what runs in a solar-powered calculator? Is there even a microprocessor?
I'd guess it has a very simple microcontroller.
Also, the Palm only draws 3 volts
And the static electricity that gathers as you shuffle your feet on the carpet can be many thousands of volts. My point being that it's not the voltage, nor even the current, that matters. What matters is the product of the two: power (watts). You could get a million volts out of a single AA battery. Or you could get a million amps. (Theoretically.;) But you can't get both.
Or better yet a DSP. I'd like to see a GHz Pentium 3 that can smoke a DSP a quarter the clock speed. Obviously they're best at what they do, but it sounds like this is exactly what DSPs do best.
I know this is off-topic, but I just thought I'd mention it. I just started playing with POV-Ray this summer, and I've discovered that it's a lot of fun! For those that don't know, POV-Ray is a freeware raytracer that's been around for years and years. This is in my opinion a truly incredible piece of free software. Here's why I think I love it so much: everything is programmed! It has a built-in macro scripting language. This is a Very Cool Thing. For the average Joe this is probably a major drawback, as GUI-oriented modelling makes many things far easier. Also, POV is a raytracer, which is generally not fast enough to render long animations (most people use scanline renderers, I believe). Anyway. I have no artistic talent. I can't draw to save my life. But I can (arguably;) write code, and thanks to that, I can make beautiful pictures.
For those that want it, there's a popular (shareware? I've never used it) graphical system for Windows called Moray. It apparently allows you to graphically setup your scene, and it generates the POV source for you to tweak as you see fit.
I've started working on entries for the Internet Ray Tracing Competition, it's been a lot of fun. The current topic is "Fantasy and Mystic", and is due August 31st. Some of the work done is simply *incredible* (check out Gilles Tran, freaking awesome). Come on you Fantasy and Sci Fi folks, you'll love it. (And you're not required to use POV-Ray for the IRTC, btw, but it's sponsored by the great folks who bring us POV.) Go browse the IRTC galleries, some of the winners are truly stunning.
And lastly, for those interested, here's my first submission to the IRTC contest (topic: "Insects and Spiders"), it's called Pond Life
Seriously! Everybody go check it out! No, it's not as easy as lots of other packages. But I must say this is the most fulfilling programming I have ever done. (Probably because my robots don't work yet.;)
I don't think, when referring to a "laser dazzler," I would use the term "weapon" in the same sentence. A bright flashlight is not a weapon. It's more along the lines of a spike strip for people. But not a weapon.. Anyway, that's just my opinion..
I'd have to agree with you on that. It's good to know I'm not the only one that thinks the whole mindpixel thing is just plain silly. (Well, whether or not you think that, I do.;) I respect the people who run it for putting their money/time where their mouth is. But it just doesn't seem like a worthwhile endeaver to me. I have the same feeling about Cyc. It's just not the right approach at all...
I thought I was also pretty clear about the fact that I'm a newbie at this, and the fact that I wasn't talking about the exact process Pixar uses. (Note the various "I assume"s, etc.) Whether they use a scanline renderer or not makes no difference whatsoever to what I was saying. My point remains, and I think all but the nitpickers saw it. In fact you saw it too, since your last couple of sentences are exactly what I was talking about.
Or try something like this. As the Pixar dood mentioned, even if the card could *render* it in realtime, there's a whole lot more than just rendering. That pic there (my first, so don't expect much;) takes several times longer just to PARSE than it does to render. And it's absolute crap compared to the crazy stuff Pixar does.
However, I'd say we ARE about advanced enough to do crap like this in realtime...;) (No goat links, I swear!!)
However, there is some hope... I remember reading in a great book about 3D games (Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming) that raytrace-quality realtime games would be (according to the author's math) about 20 years away. Interestingly, that's exactly what the Pixar guy predicted, and that book was printed in 1996. My observations: today, Pixar does far more than simple raytracing. It's radiosity up the wazoo, for example (I assume;). So to me, this suggests that ~20 years from when the book was published, we will be able to have realtime raytracing of 1996 quality. Still not too shabby. BUT. There are gazillions of optimizations you can make in realtime games that you can't make in raytracing. Here's how I see it: We can improve the algorithms a few powers of ten, efficiency-wise. (Don't say we can't, you'd be very wrong.) We can speed up our processors a few powers of ten. I think we're getting there faster than these guys are suggesting, just as long as we don't aim for the moving target of Today's Pixar Production$. (As he points out, there will never be a day when the realtime graphics are as good as the prerendered ones, simply because the big companies have the cash to throw at it to make it look better.) Anyawy. Sorry this was so long. Great stuff ahead, though.:)
While I think your devotion to Searle's (in my opinion horribly naive and simplistic) babblings is unfounded, I won't say any more on the subject here. My comment is entirely unrelated to Artificial Intelligence (or is it? hm..). I have one thing to say to you: You have much to learn in the ways of people. I myself freely admit to knowing nothing about people. In a conversational setting I rarely speak, mostly because I just don't know what to say or how to act around people. But one thing I know for sure: your behaviour is unacceptable. You will never be taken seriously as long as you act as childish as you did here. Sorry to be so blunt, but it just pisses me off when we lower ourselves that far. Is it impossible for us to have an intelligent conversation? There was a time when I was proud to call myself a member of the Slashdot community. That day has long past, thanks to the likes of you.
It is simply not OK to say "Bzzzzt!" to someone in any serious conversation. In fact it is extremely rude, and serves only to make you look too ignorant and arrogant to function as a member of society. This sort of behaviour from such supposedly "mature" or "intelligent" people as the Slashdot crowd sickens me. Let's stop being so childish and grow up, shall we?
(And sorry to all if this sounded like a "Slashdot sucks now" rant or something, I just had to speak my mind there. Thanks.)
I'm still bitter about last year's competition. I made a little Java applet which cranked out fullscreen IFS fractal images of a grassy patch of land covered in rosebushes (you'd never see the same rosebush twice - or blade of grass, for that matter). It was going to be animated, with each branch of each tree bending in the wind, but I had to cut it down as the deadline fast approached. Submitted it on time. And they never judged it, or even put it on the main list. Yeah, I was a little mad.
Did this story remind anyone else of the Hacker Hellstorm from Canadian Bacon? (Great movie.) I'm sure there's some irony or something, but I'm too lazy and tired to think about it.
You are certainly not the only one, my friend. I've been saying this for the longest time. There have been those that said watching autonomous robots stumble around in the arena looking for each other would be dull. To them I say, only if they're designed badly. And bad design is something that is everywhere. But I firmly believe that it could be done. Here's my suggestion to anyone who wants to earn my respect building a battle *BOT*: make it fully autonomous, but use your remote control for a "coach". Use it to tell your robot "Whoa, buddy, wrong way", or "WATCH OUT, HE'S COMING RIGHT AT YOU!" Leave the rest up to him (or her;).
I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I am completely convinced that it could work out. The idea is to put a semi-autonomous (fully autonomous, but with optional "coaching" from a human) into the official BattleBots arena - in other words, pitting it against human drivers.
Laugh if you want, but I could truly feel proud of myself if I had built a ROBOT (not some RC car with a hammer on the end) that could get in just one good hit on its enemy, even if it got smashed to bits immediately after. But it could, with lots of work, be much more successful than that. (Have you seen the humans driving their "bots"? Many times it's like they've never driven it in their life. How often do the hammer ones ever actually *make contact*? Darn near never. Now THAT is boring, in my opinion.)
I think it can be done. No - I KNOW it can be done. I may even try and do it. I'm not sure I can justify shelling out $thousands just to get ripped to pieces (and they all do eventually).
[Blatant plug - Join the Indiana University Robotics Club!!!]
At last, someone who agrees with me! Geez I hate that when people refer to things like Battlebots as "robots". I'd actually like to build a Battlebot one day. But it will be fully autonomous (probably with a remote control to help "coach" it). That's the only way I could go on that show and retain any of my dignity.. What do you think? I say we start entering autonomous Battlebots into the competition. Give these pansies a run for their money. Sure, the RCs will win at first. Heck they'll probably kick our butts at first. But once we get the hang of it... a human simply can't compete. (Plus we wouldn't have to deal with the shame of going on national TV and calling our remote controlled car a "robot".)
Sounds like something I was doing...
on
Anticryptography
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· Score: 1
This reminds me of something I was working on a while back: Lossy compression for text files! I'm all about efficiency. And just think of how efficient it'd be if we increased the redundancy and Huffman encoded our text!
First of all, didn't we just see this recently? I could be wrong, maybe it was some other news source.. Too lazy to go search for it.
But come on folks. Did you look at the thing? It's really not all that impressive. Sure, it's kinda cool. But impressive in any way? Not really. They mention all the nice techniques they use to miniaturize the electronics, and yet after all that work it has nothing but one single temperature sensor?
I am working on an extremely simple, very tiny robot myself. Very similar to this one in fact. I have access to none of the expensive things these guys do. In fact it will probably cost me about $20 total. Granted, it will probably be slightly larger. But it will also do more.
I don't mean to be so negative.. And in fact my response isn't so much to the article or the guys doing the work on the robot, rather than to the comments I've seen on Slashdot. Come on, folks. A machine that can barely climb over a dime on a level table is going to have a bit of trouble traversing even the smoothest parts of Mars. Even using them for surveilance would be silly. (Although this is actually one thing I'm thinking of playing with, simply for fun. Have it seek out audio in the range of human speech, and relay back what it hears. <evil laugh>)
The hardware is really not all that impressive. I have beside me two pager motors, which I'm using as the main drive system of my own tiny robot. They are roughly half an inch long, and about as thick as a pencil. Now align them in parallel, one with the shaft facing left and the other with its shaft facing right. Attach them to some small "tank treads" and you're in business. A drive system in about 1/2" square. The device they show doesn't even seem to need a microcontroller, it could be built to do the same with analog electronics. My mini robot has a "brain" of an 8-pin microcontroller, which has 6 I/O pins, leaving me plenty of room for expansion (light sensors, bump sensors..). Certainly it will get larger than the device shown. But not by very much, and its functionality would be superior (in this incarnation, at least). Sure, they have plenty of work left to do. I just think that we're all getting a little too ecstatic about something that's very very simple...
Shameless plug: Go to Indiana University? Join the IU Robotics Club! We're just getting started up.
that would be so lame. On the one hand, we have people turning scrap metal and garbage into working mechanical beasts that they bring to life to do their bidding. And on the other hand... we have a bunch of computer geeks, whose whole world exists on a hard drive somewhere. What's the absolute most exciting ending the show could have? They.... make a computer system work. Hoooo boy...
Now robotics... There's something cool. A mixture of computing and mechanics. The software and the hardware, the virtual and the real, all blending together into one. You may think it's cool to make a few characters appear on your 31337 console, but that just can't come close to making a thinking machine that exists in reality, and that can directly have an impact on the real world. I say make a cross between Junkyard Wars and Battlebots, and have two teams with a bunch of robot parts, that have to build robots to do some task! WHOOO!!! (And none of this lame Battlebots crap. I don't care how well you make it, a machine that you completely control with remote controls is just lame. That's no "robot", that's a remote controlled car. WHERE IS THE REAL CHALLENGE?!?! WHERE ARE THE ROBOTS!?)
The new Junkyard Wars episodes stink. I mean yeah, it's still a cool show, but it's just not what it used to be. I miss the silly Brits, they cracked me up. But yunno... maybe it's just me, but I swear the type of things they do on the show have changed since they got the new host and stuff. I mean.. one of the last episodes the Scrapheap Challenge did was drag racing. And what's the first Junkyard Wars thing? Drag racing. They also did all-terrain vehicles, which Scrapheap Challenge did.. and.. just tons of them. They're all the same sorts of things. Maybe it's just my perception, and the fact that I miss the old show, but it really seems like they've dumbed it down to suit us redneck Americans or something. I dunno... I just wish they'd give me my Scrapheap Challenge... Looking forward to next week's episode....
Brits are cool. They're hilarious. "Two Fat Ladies" on the Food Network rules! "And I'll put it into this rrrrravishing little blender...." You know what pisses me off? The British guy from Junkyard Wars has been replaced by some bloody idiot from the States! DANGIT... I liked the old guy. But what really gets me is that all the teams now are from the States. Now I'm American, myself, but... geez. It's just not the same anymore. Where's the old show, the way it was? Now it's just a bunch of rednecks throwing around stupid phrases and "raising the roof" and all sorts of other retarded stuff that makes me almost embarrassed to be from here.
And I mean come on... Our presidential debate, and nobody is even allowed to address their opponent. "Debate" my red American butt. Look at the Brits in parliament! If they have something to say, they bloody stand up and speak their mind! It's great to watch, anyone who hasn't is really missing out. Dubya says some idiotic thing, and we all try and play along, "He's not REALLY a moron... Seriously... No, he really got to where he was on his own merits, HONESTLY.. Give him a chance.. YES HE DOES have a mandate...." Over there, you make an idiot of yourself and the whole place erupts in laughter, and you have to actually *defend* yourself and your ideas. Hey, the Brits may be a bunch of pansies, but GEEZ, what have we become?! In the words of.. that guy, in.. that movie... "I weep for the future."
Hey, I'm proud of my country. But DAGNABBIT, BRING BACK THE BRITS on Junkyard Wars! Geez!
Ok, that's kinda out of my system now.. Um.. What were we talking about? AI? Um.. Well the site is Slashdat (the past-tense of the verb "to Slashdot", of course) but is it just the same trailer they had in the theaters months ago? It didn't show jack squat about the movie.. Oh well. I'm sure I'll see it anyway.
And what's this "I wish I could see this thing.. I'm really excited about the movie," Taco? What a hypocrite. Get a life already!
Hmm... "Get a life.." The irony....
Actually Feynman probably started the whole thing off with his famous talk given in 1959. And of course there was Von Neumann in the 40s. Anyhoo. It's cool reading all this stuff from way before I was even born, about crazy stuff we've barely even tried to grapple with yet...:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess it has a very simple microcontroller.
Also, the Palm only draws 3 volts
And the static electricity that gathers as you shuffle your feet on the carpet can be many thousands of volts. My point being that it's not the voltage, nor even the current, that matters. What matters is the product of the two: power (watts). You could get a million volts out of a single AA battery. Or you could get a million amps. (Theoretically. ;) But you can't get both.
Or better yet a DSP. I'd like to see a GHz Pentium 3 that can smoke a DSP a quarter the clock speed. Obviously they're best at what they do, but it sounds like this is exactly what DSPs do best.
With his wee beady eyes..
For those that want it, there's a popular (shareware? I've never used it) graphical system for Windows called Moray. It apparently allows you to graphically setup your scene, and it generates the POV source for you to tweak as you see fit.
I've started working on entries for the Internet Ray Tracing Competition, it's been a lot of fun. The current topic is "Fantasy and Mystic", and is due August 31st. Some of the work done is simply *incredible* (check out Gilles Tran, freaking awesome). Come on you Fantasy and Sci Fi folks, you'll love it. (And you're not required to use POV-Ray for the IRTC, btw, but it's sponsored by the great folks who bring us POV.) Go browse the IRTC galleries, some of the winners are truly stunning.
And lastly, for those interested, here's my first submission to the IRTC contest (topic: "Insects and Spiders"), it's called Pond Life
Seriously! Everybody go check it out! No, it's not as easy as lots of other packages. But I must say this is the most fulfilling programming I have ever done. (Probably because my robots don't work yet. ;)
I don't think, when referring to a "laser dazzler," I would use the term "weapon" in the same sentence. A bright flashlight is not a weapon. It's more along the lines of a spike strip for people. But not a weapon.. Anyway, that's just my opinion..
I'd have to agree with you on that. It's good to know I'm not the only one that thinks the whole mindpixel thing is just plain silly. (Well, whether or not you think that, I do. ;) I respect the people who run it for putting their money/time where their mouth is. But it just doesn't seem like a worthwhile endeaver to me. I have the same feeling about Cyc. It's just not the right approach at all...
The irony. ;)
I thought I was also pretty clear about the fact that I'm a newbie at this, and the fact that I wasn't talking about the exact process Pixar uses. (Note the various "I assume"s, etc.) Whether they use a scanline renderer or not makes no difference whatsoever to what I was saying. My point remains, and I think all but the nitpickers saw it. In fact you saw it too, since your last couple of sentences are exactly what I was talking about.
However, I'd say we ARE about advanced enough to do crap like this in realtime... ;) (No goat links, I swear!!)
However, there is some hope... I remember reading in a great book about 3D games (Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming) that raytrace-quality realtime games would be (according to the author's math) about 20 years away. Interestingly, that's exactly what the Pixar guy predicted, and that book was printed in 1996. My observations: today, Pixar does far more than simple raytracing. It's radiosity up the wazoo, for example (I assume ;). So to me, this suggests that ~20 years from when the book was published, we will be able to have realtime raytracing of 1996 quality. Still not too shabby. BUT. There are gazillions of optimizations you can make in realtime games that you can't make in raytracing. Here's how I see it: We can improve the algorithms a few powers of ten, efficiency-wise. (Don't say we can't, you'd be very wrong.) We can speed up our processors a few powers of ten. I think we're getting there faster than these guys are suggesting, just as long as we don't aim for the moving target of Today's Pixar Production$. (As he points out, there will never be a day when the realtime graphics are as good as the prerendered ones, simply because the big companies have the cash to throw at it to make it look better.) Anyawy. Sorry this was so long. Great stuff ahead, though. :)
It is simply not OK to say "Bzzzzt!" to someone in any serious conversation. In fact it is extremely rude, and serves only to make you look too ignorant and arrogant to function as a member of society. This sort of behaviour from such supposedly "mature" or "intelligent" people as the Slashdot crowd sickens me. Let's stop being so childish and grow up, shall we?
(And sorry to all if this sounded like a "Slashdot sucks now" rant or something, I just had to speak my mind there. Thanks.)
Video = graphics. Otherwise he'd have said "video capture" or something.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, there is no forest.
I'm still bitter about last year's competition. I made a little Java applet which cranked out fullscreen IFS fractal images of a grassy patch of land covered in rosebushes (you'd never see the same rosebush twice - or blade of grass, for that matter). It was going to be animated, with each branch of each tree bending in the wind, but I had to cut it down as the deadline fast approached. Submitted it on time. And they never judged it, or even put it on the main list. Yeah, I was a little mad.
Did this story remind anyone else of the Hacker Hellstorm from Canadian Bacon? (Great movie.) I'm sure there's some irony or something, but I'm too lazy and tired to think about it.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I am completely convinced that it could work out. The idea is to put a semi-autonomous (fully autonomous, but with optional "coaching" from a human) into the official BattleBots arena - in other words, pitting it against human drivers.
Laugh if you want, but I could truly feel proud of myself if I had built a ROBOT (not some RC car with a hammer on the end) that could get in just one good hit on its enemy, even if it got smashed to bits immediately after. But it could, with lots of work, be much more successful than that. (Have you seen the humans driving their "bots"? Many times it's like they've never driven it in their life. How often do the hammer ones ever actually *make contact*? Darn near never. Now THAT is boring, in my opinion.)
I think it can be done. No - I KNOW it can be done. I may even try and do it. I'm not sure I can justify shelling out $thousands just to get ripped to pieces (and they all do eventually).
[Blatant plug - Join the Indiana University Robotics Club!!!]
At last, someone who agrees with me! Geez I hate that when people refer to things like Battlebots as "robots". I'd actually like to build a Battlebot one day. But it will be fully autonomous (probably with a remote control to help "coach" it). That's the only way I could go on that show and retain any of my dignity.. What do you think? I say we start entering autonomous Battlebots into the competition. Give these pansies a run for their money. Sure, the RCs will win at first. Heck they'll probably kick our butts at first. But once we get the hang of it... a human simply can't compete. (Plus we wouldn't have to deal with the shame of going on national TV and calling our remote controlled car a "robot".)
Fascinating. Perhaps this explains 1337-5p34k!
But come on folks. Did you look at the thing? It's really not all that impressive. Sure, it's kinda cool. But impressive in any way? Not really. They mention all the nice techniques they use to miniaturize the electronics, and yet after all that work it has nothing but one single temperature sensor?
I am working on an extremely simple, very tiny robot myself. Very similar to this one in fact. I have access to none of the expensive things these guys do. In fact it will probably cost me about $20 total. Granted, it will probably be slightly larger. But it will also do more.
I don't mean to be so negative.. And in fact my response isn't so much to the article or the guys doing the work on the robot, rather than to the comments I've seen on Slashdot. Come on, folks. A machine that can barely climb over a dime on a level table is going to have a bit of trouble traversing even the smoothest parts of Mars. Even using them for surveilance would be silly. (Although this is actually one thing I'm thinking of playing with, simply for fun. Have it seek out audio in the range of human speech, and relay back what it hears. <evil laugh>)
The hardware is really not all that impressive. I have beside me two pager motors, which I'm using as the main drive system of my own tiny robot. They are roughly half an inch long, and about as thick as a pencil. Now align them in parallel, one with the shaft facing left and the other with its shaft facing right. Attach them to some small "tank treads" and you're in business. A drive system in about 1/2" square. The device they show doesn't even seem to need a microcontroller, it could be built to do the same with analog electronics. My mini robot has a "brain" of an 8-pin microcontroller, which has 6 I/O pins, leaving me plenty of room for expansion (light sensors, bump sensors..). Certainly it will get larger than the device shown. But not by very much, and its functionality would be superior (in this incarnation, at least). Sure, they have plenty of work left to do. I just think that we're all getting a little too ecstatic about something that's very very simple...
Shameless plug: Go to Indiana University? Join the IU Robotics Club! We're just getting started up.
Now robotics... There's something cool. A mixture of computing and mechanics. The software and the hardware, the virtual and the real, all blending together into one. You may think it's cool to make a few characters appear on your 31337 console, but that just can't come close to making a thinking machine that exists in reality, and that can directly have an impact on the real world. I say make a cross between Junkyard Wars and Battlebots, and have two teams with a bunch of robot parts, that have to build robots to do some task! WHOOO!!! (And none of this lame Battlebots crap. I don't care how well you make it, a machine that you completely control with remote controls is just lame. That's no "robot", that's a remote controlled car. WHERE IS THE REAL CHALLENGE?!?! WHERE ARE THE ROBOTS!?)
Ok, enough of my ranting for now.
The new Junkyard Wars episodes stink. I mean yeah, it's still a cool show, but it's just not what it used to be. I miss the silly Brits, they cracked me up. But yunno... maybe it's just me, but I swear the type of things they do on the show have changed since they got the new host and stuff. I mean.. one of the last episodes the Scrapheap Challenge did was drag racing. And what's the first Junkyard Wars thing? Drag racing. They also did all-terrain vehicles, which Scrapheap Challenge did.. and.. just tons of them. They're all the same sorts of things. Maybe it's just my perception, and the fact that I miss the old show, but it really seems like they've dumbed it down to suit us redneck Americans or something. I dunno... I just wish they'd give me my Scrapheap Challenge... Looking forward to next week's episode....
And I mean come on... Our presidential debate, and nobody is even allowed to address their opponent. "Debate" my red American butt. Look at the Brits in parliament! If they have something to say, they bloody stand up and speak their mind! It's great to watch, anyone who hasn't is really missing out. Dubya says some idiotic thing, and we all try and play along, "He's not REALLY a moron... Seriously... No, he really got to where he was on his own merits, HONESTLY.. Give him a chance.. YES HE DOES have a mandate...." Over there, you make an idiot of yourself and the whole place erupts in laughter, and you have to actually *defend* yourself and your ideas. Hey, the Brits may be a bunch of pansies, but GEEZ, what have we become?! In the words of.. that guy, in.. that movie... "I weep for the future."
Hey, I'm proud of my country. But DAGNABBIT, BRING BACK THE BRITS on Junkyard Wars! Geez!
Ok, that's kinda out of my system now.. Um.. What were we talking about? AI? Um.. Well the site is Slashdat (the past-tense of the verb "to Slashdot", of course) but is it just the same trailer they had in the theaters months ago? It didn't show jack squat about the movie.. Oh well. I'm sure I'll see it anyway.
And what's this "I wish I could see this thing.. I'm really excited about the movie," Taco? What a hypocrite. Get a life already!
Hmm... "Get a life.." The irony....
Actually Feynman probably started the whole thing off with his famous talk given in 1959. And of course there was Von Neumann in the 40s. Anyhoo. It's cool reading all this stuff from way before I was even born, about crazy stuff we've barely even tried to grapple with yet... :)
Resedit bloody rocks!
Try it, it's fun!
A followup to our friendly AC.. ;)
True geeks don't get incoming calls! (Sorry..