I just remember the features that particularly stick out; it seems like what I store about that face is more a caricature than an accurate image. The Mii creation tool is about making caricatures, not photo-realistic faces. You will be surprised.
I agree with you to great extent, however, I do want to make a note that developing for multiple consoles is a time-consuming endeavour that can result in some sacrifices to game quality. In the last generation, developing for GC, PS2 and XBox was not as difficult, as the specs of each machine were close enough that properly designed modular code wouldn't need to be changed, just added on to. Yet even then, you would be limited in each area (CPU, memory, graphics, etc.) by the lowest-performing system in the bunch, meaning you might not take advantage of each system's strong points.
Things have shifted towards rewarding exclusivity. PS3's cell architecture is certainly very powerful, but taking advantage of the cores takes specialized code. Certainly no game that runs on the PS3 or XBox 360 would run well on the Wii without significant changes, regardless of the control scheme. Perhaps it's time that consoles start differentiating even more; I have no doubt that great, innovative games will come out for the Wii that take advantage of its differences. Games will come out for the PS3 that look and feel amazing because they take advantage of its power. Already we see games on the XBox 360 that use XBox Live so successfully that playing it on another system is unsatisfying. Yes, it means gamers have to spend more for systems. But with any luck, we will be rewarded with more interesting games. *crosses fingers*
Cheers, you've given me some more stuff to ponder! For other people's interest, Bartle's classification of players can be read about here, and is a very good read. Indeed, the success of MMORPG's (which have almost no learning even from the start) and meta-games like XBox Live's Achievement system definitely point towards the more general idea of rewards. I think Koster's book is still an interesting read, but I definitely agree that it is nowhere near a comprehensive explanation of what makes games fun.
If serious games aren't fun, people won't play them. It's really that simple. As TFS mentions, games not labelled as serious are learning tools as well; in fact, Raph Koster theorizes that we find games fun because we are learning, and constantly challenged (see his book's website). People in "serious" games (a moniker that I despise) have a lot of work to do before their games will be as widely played as mainstream games. I hope they succeed though; games have such a great potential to teach, and people are more willing to learn than they think.
This article is interesting, despite their wide generalizations of gamers, many of which are not really true. If you take out their focus on mentioning video games and gamers every sentence, the article is really about two things.
People aren't having a whole lot of fun in libraries. They suggest: Hold LAN parties, after hours, in libraries. In effect, make the library somewhere that people associate with fun, instead of... not. I don't think this will ever work: people come to the library to find books. If people enjoy reading, they'll enjoy the library. If they just come to do work, then they probably won't. Nothing wrong with that. In my opinion, if you want to make libraries seem like a more fun place, they should have more sections that don't stress silence so much. Of course, people who are trying to work or read quietly, perfectly understandable, but if I'm just leisurely reading and I see someone reading an interesting book, I might want to have a chat with that person. If you go to any bookstore, especially one with a cafe attached, you'll see tons of people reading, drinking coffee and chatting. Why? Silence isn't an enforced rule.
The real substance of the article, though, is about usability. It's not really true that no gamer reads the manual before playing, but the reason that it's not mandatory is because games (especially console games) have a common interface. If you're playing on the 360, you know the controller layout, it's just a matter of pushing a button and seeing what it does. PC games can be a bit more complicated, and I would argue that most people tend to read the readme or look at the Controls option in the game to find out what the controls are. Libraries without a doubt could use a usability overhaul. A requisite link for talking about usability is Don Norman's publications.
As a sidenote, I really hate the term "Digital Natives". I hope it doesn't catch on.
This is obvious flamebait, but I'll bite anyway.
There's a big difference between carrying a guide book and speaking basic phrases like "Hello! Where is the bathroom?" and being able to cope with a normal conversation, much less a high-pressure situation like dealing with the police (especially if they are being belligerent). If you had been stopped by the police in one of those 40 countries, would you have been able to explain your situation clearly? Like you, I lived in a foreign country for a year; in my case Japan. Unlike you, I had studied Japanese for a few years before arriving there, and after that year specifically studying the language, I still would not have trusted my language abilities to clearly explain myself in a situation where subtleties are very important, such as dealing with law enforcement.
Whether or not you've actually been around the world, my statement that you sound like someone who hasn't still stands. I've known people like you before; you take the moral high ground by being able to spout a few phrases in a language and claim that those who don't take that effort are 'intolerant racists' and culturally insensitive. Yet you've never put in the effort to understand what people around you are saying. You will do anything to make the people around you think that you're smart; hence why you care more about being able to speak than understand. Even a quick check of your blog dealing with fine wines shows this quite clearly. Really, truly understanding a language is very difficult (near impossible for someone who starts after puberty), and to ridicule and attack someone who's just learning shows how self-centered you are.
Grandparent sounds like someone who's never been outside of his hometown of Buttfuck, Texas. Go live a little and learn how to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Parent deserves props for calling him out and not hiding under anonymity.
Is this post a joke? Maybe my sarcasm-radar is on the fritz, but if you're serious, you and that developer are off your respective rockers. Maybe different consoles have different standards for games they licence; I don't know, I've not developed for a console before. But to think that their different standards have something to do with the country they're based in is ludicrous. The forum thread you linked to discusses differences in Resident Evil 4 between various versions; one poster noted: You got it wrong. The japanese version has bouncy tits, the american don't. And its the japanese Playstation 2 version. Look at the textures. I suspect that the difference is the console the game is on, not the country the game is released in (which, according to that post, is backwards from what you describe anyway, assuming that poster is correct).
Just to put things in perspective, the primary console (not including the PC) that the AV and H productions publish their games on is the Dreamcast, what you would consider a Japan-based console. People also like to reference the Dead or Alive series when talking about bouncing tits, a series that lived until recently primarily on Sega's and Sony's consoles.
We need to stop obsessing over and searching for differences between cultures. There are so many more similarities than differences, obsessing over what sets us apart only serves to keep us apart. I, for one, am glad at how much international collaboration happens in the game industry as opposed to other media; we need to keep this train rolling forward, as we still have a long way to go.
I am also Canadian, and while we can be pretty sure that we (probably) won't be taken to court over these issues, we still have the same absurd copyright laws, and there are some institutions that will enforce them, whether it's out of fear or some false sense of justice. At the moment, I am a visiting student at the University of Alberta and my access to the internet service in my residence has been suspended because of 'copyright infringement'.
While these laws still exist in their current form, we can't rest on our laurels whether we're in a country that regularily enforces these laws with legal action or not.
Assembler beats C every time by a large margin for both size and speed. What C/C++ etc beat assembler on is speed of development and, sometimes, ease of maintenance.
...most compilers generate code that can be improved by hand by even fairly average assmbly-language programmers.
How large a margin are we talking here? It's definitely true that good assembly code beats good C code most if not all the time, but not all assembly programmers are good. Design choices make far bigger a difference than optimizations you can make through programming purely in assembly.
I will definitely agree with you here. For most programs it's not worth the time, but for an OS, I should hope that an assembly programmer optimizes compiler generated code on frequently run sections of code. I don't have any experience with programming an OS though; I'm curious if any OS devs can shed some light on how much coding is done in assembler?
When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.
I don't think anyone's stopping him from typing up his article on a Mac Plus, but I'm guessing he didn't. If we look at what he's really comparing, which is System 6.0.8 and Windows XP (not the hardware, which would yield some non-surprising but real results), the differences are not terribly surprising; you would likely find similar results comparing System 6.0.8 and any iteration of MacOS X. The difference between newer OS's and System 6.0.8 is choice. If you're annoyed with boot up times or how slow certain tasks are, there are usually ways to speed it up; disable some services, disable visual effects, etc.
System 6.0.8 is not only a lot more compact since it has far fewer (mostly useless) features and therefore less code to process, but also because it was written in assembly code instead of the higher level language C. The lower the level of the code language, the less processing cycles are required to get something done.
The majority of slashdot readers should be raising their nose at the scent of bullshit from this comment. Just some pithy statement that most people will believe to lend credence to the results they were searching for before they even started testing. This isn't news, it's Fox news.
I'm really surprised that your comment was moderated so highly... It may be interesting, but it is incredibly off-topic. Let's not confuse the issue here: the article is about Game AI. Do animators play a big part in creating realistic games? I would argue no. It's easy to get immersed in a well written book, and yet a crappy wooden romantic comedy doesn't pull me in at all. But aren't actors people, providing the most human-like interaction you could hope to achieve through animation? A poorly written script, where characters get in wacky situations and manage to crack a joke at least once a minute just isn't engaging to me because people don't act that way. Game AI could give two shits how nice its graphical representations look, the point (at least for the AI that is discussed in the article) is to make characters behave in a realistic fashion. If I shoot my gloriously animated team-mate in the crotch in "Excellent New FPS Game 3," I want them to turn on me! If they stand there and take it, then I lose that sense of immersion, and any tension I've built up from the realistic ambiance is lost.
So, in response to the quote (I suspect that consultation with and evaluation by psychology departments may become relevant to game AI in the coming years, given that they're the most comprehensive resource in existence on human behavior), yes, psychology will play a large role as we are able to dedicate more computing resources to AI. This isn't conjecture; I and many other researchers are already consulting with psychologists in designing games.
Hey, guess what, all narratives can be classified if you abstract it enough; there's the 36 Dramatic Situations, and a lot of games follow the Monomyth to some extent. Should all games go away? Maybe. To say that there's a lack of originality in storywriting for games is an unfortunate truth, but it by no means is limited to the Final Fantasy series. In fact, the situation you described applies to a whole host of console RPG's, churned out because a lot of people love it and (more importantly) will pay for it. The Final Fantasy series, however, has at least made strides towards improving (or at least varying) their gameplay mechanics--just look at Final Fantasy XII.
In my opinion, better storywriting is the future of games. Chris Crawford talks about this in a somewhat old Gamasutra interview. *Shameless plug alert* I'm also involved in a project that aims to tailor stories to the player.
I'm curious about a few things... I'm from Canada, where I'm told our Walmarts are generally inferior; is there a difference between a Super Walmart and a normal Walmart?
;)
Also, I used to frequent an Itoyokado for my weekly groceries, so I'll join in you in praising their variety of goods. But it seems to me like it exists for a different purpose than Walmart. Itoyokado offers convenience by being a one-stop-shop, but you pay for it (250 yen for an apple!?), Walmart endeavours to have the best price on pretty much everything they sell. It's like Itoyokado and a 100yen store in one! That's my opinion anyway. Plus, Itoyokado expands up while Walmart just widens
It sounds like the writer of this article does not really grasp the reason why Brain Age, and for that matter, all games, are fun. Brain Age is fun because we learn as we play. Halo is fun because we learn as we play. Brain Age does this transparently; openly offering challenges to the player that test certain skills. Games like Halo do the same thing: we are constantly seeing new challenges that test our skills to navigate, aim, conserve ammo, etc. Games are not fun when they are too hard, as there is too much noise and we can't get a worthwhile signal out of it without excessive effort filtering out the noise. I don't particularly like FPS's, nor do I enjoy jazz music, and you could say it's because I don't understand it enough to learn from it. Games are not fun when they are too easy, as we feel that we've grokked the game, and there's nothing else to learn from it. After you hit the glitch level in Pac-man, what's the point in continuing?
The author clearly shows his lack of understanding in this quote: It is a game of chores, really, not of challenges. Games like speed arithmetic and number tracing actually become maddeningly dull after only a short time, but many players persist because they want to have the sensation of keeping their minds sharp. [...] [It] makes people feel as though they are improving their long term mental health. It satisfies a mundane need for personal upkeep.
I played Brain Age daily until I unlocked the final challenge-dealie (I think it's the one where you say the numbers instead of write them?). Then I stopped. Along the way, it was nice to see improvement in each challenge over time, but after a while I would plateau, and that game would stop being fun to me. I kept playing so that I could unlock the other games, as they would offer me new situations to learn. If all the games had been available to me at the start, I would have stopped playing far earlier, and that unlock system is one of the great ideas that other games of Brain Age's ilk have adopted. I would love to know how many people keep playing regularily after all challenges are unlocked and they are not seeing significant improvements.
Of course, all of this is not something I thought consciously as I was playing. I realized it after reading A Theory of Fun for Game Design. A great read, and really has made me think twice about why I enjoy some games and not others.
I regret nothing! But, if I got the chance to play out certain situations over and over again, I totally would; see Groundhog Day (do not see Click)
I think the most interesting part of transhumanism is life extension. Trying out new modifications is risky no doubt, but if I can upload my mind before that, I might be a lot more cavalier in what I decide to do with my squishier vessel. It would bring me one step close to fulfilling my life-long dream of being able to save my game in real life.
Article should read At home, using a cheap Chinese device, the chip is activated and sends an electrical pulse through the coating, turning it clear and making the disc playable.
China thanks you for creating another black market for it to thrive in.