Yes, if you have 1,000,000 nodes and there are at least 499,994,500,020 edges out of a possible 499,999,500,000 (ie. a bit more than 99.999% of them), then yes you can conclude the diameter of the graph is no more than 6. But no, simply counting the number of edges is not particularly useful. You need to make further assumptions about the graph to get a useful bound.
Been getting into LoL recently, and while I agree it's very polished (I really like the character designs and the free-to-play model is a good one), the one area that Valve could improve on is making it more newbie-friendly. While LoL may be more newbie-friendly than DoTA, that's like saying Venus is less hot than the sun. It's still not a very hospitable place. It's basically a full-time job to get up to speed with all the acronyms, jargon, and conventions. You join your first match of LoL and your teammate says something like: "I'm going jungle Amumu with an AP Sunfire build so I can tank the carry in the lane with my ult when they ping." and then they get mad at you when you have no idea what they're saying. Don't get me wrong, I do like the game, it's just really hard for beginners like me.
Compare the steep learning curve of TFC where you have to master grenade jumping with every class just to compete with how easy it is to pick up TF2. So hopefully Valve will do something similar with DoTA, and make it accessible.
That's the Hales-Jewett theorem. The density Hales-Jewett(3) is a little different. Suppose you're putting X's on a 3x3x...x3 (n-dimensional) grid. Such a grid has 3^n points. What the theorem says is that if you've put X's on at least, say, 1% of the 3^n points, then you must have made a line somewhere if n is large enough. You can replace the 1% with whatever fraction you please, but that will change how large n has to be. No, the theorem doesn't state exactly how large n has to be, but already it's a challenging problem.
You get exp from engaging in RvR, so you can't stay at a particular level indefinitely. Not sure about T2 or T3, but at least for T1 there isn't much disparity from the best gear available and the gear an "average" player will get. It's pretty easy to get decent gear without really excessive grinding or spending lots of money. Also there don't seem to be anything like crusader enchants, which significantly increase a lower level character's power.
This couldn't be more wrong. It's a hybrid of established genres (FPS and action RPG), sure, but there's nothing else out there that's the same mixture. The problem is the game was very poorly polished, with tons of bugs and many ambitious features falling short of expectations. For example, there are random 3d levels, but they're very bland. There are a few unique quests, like a pseudo-RTS or a capture-the-flag style game, but they're poorly executed.
GP stated the movie's going to be told from the perspective of the Alliance because Blizzard has said it's going to be told from the perspective of the Alliance.
Sure, the games are not "Alliance-centric". Which is exactly why the upcoming "Alliance-centric" movie will be lacking.
There are a number of comics that I think are fun like Stray Bullets, Milk & Cheese, Midnight Nation. But for my money, nothing comes close to what Chris Ware's been doing with Acme Novelty Library. Look at the way he establishes a character is adopted using
an almost entirely wordless diagram. Admittedly, the plot isn't the type to keep you on the edge of your seat, but the artistry is second to none, IMO.
For the game that I was most looking forward to but died was The Lost. I mean, the creepy atmosphere and "emergent gameplay" of Thief/System Shock 2, but in Hell? How could it go wrong? I actually put off buying a PS2 for a couple years because I waiting for it to come out. Oh well, hopefully Bioshock actually hits shelves (and doesn't suck).
I'd agree that season 5 is fairly lackluster, but the last episode is so good that it redeems the entire season. Of course, it was originally filmed as the last episode of season 4, so in some sense you might consider it part of season 4.
It's definitely mentioned near the beginning of the movie that the war is due to a prince being missing, but it's in the background dialogue. So if the sound quality was bad at your showing, it'd be easy to miss.
Aureal used transfer functions to simulate the effect of your pinnae to place the origin of the sound in 3d space. This was a failure mainly because it didn't work very well. (Everyone's pinnae are different, so the transfer functions would have to be customized for each person. Plus you need a good headphones or precisely placed speakers to notice the subtleties. Plus there's more to how your brain places sound than just transfer functions - context is also important.) But even if it did work well, there is much more to sound than being able to identify where it's coming from.
Switching gears, Carmack touched on the subject of audio in games, saying that if you wanted to spend all the computing power currently available, you could do just about anything with audio in games. The question at the moment is whether it's worth devoting that much effort and horsepower to audio. "It really doesn't pay off in the current generation to put that much effort to it," said Carmack, "but give it a couple more turns of processor generations, and audio will be just be 'done.'"
IANAGD, but this seems short-sighted to me. The state of audio in games nowadays is incredibly primitive. There are a limited number of sound effects and every time an event occurs you always hear the exact same thing. This is like saying that since the sprites in Mortal Kombat are photorealistic, graphics will never improve much more than that.
A truly advanced audio system will dynamically generate sounds that are uniquely appropriate for the corresponding event. So when an object falls into a body of liquid, for instance, it takes into account the object shape and size and speed and density and the viscosity of the liquid etc. The Half-life 2 engine seems to do more or less do this, but it's not out yet. And I think it just calls upon a large database of sound effects rather than generating something truly unique.
Another thing is that right now every single line of speech in a game has to be recorded and stored, which a herculean effort for a large RPG, and generally limits the possibilities of conversation. Hearing the same stupid bark every time you encounter a character in Deus Ex 2, for instance, is badly grating. Ideally, designers will be able to just write dialogue (or better yet design an AI which dynamically generates dialogue), add a few parameters for inflection and rythm, and have a text-to-speech engine take care of the rest. Considering how non-real-time state of the art text to speech is laughably bad, I don't see how throwing more computational power at the problem is going to solve it.
And then there's the problem of creating music which reflects the onscreen action. Just looping the same music over and over works OK if the music is well-written, but ideally it should be responsive to what's going on in the game world. This isn't just a technical question - how do you even compose music or bits of music that flow together seamlessly and in any order? An then how does your engine call upon these bits of music? Or do you create an algorithm to randomly generate music? In general, random content generators, whether level design or art or music doesn't come anywhere near the level of quality of hand-crafted material, at least for any algorthm that I've seen.
All that said, I do believe that Carmack's main point that the cost/benefit of developing an advanced audio engine is not nearly as important as graphical innovation. People notice graphics much more than audio and you can get away with a relatively crude audio system if the graphics are pretty. Also a good audio engineer (like Eric Brosius who did the audio for the Thief games and SS2) who creates fantastic music and sound effects is far more valuable than highly advanced technical engine. I just think that there are a lot of serious technical and artistic innovations that can be made, even though they may be subtle and initially underappreciated by the average user.
Turn on a radio in any metro area at any time of the day, and you can hear some jackass talking. There isn't really even a difference between them anymore
I've been thinking, why not a website that lists independent artists' music only, to let people know of an alternative?
Not exactly the same, but you can use the RIAA radar to check and make sure the CD you're interested in is "RIAA-safe" (ie. not from a label that's a RIAA member). Site's kinda slow, but I've found it very useful.
Personally, I've made the decision to avoid RIAA records for life, but so far that's just meant that I haven't bought the new Radiohead. It's not much of a sacrifice since most of the music I like is on independent labels anyway. I don't know what I'd do if Warp or Ipecac were RIAA members.
What about The Adventures of Cookie & Cream? It's a platformer that has some puzzles which require two players working in tandem. I've never played it, but I've always wanted to to since I heard about it.
Nintendo released the NES in two different bundles: one at $249 with the R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy) unit, two controllers, a lightgun, Gyromite (a R.O.B. game), Duck Hunt, and Super Mario Bros., and the other set at $199 with controllers and Super Mario Bros.
"Maths" is just the british way of saying "math". (Conversely, "math" is just the american way of saying "maths".) Just different ways of shortening the word "mathematics".
it is a well known fact that AMD Duron processors are made in a sweatshop in Maylasia. - i have never read anything about AMD making their processors in sweatshops...do you have any information to back that up?
I would have gotten it on the spot except for the fact that it had an explicit lyrics label. Wtf, was he turning into Trent Reznor?
The explicit lyrics thing is a joke. There are hardly any discernible vocals throughout the album. I think there's one distorted sample with one four letter word on the whole album. The only real song is Richard's parents singing him happy birthday. His mom may have a weird, even disturbing laugh, but it doesn't exactly warrant a parental advisory.
Oh, and I can play my copy in a CDRom drive. Haven't tried ripping it though.
Why aren't high rise buildings like the WTC equipped with parachutes so that people stuck at the top have at least a small chance of getting out alive? Is it prohibitively expensive or impractical for some reason? Even in the case of a normal fire, you're not going to be able to get down through the floors which are burning.
But if you can't calculate *all* of Pi's digits, how do you know that it isn't a repeating pattern? Until you know all of the digits, it's still logically possible for there to be a sequence. If you knew all the digits, then there *would* be a pattern, but not a repeating one. I'm definitely not a mathematician (as you can tell from my original post) so I would welcome a mathematical explanation of how one can say irrefutably that Pi is non-repeating.
If pi were repeating, it would be rational (expressable as the ratio of two integers). The proof of irrationality of pi is somewhat complicated however. If you want to see an easier example of how one can prove a number to be irrational, consider the irrationality of the square root of two.
I haven't given this much thought, but I suspect that the two facts I listed in my post do not completely specify Hamming codes, i.e. there might be non-Hamming codes that meet those criteria
Don't those two conditions imply that the code is perfect? There are only a few families of perfect codes. I suppose there might be nonlinear codes meeting those conditions (eg. the set of words w for which w + c is a Hamming codeword, for some fixed nonzero c). I can't find my coding theory textbook, so I'm not sure; it's been a while since I thought about this stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, if you have 1,000,000 nodes and there are at least 499,994,500,020 edges out of a possible 499,999,500,000 (ie. a bit more than 99.999% of them), then yes you can conclude the diameter of the graph is no more than 6. But no, simply counting the number of edges is not particularly useful. You need to make further assumptions about the graph to get a useful bound.
Been getting into LoL recently, and while I agree it's very polished (I really like the character designs and the free-to-play model is a good one), the one area that Valve could improve on is making it more newbie-friendly. While LoL may be more newbie-friendly than DoTA, that's like saying Venus is less hot than the sun. It's still not a very hospitable place. It's basically a full-time job to get up to speed with all the acronyms, jargon, and conventions. You join your first match of LoL and your teammate says something like: "I'm going jungle Amumu with an AP Sunfire build so I can tank the carry in the lane with my ult when they ping." and then they get mad at you when you have no idea what they're saying. Don't get me wrong, I do like the game, it's just really hard for beginners like me.
Compare the steep learning curve of TFC where you have to master grenade jumping with every class just to compete with how easy it is to pick up TF2. So hopefully Valve will do something similar with DoTA, and make it accessible.
Doesn't she ever learn? Fox's paranoia is always proven justified in the end.
That's the Hales-Jewett theorem. The density Hales-Jewett(3) is a little different. Suppose you're putting X's on a 3x3x...x3 (n-dimensional) grid. Such a grid has 3^n points. What the theorem says is that if you've put X's on at least, say, 1% of the 3^n points, then you must have made a line somewhere if n is large enough. You can replace the 1% with whatever fraction you please, but that will change how large n has to be. No, the theorem doesn't state exactly how large n has to be, but already it's a challenging problem.
Terry tao's blog has an explanation that's about as simple as you're going to find. (At least one that actually explains the math without handwaving).
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/upper-and-lower-bounds-for-the-density-hales-jewett-problem/
You get exp from engaging in RvR, so you can't stay at a particular level indefinitely. Not sure about T2 or T3, but at least for T1 there isn't much disparity from the best gear available and the gear an "average" player will get. It's pretty easy to get decent gear without really excessive grinding or spending lots of money. Also there don't seem to be anything like crusader enchants, which significantly increase a lower level character's power.
This couldn't be more wrong. It's a hybrid of established genres (FPS and action RPG), sure, but there's nothing else out there that's the same mixture. The problem is the game was very poorly polished, with tons of bugs and many ambitious features falling short of expectations. For example, there are random 3d levels, but they're very bland. There are a few unique quests, like a pseudo-RTS or a capture-the-flag style game, but they're poorly executed.
GP stated the movie's going to be told from the perspective of the Alliance because Blizzard has said it's going to be told from the perspective of the Alliance.
Sure, the games are not "Alliance-centric". Which is exactly why the upcoming "Alliance-centric" movie will be lacking.
There are a number of comics that I think are fun like Stray Bullets, Milk & Cheese, Midnight Nation. But for my money, nothing comes close to what Chris Ware's been doing with Acme Novelty Library. Look at the way he establishes a character is adopted using an almost entirely wordless diagram. Admittedly, the plot isn't the type to keep you on the edge of your seat, but the artistry is second to none, IMO.
For the game that I was most looking forward to but died was The Lost. I mean, the creepy atmosphere and "emergent gameplay" of Thief/System Shock 2, but in Hell? How could it go wrong? I actually put off buying a PS2 for a couple years because I waiting for it to come out. Oh well, hopefully Bioshock actually hits shelves (and doesn't suck).
I'd agree that season 5 is fairly lackluster, but the last episode is so good that it redeems the entire season. Of course, it was originally filmed as the last episode of season 4, so in some sense you might consider it part of season 4.
It's definitely mentioned near the beginning of the movie that the war is due to a prince being missing, but it's in the background dialogue. So if the sound quality was bad at your showing, it'd be easy to miss.
Aureal used transfer functions to simulate the effect of your pinnae to place the origin of the sound in 3d space. This was a failure mainly because it didn't work very well. (Everyone's pinnae are different, so the transfer functions would have to be customized for each person. Plus you need a good headphones or precisely placed speakers to notice the subtleties. Plus there's more to how your brain places sound than just transfer functions - context is also important.) But even if it did work well, there is much more to sound than being able to identify where it's coming from.
Switching gears, Carmack touched on the subject of audio in games, saying that if you wanted to spend all the computing power currently available, you could do just about anything with audio in games. The question at the moment is whether it's worth devoting that much effort and horsepower to audio. "It really doesn't pay off in the current generation to put that much effort to it," said Carmack, "but give it a couple more turns of processor generations, and audio will be just be 'done.'"
IANAGD, but this seems short-sighted to me. The state of audio in games nowadays is incredibly primitive. There are a limited number of sound effects and every time an event occurs you always hear the exact same thing. This is like saying that since the sprites in Mortal Kombat are photorealistic, graphics will never improve much more than that.
A truly advanced audio system will dynamically generate sounds that are uniquely appropriate for the corresponding event. So when an object falls into a body of liquid, for instance, it takes into account the object shape and size and speed and density and the viscosity of the liquid etc. The Half-life 2 engine seems to do more or less do this, but it's not out yet. And I think it just calls upon a large database of sound effects rather than generating something truly unique.
Another thing is that right now every single line of speech in a game has to be recorded and stored, which a herculean effort for a large RPG, and generally limits the possibilities of conversation. Hearing the same stupid bark every time you encounter a character in Deus Ex 2, for instance, is badly grating. Ideally, designers will be able to just write dialogue (or better yet design an AI which dynamically generates dialogue), add a few parameters for inflection and rythm, and have a text-to-speech engine take care of the rest. Considering how non-real-time state of the art text to speech is laughably bad, I don't see how throwing more computational power at the problem is going to solve it.
And then there's the problem of creating music which reflects the onscreen action. Just looping the same music over and over works OK if the music is well-written, but ideally it should be responsive to what's going on in the game world. This isn't just a technical question - how do you even compose music or bits of music that flow together seamlessly and in any order? An then how does your engine call upon these bits of music? Or do you create an algorithm to randomly generate music? In general, random content generators, whether level design or art or music doesn't come anywhere near the level of quality of hand-crafted material, at least for any algorthm that I've seen.
All that said, I do believe that Carmack's main point that the cost/benefit of developing an advanced audio engine is not nearly as important as graphical innovation. People notice graphics much more than audio and you can get away with a relatively crude audio system if the graphics are pretty. Also a good audio engineer (like Eric Brosius who did the audio for the Thief games and SS2) who creates fantastic music and sound effects is far more valuable than highly advanced technical engine. I just think that there are a lot of serious technical and artistic innovations that can be made, even though they may be subtle and initially underappreciated by the average user.
Prove you wrong with 2 words: Phil Hendrie.
Not exactly the same, but you can use the RIAA radar to check and make sure the CD you're interested in is "RIAA-safe" (ie. not from a label that's a RIAA member). Site's kinda slow, but I've found it very useful.
Personally, I've made the decision to avoid RIAA records for life, but so far that's just meant that I haven't bought the new Radiohead. It's not much of a sacrifice since most of the music I like is on independent labels anyway. I don't know what I'd do if Warp or Ipecac were RIAA members.
What about The Adventures of Cookie & Cream? It's a platformer that has some puzzles which require two players working in tandem. I've never played it, but I've always wanted to to since I heard about it.
From http://www.classicgaming.com/museum/nes/
Nintendo released the NES in two different bundles: one at $249 with the R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy) unit, two controllers, a lightgun, Gyromite (a R.O.B. game), Duck Hunt, and Super Mario Bros., and the other set at $199 with controllers and Super Mario Bros.
"Maths" is just the british way of saying "math". (Conversely, "math" is just the american way of saying "maths".) Just different ways of shortening the word "mathematics".
Probably referring to this shocking exposé.
The explicit lyrics thing is a joke. There are hardly any discernible vocals throughout the album. I think there's one distorted sample with one four letter word on the whole album. The only real song is Richard's parents singing him happy birthday. His mom may have a weird, even disturbing laugh, but it doesn't exactly warrant a parental advisory.
Oh, and I can play my copy in a CDRom drive. Haven't tried ripping it though.
Terrible.
If pi were repeating, it would be rational (expressable as the ratio of two integers). The proof of irrationality of pi is somewhat complicated however. If you want to see an easier example of how one can prove a number to be irrational, consider the irrationality of the square root of two.
Don't those two conditions imply that the code is perfect? There are only a few families of perfect codes. I suppose there might be nonlinear codes meeting those conditions (eg. the set of words w for which w + c is a Hamming codeword, for some fixed nonzero c). I can't find my coding theory textbook, so I'm not sure; it's been a while since I thought about this stuff.
- The group has agreed to a strategy ahead of time.
- Only one needs to be right - the rest of the group can pass.
- If they are all wrong, they are not penalized any more than if only one of them were wrong.
50% of the time each individual's answer is wrong (as expected) but the group is wrong only 25% of the time.