PL/C using mark-sense cards, lying in an infirmary with a collapsed lung and nothing to read but textbooks.
Read the whole PL/C textbook while waiting to heal - never had to go to class afterwards except for exams.
Then a parade of languages: COBOL, APL, PDP assembler, VAX assembler, IBM 360 assembler, C, Snobol, Lisp, Pascal, Fortran and a bunch I've forgtotten - all while getting a Zoology degree.
Ended up as a CS prof. That collapsed lung wasn't the catastrophe I thought it was at the time.
Of course, evolution is happening N-dimensionally, so going "downhill" in one aspect may be taking you "uphill" in another - which one wins depends upon selection pressure, luck etc.
And since selection pressures also happen in multiple dimensions (as well as being time and space varying - oh and non-linearities), the landscape of your objective function is constantly changing as well - so from one generation, "down" may become level or uphill, and genetic variation will also tend to scatter individuals through this N-dimensional hyperspace giving them slightly different starting points.
If you think Dawkins in indoctrination, then you better take your kids (and yourself) out of church and start waking up to what "rational discourse" means.
Perhaps it's the obesity virus that's causing the problem?
Anyone knowledgeable about this?
From the CBC: It's a contentious idea, but Dr. Leah Whigham is not the first to suggest that a virus could make us fat. In her latest study, the associate scientist from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has studied the effect of some human adenoviruses on chickens. She found that one such virus, Ad-37, seems to cause obesity in the birds. Her finding builds on other studies that show that two related viruses also cause obesity in animals. Dr. Whigham admits that more research is needed to determine if viruses play a role in obesity, and indeed, developing a vaccine is still a long way off. She plans to study other adenoviruses to see if they, too, have the same fat-making effect in animals.
"Anyone can pick up a piece of clay and perform manipulations on it". So what? You aren't sculpting if you're just pounding clay.
"without restricting the 3D movement" --- I was supporting your orginal argument.
Go re-read it, and then answer the point - even with a "perfect" 3D interface - i.e. the real world - 3D interfaces are difficult to use.
So a magical 3D computer interface may (or more likely will) suck even when you add all the things you think it currently lacks - if you can add them at all.
As for interaction really being more than 3D - it's the world that is 3D not the manipulators and anyways, that is the crux of the argument! The real world is the best place to see how humans work, or more importantly don't work, in a 3D (plus time) world.
Look to the real world. Give me an example of any 3D behaviour that is easy to use or master without actually restricting 3 dimensional movement.
The real world is real-time with haptic feedback, amazing resolution and field of view and none of the problems of 3D computer applications yet humans do very, very little in 3D. We manage 2.5D or constrained 3D.
Nothing, not sculpting (where you never actually do anything without bracing yourself), not flying, not hitting a baseball (one of the hardest sport skills) is straightforward to master or use. So even with the most sophisticated interface - 3D is hard.
The computer does not do something magical to the way the human mind has evolved to work.
Well congrats in taking it that far. I tried similar things and gave up, daunted by geometric expansion of the amount of text needed, the impossibility of inter-connecting the effects of the choices, and the difficulty in making even a small percentage of the paths interesting.
We seem to have a firm grasp on different ends of the statistical stick.
I don't want a game that takes a million people playing it to have a small percentage (ie. those people who end up on the news) with an interesting experience. (On broadway and in bookstores, that's called a failure)
It's not about risk taking. Wandering through a storyscape hoping to stumble upon a good storyline is as bad as playing "find the right verb" in IF with a poor parser. The "compelling" next choice (in terms of a story) may not be the risky one. The nature of the choice and the result has little if anything to do with people being free from their normal behaviours.
It is not the likelyhood of them choosing the apparent tragic, or heroic, cruel or foolhardy path because any particular choice may be exactly wrong or right (in terms of a compelling story) at that point in the narrative.
As for playing RPG for 30 years, I started in high school in 74 - it is that experience that makes me dubious about how interactive storytelling will work. Real-life RPGs have a DM - an active intelligent agent that adapts, modifies and, in the best of times creates a marvelous experience (the bad ones are just Monty Hauls...). The DM ensures that the choices ultimately are "correct" for the experience he/she wants to create.
Are you trying to tell me that Chris' system is going to solve the strong AI problem to provide the computational equivalent of a DM? He has categorically stated he isn't.
If you're trying to tell me the stories that come out of real-life RPGs can be great - I agree absolutely!
I'll give it a try, but the starting page talks about reaching an end in a few minute - please tell me that's not so. Branching systems suffer from combinatorial explosions and a few minutes is practical but sustained games are difficult without choke points.
I've been playing IF since the original adventure on a pdp-11/25 in 1978? and no longer get kicks from simple complexity:-) (i.e. just from the fact that there is branching). Will give it a shot after work today.
Thanks, I hadn't seen the screen mockup before, but now that I have it looks like a simple job to mockup a complete game segment to show folks exactly why this will be compelling and why choosing your response on the right side isn't just like turning to page 42.
If this is your example, you are going to have to solve the strong AI problem to get this to work...:-)
Please point me to something on your website that shows how a game would play out. If there isn't anything, you'd gain a lot of ground both with critics and with supporters if we had a more conrete idea of what your vision is rather than handwaving. I'd like to see stages - this is what the first implementation will be capable of, and what a more complete system will do. And giving an example of grandpa telling a story is still just handwaving.
If you don't have the bandwidth or money to put together an animation or machima, then do a script of more than a few moments of interaction. I want to be able to look at it and go "yeah, I want to try this" or "it's just talking heads" or whatever.
And interaction is an enemy of narrative... just how good will the story be if the kid interrupts grandpa every other sentence...:-) and this is likely to be the situation your system will find itself.
BTW Thanks for participating in the disussion - much appreciated
The basic problem with interactive fiction is the interactive part...:-)
A player is extremely unlikely to make the choices and take the actions that lead to a compelling story.
They won't make the mistakes that lead to King Lear or Hamlet to their tragic ends.
They won't make the choices that take Luke Skywalker to defeating the death star (not if they have real choices that affect the storyline)
A good story takes the reader through a series of psychological stages resulting from the characters making choices a player is unlikely to make. (they just look up the "right" answer on the net...)
I would be more convinced if Crawford had a single example: mockup, text, an animated video - anything - that demonstrated how a working game would play in a (even a 15-minute) gaming session.
I don't even want a working system at this point - show me a walkthrough so we can get an idea of what game play would be. (it would be nice it that doesn't require the strong AI problem to be solved first as well:-)
Name one real-world 3D interface that is good and convienient/easy to use.
Note that driving a car is really a 2D activity - hitting a baseball is
hard to master, and effectively flying a plane in 3D is something we spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars per person for training.
Another crucial factor is not the amount of data, but the data transfer rate. The first-gen Blu-ray devices may not even equal the rates of the latest generation of DVD's, and this may cripple the performance of some games.
These are probably not shutter glasses, too heavy, requires wireless synchronization... bah.
A cheaper way would be to copy the method from the 3D Imax theatres where circular polarizing filters are placed in front of the projectors with matching passive filters on the glasses.
Since this is based on DLP tech, then the expensive switching filter would be placed over the mirror system - thus keeping size and cost down - much cheaper than putting a switching system over the entire screen.
I am an original gamer, raisen on the NES, I am 24 now
AAAARRGGHHH...
I must be pre-original... my console was a PDP/8 playing TREK in 1976.... and no silly comments about how you haven't really played tetris unless you played the original version on an abacus..:-)
My point was orthogonal to the legality of the machines.
I'm sure there are a hundred different ways to cheat. Give me 20 minutes with the regulations and there probably is a way to only pay out a miniscule proportion *within the rules*.
If they are illegal by the regulations, then the manufacturers are just stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Jan, 1976 - UoGuelph
PL/C using mark-sense cards, lying in an infirmary with a collapsed lung and nothing to read but textbooks.
Read the whole PL/C textbook while waiting to heal - never had to go to class afterwards except for exams.
Then a parade of languages: COBOL, APL, PDP assembler, VAX assembler, IBM 360 assembler, C, Snobol, Lisp, Pascal, Fortran and a bunch I've forgtotten - all while getting a Zoology degree.
Ended up as a CS prof. That collapsed lung wasn't the catastrophe I thought it was at the time.
Of course, evolution is happening N-dimensionally, so going "downhill" in one aspect may be taking you "uphill" in another - which one wins depends upon selection pressure, luck etc.
And since selection pressures also happen in multiple dimensions (as well as being time and space varying - oh and non-linearities), the landscape of your objective function is constantly changing as well - so from one generation, "down" may become level or uphill, and genetic variation will also tend to scatter individuals through this N-dimensional hyperspace giving them slightly different starting points.
Enough for now? :-)
If you think Dawkins in indoctrination, then you better take your kids (and yourself) out of church and start waking up to what "rational discourse" means.
Perhaps it's the obesity virus that's causing the problem?
u s.ap/index.htmlt /290/1/R190?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMA T=&author1=whigham&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid =1138723430984_644&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance &resourcetype=1i rus-could-obesity-be-contagious
Anyone knowledgeable about this?
From the CBC:
It's a contentious idea, but Dr. Leah Whigham is not the first to suggest that a virus could make us fat. In her latest study, the associate scientist from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has studied the effect of some human adenoviruses on chickens. She found that one such virus, Ad-37, seems to cause obesity in the birds. Her finding builds on other studies that show that two related viruses also cause obesity in animals. Dr. Whigham admits that more research is needed to determine if viruses play a role in obesity, and indeed, developing a vaccine is still a long way off. She plans to study other adenoviruses to see if they, too, have the same fat-making effect in animals.
Related Links:
http://www.the-aps.org/press/journal/06/4.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/07/28/fat.vir
http://ajpregu.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstrac
http://www.webmd.aol.com/diet/news/20040805/fat-v
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midimaze
Yes, on the Atari ST
Read first, post second.
"Easy to use OR master" so there is no bar.
"Anyone can pick up a piece of clay and perform manipulations on it". So what? You aren't sculpting if you're just pounding clay.
"without restricting the 3D movement" --- I was supporting your orginal argument.
Go re-read it, and then answer the point - even with a "perfect" 3D interface - i.e. the real world - 3D interfaces are difficult to use.
So a magical 3D computer interface may (or more likely will) suck even when you add all the things you think it currently lacks - if you can add them at all.
As for interaction really being more than 3D - it's the world that is 3D not the manipulators and anyways, that is the crux of the argument! The real world is the best place to see how humans work, or more importantly don't work, in a 3D (plus time) world.
It's not the interface.
Look to the real world. Give me an example of any 3D behaviour that is easy to use or master without actually restricting 3 dimensional movement.
The real world is real-time with haptic feedback, amazing resolution and field of view and none of the problems of 3D computer applications yet humans do very, very little in 3D. We manage 2.5D or constrained 3D.
Nothing, not sculpting (where you never actually do anything without bracing yourself), not flying, not hitting a baseball (one of the hardest sport skills) is straightforward to master or use. So even with the most sophisticated interface - 3D is hard.
The computer does not do something magical to the way the human mind has evolved to work.
Well congrats in taking it that far. I tried similar things and gave up, daunted by geometric expansion of the amount of text needed, the impossibility of inter-connecting the effects of the choices, and the difficulty in making even a small percentage of the paths interesting.
We seem to have a firm grasp on different ends of the statistical stick.
I don't want a game that takes a million people playing it to have a small percentage (ie. those people who end up on the news) with an interesting experience. (On broadway and in bookstores, that's called a failure)
It's not about risk taking. Wandering through a storyscape hoping to stumble upon a good storyline is as bad as playing "find the right verb" in IF with a poor parser. The "compelling" next choice (in terms of a story) may not be the risky one. The nature of the choice and the result has little if anything to do with people being free from their normal behaviours.
It is not the likelyhood of them choosing the apparent tragic, or heroic, cruel or foolhardy path because any particular choice may be exactly wrong or right (in terms of a compelling story) at that point in the narrative.
As for playing RPG for 30 years, I started in high school in 74 - it is that experience that makes me dubious about how interactive storytelling will work. Real-life RPGs have a DM - an active intelligent agent that adapts, modifies and, in the best of times creates a marvelous experience (the bad ones are just Monty Hauls...). The DM ensures that the choices ultimately are "correct" for the experience he/she wants to create.
Are you trying to tell me that Chris' system is going to solve the strong AI problem to provide the computational equivalent of a DM? He has categorically stated he isn't.
If you're trying to tell me the stories that come out of real-life RPGs can be great - I agree absolutely!
I'll give it a try, but the starting page talks about reaching an end in a few minute - please tell me that's not so.
Branching systems suffer from combinatorial explosions and a few minutes is practical but sustained games are difficult without choke points.
I've been playing IF since the original adventure on a pdp-11/25 in 1978? and no longer get kicks from simple complexity
I am arguing that it may have to be on rails to be a compelling story/narrative.
Thanks, I hadn't seen the screen mockup before, but now that I have it looks like a simple job to mockup a complete game segment to show folks exactly why this will be compelling and why choosing your response on the right side isn't just like turning to page 42.
If this is your example, you are going to have to solve the strong AI problem to get this to work... :-)
:-) and this is likely to be the situation your system will find itself.
Please point me to something on your website that shows how a game would play out.
If there isn't anything, you'd gain a lot of ground both with critics and with supporters if we had a more conrete idea of what your vision is rather than handwaving. I'd like to see stages - this is what the first implementation will be capable of, and what a more complete system will do. And giving an example of grandpa telling a story is still just handwaving.
If you don't have the bandwidth or money to put together an animation or machima, then do a script of more than a few moments of interaction. I want to be able to look at it and go "yeah, I want to try this" or "it's just talking heads" or whatever.
And interaction is an enemy of narrative... just how good will the story be if the kid interrupts grandpa every other sentence...
BTW Thanks for participating in the disussion - much appreciated
The basic problem with interactive fiction is the interactive part... :-)
A player is extremely unlikely to make the choices and take the actions that lead to a compelling story.
They won't make the mistakes that lead to King Lear or Hamlet to their tragic ends.
They won't make the choices that take Luke Skywalker to defeating the death star (not if they have real choices that affect the storyline)
A good story takes the reader through a series of psychological stages resulting from the characters making choices a player is unlikely to make. (they just look up the "right" answer on the net...)
I would be more convinced if Crawford had a single example: mockup, text, an animated video - anything - that demonstrated how a working game would play in a (even a 15-minute) gaming session.
I don't even want a working system at this point - show me a walkthrough so we can get an idea of what game play would be. (it would be nice it that doesn't require the strong AI problem to be solved first as well:-)
The drive gets data off the disk no faster than the 360.
It doesn't matter how much you have on disk if you can't get it into the machine fast enough.
Totally agree. But why stop at theoretical?
Name one real-world 3D interface that is good and convienient/easy to use.
Note that driving a car is really a 2D activity - hitting a baseball is
hard to master, and effectively flying a plane in 3D is something we spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars per person for training.
Another crucial factor is not the amount of data, but the data transfer rate.
The first-gen Blu-ray devices may not even equal the rates of the latest
generation of DVD's, and this may cripple the performance of some games.
Anyone have any hard numbers?
He was building these before Brooks even thought of the concepts...
His first ones were 20 years ago.... also made some interesting motor-driven
water guns from parts of broken printers....
Remember.... when everyone has a voice, you have to shout to be heard.
These are probably not shutter glasses, too heavy, requires wireless synchronization... bah.
A cheaper way would be to copy the method from the 3D Imax theatres where circular polarizing
filters are placed in front of the projectors with matching passive filters on the glasses.
Since this is based on DLP tech, then the expensive switching filter would be placed over
the mirror system - thus keeping size and cost down - much cheaper than putting a switching
system over the entire screen.
I am an original gamer, raisen on the NES, I am 24 now
AAAARRGGHHH...
I must be pre-original... my console was a PDP/8 playing TREK in 1976....
and no silly comments about how you haven't really played tetris unless you played the original version on an abacus..
Yes, but it is basically a 2D process.... look at all the motion of the object being grasped, it's all in a single plane.
I'd guess that most of the matching is being done in 2D, and grasping might be initiated when sensors in the hand itself contact the object.
Pretty amazing behaviour notwithstanding.
My point was orthogonal to the legality of the machines.
I'm sure there are a hundred different ways to cheat. Give me
20 minutes with the regulations and there probably is a way to only pay out a miniscule proportion *within the rules*.
If they are illegal by the regulations, then the manufacturers are just stupid.