I find the focus on Bluetooth in this article perverse. Yes, the legs communicate via Bluetooth, but they also *walk*. To me, *that's* the impressive part. I couldn't care less that it's Bluetooth or some other protocol.
I will say, though, that it's encouraging as a general trend to see consumer-level technologies like this being used as plug-in components to cutting-edge research projects (like Johnny Lee's Wiimote awesomeness, for example). But hell... wake me up when I can build my own artificial legs from commodity hardware.
But don't forget, the cars are shared. You've got to worry about contention and locking, and don't forget about the GC overhead for all these extra stacks you're leaving around.
RTFA. Neither of your objections is particularly applicable. They're putting this forth as a service model (swipe your card and take one of the interchangeable cars when and where you need it), not for individual ownership. And when they talk about "stacking," I believe they mean horizontal nesting. Nobody stacks shopping carts vertically either.
And you base all this on... what, exactly? Have you ever worked on a software project? Schedules are always overly optimistic, and there is a constant tension between getting things done well and getting something out the door, usually based on some completely arbitrary date set by the higher ups. In a typical case, from a quality-of-product perspective (which is what you should care about as a customer), delaying a few months on a multi-year project to make a good game great by really polishing it is exactly the right thing to do. Most developers know this, but many development houses don't have the wherewithal to act on that knowledge; they bow to short-term market pressures and push out the crap that fills 90% of store shelves. This is *not* a ridiculously long delay, and it's certainly not Duke Nukum Forever. The fact that they were able to make this decision, erring on the side of quality, in all likelihood is a symptom of an organization where the decision-makers have actually got their heads screwed on straight for once and know how to make the right long-term plays.
To put it in simpler terms, if it's a good game, then once it comes out and you play it for a few days you won't give a rat's ass about how long it took to arrive.
Re:why check everything
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
Go is too complex for a total understanding, if ever there were an NP complete problem, this is it. thats why we have evolutionary algorithms.
Be wary of using terms without understanding them. "NP-complete" is not synonymous with "really hard." There are problems which are even harder than those which are NP-complete, and optimal play in go is probably in that set. That is, for arbitrarily-sized boards. Technically speaking, solving go for the standard 19x19 board, or any fixed board size, is a constant-time operation, hence far short of NP-complete.
Similarly, I'm guessing you're using the term "evolutionary algorithm" rather loosely. It means something rather specific, and is far from the be-all-and-end-all answer to NP-complete problems in practice. And it's important to realize that "best possible in reasonable time" in many cases is not adequate. Computer go is a perfect example of such a case -- the best computer go play at the moment, using all the various heuristics and evolutionary algorithms and whatnot, is atrocious compared to a modestly competent human.
Incidentally, some modern computer go programs (including GNU Go, IIRC) do use a multi-objective approach. The difficulty is twofold, though. First, you've got to accurately measure progress toward each objective. That's fiendishly difficult amid the subtleties of a go game. Second, you've got to tune the parameters to optimal, or at least acceptable, weights. That tuning itself may be computationally intractable. And even if you do accomplish those two things, it's still just a heuristic that will definitely miss much of the complex interplay among goals which are far from orthogonal.
Yeah, but who wants to wait another 20k years?
Besides, sequels always disappoint. I betcha Madden 40k will still be just the same game as it is now.;)
Provided that your definition of legal means "obtained in violation of the terms of service and by providing fraudulent information to bypass the compliance checks."
Don't tell me you automatically equate violating/circumventing some company's terms of service with lawbreaking...?
Well, the stability of tripods is pretty well-established. Of course, you'd want to consider stability while stationary and while in motion. There's also a weight ratio to consider -- whatever metric of stability you choose, I bet you can maximize stability-to-weight with three legs rather than any other number.
As another poster pointed out, the stability of three legs has a lot to do with the fact that any three (non-colinear) points describe a plane. With four legs, you'd have to engineer against the tendency of the fourth leg to disrupt the plane and set the whole thing rocking on a linear axis between two diagonal legs.
Stability in motion is a much more complex matter. Think of all the things that can go wrong in the course of walking. The ground can give way underneath you, or move vertically, or move laterally. You can get stuck in the mud. You can trip over stuff. Your feet can slip or bounce (as the prototype in the video seems to have some issues with -- too bad they don't show more of it). And on and on. There's too many possible variations to declare "four legs good, three legs baaaaad" (or the converse) in general. You'd have to select a particular subset of important criteria -- do you want to walk on rubble? Mars? Sand? Mud? Ice? Dodge flying obstacles?
One thing I haven't seen in this discussion or TFA -- and maybe I'm missing something because I haven't thought seriously about raytracing or rasterization since my undergrad graphics class -- is the possibility of getting away from polygons. With rasterization, there are specific technical reasons why everything's done in triangles. As I understand it, many or most of these reasons don't necessarily apply to raytracing. A raytracing engine can happily model a perfect sphere and render it as precisely as the pixel grid allows.
That's just the beginning -- constructive geometry allows the definition of complex shapes from primitives like spheres, cylinders, etc. Set operations such as union, intersection, and difference allow "sculpting." Those who have fooled around with Second Life's "prims" will be familiar with a simple version of this, but of course SL's prims are still rendered the old fashioned way and are pretty limited in how they can be combined (IIRC, you can really only glue stuff together, not make holes and stuff.
If we suddenly don't have to define our world geometry in terms of triangles anymore, I'd expect there to be far-reaching impacts in the way we think about defining 3D worlds. There may be some very interesting complex shapes that would be far too expensive to model with triangles, but which have compact mathematical representations and are easy to intersect with a ray. We'll just have to see, I guess.
If you think the kilogram is in bad shape, consider the dire fate of the Newton (the SI unit of force, a.k.a. weight). Newton's been decomposing for centuries -- there's no way he weighs the same as he used to!
Clean it? If they're letting it get dirty so that it'd need cleaning, they've got some bigger problems than aging staff. How do you clean something like this without abrading away some of the mass? It's not like you can just spray it down with Windex and give it a wipe.
The article alternates several times between talking about child pornography and viewing of pornography by children. This confusion is evidently not merely the fault of the article, as both concepts appear clearly in quoted sections. Is there a conscious attempt to broaden the term "child pornography" to include any involvement of children with pornography including viewing it? Or is it simply a particularly blatant instance of doublespeak?
What I really like, though, is the fact that no doubt many of the same folks backing this are vigorous proponents of the sort of privatization that's funneling billions into the pockets of contractors in Iraq. I guess none of their friends own stock in any of the many and varied private companies out there who have been shilling filtering software for years. Or maybe that's what they'll do -- hire a contractor to build what they want under government auspices. So apparently all the private-sector companies out there who've been trying all these years haven't done a good enough job, but the lowest-bidding snake oil salesman will surely pull a miracle out of his ass.
The article is a bit thin on the details of how the exploit works. Without some kind of explanation, I'm skeptical of the claim that this works for "any application in which there is a dangling pointer." In particular, note the quote that "[t]he long and short of it is, if you can determine the value of the pointer, it's game over." Okay, but I'm not in the habit of exposing pointer values to users, so if a user-visible pointer value is required for the exploit, that significantly reduces the set of apps to which this attack applies. The apparent overstatement degrades the overall credibility of the related claims.
Also, I'm really curious why on earth it would matter that the pointer is dangling. A dangling pointer is a pointer that points to a resource that no longer exists -- and, therefore, to garbage memory. I'm assuming the attack involves writing arbitrary code to that garbage memory. The question is, why would such an attack rely on the memory being garbage, as opposed to a valid resource? If we're overwriting it anyway, why does it matter?
Perhaps what really happens is that when you crash due to a dangling pointer, the resulting dialogue shows the pointer value, and this tells the attacker which location to overwrite for the next time. If that's the case, it strikes me as being just as obvious as, say, buffer overflow, and that dangling pointers are rather incidental.
I guess we'll have to await the details to determine if there really is meat here, a legitimate new class of attacks, or just overstatement of something not at all new an exciting.
If you're not getting enough exercise, making your heart work harder is *exactly* what you should be doing. The heart is a muscle, and it gets stronger the more you use it. Consider making an analogous statement about skeletal muscles such as those in your arms, and see how ridiculous it sounds.
Slashdot Mirror
They have their own silly language...
I will say, though, that it's encouraging as a general trend to see consumer-level technologies like this being used as plug-in components to cutting-edge research projects (like Johnny Lee's Wiimote awesomeness, for example). But hell... wake me up when I can build my own artificial legs from commodity hardware.
But don't forget, the cars are shared. You've got to worry about contention and locking, and don't forget about the GC overhead for all these extra stacks you're leaving around.
RTFA. Neither of your objections is particularly applicable. They're putting this forth as a service model (swipe your card and take one of the interchangeable cars when and where you need it), not for individual ownership. And when they talk about "stacking," I believe they mean horizontal nesting. Nobody stacks shopping carts vertically either.
And you base all this on... what, exactly? Have you ever worked on a software project? Schedules are always overly optimistic, and there is a constant tension between getting things done well and getting something out the door, usually based on some completely arbitrary date set by the higher ups. In a typical case, from a quality-of-product perspective (which is what you should care about as a customer), delaying a few months on a multi-year project to make a good game great by really polishing it is exactly the right thing to do. Most developers know this, but many development houses don't have the wherewithal to act on that knowledge; they bow to short-term market pressures and push out the crap that fills 90% of store shelves. This is *not* a ridiculously long delay, and it's certainly not Duke Nukum Forever. The fact that they were able to make this decision, erring on the side of quality, in all likelihood is a symptom of an organization where the decision-makers have actually got their heads screwed on straight for once and know how to make the right long-term plays.
To put it in simpler terms, if it's a good game, then once it comes out and you play it for a few days you won't give a rat's ass about how long it took to arrive.
Be wary of using terms without understanding them. "NP-complete" is not synonymous with "really hard." There are problems which are even harder than those which are NP-complete, and optimal play in go is probably in that set. That is, for arbitrarily-sized boards. Technically speaking, solving go for the standard 19x19 board, or any fixed board size, is a constant-time operation, hence far short of NP-complete.
Similarly, I'm guessing you're using the term "evolutionary algorithm" rather loosely. It means something rather specific, and is far from the be-all-and-end-all answer to NP-complete problems in practice. And it's important to realize that "best possible in reasonable time" in many cases is not adequate. Computer go is a perfect example of such a case -- the best computer go play at the moment, using all the various heuristics and evolutionary algorithms and whatnot, is atrocious compared to a modestly competent human.
Incidentally, some modern computer go programs (including GNU Go, IIRC) do use a multi-objective approach. The difficulty is twofold, though. First, you've got to accurately measure progress toward each objective. That's fiendishly difficult amid the subtleties of a go game. Second, you've got to tune the parameters to optimal, or at least acceptable, weights. That tuning itself may be computationally intractable. And even if you do accomplish those two things, it's still just a heuristic that will definitely miss much of the complex interplay among goals which are far from orthogonal.
Yeah, but who wants to wait another 20k years? Besides, sequels always disappoint. I betcha Madden 40k will still be just the same game as it is now. ;)
Don't tell me you automatically equate violating/circumventing some company's terms of service with lawbreaking...?
Well, the stability of tripods is pretty well-established. Of course, you'd want to consider stability while stationary and while in motion. There's also a weight ratio to consider -- whatever metric of stability you choose, I bet you can maximize stability-to-weight with three legs rather than any other number.
As another poster pointed out, the stability of three legs has a lot to do with the fact that any three (non-colinear) points describe a plane. With four legs, you'd have to engineer against the tendency of the fourth leg to disrupt the plane and set the whole thing rocking on a linear axis between two diagonal legs.
Stability in motion is a much more complex matter. Think of all the things that can go wrong in the course of walking. The ground can give way underneath you, or move vertically, or move laterally. You can get stuck in the mud. You can trip over stuff. Your feet can slip or bounce (as the prototype in the video seems to have some issues with -- too bad they don't show more of it). And on and on. There's too many possible variations to declare "four legs good, three legs baaaaad" (or the converse) in general. You'd have to select a particular subset of important criteria -- do you want to walk on rubble? Mars? Sand? Mud? Ice? Dodge flying obstacles?
One thing I haven't seen in this discussion or TFA -- and maybe I'm missing something because I haven't thought seriously about raytracing or rasterization since my undergrad graphics class -- is the possibility of getting away from polygons. With rasterization, there are specific technical reasons why everything's done in triangles. As I understand it, many or most of these reasons don't necessarily apply to raytracing. A raytracing engine can happily model a perfect sphere and render it as precisely as the pixel grid allows.
That's just the beginning -- constructive geometry allows the definition of complex shapes from primitives like spheres, cylinders, etc. Set operations such as union, intersection, and difference allow "sculpting." Those who have fooled around with Second Life's "prims" will be familiar with a simple version of this, but of course SL's prims are still rendered the old fashioned way and are pretty limited in how they can be combined (IIRC, you can really only glue stuff together, not make holes and stuff.
If we suddenly don't have to define our world geometry in terms of triangles anymore, I'd expect there to be far-reaching impacts in the way we think about defining 3D worlds. There may be some very interesting complex shapes that would be far too expensive to model with triangles, but which have compact mathematical representations and are easy to intersect with a ray. We'll just have to see, I guess.
If you think the kilogram is in bad shape, consider the dire fate of the Newton (the SI unit of force, a.k.a. weight). Newton's been decomposing for centuries -- there's no way he weighs the same as he used to!
Clean it? If they're letting it get dirty so that it'd need cleaning, they've got some bigger problems than aging staff. How do you clean something like this without abrading away some of the mass? It's not like you can just spray it down with Windex and give it a wipe.
Mauve.
Damn, guess I need to choose a new nick.
The article alternates several times between talking about child pornography and viewing of pornography by children. This confusion is evidently not merely the fault of the article, as both concepts appear clearly in quoted sections. Is there a conscious attempt to broaden the term "child pornography" to include any involvement of children with pornography including viewing it? Or is it simply a particularly blatant instance of doublespeak?
What I really like, though, is the fact that no doubt many of the same folks backing this are vigorous proponents of the sort of privatization that's funneling billions into the pockets of contractors in Iraq. I guess none of their friends own stock in any of the many and varied private companies out there who have been shilling filtering software for years. Or maybe that's what they'll do -- hire a contractor to build what they want under government auspices. So apparently all the private-sector companies out there who've been trying all these years haven't done a good enough job, but the lowest-bidding snake oil salesman will surely pull a miracle out of his ass.
The article is a bit thin on the details of how the exploit works. Without some kind of explanation, I'm skeptical of the claim that this works for "any application in which there is a dangling pointer." In particular, note the quote that "[t]he long and short of it is, if you can determine the value of the pointer, it's game over." Okay, but I'm not in the habit of exposing pointer values to users, so if a user-visible pointer value is required for the exploit, that significantly reduces the set of apps to which this attack applies. The apparent overstatement degrades the overall credibility of the related claims. Also, I'm really curious why on earth it would matter that the pointer is dangling. A dangling pointer is a pointer that points to a resource that no longer exists -- and, therefore, to garbage memory. I'm assuming the attack involves writing arbitrary code to that garbage memory. The question is, why would such an attack rely on the memory being garbage, as opposed to a valid resource? If we're overwriting it anyway, why does it matter? Perhaps what really happens is that when you crash due to a dangling pointer, the resulting dialogue shows the pointer value, and this tells the attacker which location to overwrite for the next time. If that's the case, it strikes me as being just as obvious as, say, buffer overflow, and that dangling pointers are rather incidental. I guess we'll have to await the details to determine if there really is meat here, a legitimate new class of attacks, or just overstatement of something not at all new an exciting.
Zombies with AIDS! That would be the most wicked cool zombie movie evar.
If you're not getting enough exercise, making your heart work harder is *exactly* what you should be doing. The heart is a muscle, and it gets stronger the more you use it. Consider making an analogous statement about skeletal muscles such as those in your arms, and see how ridiculous it sounds.
Sounds like someone's not in the http://future.google.com/ beta. Sour grapes.
When they do, please make sure to post and complain about the Slashvertisement.
Don't they know that no plan of battle survives contact with the blogosphere?
Wouldn't that be three times as many animals as exist?