>Yeah, like Bush's anti-terrorism plan has gone so well.. Starting a war with a country completely unrelated to those who attacked us over 7 years ago, killing thousands of our citizens, spending billions, and he STILL hasn't caught those who planned/directed/masterminded the attack.
Oh, Bush cocked it some something fierce, but under a Clinton/Gore scenario, the terrorists basically knew that they could get away with anything. Every time they blew up an embassy or a navy ship, the US would randomly launch a cruise missile and shoot something that probably wasn't related to the terrorists at all. But one of the side effects of the war in Iraq is that it makes it easy for nutjob jihadists able to grab an AK and get themselves killed by the marines.
>>That's still being judged, isn't it? Unless you're willing to concede that I will not be judged by your deity, for whatever reason, you're applying your religion to me.
You said this: "Show me one Christian that's open to believe that I won't be judged because I don't believe."
And I did. There's a difference between being judged on acts and being judged on what you believe. If you want a more liberal soteriology, there's a variety of thoughts on the matter, including a number of people that promote universal soteriology (i.e. everyone goes to heaven). I believe the last pope said that salvation or not was the choice of each individual to accept or turn away from God, which is a different mechanic from the judging which you seem to find distasteful.
"John Paul II asserts that "the elect" refers to every individual. "Connected with the mystery of creation is the mystery of election, which in a special way shaped the history of the people whose spiritual father is Abraham by virtue of his faith. Nevertheless, through this people which journeys forward through the history both of the Old Covenant and the New, that mystery of election refers to every man and woman, to the whole great human family" (John Paul II, Dives in misericordia, Section 4). Again, John Paul II affirms his universal view of salvation: "for each one is included in the mystery of the Redemption and with each one Christ has united himself for ever through this mystery" (John Paul II, Redemptor homonis, Section 13, March 4, 1979)."
>With pressure to meet CAFE standards, don't you think Detroit would have deployed such tech years ago if it really worked?
You know, in the late 80s and early 90s you could buy a cheap non-hybrid car that got 40+ MPG easily. And today a hybrid Camry gets, what, 33 MPG?
It's not a coincidence. CAFE standards haven't been raised from 27.5MPG since 1990. (http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/CARS/rules/CAFE/overview.htm)
It wasn't till late last year that congress and the president passed a new law raising fleet efficiency goals to 35MPG by 2020.
So you're right, but just in the opposite direction. Now that Detroit has pressure on it to raise efficiency standards again, I expect to start seeing devices like this come out.
>>The US Constitution defines the protections US citizens have from their Government. The US Government has established in the courts the precedent that members of the US Military is not protected by the US Constitution.
Members of the military are subject to the UCMJ, which has a different set of procedures and protections, but it's not like military members suddenly become PNGs when they enter.
>>Ergo, the US Military are not US citizens from a legal standpoint.
Lols. By this argument, anyone who goes to family court to handle a divorce proceeding isn't a US Citizen because he didn't use the normal legal system.
>>And how the hell do you lose a Predator to small-arms? Bet you 1000:1 it was lack of maintenance and/or lack of manpower
It's a predator. The point of the whole thing is this: who cares?
>>I believe we would mostly be better off if Gore had been elected.
Damn, I wish I had some mod points so I could mod this funny.
With Gore in office, he'd most likely have continued the Clintonian anti-terrorism plan, which is to say that he'd shoot off a cruise missile every once in a while to show that he's doing something, or perhaps just to deflect attention away from the fact that all our major cities would be having rolling blackouts as a result of his energy plan.
A while back the NVIDIA president emailed ATI and said that they should get together some time to set prices for video cards.
That's, you know, illegal and stuff.
Generally speaking, if businessmen are going to do something like that they just meet in person so there's no paper trail. Oil companies been doing it this way for years, and I know the owners of some of the local businesses meet together to arrange "things".
I'm surprised that they got off so lightly. But then again, Microsoft got away from their antitrust battle by giving away nothing more than some coupons for their overpriced software.
>>Show me one Christian that's open to believe that I won't be judged because I don't believe, and I'll be open to change my classification.
CS Lewis.
He felt that it might be possible for a person to be judged on their acts, and so righteous people in non-Christian lands might be able to go to heaven.
>>Kernel Panic? Why not just teach that damned kernel some self-defense lessons. Or, at least tell it to grow a set of balls. Just stop the damned Panic.
You don't want to do that if the computer is on fire.
Eh, Diablo is supposed to be a pretty dark series, metaphorically. The D3 screenshots *were* too bright and colorful for my taste. The fan-goth-boi was a bit to grey (it's easy to go into Photoshop and choose 'greyscale'), but I think something in the middle would be ideal. It's not a battle through Strawberry Shortcake Land.
With Approval Voting, the same problem would occur. If I'm a Hill-dogg supporter, I *really want* Hillary to win. I guess Obama would be a better choice over McCain, but she's the one I want to win. (And yeah, people do think this way once they get a horse in the race.) So in a close election, and one that it looks like either Hillary or Obama will win (so I'm not so concerned McCain will win), I'll vote Hillary 1, Obama and McCain 0, so that my gal will get an edge over Obama.
Same bug occurs.
While range voting is probably the best system when people honestly vote, the real problem is that people don't vote honestly.
Take the alleged number of Republicans voting for Hillary during the primaries as a great example... if true, it extended the fight in the Democratic party for months and possibly hurt party unity to a point where Palin might be able to pick up some of the disenfranchised female voters.
>>So I think you should suggest a way that the system can be gamed.
>>Perhaps you are thinking of Arrows impossibility theorem which applies only to ranked voting systems. Range voting is not one of those. It allows ties and weightings. Arrows theorem does not apply.
No, but Shaka's Impossibility Theorem does apply, which says that people will not vote their honest preferences, but will vote however they think will best get their favorite candidate elected.
Here's an example using range voting. Let's say 60% of Americans are democrats, and 40% are republicans. Using range voting, we'd assume that a democrat would win. Let's say that there's three candidates to vote for, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and John McCain. Say that half of democrats support Hill-dogg, half support Obama, but Obama has a slight lead. So we'll say people's favorites are: Hill-dogg 29%, Obama 31%, McCain 40%.
Now, if people honestly voted, then Obama would win. Range voting would have done its job, unlike the current system (which would split the candidates).
However, people will not honestly vote. Hill-dogg supporters will look at Obama's slight lead, and since they'd much rather prefer Hill-dogg instead of Obama, they vote like this: Hill-dogg 10, Obama 1, McCain 0. Obama supporters, worried about their slight lead, vote the converse. McCain supporters vote McCain 10, Hill-dogg 0, Obama 0.
All voting systems can be gamed, except a two-party (or 1-party or 0-party I suppose) election where you have to pick one person. Range Voting, Approval Voting, Condorcet Voting, they all have mathematical "exploits" to them which can result in the wrong person being elected.
The only problem with a two-party election, of course, is that there are sometimes multiple people we might want to vote for.
>>I think that stuff's silly, but as long as they don't propose that it should be taught in public schools, I don't care.
There's a difference between teaching something, and being willing to discuss something in a public school. A science teacher who teaches evolution should be prepared for questions about ID, creationism, etc. That's all the Royal Society guy was saying, but they burnt him alive at the stake for it. (Bad metaphor?)
>>Would it be OK for them to set up a business that operated by spreading their ideas, encouraging people to pay a voluntary "weekly membership fee", and getting a tax-exempt status from the government? No, of course it wouldn't. But how is that any different than churches?
If they qualify as a church, then they qualify as a church. We got a lot of weird religions in America, and the government shouldn't be trying to distinguish which one is right. Why are they tax-exempt? Because they (more or less) fall under the category of non-profits, or more often, charities. Churches help better society by feeding the homeless, tending to sick kids whose parents can't pay for health care, and all that other irrational stuff that comes with a belief in God. The government recognizes that organizations make the country a better place, and allows them a tax-exempt status as long as they play by the rules which govern charities (such as they can't be used for political speech). Churches which don't follow these rules pay taxes.
Since you obviously think that churches should lose their tax-exempt status, answer me this question: 1) Do you want all charities to lose tax-exempt status, or are you just discriminating against religious ones? 2) If you do want to eliminate all tax-exempt status, do you think that bankrupting charities will make the country a better place?
Remember, it's a lot more than just churches which get tax-exempt status. 501c3's include labor unions, amateur sports organizations, and a bunch of other things besides.
>>The alternative would be one dominant strategy that it'd always stick to which would get boring really, really fast.
The whole, "have the AI cheat and build 10x as many units as it should have" also gets boring really, really fast. Actually, no, it doesn't. It takes about 8 hours to mop up an AI in games like that. It gets boring very slowly. =)
What would be better? Have it cheat on tech instead of unit building when its falling too far behind, maybe? Or have it understand combat odds so it does more than throw away units in suicide waves?
Actually, one of the quotes from the original article was: "It's not appropriate for a Christian to be in the Science Education position", or something close to that.
I wonder that if Dawkins had said that science teachers should answer questions about creationism in a science classroom if he'd have been pilloried and forced to resign as well.
>>Also you might try a different game. Galactic Civilizations II is reputed to have some very devious AIs at higher levels. You might give it a shot and see if it is more to your liking.
>>Finally you can always play other humans. You aren't guaranteed how hard they'll be, but there are ones waaaaay better than any computer out there.
Those two statements are contradictory.:/ I played GalCiv II and liked it quite a bit, but it has no multiplayer, which ruined most of the fun for me.
Usually I play with 3 of my friends, and we have good times going 2v2, or even better, 2v2v2v2v2 against AI teams as well (usually on Monarch). It's in these latter games that I get really annoyed at the difficulty settings - while the AI does a much better job keeping up with tech with us on Monarch (on Noble and below it's helpless), it has the side effect of giving the AI 10 times as many military units as it should have, since it has no clue how to use its military in an intelligent fashion, and just throws them all away in tedious suicide waves. We usually call the game when it's clear we've won, but don't want to go through the 8 hours of mopping up, because the AI cheats and has way too many units, and produces them way too fast.
That's an interesting question. I actually sketched out a fairly detailed document on how I'd write a Civ AI and downloaded the API for it, but couldn't make enough sense of the code to start hacking on it. I do have a background in writing game AI - I wrote a bot for Quake, and have modded quite a few games (see my URL for the biggest one), but I couldn't get to the point where I grokked the code. I know it's not much of an excuse, I obviously could have spent more time on it, and spent more time digging up docs on it, but there it is.
Essentially, the problems I see with the Civ 4 AI are this (in no particular order): 1) Too easy on noble (and lower). As in, without doing anything particularly interesting, you end up outteching the AI by progressively larger margins, and they don't have much of an army to stop you. At some point, you can just roll in with a small stack of gunpowder units and wipe out all the enemy civs. 2) Surrendering to Switzerland. A number of times I've been beating the snot out of a civ, and offered it vassalage, which it would refuse. I'd beat on it some more, then it would surrender to a random third party that neither of us are at war with. 3) On Monarch and higher, the game makes these obscene superstacks of units for the AI. As in, there'll be 30 or 40 tanks or knights or whatever on one city, and 10 to 20 units on all the other cities. If a human is at the point where it can kill such a stack, he's going to win eventually, but it requires an amazingly tedious amount of time to do so, and the AI appears to be able to pull massive amounts of military units out of its ass, and apparently without paying upkeep. Or if it is paying upkeep, then it's certainly a bug, since it'll get even more out-teched since it can't afford research. 4) The AI's lacking in basic tactics sometimes. It'll suicide entire stacks of 20 units against a trio of fortified machine gunners, won't use terrain intelligently (well, some of the time it will), doesn't use spies to take out critical resources (like a lone copper or horse resource, instead attacking horses in the tank era or a resource that I already have 3 of). 5) It's careless with its workers, allowing them to get captured easily. I know this was patched in the latest version, but the last game I played I captured a lot of enemy workers just tooling around. They're especially trusting before war breaks out. 6) It's general method of moving troops and ships around is just odd sometimes. I've seen enemy units get stuck in a mountain, trying to pathfind across it, or individual units approaching my stack when I'm at war with them. 7) The AI, in general, is completely reactive. If I set my spy rate up higher, the AI will set its spy rate up higher. If I turn up my culture rate, he turns up his culture rate. 8) Too trusting. If I'm at peace with an AI, but building up a large force along the border, it will mostly ignore it until I invade. I'd like to see it take up defensive positions with spare units and build forts in border tiles (especially in chokepoints) instead of being constantly surprised every time someone declares war on them. Likewise, a lot of time they'll declare war without their armies being in position for it.
What I'd like to see is this: 1) High level AI tasks. Have AIs decide perhaps 30 turns in advance that they're going to betray a peace treaty and start cranking out units and positioning them on a border, ready to invade. If relations haven't improved on the target date, rush in with everything. Alternatively, have it decide to make a solid effort to take over the new world, instead of the piecemeal way that it expands to new continents now. The different AI types (techers, expansionists, militarists) would have different likelihoods for the various tasks. Essentially this would make them appear to be more human, and more interesting to work with. 2) Set them up to beeline different techs and wonders to match a specific objective chosen at the beginning of the game. For example, an AI could go with
On the contrary, I hate how Civ IV does its difficulty settings.
It's normal and slightly above normal difficulty settings are far too easy. Immortal (the highest setting) is simply designed to cripple you as much as possible while giving the AI bonus cities and resources. The medium-high difficulty settings (which is what I usually play at) are usually pretty balanced between them and me, but the kicker is that the difficulty isn't precisely harder than normal, the game just gives the AI 5 times the units it would normally have. So when you have machine gunners and riflemen gunning down their knights and longbowmen (since it doesn't actually play any smarter), it just takes 5x as long to beat the game, and it just ends up feeling like an eternal slogging march, not fun at all. Personally, I think the approach is just stupid.
>>More than anything, this is an indictment on the scientists who pressured the good doctor out of his posting. He was bullied out for a misquote.
Right. By the slashdot and article summaries, it sounded like he wanted to replace evolution with creationism in the classroom, which wasn't what he said at all.
It's so nice that we've come to a point in our society that merely being Christian is enough to get you kicked out of the Royal Society.
Sorry, not kicked out. Chased out by rabid morons who can't read TFA wielding pitchforks and torches.
>>No API's or 3D hardware was available, only a single CPU and a frame buffer and compiler.
Of course there were APIs and 3D hardware in the pre-Quake days. I know; I wrote 3D arcade games back in the era before Quake 1 even came out, and our company got demo hardware for something like 20 different 3D graphics accelerators for the PC at the time. This was all before the Voodoo came out and turned the industry on its head, mind you. OpenGL was the standard, and you could run OpenGL software with or without hardware acceleration. We ended up using a high end ($20k) graphics accelerator for the PC at the time that had its own API.
>>You had to hand code and entire rendering engine for the game
Sort of. The main reason why you couldn't just render an entire 3D world using a naive sort of OpenGL implementation is that you'd get crap for a framerate. The engines, even those that used OpenGL, were mainly culling algorithms that cut down on the number of surfaces being processed by the engine. Quake did a pretty good job at this, actually. It was quite playable as a true 3D engine (Doom was 2.5D) on a 486 processor.
Modern Quake1 clients have added bloom and a bunch of other stuff that would cause machines from that era to cry, but it's quite telling that if you turn off these culling optimizations on a modern machine, the modern machine will still slow down to a few fps. At least, it does on my 4800X2 and 8800GTS.
I don't think your idea to simply have geometry that gets rendered in a naive fashion would work, to be honest, and especially not a realtime raytracing engine. You still need smart guys like Carmack in there optimizing the hell out of a handcrafted rendering engine.
I learned on C++. It's kind of the lingua franca of the modern CS world. If you understand it, you can learn to code in Java, PHP, C#, etc. etc., but it doesn't work the other way. While people talk about user friendly languages and stuff, just bite the bullet. It's not actually that hard to learn. Start simple.
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>Yeah, like Bush's anti-terrorism plan has gone so well.. Starting a war with a country completely unrelated to those who attacked us over 7 years ago, killing thousands of our citizens, spending billions, and he STILL hasn't caught those who planned/directed/masterminded the attack.
Oh, Bush cocked it some something fierce, but under a Clinton/Gore scenario, the terrorists basically knew that they could get away with anything. Every time they blew up an embassy or a navy ship, the US would randomly launch a cruise missile and shoot something that probably wasn't related to the terrorists at all. But one of the side effects of the war in Iraq is that it makes it easy for nutjob jihadists able to grab an AK and get themselves killed by the marines.
>>That's still being judged, isn't it? Unless you're willing to concede that I will not be judged by your deity, for whatever reason, you're applying your religion to me.
You said this: "Show me one Christian that's open to believe that I won't be judged because I don't believe."
And I did. There's a difference between being judged on acts and being judged on what you believe. If you want a more liberal soteriology, there's a variety of thoughts on the matter, including a number of people that promote universal soteriology (i.e. everyone goes to heaven). I believe the last pope said that salvation or not was the choice of each individual to accept or turn away from God, which is a different mechanic from the judging which you seem to find distasteful.
From http://wesleycrouser.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/comparative-soteriologies-roman-catholocism/ --
"John Paul II asserts that "the elect" refers to every individual. "Connected with the mystery of creation is the mystery of election, which in a special way shaped the history of the people whose spiritual father is Abraham by virtue of his faith. Nevertheless, through this people which journeys forward through the history both of the Old Covenant and the New, that mystery of election refers to every man and woman, to the whole great human family" (John Paul II, Dives in misericordia, Section 4). Again, John Paul II affirms his universal view of salvation: "for each one is included in the mystery of the Redemption and with each one Christ has united himself for ever through this mystery" (John Paul II, Redemptor homonis, Section 13, March 4, 1979)."
>With pressure to meet CAFE standards, don't you think Detroit would have deployed such tech years ago if it really worked?
You know, in the late 80s and early 90s you could buy a cheap non-hybrid car that got 40+ MPG easily. And today a hybrid Camry gets, what, 33 MPG?
It's not a coincidence. CAFE standards haven't been raised from 27.5MPG since 1990. (http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/CARS/rules/CAFE/overview.htm)
It wasn't till late last year that congress and the president passed a new law raising fleet efficiency goals to 35MPG by 2020.
So you're right, but just in the opposite direction. Now that Detroit has pressure on it to raise efficiency standards again, I expect to start seeing devices like this come out.
>>The US Constitution defines the protections US citizens have from their Government. The US Government has established in the courts the precedent that members of the US Military is not protected by the US Constitution.
Members of the military are subject to the UCMJ, which has a different set of procedures and protections, but it's not like military members suddenly become PNGs when they enter.
>>Ergo, the US Military are not US citizens from a legal standpoint.
Lols. By this argument, anyone who goes to family court to handle a divorce proceeding isn't a US Citizen because he didn't use the normal legal system.
>>And how the hell do you lose a Predator to small-arms? Bet you 1000:1 it was lack of maintenance and/or lack of manpower
It's a predator. The point of the whole thing is this: who cares?
>>I believe we would mostly be better off if Gore had been elected.
Damn, I wish I had some mod points so I could mod this funny.
With Gore in office, he'd most likely have continued the Clintonian anti-terrorism plan, which is to say that he'd shoot off a cruise missile every once in a while to show that he's doing something, or perhaps just to deflect attention away from the fact that all our major cities would be having rolling blackouts as a result of his energy plan.
>>The only mentions of price were about STOCK prices.
Huh, they have OEM stock prices now?
Lol.
(See the reference to the other poster below.)
A scan of one email:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/0/G/156832/original/Picture%203.png
Taken from:
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/amd-nvidia-price-fixing,0201--4553----jpg-.html
Best line from the bunch: "We need to stop beating each other up in the OEM space".
A while back the NVIDIA president emailed ATI and said that they should get together some time to set prices for video cards.
That's, you know, illegal and stuff.
Generally speaking, if businessmen are going to do something like that they just meet in person so there's no paper trail. Oil companies been doing it this way for years, and I know the owners of some of the local businesses meet together to arrange "things".
I'm surprised that they got off so lightly. But then again, Microsoft got away from their antitrust battle by giving away nothing more than some coupons for their overpriced software.
>>Show me one Christian that's open to believe that I won't be judged because I don't believe, and I'll be open to change my classification.
CS Lewis.
He felt that it might be possible for a person to be judged on their acts, and so righteous people in non-Christian lands might be able to go to heaven.
>>Kernel Panic? Why not just teach that damned kernel some self-defense lessons. Or, at least tell it to grow a set of balls. Just stop the damned Panic.
You don't want to do that if the computer is on fire.
It's fun. A lot like WoW, but does a lot of things better/more fun, like how mana regenerates and how Public Quests work.
The GM is right though. Gold spam is starting already.
Eh, Diablo is supposed to be a pretty dark series, metaphorically. The D3 screenshots *were* too bright and colorful for my taste. The fan-goth-boi was a bit to grey (it's easy to go into Photoshop and choose 'greyscale'), but I think something in the middle would be ideal. It's not a battle through Strawberry Shortcake Land.
With Approval Voting, the same problem would occur. If I'm a Hill-dogg supporter, I *really want* Hillary to win. I guess Obama would be a better choice over McCain, but she's the one I want to win. (And yeah, people do think this way once they get a horse in the race.) So in a close election, and one that it looks like either Hillary or Obama will win (so I'm not so concerned McCain will win), I'll vote Hillary 1, Obama and McCain 0, so that my gal will get an edge over Obama.
Same bug occurs.
While range voting is probably the best system when people honestly vote, the real problem is that people don't vote honestly.
Take the alleged number of Republicans voting for Hillary during the primaries as a great example... if true, it extended the fight in the Democratic party for months and possibly hurt party unity to a point where Palin might be able to pick up some of the disenfranchised female voters.
>>So I think you should suggest a way that the system can be gamed.
>>Perhaps you are thinking of Arrows impossibility theorem which applies only to ranked voting systems. Range voting is not one of those. It allows ties and weightings. Arrows theorem does not apply.
No, but Shaka's Impossibility Theorem does apply, which says that people will not vote their honest preferences, but will vote however they think will best get their favorite candidate elected.
Here's an example using range voting. Let's say 60% of Americans are democrats, and 40% are republicans. Using range voting, we'd assume that a democrat would win. Let's say that there's three candidates to vote for, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and John McCain. Say that half of democrats support Hill-dogg, half support Obama, but Obama has a slight lead. So we'll say people's favorites are: Hill-dogg 29%, Obama 31%, McCain 40%.
Now, if people honestly voted, then Obama would win. Range voting would have done its job, unlike the current system (which would split the candidates).
However, people will not honestly vote. Hill-dogg supporters will look at Obama's slight lead, and since they'd much rather prefer Hill-dogg instead of Obama, they vote like this: Hill-dogg 10, Obama 1, McCain 0. Obama supporters, worried about their slight lead, vote the converse. McCain supporters vote McCain 10, Hill-dogg 0, Obama 0.
McCain wins; range voting fails.
I'm definitely voting for the Osama Hussein / Joe Bin Laden ticket in '08!
All voting systems can be gamed, except a two-party (or 1-party or 0-party I suppose) election where you have to pick one person. Range Voting, Approval Voting, Condorcet Voting, they all have mathematical "exploits" to them which can result in the wrong person being elected.
The only problem with a two-party election, of course, is that there are sometimes multiple people we might want to vote for.
>>I think that stuff's silly, but as long as they don't propose that it should be taught in public schools, I don't care.
There's a difference between teaching something, and being willing to discuss something in a public school. A science teacher who teaches evolution should be prepared for questions about ID, creationism, etc. That's all the Royal Society guy was saying, but they burnt him alive at the stake for it. (Bad metaphor?)
>>Would it be OK for them to set up a business that operated by spreading their ideas, encouraging people to pay a voluntary "weekly membership fee", and getting a tax-exempt status from the government? No, of course it wouldn't. But how is that any different than churches?
If they qualify as a church, then they qualify as a church. We got a lot of weird religions in America, and the government shouldn't be trying to distinguish which one is right. Why are they tax-exempt? Because they (more or less) fall under the category of non-profits, or more often, charities. Churches help better society by feeding the homeless, tending to sick kids whose parents can't pay for health care, and all that other irrational stuff that comes with a belief in God. The government recognizes that organizations make the country a better place, and allows them a tax-exempt status as long as they play by the rules which govern charities (such as they can't be used for political speech). Churches which don't follow these rules pay taxes.
Since you obviously think that churches should lose their tax-exempt status, answer me this question:
1) Do you want all charities to lose tax-exempt status, or are you just discriminating against religious ones?
2) If you do want to eliminate all tax-exempt status, do you think that bankrupting charities will make the country a better place?
Remember, it's a lot more than just churches which get tax-exempt status. 501c3's include labor unions, amateur sports organizations, and a bunch of other things besides.
>>The alternative would be one dominant strategy that it'd always stick to which would get boring really, really fast.
The whole, "have the AI cheat and build 10x as many units as it should have" also gets boring really, really fast. Actually, no, it doesn't. It takes about 8 hours to mop up an AI in games like that. It gets boring very slowly. =)
What would be better? Have it cheat on tech instead of unit building when its falling too far behind, maybe? Or have it understand combat odds so it does more than throw away units in suicide waves?
>>Well, no. That is not true at all.
Actually, one of the quotes from the original article was: "It's not appropriate for a Christian to be in the Science Education position", or something close to that.
I wonder that if Dawkins had said that science teachers should answer questions about creationism in a science classroom if he'd have been pilloried and forced to resign as well.
>>Also you might try a different game. Galactic Civilizations II is reputed to have some very devious AIs at higher levels. You might give it a shot and see if it is more to your liking.
>>Finally you can always play other humans. You aren't guaranteed how hard they'll be, but there are ones waaaaay better than any computer out there.
Those two statements are contradictory. :/ I played GalCiv II and liked it quite a bit, but it has no multiplayer, which ruined most of the fun for me.
Usually I play with 3 of my friends, and we have good times going 2v2, or even better, 2v2v2v2v2 against AI teams as well (usually on Monarch). It's in these latter games that I get really annoyed at the difficulty settings - while the AI does a much better job keeping up with tech with us on Monarch (on Noble and below it's helpless), it has the side effect of giving the AI 10 times as many military units as it should have, since it has no clue how to use its military in an intelligent fashion, and just throws them all away in tedious suicide waves. We usually call the game when it's clear we've won, but don't want to go through the 8 hours of mopping up, because the AI cheats and has way too many units, and produces them way too fast.
That's an interesting question. I actually sketched out a fairly detailed document on how I'd write a Civ AI and downloaded the API for it, but couldn't make enough sense of the code to start hacking on it. I do have a background in writing game AI - I wrote a bot for Quake, and have modded quite a few games (see my URL for the biggest one), but I couldn't get to the point where I grokked the code. I know it's not much of an excuse, I obviously could have spent more time on it, and spent more time digging up docs on it, but there it is.
Essentially, the problems I see with the Civ 4 AI are this (in no particular order):
1) Too easy on noble (and lower). As in, without doing anything particularly interesting, you end up outteching the AI by progressively larger margins, and they don't have much of an army to stop you. At some point, you can just roll in with a small stack of gunpowder units and wipe out all the enemy civs.
2) Surrendering to Switzerland. A number of times I've been beating the snot out of a civ, and offered it vassalage, which it would refuse. I'd beat on it some more, then it would surrender to a random third party that neither of us are at war with.
3) On Monarch and higher, the game makes these obscene superstacks of units for the AI. As in, there'll be 30 or 40 tanks or knights or whatever on one city, and 10 to 20 units on all the other cities. If a human is at the point where it can kill such a stack, he's going to win eventually, but it requires an amazingly tedious amount of time to do so, and the AI appears to be able to pull massive amounts of military units out of its ass, and apparently without paying upkeep. Or if it is paying upkeep, then it's certainly a bug, since it'll get even more out-teched since it can't afford research.
4) The AI's lacking in basic tactics sometimes. It'll suicide entire stacks of 20 units against a trio of fortified machine gunners, won't use terrain intelligently (well, some of the time it will), doesn't use spies to take out critical resources (like a lone copper or horse resource, instead attacking horses in the tank era or a resource that I already have 3 of).
5) It's careless with its workers, allowing them to get captured easily. I know this was patched in the latest version, but the last game I played I captured a lot of enemy workers just tooling around. They're especially trusting before war breaks out.
6) It's general method of moving troops and ships around is just odd sometimes. I've seen enemy units get stuck in a mountain, trying to pathfind across it, or individual units approaching my stack when I'm at war with them.
7) The AI, in general, is completely reactive. If I set my spy rate up higher, the AI will set its spy rate up higher. If I turn up my culture rate, he turns up his culture rate.
8) Too trusting. If I'm at peace with an AI, but building up a large force along the border, it will mostly ignore it until I invade. I'd like to see it take up defensive positions with spare units and build forts in border tiles (especially in chokepoints) instead of being constantly surprised every time someone declares war on them. Likewise, a lot of time they'll declare war without their armies being in position for it.
What I'd like to see is this:
1) High level AI tasks. Have AIs decide perhaps 30 turns in advance that they're going to betray a peace treaty and start cranking out units and positioning them on a border, ready to invade. If relations haven't improved on the target date, rush in with everything. Alternatively, have it decide to make a solid effort to take over the new world, instead of the piecemeal way that it expands to new continents now. The different AI types (techers, expansionists, militarists) would have different likelihoods for the various tasks. Essentially this would make them appear to be more human, and more interesting to work with.
2) Set them up to beeline different techs and wonders to match a specific objective chosen at the beginning of the game. For example, an AI could go with
On the contrary, I hate how Civ IV does its difficulty settings.
It's normal and slightly above normal difficulty settings are far too easy. Immortal (the highest setting) is simply designed to cripple you as much as possible while giving the AI bonus cities and resources. The medium-high difficulty settings (which is what I usually play at) are usually pretty balanced between them and me, but the kicker is that the difficulty isn't precisely harder than normal, the game just gives the AI 5 times the units it would normally have. So when you have machine gunners and riflemen gunning down their knights and longbowmen (since it doesn't actually play any smarter), it just takes 5x as long to beat the game, and it just ends up feeling like an eternal slogging march, not fun at all. Personally, I think the approach is just stupid.
>>More than anything, this is an indictment on the scientists who pressured the good doctor out of his posting. He was bullied out for a misquote.
Right. By the slashdot and article summaries, it sounded like he wanted to replace evolution with creationism in the classroom, which wasn't what he said at all.
It's so nice that we've come to a point in our society that merely being Christian is enough to get you kicked out of the Royal Society.
Sorry, not kicked out. Chased out by rabid morons who can't read TFA wielding pitchforks and torches.
>>No API's or 3D hardware was available, only a single CPU and a frame buffer and compiler.
Of course there were APIs and 3D hardware in the pre-Quake days. I know; I wrote 3D arcade games back in the era before Quake 1 even came out, and our company got demo hardware for something like 20 different 3D graphics accelerators for the PC at the time. This was all before the Voodoo came out and turned the industry on its head, mind you. OpenGL was the standard, and you could run OpenGL software with or without hardware acceleration. We ended up using a high end ($20k) graphics accelerator for the PC at the time that had its own API.
>>You had to hand code and entire rendering engine for the game
Sort of. The main reason why you couldn't just render an entire 3D world using a naive sort of OpenGL implementation is that you'd get crap for a framerate. The engines, even those that used OpenGL, were mainly culling algorithms that cut down on the number of surfaces being processed by the engine. Quake did a pretty good job at this, actually. It was quite playable as a true 3D engine (Doom was 2.5D) on a 486 processor.
Modern Quake1 clients have added bloom and a bunch of other stuff that would cause machines from that era to cry, but it's quite telling that if you turn off these culling optimizations on a modern machine, the modern machine will still slow down to a few fps. At least, it does on my 4800X2 and 8800GTS.
I don't think your idea to simply have geometry that gets rendered in a naive fashion would work, to be honest, and especially not a realtime raytracing engine. You still need smart guys like Carmack in there optimizing the hell out of a handcrafted rendering engine.
I learned on C++. It's kind of the lingua franca of the modern CS world. If you understand it, you can learn to code in Java, PHP, C#, etc. etc., but it doesn't work the other way. While people talk about user friendly languages and stuff, just bite the bullet. It's not actually that hard to learn. Start simple.