Re:Of hives and genetics
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Exultant
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, just because the bees happen to have a genetic mechanism to encourage hive behavior doesn't mean there aren't others, or in fact that such a thing is even required. You're trying too hard to map human desires and needs onto other biologies. Ants are too dumb to want things; their behavior is driven largely by lack of certain behaviors being adequately performed from their perspectives (very similar to the scratch an itch mechanism underlying some larger OSS projects, natch.)
There are many non-haploiding hiving creatures, such as termites, the Japanese, and arguably some forms of gopher and wren - there's even a reasonable argument for the clownfish, which build up coral reefs and sacrifice one so that the rest of the school can escape, and the sequoia, which are entire forests as single entities and which intentionally kill edge trees to keep other plants from crossing soil borders.
IANAEvolutionaryBiologist, but I suspect the primary reason that we see hiving occuring in tiny animals isn't about a particular biological mechanism at all, but rather the food requirements of a hive of things much larger. Transportation isn't cheap, and one of a hive's large vulnerabilities is that the population due to design cannot spread out to increase food available to the individual as do individual predators. As such, the hive is limited to the food sources available within an individual's travel. For this reason, one rarely sees a hive even near a desert border, because the half of the food region which is worthless means that area cannot sustain the hive even if the other half of the region is good. If one deals with a hive of larger creatures, that food cost spirals up stratospherically, which eventually pits the individual's needs directly against those of its hive; it's all well and good to ignore one's daughters in favor of one's sisters, but to ignore one's self in a setting due to food constraints means a significant portion of the population would be starving, meaning that a successful hive would be damned hard to create.
As far as the bond for sociality, many biologists believe that altruism and samaritanism are deeply hard-wired into us, but at the tribal scale instead of the species scale, which is one good argument for the prevalence of racism and other forms of us-vs-them. Preserve the tribe at the expense of other tribes. Fits very well into the worldview wherein one thinks of creatures as vehicles for genes to spread.
So, maybe it's not as cut and dried as you suggest.
Uh, I'm sorry, Mars Base, your signal is breaking up.
The GameBoy went through three black and white iterations, two color iterations and three SNES console iterations before the GBA was released. It faced competition from the Jaguar, Lynx, Game Gear, Nomad, NeoGeo Pocket, NeoGeo Pocket Color, WonderSwan/WS Color/WS Crystal, TurboExpress, Game.Com (tiger electronics, not a web site,) NEC TurboExpress, GamePark/GamePark32, etc. This is the least competition in the handheld market Nintendo has ever had.
The GBA was released in early 2001, which if you check is more than four and a half years ago. Since then it has gone through only one refactoring, which allowed a backlit screen and a rechargable battery. This is the least alteration Nintendo has made to any console system they have ever made in four and a half years.
Nintendo has competition from many other sources than Sony at the moment, such as Gizmodo, Zodiac, Tiger again, Bandai again, and now Creative. The PSP is certainly their largest competitor, but with a brief look at Asian sales rates outside of Japan, you'll quickly realize that Sony isn't the largest of Nintendo's competition by much; the Koreans have a shocking number of consoles, considering how rarely we hear about them in the US. Furthermore, cellular phones are becoming a significant threat; Civilization 3 has been ported to a cell phone in Korea, for example. Yes, Civilization 3. No, I'm not joking.
And, well, okay, I can't even bring myself to joke that the N-Gage matters.
Zero motivation to improve? The PSP is not the first console to hold any real technical threat for Nintendo. The DMG maintained black and white graphics and a lack of rechargable battery, radio/tv tuning or other features prominent in the Atari and Sega machines of the day. Don't mistake stolid behavior for lack of motivation; Nintendo was keeping their prices down and the prices of batteries down for kids.
They did the right thing, and as a result, they won the last five generations of portable gaming hardware with three systems.
Now, you want us to believe that a system from early '01 and one from late 1998 are less than three years old, that a market they've held since 1983 with the game and watch was theirs from the early 90s because of the gameboy (when the gameboy is from the 80s,) and that the least developmental period in the history of any of their console lines is their development ramping up in response to the least competition they've ever had?
This is entirely a matter of perspective. By and on the whole the person which already replied to you is correct; I intend to provide contrast in the hopes that this can be made more visible.
In the most literal sense, Alsee is correct to point out that the game state includes literally everything of value to the game. So, the question is in effect tautological: if the history of the states of the board matters, then that history is part of the current state.
Another viewpoint which is popular is to answer that in terms of its reverse observation as cyclics: if the game cannot cycle, and if there is no chance, then the history of board states is the sole determinant of the current board state, and therefore in such a game an understanding of the history is effectively an understanding of the current state. Games where tokens are added with no mechanic for removal, such as pente, tic tac toe and connect-4 would fall well within these boundaries.
That said, I choose to answer your question from a different viewpoint, because I believe you're asking something else based on slightly flawed understanding of the game theory terms in play. This is a guess; I could be wrong about what you mean.
As I see it, what I suspect you're asking is whether current board states can be interfered with by how those board states were achieved. The answer to that question is a resounding no for every game, but a strong yes for agents. Remember please that the rules of the game are usually less important than the behavioral characteristics of the people playing the game. For example, Connect-4 solves to a second player's win, guaranteed; still, the way most people play, player 1 appears to have a large advantage for first play.
The game state is oftentimes more than just a board. By comparison, the game state for poker includes not only the cards on the table and in people's hands, but also the amount of money held by each player and in the pot, the size of the current raise, the check position, where any blinds are, whether wilds or special rules are in play, et cetera. Therefore, it really doesn't matter how we got to our current position: if I have cards a..e and you have cards f..j, if I have X money and you have Y money, and it's your turn to bet on such-and-such a raise, then there's no real variance based on how we played earlier in vantage or available opportunity.
That said, I chose poker carefully for this example because the notion of a card shark is prominent and easily associated with, and there are movies to which I can refer to give a sense of method. One common tactic for a poker shark is to lose for the first 45m-1h of a game, not horridly but measurably. This has two effects: one, the other players are (sometimes) fooled into thinking there's a mark on hand to be bled, and two, the player has a chance to inspect his/her opponent's tells.
There's a good example of this behavior in the Mel Gibson movie Maverick, in which the main character openly promises to lose for the first hour in order to gain access to a table. The proposition was in essence to pay for the privelege of playing, but what the character was up to was learning his opponent's poker faces so as to better read them, and to ditch any appearance he might have had of skill in order to sweeten that speculative big pot. There are similar examples where players who inspected early chess algorithms made bad moves to poison the algorithm's impression of the player, leading the algorithm to respond wrongly thereafter.
So in the technical sense, if it affects the current game it's not history, it's part of the game state, so no. In the literal sense, the history is the creator of the state, so yes. In the realistic sense, the game state no, but the players yes, oftentimes very importantly so.
Ok, the position evaluation needs Benson's algorithm to identify unconditionally alive stones, for which 100,000 positions per second is a realistic pace.
No, it doesn't. Ply trees are only concerned with boards which are won, boards which are lost, and the distance to either. Because a solution is a complete expansion, one need not be concerned with the actual score during evaluation; only with finding all achievable states and state loops. The hell with scoring the tree; the building of the tree is the difficult part, and the scoring of the board - which you correctly point out is expensive - need not be considered during the tree solution.
Once the tree and loops are identified, then one can begin evaluating the solution with something like Benson's. Still, that's not nessecary for a solution; a solution just means you know every possible consequence, not that you have an opiunion on which consequences are superior. (This is a critical distinction when one gets into games where the needs of the two players are not matched, where there are multiple possible game states, or when information is imperfect.)
To solve the game simply construct the tree. Don't worry about scoring the boards; just know what boards are reachable.
The article is basically misled. Yes, you can apply searching techniques to a larger board, and no, there isn't a practical limit to board size for searching techniques.
The issue here is the positively spectacular rate at which Go ply trees expand. Even in the case of a go game in which no stones are taken by move 5 - three by player A and two by player B, only five stones on the board - there are already 5,962,870,725,840 distinct possible boards (well, almost - about 0.001% aren't legal possibilities, but I don't feel like doing the underlying math.)
The problem here is that modern machines crap out on the solution space without reduction techniques around move 6, and even with reduction techniques around move 20. Furthermore, moves in Go are smaller than they are in Chess - one chess move is far more significant on average than one Go move. As a result, those 20 moves turn out to not be very far looked ahead at all.
They could in fact solve 9*9; it'd just take a shocking amount of processor time. You're well into the multiple decades with a good advanced PVS or MTD(f) implementation on a high-end home machine. 9*9 might be tractable with a Seti@HOME sized effort, given modern computing, but single or small-cluster setups are just totally outclassed by the massive size of a Go board's move space.
You're trying to apply too much emotional content here. In the context of solving a game, the notion of scoring applies to exactly one thing: a board's proximity to a winning or losing state, as measured by the risk and reward ratio between possible end states over the gamut of the ply tree.
That has nothing to do with the reason computer programs are still bad go players. The reason that computer go players suck is that the ply tree for Go is awesomely large, and that short of currently-unknown geometric attacks on the board, the only way to reduce the size of the ply tree short of an incomplete principal variation search is to do simple reflections and rotations, which is woefully inadequate. Furthermore, the number of potential go states following any initial or leader state prevents strong knowledge of the strength of a leading position, and the number of closure states is fantastically large, so closure systems like chess' and draughts' dictionary play isn't realistic.
There are a number of approaches which are showing new promise on the front of computer go; I have a neural network playing at what I estimate to be about 8 kyu against american professional Dan. Most active go playters will scoff and insist that's impossible, as the best known computer go players play at 1 dan 1 kyu and because I'm a total nobody. What's really going on is that I know what the guy behind Negascout did, and I applied it to Go, and it works really well.
Oh, and I'm not the first one to do it. Things are about to change.
Anyway, computers have been able to defeat weak amateurs (Try learning the rules
I play at one dan six, and at 9 kyu against american professional rank, meaning I probably play at around 8 kyu against Japanese professional rank. Don't tell me to learn the rules until you know whether I'm familiar with the game, please. I'm a professional game developer. I'm not speaking out of ignorance of either the game or the math underlying attacking a game. Your tone is unwarranted and insulting.
When you're dealing with a ply tree, it's relatively straightforward: the score is positive infinity if the board wins, negative infinity if the board loses, 0 if no path to a win is possible (tie boards or unknown boards,) and +-inf +-epsilon/ply for any board whose path towards a solution/solutions are known.
How do you know what a move is worth without knowing its effect?
Uh, when you're solving a game, there's no such thing as a move. You consider only board states, not the moves which lead to them, except in determining in which order to evaluate states. In this way it's trivial to understand how the value of a board in an infinite cycle between two paired positions - say, two kings moving back and forth between their same two cells each turn on a chess board - have up to four board scores through which they oscillate (unless there's a terminate-at-N-moves rule like in chess, but whatever.)
The only true way to "solve" is not to consider all game states, but to consider all possible paths
Game theory 101: the board states are the only thing there is. There are no "paths" - there is no difference between a board which has had a cyclic move applied to it ten thousand times than one which hasn't gone through them at all.
Solve has a very specific mathematical definition here - that the perfect response is known for every move. For games of no chance and perfect information such as go, chess and so forth, the traditional way to handle this is to create the entire move ply tree and then follow through the paths of least risk. When that tree is completed, you know for every possible board state every possible result of every move, and therefore know what exactly the best move is.
In this way you can find out that some games are balanced (tic tac toe, for example, is always a tie with perfect play with both sides) whereas other games are unbalanced (with perfect play by both sides, the second player will always win at connect-4; there is nothing player 1 can do.)
The reason chess remains unsolved is that its solution tree is so preposterously huge that even by modern computing standards it's just an absurd thing to want to attack, even given twenty years and positing 20 years' hardware development.
By the way, what I described above is not the only way to sove a game; if you'd like to find out how the branch of mathematics called Game Theory works, I recommend the primers "The Compleat Strategyst" (yes, it's spelled like that) and "Game Theory: a Nontechnical Introduction."
Common sense as what you're saying may seem, John von Neumann proved you quite wrong in the early 50s. I suggest you read up before challenging these terms; they're very well defined.
(note: the board never gets completely full, game stops before, when no more territory can be made, and playing into enemy territory would be suicide inviting a pass from the opponent while the invasion stones still being dead, increasing the enemies points.)
Er, yes, I know how Go works, and that's what I was referring to when mentioning that I was counting impossible boards. The number I quoted is the mathematically-derived high end cap on possible board definitions as a simple string of radix-3 digits. Observing that you can reduce the solution space here does you no good: you're only making my job easier.
Now take those 847,288,609,443 possible states, and consider all the sequences through which you can travel
That's a giant waste of time. Watching the ko cycle doesn't change the board, and since Go is scored not on held piece count but rather difference in held piece counts, the scores aren't changing either. It really doesn't matter how you got to a board - if you play squares a,b,c,d,e,f in order then the next game you play f,a,b,e,c,d, nothing has changed; your opportunities are still exactly the same.
because you can't just look at a position and "evaluate it" without knowing the "future" it holds
A 5x5 go board has only 847,288,609,443 possible game states, even including impossible boards. Assuming the relatively tame pace of scoring 100,000 boards per second towards completion, which on a board of that size is trivial, this solution takes a simple brute-force time of 98 days. That solution space can be cut down by almost two orders of magnitude with simple reflection and rotation tricks, implying a realtime tree search space of about a day and a half.
Given that my full board scorer moves faster than that, and given that the university probably has more than one PC to work with, I wonder how it is that anyone can justify this as something larger than a publicity stunt, especially given that none of go's emergent structures even fit onto a 5x5 board.
The idea that all die-hard OO fanatics would do the same thing is absurd. Yes, making a member method (or more desirably the stream operators) for serialization is desirable. However, one could just as easily use a generic serializer like Boost::Serialize(), or a database, or SQLite, or a traditional set of structs, or a byte stream, or feed something to bzip, or or or or or...
Don't choose technique by dogma. Choose technique to suit the current project's need. As the commercial said, "anything else would be uncivilized."
Whoa, there, calm down. It's just a typo in the HTML default template. The property border-collapse is quite real, and in fact gecko, safari and opera render it just fine. The problem is just that the property value should be collapse, not collapsed.
Go dig up the HTML template, remove the 'd', and presto, it's fixed forever. It's annoying and embarrassing that they'd make a mistake like this, but you're seeing conspiracy where lies only stupidity. Do note that patching VS.Net fixes this automagically; maybe you should patch more often (tools menu.)
The canonical example is the public utility system or the mail system, though in fact there are many examples, especially revolving around community telecommunications infrastructure, giant industry like satellite launching, et cetera.
The typical situation in which the best solution is a monopoly is when the infrastructure required to deploy is orders of magnitude larger than the value of what's being transmitted. The government doesn't want five different sets of water pipes being run by five different companies. In order to get service out to the weird rural areas, the government chooses a company which seems like it can do the job, and grants them a monopoly in exchange for laying pipe out at least as far as west bumblefuck.
There are other examples, but I'm bored. That'll do.
You yourself give an excellent example of this phenomenon later on in your post.
Admoinitions are hardly an attack. Pull the other one.
Microsoft is not a natural monopoly either, r even a monopoly, because there are other operating systems on the market.
You're on Mars. Look up what a natural monopoly is, since my explanation doesn't seem to have fazed you. It has nothing to do with the presence of competition. It has to do with under which situations the monopoly was created.
And before you play the gear-changing "that's not what I meant" game again, it's a monopoly under US law.
If you can give me an example of logistics leading to natural monopolies, that would be much appreciated.
UPS, then FedEx, then DHL. WalMart. University of Phoenix Online. Arguably EA. Ford. Heinz. Dehlmann. Stanley Tools. Winchester Rifles. Ben Franklin's Pony Express. Dennison. Georgia Pacific, then Boise Cascade. Western Union.
Did you bother trying to come up with one? I could go on like that all day.
Just because something can't exist doesn't mean the term shouldn't exist.
In economics, it most certainly does. Not everything can brook Platonic ideals, and economics has a massive vested interest in keeping away from pure academic concerns.
Nonetheless, it is not "patently ridiculous" to maintain that with certain perspectives there is no such thing as a natural monopoly.
Well, sure, unless you know what one is. The only reason you believe a natural monopoly cannot exist is that you're spending as much effort as you can to redefine the term in order to prove that in fact such a thing cannot exist. Unfortunately for you, every macro textbook I've ever seen gives a bullet list of at least 20 well known natural monopolies.
No amount of handwavery about that something isn't patently ridiculous changes the blatant falsehood that you're trying to defend. Try to play eschatalogical games all you want; I don't care. I've heard of Microsoft. They clearly exist.
It does depend on perspective.
The definition of natural monopoly depends no more on perspective than does the definition of addition.
Technically, the baby bells might be natural monopolies in their domains, but this is missing the point.
It never fails to amaze me how often people will set up totally useless arguments, then point out how far from germane they are, and think they've then somehow made a cogent argument.
Microsoft might be a dominant player in the OS market for PCs, but then people don't have to buy PCs.
I fail to see why you said this at all. This has no bearing on the definition of a natural monopoly, nor does what could happen, nor do people's other options, nor do people's requirements. This is cut, dry, and simple.
Did a greater power such as government create the monopoly explicitly? Then it's unnatural.
Otherwise, it's natural.
You may attempt to hang as many connotations, emotional arguments, near-misses, speculations, or whatever else you want to on this point. However, economics is not like history, which is fungible; rather, it's like mathematics, which is concrete. The distinction is crystal clear and very simple.
Finally, if I have an opinion, and I want to say it, I will, not because I'm absolutely sure it's correct, but to see what others think of it.
That's a cute little catch phrase you've got there, to shore up your own belief in your open-mindedness; still, take a look at how you reacted to me, when I was not being particularly rude, in about a month when you've settled down and stopped being so defensive. The fact of the matter is that I came in and said "actually, that phrase means something quite different," and you decided to try to shore yourself up with personal attacks and nonsense straw men. (Think you didn't attack me personally?
Actually, Microsoft has done many things well on its first attempt, including its first implementation of C++ after the ISO standard was released (check your dates: VC6 predates C++,) the design of the.NET CLR and common libraries, the design of COM (yeah yeah, holy war, but for its day it was kickass,) the mouse (did you forget who popularized the thing?) and a variety of ergonomic input peripherals, especially keyboards and joysticks.
Furthermore, though the X-Box itself is a pile, X-Box Live is nothing short of a miracle.
Do it as quickly as possible and put effort in where it can be seen. This is not what I would expect when it comes to a commercial product, and only works for proof on concepts.
I would like to know how exactly you justify suggesting that the business practices of by far and away the world's largest software producer over the last 20 years have not worked.
I don't think this natural monopoly thing exists. It sounds like you're trying to say a natural monopoly is a good thing cuz its natural.
You should not attempt to read emotional content into economics terms. Yes, this natural monopoly thing exists, and Microsoft is one.
A natural monopoly arose on its own, such as was the case with Bell Telephone, General Motors, and your buddy Microsoft.
By contrast, an unnatural monopoly is one created by an outside entity, typically government. These are usually created either in cases where a monopoly provides a significant advantage in efficiency - especially when preventing recreating expensive infrastructure such as with utilities; however, there are a good many cases of these being created for nepotism or in simple stupidity.
And nature is good, we all know that. Its all BS.
Nobody said that but you. Don't make things up to talk about how awful they are.
The next time a bunch of people are using terminology you don't understand, try looking it up before claiming it doesn't exist, thanks.
1) Argumentum ad hominem means "argument against the person." Given that a corporation is not a person, one cannot apply argumentum ad hominem to the corporation, even if a fallacious argument is based on the attack of character. In this case, the appropriate fallacy is Appeal to Motive, though the cases can be made for Appeal to Ridicule, Appeal to Spite, Misleading vividness or Poisoning the Well.
2) No, a public postal service is not a natural monopoly. The USPS was once an unnatural monopoly - a monopoly granted by the government (it no longer is.) Microsoft is a natural monopoly, ie a monopoly which arose on its own, rather than one which was created to suit a task.
3) Logistics is a field; it cannot be or not be a monopoly. However, contrary to the impression you give, logistics does not lead to unnatural monopolies; it leads to natural monopolies by providing a more efficient workforce. You're just wrong.
4) Arguably nothing. Much like logistics, industry is not a company, and therefore the word monopoly simply does not apply to it. However, your implication that an industrial firm cannot be a natural monopoly is patently ridiculous. Were that true, the term would not exist. It doesn't depend on how you define an industry at all: either the monopoly arose on its own (natural; microsoft, bell, general motors) or was granted by an outside power such as government (USPS, utilities.)
Just because you don't understand the distinction does not empower you to comment upon its nonextance. You should take an economics course before telling people that an economics term never applies to any company. That's just boneheaded.
A natural monopoly is when a monopoly has arisen on its own through typical business practices. This is especially common where design costs are high and production costs are low, hence the extreme monopolistic tendencies of software.
An unnatural monopoly is a monopoly created specifically to suit a purpose. Most frequently, when a monopoly can serve the public interest more effectively than a diversified business group, then an unnatural monopoly is created by government. Your utility examples are in fact quite backwards.
Microsoft is unethical. They are immoral. Their business practices are appalling, their security record horrific, their legal background stultifying.
This is not justification for calling their monopoly unnatural. It arose pure and simple through their own efforts. The government did not grant a monopoly to microsoft. Even if it's grotesque, that monopoly is natural, even though you want to apply the meaner word.
Sit down until you take a macroeconomics class, please.
Welcome to 1945. The USPS lost its monopoly sixty years ago. If you really think that sending regular mail by FedEx sends you to jail, then why is it right there on their price list? Also UPS, DHL, et cetera.
This is a commonly held belief, and is generally false. It is well known that in most companies fewer than 10% of the voting shareholders actually vote; it is not at all uncommon for someone to achieve control stakes on something as slim as 5% of the outstanding shares. In the case of individual shareholders which do vote, it is typical that they are in contact via minutes and board meetings; a charismatic individual can frequently swing the opinions of a number of stake shareholders to their side, and just a few well-positioned individuals frequently make up at least five percent.
Microsoft, of course, is a special case, considering that Bill's stake guarantees him veto, and considering that Bill takes a very active interest in his company. Still, this is a rarity; the big-money history books are littered with the corpses of companies destroyed by competitors with single-digit control.
When a consumer is buying a plasma at Best Buy (for example), I don't think in fact they are buying a TV with a life of 20,000 hours. I think they have no idea that is the case, and as far as they are concerned that TV should last for years and years.
You haven't yet done the math, have you? Google gives seven different answers as to the average hour count an American watches TV daily, but since the mode is 4 hours, I'll run with that.
At four hours a day, those 20k hours will last you a hair under fourteen years. Add to that that a lamp is always underrated by hours to account for variance in filaments, contained gasses and so forth, and you're looking at someone which just isn't being disappointed.
Hell, it's more than two and a quarter years of straight viewing.
After all, people are used to the TV's they had before which did last perhaps ten years or so (that was the case for my last TV, even really a bit longer than ten years).
Yes, they are, which is why the television you're currently lambasting lasts 14. It's worth noting that studies show that television watching drops as salaries go up, so the chances are that the people buying these plasma televisions are watching substantially less than four hours a day, and can expect a life of two decades or more.
Really, before talking about how other consumers aren't thinking, you should try thinking yourself. Just because you don't see the flaw in your knee-jerk reaction to a number doesn't mean it isn't there.
That's quite a claim to make, given that he's held the two largest franchises in the MMO world and that one has failed and the other is in the process of failing, despite legions of fans so rabid that they'll watch Episode One half a dozen times, and despite literally tens of millions of dollars in investment capital being pumped down his personal drain day in, day out.
You want a smart guy in the MMO world? Look at the people who designed WoW, the original Evercrack, NWN, or things that are more than five years old. Look at games which succeed, whose fans aren't all constantly in complaint, whose releases are not burdened with design flaw after design flaw after design flaw. He wrote a list of painfully obvious rules? Good for him. Maybe he should read the lists his consumers have been trying to provide to him for years; he hasn't learned from any of his literally dozens of mistakes, and continues to make the same ones repeatedly with nearly every release he makes.
I genuinely don't understand how he continues to get work. He's the Kevin Costner of the gaming world.
A Family Guy game on the other hand, may score very high on the horizontal as well as high on the vertical due to a collector's edition version that comes with some of the same stuff the show's writers are on while writing, thereby revealing the game to be truly fun.
I get the impression you've never played a video game derived from a TV show before. When you're willing to use more meaningful descriptions than a cheesy attempt to graph importance based on two relatively minor characteristics of a game, let us know; there's a hell of a lot more to fun than quality of execution multiplied by how on television it's been.
Think I'm wrong? Try playing the Simpsons wrestling game; that show has more cultural clout than Family Guy ever will, the quality of execution of the game was stellar, and the game still sucks. Got a review that says otherwise? So do I, by the fistful; you still don't see the game flying off the shelves, be they for purchase or for rental. That's not because people forgot about it, and it's not because there was a lack of advertisement (in fact, that was one of the first games with a real television marketing campaign.) It's because the game isn't fun, because wrestling fans as a demographic aren't interested in any of the characters except occasionally Homer or Bart, and because the voice clips get extremely old extremely quickly. You could take a current successful wrestling game, skin it as The Simpsons, and it would still suck, even though the actual underlying game mechanics haven't changed.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe that their favorite cartoon is going to somehow magically translate into a great game. Don't get me wrong: I love Stewie as much as you do. I'm not coming down on Family Guy.
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Well, just because the bees happen to have a genetic mechanism to encourage hive behavior doesn't mean there aren't others, or in fact that such a thing is even required. You're trying too hard to map human desires and needs onto other biologies. Ants are too dumb to want things; their behavior is driven largely by lack of certain behaviors being adequately performed from their perspectives (very similar to the scratch an itch mechanism underlying some larger OSS projects, natch.)
There are many non-haploiding hiving creatures, such as termites, the Japanese, and arguably some forms of gopher and wren - there's even a reasonable argument for the clownfish, which build up coral reefs and sacrifice one so that the rest of the school can escape, and the sequoia, which are entire forests as single entities and which intentionally kill edge trees to keep other plants from crossing soil borders.
IANAEvolutionaryBiologist, but I suspect the primary reason that we see hiving occuring in tiny animals isn't about a particular biological mechanism at all, but rather the food requirements of a hive of things much larger. Transportation isn't cheap, and one of a hive's large vulnerabilities is that the population due to design cannot spread out to increase food available to the individual as do individual predators. As such, the hive is limited to the food sources available within an individual's travel. For this reason, one rarely sees a hive even near a desert border, because the half of the food region which is worthless means that area cannot sustain the hive even if the other half of the region is good. If one deals with a hive of larger creatures, that food cost spirals up stratospherically, which eventually pits the individual's needs directly against those of its hive; it's all well and good to ignore one's daughters in favor of one's sisters, but to ignore one's self in a setting due to food constraints means a significant portion of the population would be starving, meaning that a successful hive would be damned hard to create.
As far as the bond for sociality, many biologists believe that altruism and samaritanism are deeply hard-wired into us, but at the tribal scale instead of the species scale, which is one good argument for the prevalence of racism and other forms of us-vs-them. Preserve the tribe at the expense of other tribes. Fits very well into the worldview wherein one thinks of creatures as vehicles for genes to spread.
So, maybe it's not as cut and dried as you suggest.
You appear to not realize what salary means. Salary means you work however many hours you need to in order to get the job done, be that 20 or 60.
A salaried employee neither gets overtime nor gets docked for idle time. That's the nature of salary.
Uh, I'm sorry, Mars Base, your signal is breaking up.
The GameBoy went through three black and white iterations, two color iterations and three SNES console iterations before the GBA was released. It faced competition from the Jaguar, Lynx, Game Gear, Nomad, NeoGeo Pocket, NeoGeo Pocket Color, WonderSwan/WS Color/WS Crystal, TurboExpress, Game.Com (tiger electronics, not a web site,) NEC TurboExpress, GamePark/GamePark32, etc. This is the least competition in the handheld market Nintendo has ever had.
The GBA was released in early 2001, which if you check is more than four and a half years ago. Since then it has gone through only one refactoring, which allowed a backlit screen and a rechargable battery. This is the least alteration Nintendo has made to any console system they have ever made in four and a half years.
Nintendo has competition from many other sources than Sony at the moment, such as Gizmodo, Zodiac, Tiger again, Bandai again, and now Creative. The PSP is certainly their largest competitor, but with a brief look at Asian sales rates outside of Japan, you'll quickly realize that Sony isn't the largest of Nintendo's competition by much; the Koreans have a shocking number of consoles, considering how rarely we hear about them in the US. Furthermore, cellular phones are becoming a significant threat; Civilization 3 has been ported to a cell phone in Korea, for example. Yes, Civilization 3. No, I'm not joking.
And, well, okay, I can't even bring myself to joke that the N-Gage matters.
Zero motivation to improve? The PSP is not the first console to hold any real technical threat for Nintendo. The DMG maintained black and white graphics and a lack of rechargable battery, radio/tv tuning or other features prominent in the Atari and Sega machines of the day. Don't mistake stolid behavior for lack of motivation; Nintendo was keeping their prices down and the prices of batteries down for kids.
They did the right thing, and as a result, they won the last five generations of portable gaming hardware with three systems.
Now, you want us to believe that a system from early '01 and one from late 1998 are less than three years old, that a market they've held since 1983 with the game and watch was theirs from the early 90s because of the gameboy (when the gameboy is from the 80s,) and that the least developmental period in the history of any of their console lines is their development ramping up in response to the least competition they've ever had?
Get a history book. Mod parent subterranean.
This is entirely a matter of perspective. By and on the whole the person which already replied to you is correct; I intend to provide contrast in the hopes that this can be made more visible.
In the most literal sense, Alsee is correct to point out that the game state includes literally everything of value to the game. So, the question is in effect tautological: if the history of the states of the board matters, then that history is part of the current state.
Another viewpoint which is popular is to answer that in terms of its reverse observation as cyclics: if the game cannot cycle, and if there is no chance, then the history of board states is the sole determinant of the current board state, and therefore in such a game an understanding of the history is effectively an understanding of the current state. Games where tokens are added with no mechanic for removal, such as pente, tic tac toe and connect-4 would fall well within these boundaries.
That said, I choose to answer your question from a different viewpoint, because I believe you're asking something else based on slightly flawed understanding of the game theory terms in play. This is a guess; I could be wrong about what you mean.
As I see it, what I suspect you're asking is whether current board states can be interfered with by how those board states were achieved. The answer to that question is a resounding no for every game, but a strong yes for agents. Remember please that the rules of the game are usually less important than the behavioral characteristics of the people playing the game. For example, Connect-4 solves to a second player's win, guaranteed; still, the way most people play, player 1 appears to have a large advantage for first play.
The game state is oftentimes more than just a board. By comparison, the game state for poker includes not only the cards on the table and in people's hands, but also the amount of money held by each player and in the pot, the size of the current raise, the check position, where any blinds are, whether wilds or special rules are in play, et cetera. Therefore, it really doesn't matter how we got to our current position: if I have cards a..e and you have cards f..j, if I have X money and you have Y money, and it's your turn to bet on such-and-such a raise, then there's no real variance based on how we played earlier in vantage or available opportunity.
That said, I chose poker carefully for this example because the notion of a card shark is prominent and easily associated with, and there are movies to which I can refer to give a sense of method. One common tactic for a poker shark is to lose for the first 45m-1h of a game, not horridly but measurably. This has two effects: one, the other players are (sometimes) fooled into thinking there's a mark on hand to be bled, and two, the player has a chance to inspect his/her opponent's tells.
There's a good example of this behavior in the Mel Gibson movie Maverick, in which the main character openly promises to lose for the first hour in order to gain access to a table. The proposition was in essence to pay for the privelege of playing, but what the character was up to was learning his opponent's poker faces so as to better read them, and to ditch any appearance he might have had of skill in order to sweeten that speculative big pot. There are similar examples where players who inspected early chess algorithms made bad moves to poison the algorithm's impression of the player, leading the algorithm to respond wrongly thereafter.
So in the technical sense, if it affects the current game it's not history, it's part of the game state, so no. In the literal sense, the history is the creator of the state, so yes. In the realistic sense, the game state no, but the players yes, oftentimes very importantly so.
Ok, the position evaluation needs Benson's algorithm to identify unconditionally alive stones, for which 100,000 positions per second is a realistic pace.
No, it doesn't. Ply trees are only concerned with boards which are won, boards which are lost, and the distance to either. Because a solution is a complete expansion, one need not be concerned with the actual score during evaluation; only with finding all achievable states and state loops. The hell with scoring the tree; the building of the tree is the difficult part, and the scoring of the board - which you correctly point out is expensive - need not be considered during the tree solution.
Once the tree and loops are identified, then one can begin evaluating the solution with something like Benson's. Still, that's not nessecary for a solution; a solution just means you know every possible consequence, not that you have an opiunion on which consequences are superior. (This is a critical distinction when one gets into games where the needs of the two players are not matched, where there are multiple possible game states, or when information is imperfect.)
To solve the game simply construct the tree. Don't worry about scoring the boards; just know what boards are reachable.
The article is basically misled. Yes, you can apply searching techniques to a larger board, and no, there isn't a practical limit to board size for searching techniques.
The issue here is the positively spectacular rate at which Go ply trees expand. Even in the case of a go game in which no stones are taken by move 5 - three by player A and two by player B, only five stones on the board - there are already 5,962,870,725,840 distinct possible boards (well, almost - about 0.001% aren't legal possibilities, but I don't feel like doing the underlying math.)
The problem here is that modern machines crap out on the solution space without reduction techniques around move 6, and even with reduction techniques around move 20. Furthermore, moves in Go are smaller than they are in Chess - one chess move is far more significant on average than one Go move. As a result, those 20 moves turn out to not be very far looked ahead at all.
They could in fact solve 9*9; it'd just take a shocking amount of processor time. You're well into the multiple decades with a good advanced PVS or MTD(f) implementation on a high-end home machine. 9*9 might be tractable with a Seti@HOME sized effort, given modern computing, but single or small-cluster setups are just totally outclassed by the massive size of a Go board's move space.
You're trying to apply too much emotional content here. In the context of solving a game, the notion of scoring applies to exactly one thing: a board's proximity to a winning or losing state, as measured by the risk and reward ratio between possible end states over the gamut of the ply tree.
That has nothing to do with the reason computer programs are still bad go players. The reason that computer go players suck is that the ply tree for Go is awesomely large, and that short of currently-unknown geometric attacks on the board, the only way to reduce the size of the ply tree short of an incomplete principal variation search is to do simple reflections and rotations, which is woefully inadequate. Furthermore, the number of potential go states following any initial or leader state prevents strong knowledge of the strength of a leading position, and the number of closure states is fantastically large, so closure systems like chess' and draughts' dictionary play isn't realistic.
There are a number of approaches which are showing new promise on the front of computer go; I have a neural network playing at what I estimate to be about 8 kyu against american professional Dan. Most active go playters will scoff and insist that's impossible, as the best known computer go players play at 1 dan 1 kyu and because I'm a total nobody. What's really going on is that I know what the guy behind Negascout did, and I applied it to Go, and it works really well.
Oh, and I'm not the first one to do it. Things are about to change.
Anyway, computers have been able to defeat weak amateurs (Try learning the rules
I play at one dan six, and at 9 kyu against american professional rank, meaning I probably play at around 8 kyu against Japanese professional rank. Don't tell me to learn the rules until you know whether I'm familiar with the game, please. I'm a professional game developer. I'm not speaking out of ignorance of either the game or the math underlying attacking a game. Your tone is unwarranted and insulting.
When you're dealing with a ply tree, it's relatively straightforward: the score is positive infinity if the board wins, negative infinity if the board loses, 0 if no path to a win is possible (tie boards or unknown boards,) and +-inf +-epsilon/ply for any board whose path towards a solution/solutions are known.
How do you know what a move is worth without knowing its effect?
Uh, when you're solving a game, there's no such thing as a move. You consider only board states, not the moves which lead to them, except in determining in which order to evaluate states. In this way it's trivial to understand how the value of a board in an infinite cycle between two paired positions - say, two kings moving back and forth between their same two cells each turn on a chess board - have up to four board scores through which they oscillate (unless there's a terminate-at-N-moves rule like in chess, but whatever.)
The only true way to "solve" is not to consider all game states, but to consider all possible paths
Game theory 101: the board states are the only thing there is. There are no "paths" - there is no difference between a board which has had a cyclic move applied to it ten thousand times than one which hasn't gone through them at all.
Solve has a very specific mathematical definition here - that the perfect response is known for every move. For games of no chance and perfect information such as go, chess and so forth, the traditional way to handle this is to create the entire move ply tree and then follow through the paths of least risk. When that tree is completed, you know for every possible board state every possible result of every move, and therefore know what exactly the best move is.
In this way you can find out that some games are balanced (tic tac toe, for example, is always a tie with perfect play with both sides) whereas other games are unbalanced (with perfect play by both sides, the second player will always win at connect-4; there is nothing player 1 can do.)
The reason chess remains unsolved is that its solution tree is so preposterously huge that even by modern computing standards it's just an absurd thing to want to attack, even given twenty years and positing 20 years' hardware development.
By the way, what I described above is not the only way to sove a game; if you'd like to find out how the branch of mathematics called Game Theory works, I recommend the primers "The Compleat Strategyst" (yes, it's spelled like that) and "Game Theory: a Nontechnical Introduction."
Common sense as what you're saying may seem, John von Neumann proved you quite wrong in the early 50s. I suggest you read up before challenging these terms; they're very well defined.
(note: the board never gets completely full, game stops before, when no more territory can be made, and playing into enemy territory would be suicide inviting a pass from the opponent while the invasion stones still being dead, increasing the enemies points.)
Er, yes, I know how Go works, and that's what I was referring to when mentioning that I was counting impossible boards. The number I quoted is the mathematically-derived high end cap on possible board definitions as a simple string of radix-3 digits. Observing that you can reduce the solution space here does you no good: you're only making my job easier.
Now take those 847,288,609,443 possible states, and consider all the sequences through which you can travel
That's a giant waste of time. Watching the ko cycle doesn't change the board, and since Go is scored not on held piece count but rather difference in held piece counts, the scores aren't changing either. It really doesn't matter how you got to a board - if you play squares a,b,c,d,e,f in order then the next game you play f,a,b,e,c,d, nothing has changed; your opportunities are still exactly the same.
because you can't just look at a position and "evaluate it" without knowing the "future" it holds
A 5x5 go board has only 847,288,609,443 possible game states, even including impossible boards. Assuming the relatively tame pace of scoring 100,000 boards per second towards completion, which on a board of that size is trivial, this solution takes a simple brute-force time of 98 days. That solution space can be cut down by almost two orders of magnitude with simple reflection and rotation tricks, implying a realtime tree search space of about a day and a half.
Given that my full board scorer moves faster than that, and given that the university probably has more than one PC to work with, I wonder how it is that anyone can justify this as something larger than a publicity stunt, especially given that none of go's emergent structures even fit onto a 5x5 board.
This is horseshit, in short. Mod story down.
Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within and World of Warcraft for character design? Sure, maybe if they're talking about visual design only.
Um, yes, that's what the phrase character design means.
Not to mention a dramatic reduction in the risk to human life...
The idea that all die-hard OO fanatics would do the same thing is absurd. Yes, making a member method (or more desirably the stream operators) for serialization is desirable. However, one could just as easily use a generic serializer like Boost::Serialize(), or a database, or SQLite, or a traditional set of structs, or a byte stream, or feed something to bzip, or or or or or...
Don't choose technique by dogma. Choose technique to suit the current project's need. As the commercial said, "anything else would be uncivilized."
Whoa, there, calm down. It's just a typo in the HTML default template. The property border-collapse is quite real, and in fact gecko, safari and opera render it just fine. The problem is just that the property value should be collapse, not collapsed.
Go dig up the HTML template, remove the 'd', and presto, it's fixed forever. It's annoying and embarrassing that they'd make a mistake like this, but you're seeing conspiracy where lies only stupidity. Do note that patching VS.Net fixes this automagically; maybe you should patch more often (tools menu.)
The canonical example is the public utility system or the mail system, though in fact there are many examples, especially revolving around community telecommunications infrastructure, giant industry like satellite launching, et cetera.
The typical situation in which the best solution is a monopoly is when the infrastructure required to deploy is orders of magnitude larger than the value of what's being transmitted. The government doesn't want five different sets of water pipes being run by five different companies. In order to get service out to the weird rural areas, the government chooses a company which seems like it can do the job, and grants them a monopoly in exchange for laying pipe out at least as far as west bumblefuck.
There are other examples, but I'm bored. That'll do.
Admoinitions are hardly an attack. Pull the other one.
Microsoft is not a natural monopoly either, r even a monopoly, because there are other operating systems on the market.
You're on Mars. Look up what a natural monopoly is, since my explanation doesn't seem to have fazed you. It has nothing to do with the presence of competition. It has to do with under which situations the monopoly was created.
And before you play the gear-changing "that's not what I meant" game again, it's a monopoly under US law.
If you can give me an example of logistics leading to natural monopolies, that would be much appreciated.
UPS, then FedEx, then DHL. WalMart. University of Phoenix Online. Arguably EA. Ford. Heinz. Dehlmann. Stanley Tools. Winchester Rifles. Ben Franklin's Pony Express. Dennison. Georgia Pacific, then Boise Cascade. Western Union.
Did you bother trying to come up with one? I could go on like that all day.
Just because something can't exist doesn't mean the term shouldn't exist.
In economics, it most certainly does. Not everything can brook Platonic ideals, and economics has a massive vested interest in keeping away from pure academic concerns.
Nonetheless, it is not "patently ridiculous" to maintain that with certain perspectives there is no such thing as a natural monopoly.
Well, sure, unless you know what one is. The only reason you believe a natural monopoly cannot exist is that you're spending as much effort as you can to redefine the term in order to prove that in fact such a thing cannot exist. Unfortunately for you, every macro textbook I've ever seen gives a bullet list of at least 20 well known natural monopolies.
No amount of handwavery about that something isn't patently ridiculous changes the blatant falsehood that you're trying to defend. Try to play eschatalogical games all you want; I don't care. I've heard of Microsoft. They clearly exist.
It does depend on perspective.
The definition of natural monopoly depends no more on perspective than does the definition of addition.
Technically, the baby bells might be natural monopolies in their domains, but this is missing the point.
It never fails to amaze me how often people will set up totally useless arguments, then point out how far from germane they are, and think they've then somehow made a cogent argument.
Microsoft might be a dominant player in the OS market for PCs, but then people don't have to buy PCs.
I fail to see why you said this at all. This has no bearing on the definition of a natural monopoly, nor does what could happen, nor do people's other options, nor do people's requirements. This is cut, dry, and simple.
You may attempt to hang as many connotations, emotional arguments, near-misses, speculations, or whatever else you want to on this point. However, economics is not like history, which is fungible; rather, it's like mathematics, which is concrete. The distinction is crystal clear and very simple.
Finally, if I have an opinion, and I want to say it, I will, not because I'm absolutely sure it's correct, but to see what others think of it.
That's a cute little catch phrase you've got there, to shore up your own belief in your open-mindedness; still, take a look at how you reacted to me, when I was not being particularly rude, in about a month when you've settled down and stopped being so defensive. The fact of the matter is that I came in and said "actually, that phrase means something quite different," and you decided to try to shore yourself up with personal attacks and nonsense straw men. (Think you didn't attack me personally?
Actually, Microsoft has done many things well on its first attempt, including its first implementation of C++ after the ISO standard was released (check your dates: VC6 predates C++,) the design of the .NET CLR and common libraries, the design of COM (yeah yeah, holy war, but for its day it was kickass,) the mouse (did you forget who popularized the thing?) and a variety of ergonomic input peripherals, especially keyboards and joysticks.
Furthermore, though the X-Box itself is a pile, X-Box Live is nothing short of a miracle.
Do it as quickly as possible and put effort in where it can be seen. This is not what I would expect when it comes to a commercial product, and only works for proof on concepts.
I would like to know how exactly you justify suggesting that the business practices of by far and away the world's largest software producer over the last 20 years have not worked.
I don't think this natural monopoly thing exists. It sounds like you're trying to say a natural monopoly is a good thing cuz its natural.
You should not attempt to read emotional content into economics terms. Yes, this natural monopoly thing exists, and Microsoft is one.
A natural monopoly arose on its own, such as was the case with Bell Telephone, General Motors, and your buddy Microsoft.
By contrast, an unnatural monopoly is one created by an outside entity, typically government. These are usually created either in cases where a monopoly provides a significant advantage in efficiency - especially when preventing recreating expensive infrastructure such as with utilities; however, there are a good many cases of these being created for nepotism or in simple stupidity.
And nature is good, we all know that. Its all BS.
Nobody said that but you. Don't make things up to talk about how awful they are.
The next time a bunch of people are using terminology you don't understand, try looking it up before claiming it doesn't exist, thanks.
1) Argumentum ad hominem means "argument against the person." Given that a corporation is not a person, one cannot apply argumentum ad hominem to the corporation, even if a fallacious argument is based on the attack of character. In this case, the appropriate fallacy is Appeal to Motive, though the cases can be made for Appeal to Ridicule, Appeal to Spite, Misleading vividness or Poisoning the Well.
2) No, a public postal service is not a natural monopoly. The USPS was once an unnatural monopoly - a monopoly granted by the government (it no longer is.) Microsoft is a natural monopoly, ie a monopoly which arose on its own, rather than one which was created to suit a task.
3) Logistics is a field; it cannot be or not be a monopoly. However, contrary to the impression you give, logistics does not lead to unnatural monopolies; it leads to natural monopolies by providing a more efficient workforce. You're just wrong.
4) Arguably nothing. Much like logistics, industry is not a company, and therefore the word monopoly simply does not apply to it. However, your implication that an industrial firm cannot be a natural monopoly is patently ridiculous. Were that true, the term would not exist. It doesn't depend on how you define an industry at all: either the monopoly arose on its own (natural; microsoft, bell, general motors) or was granted by an outside power such as government (USPS, utilities.)
Just because you don't understand the distinction does not empower you to comment upon its nonextance. You should take an economics course before telling people that an economics term never applies to any company. That's just boneheaded.
Oh, so sorry. Nice try, though.
A natural monopoly is when a monopoly has arisen on its own through typical business practices. This is especially common where design costs are high and production costs are low, hence the extreme monopolistic tendencies of software.
An unnatural monopoly is a monopoly created specifically to suit a purpose. Most frequently, when a monopoly can serve the public interest more effectively than a diversified business group, then an unnatural monopoly is created by government. Your utility examples are in fact quite backwards.
Microsoft is unethical. They are immoral. Their business practices are appalling, their security record horrific, their legal background stultifying.
This is not justification for calling their monopoly unnatural. It arose pure and simple through their own efforts. The government did not grant a monopoly to microsoft. Even if it's grotesque, that monopoly is natural, even though you want to apply the meaner word.
Sit down until you take a macroeconomics class, please.
Welcome to 1945. The USPS lost its monopoly sixty years ago. If you really think that sending regular mail by FedEx sends you to jail, then why is it right there on their price list? Also UPS, DHL, et cetera.
This is a commonly held belief, and is generally false. It is well known that in most companies fewer than 10% of the voting shareholders actually vote; it is not at all uncommon for someone to achieve control stakes on something as slim as 5% of the outstanding shares. In the case of individual shareholders which do vote, it is typical that they are in contact via minutes and board meetings; a charismatic individual can frequently swing the opinions of a number of stake shareholders to their side, and just a few well-positioned individuals frequently make up at least five percent.
Microsoft, of course, is a special case, considering that Bill's stake guarantees him veto, and considering that Bill takes a very active interest in his company. Still, this is a rarity; the big-money history books are littered with the corpses of companies destroyed by competitors with single-digit control.
Oy.
When a consumer is buying a plasma at Best Buy (for example), I don't think in fact they are buying a TV with a life of 20,000 hours. I think they have no idea that is the case, and as far as they are concerned that TV should last for years and years.
You haven't yet done the math, have you? Google gives seven different answers as to the average hour count an American watches TV daily, but since the mode is 4 hours, I'll run with that.
At four hours a day, those 20k hours will last you a hair under fourteen years. Add to that that a lamp is always underrated by hours to account for variance in filaments, contained gasses and so forth, and you're looking at someone which just isn't being disappointed.
Hell, it's more than two and a quarter years of straight viewing.
After all, people are used to the TV's they had before which did last perhaps ten years or so (that was the case for my last TV, even really a bit longer than ten years).
Yes, they are, which is why the television you're currently lambasting lasts 14. It's worth noting that studies show that television watching drops as salaries go up, so the chances are that the people buying these plasma televisions are watching substantially less than four hours a day, and can expect a life of two decades or more.
Really, before talking about how other consumers aren't thinking, you should try thinking yourself. Just because you don't see the flaw in your knee-jerk reaction to a number doesn't mean it isn't there.
+5 insightful, indeed. Mod parent down.
Do distinguish please between Not Applicable and Not Available.
That's quite a claim to make, given that he's held the two largest franchises in the MMO world and that one has failed and the other is in the process of failing, despite legions of fans so rabid that they'll watch Episode One half a dozen times, and despite literally tens of millions of dollars in investment capital being pumped down his personal drain day in, day out.
You want a smart guy in the MMO world? Look at the people who designed WoW, the original Evercrack, NWN, or things that are more than five years old. Look at games which succeed, whose fans aren't all constantly in complaint, whose releases are not burdened with design flaw after design flaw after design flaw. He wrote a list of painfully obvious rules? Good for him. Maybe he should read the lists his consumers have been trying to provide to him for years; he hasn't learned from any of his literally dozens of mistakes, and continues to make the same ones repeatedly with nearly every release he makes.
I genuinely don't understand how he continues to get work. He's the Kevin Costner of the gaming world.
A Family Guy game on the other hand, may score very high on the horizontal as well as high on the vertical due to a collector's edition version that comes with some of the same stuff the show's writers are on while writing, thereby revealing the game to be truly fun.
I get the impression you've never played a video game derived from a TV show before. When you're willing to use more meaningful descriptions than a cheesy attempt to graph importance based on two relatively minor characteristics of a game, let us know; there's a hell of a lot more to fun than quality of execution multiplied by how on television it's been.
Think I'm wrong? Try playing the Simpsons wrestling game; that show has more cultural clout than Family Guy ever will, the quality of execution of the game was stellar, and the game still sucks. Got a review that says otherwise? So do I, by the fistful; you still don't see the game flying off the shelves, be they for purchase or for rental. That's not because people forgot about it, and it's not because there was a lack of advertisement (in fact, that was one of the first games with a real television marketing campaign.) It's because the game isn't fun, because wrestling fans as a demographic aren't interested in any of the characters except occasionally Homer or Bart, and because the voice clips get extremely old extremely quickly. You could take a current successful wrestling game, skin it as The Simpsons, and it would still suck, even though the actual underlying game mechanics haven't changed.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe that their favorite cartoon is going to somehow magically translate into a great game. Don't get me wrong: I love Stewie as much as you do. I'm not coming down on Family Guy.
There just isn't a game there.