Wow, if only there were some kind of organized system of, say, i don't know, governance for ensuring that under-represented members of our communities get equal access to economic resources? Like a set of written guidelines or maybe rules that all members of a community need to abide by...
The Hackers Diet makes it clear: Exercise just doesn't burn that many calories. You can lose weight just by eating less calories than you burn, no exercise required.
I used this book as one of the references for my Game Developer Conference course on "Faster Math Functions", and the book is good but has holes. Crenshaw's style shows his crusty old engineer roots at times - his coverage of Mininax polynomials is way behind the times and he seriously needs to get into Mathematica or Maple as his basic high-precision tool. Work by Tang on combatting destructive cancellation in range reduction, the new semi-table based exponant and log methods, Intel's research into using Estrin's Method based SIMD for evaluating polynomials or Muller's book on Elementary Functions are beyond Crenshaw's experience, and it shows. This is a homebrew book rather than an introduction to the state of the art. More information at SCEA R&D Website.
Good Old binary and Floating Point.
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Ternary numbers are an interesting sidetrack and some similar techniques are used in fast chip-based systems to speed up adding (each bit also caries it's own overflow and sign bits, turning the classic serial add-with-carry into a more parallel operation).
It must be remembered that, for floating point numbers, base 2 is *the* most efficient representation, as argued in the classic paper "What Every computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg. The deep understanding behind IEEE754 is a masterpiece of numerical engineering that is often overlooked, IMO.
Re:Britain's history of amateur games development
on
Playstation 2 Basic?
·
· Score: 5
I can't read the Sony Management's collective mind, but I suspect that the strength of the British computer games industry is one of the reasons behind their decision to sell the PS2 with an amateur development capability. Not that different from the "Net Yaroze" version of the original Playstation, really.
I was one of the people who worked on the YABasic project at Sony's Technology Group in London, where I worked on the documentation.
The YABasic had two reasons for being done. One, the UK Government was trying to classify the PS2 as a game system only rather than a more general purpose computer to tax imports. Sony has always seen the PS2 as a general purpose machine, and in the future you will see a number of toys, add-ons, applications and software that is non-gaming on the system. There are some very exciting things going on right now that may be announced soon.
The other reason that YABasic was written is that the Technology Group there is tasked with doing things that other companies don't have the time or reason to do. Games companies are busy trying to recoup their costs for the devkits and down-time from learning the system, so somebody had to show the world some of the more interesting things the PS2 could do. Sure, there is a history of hmoe enthusiast programming in the UK and that probably helped. Expect to see updates to YABasic and demo progras on magazine cover-disks and also the ability to freely swap programs on memory cards. We had great fun going retro and trying to recreate all those old-school demos - 8-Bit programs with 128-Bit fill rates!
FYI, YABasic is a fully virtualised machine, so PEEK and POKE only set variables in the interpreter and don't directly address the underlying machine. *IF* management decide to release the specs for the underlying chipsets (and press releases from Sony do suggest that it's at least licensable), then YABasic may be changed to allow direct access to the GIF, DMAC and other chips. Heck, it's all memory mapped at the end of the day.
> Studying creationism can be valuable, if only to understand its assumptions.
I was always taught that Genesis was about establishing who the main protagonist in "that book" is. 6 Days, three groups of three interrelated through time:
Day 1: light/dark -> Day 4: sun/moon Day 2: water/land -> Day 5: fishes/birds Day 3: trees/fruit -> Day 6: creatures/mankind
All this to establish the protagonist as an artist, a creator and has a multidimensional view of space-time that we can only start to grasp.
But that's Exegesis and Hermenutics, and this is Slashdot. So I'll shut up now.
Chances are slim. EA is a cutthroat company when it comes to only releasing for mass-market platforms. Those SKUs that have been released for Linux have done so because the original programmers personally wanted to and had done so for their own entertainment. It's hard to justify the risk/returns for 30+ person teams in 2-year development of an original title without a *lot* of commitment from corporate.
Worthy as it is, the Linux market will have to hit 10% or more of all gaming platforms before it even gets a sniff. Heck, PC sales are 30% of all games sales and Linux is a fraction of that. We regularly get Playstation titles selling x10 what the PC SKU does.
> To be completely honest, knowing how to reduce a Nondeterministic Automaton to a Deterministic > Automaton is not going to help most CS majors in the type of work they will be performing upon > graduation. True, there do exist positions in which such knowledge is applicable, but most > graduations are not doing programming of that caliber.
Computer games is one such area. The breadth of knowledge needed to be a gaming guru is startling - AI, finite state machines, fuzzy logic, 3D math, integration, image processing, audio processing, multi-threading, I/O, language design, parsing, OOP, etcetera. The list is endless.
My question is, if all these CS Majors are spewing forth from the halls of academia, why is it so damn difficult to find good games programmers?
Beats me, and I've only been interviewing for the past four years.
I'm interested in the reasons that this article, and similar ones, keeping turning up in the press.
Intel keep hyping AI as the "next big thing" because more and more of the hard stuff is being taken off the processor by custom hardware - 3D cards, audio streaming and compression, etc. They want to sell their kick-butt processors so they hype the expensive stuff - currently that's Physical Simulation and "Advanced AIs", even if nobody has done physics well (it's a *very* hard problem and all the demos you'll see are cheap hacks and "special cases") and "Advanced AIs" are pure vapourware.
Having been in the business for a fair few years, I maintain that nothing significant has been invented in gaming AI for ages. Sure, there have been learning systems but they have been reserved for nieche "simulators" and "virtual pets". Mainstream games continue to plod along with rule-based AIs as always.
The only thing that has changed is that we can calculate more and more complex metrics for our rule based AIs - instead of proximity, we can do line-of-sight, instead of closest enemy we can now do spatial searches for the mean positions of groups of nasties.
Why will it always be thus? Because debugging a neural network is impossible (you just have to re-train it with a different working set) and having predictable AIs is key to shipping a game within your launch window. Having an out of control AI where nobody can pinpoint the bugs will get your project canned.
Certainly Dungeon Keeper 2 and Theme Park 2 are simple AIs - the only difference is that we can now run them on huge crowds, use flocking algorithms and have more interacting states to provide emergant behaviours. It's still all rule based though.
Interesting to see the Humanist argument coming up again (i.e. mankind is alone in the world and life is what you make it), especially since the internet was based upon the more austere Libertarian values (i.e. life is what *I* make it so get out of my way). Also interesting to see Postmodernism showing it's confused face in a new form (i.e. the truth is what I believe it to be, your milage may vary).
My comment on the article is that the form of Christianity and "Holy Circle" (those that attempt to control change and say they hold the moral high ground) in the article may be typical of the USA but aren't representative of the rest of the world. Sure, the USA is going through a time of milennial turmoil and change but please, don't believe that the same form of change is happening the world over.
I live in the UK and, although change is happening, it takes a very different form. The power of institutions is very much eroded and is often seen as an irrellevence to the "european" youth. The experience of living and working internationally, creating products for an international market and choosing which country and currency to have your bank account in is a liberating one; the internet is just one of the mechanisms used to make this happen. However language will always be a barrier to free movement, hence the highly intelligent are more free than the uneducated, regardless of computer knowhow.
Summing up, I'd ask you Merkins to please think globally when attempting to characterise the Internet. Anyway, there's more of us than there are of you!
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, if only there were some kind of organized system of, say, i don't know, governance for ensuring that under-represented members of our communities get equal access to economic resources? Like a set of written guidelines or maybe rules that all members of a community need to abide by...
There is no "cyber". It's just the internet. These politicians sound like they've been briefed out of a copy of Mondo2000 from 1994.
It's based on "Gradient Based Image Completion by solving the Poisson Equation":
http://www2.mae.cuhk.edu.hk/~cwang/pubs/C&GImageCompletion.pdf
Plus a bunch of other related papers that Siggraph people have been playing with for some years now.
The Hackers Diet makes it clear: Exercise just doesn't burn that many calories. You can lose weight just by eating less calories than you burn, no exercise required.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html
Most market analysts have to pay good money for personal opinions and demographic information.
So, I'd say $5 would secure my reply to that question. Oh, and FYI I only recommend/specify purchases rather than approve/authorise them.
I used this book as one of the references for my Game Developer Conference course on "Faster Math Functions", and the book is good but has holes. Crenshaw's style shows his crusty old engineer roots at times - his coverage of Mininax polynomials is way behind the times and he seriously needs to get into Mathematica or Maple as his basic high-precision tool.
Work by Tang on combatting destructive cancellation in range reduction, the new semi-table based exponant and log methods, Intel's research into using Estrin's Method based SIMD for evaluating polynomials or Muller's book on Elementary Functions are beyond Crenshaw's experience, and it shows. This is a homebrew book rather than an introduction to the state of the art. More information at SCEA R&D Website.
Ternary numbers are an interesting sidetrack and some similar techniques are used in fast chip-based systems to speed up adding (each bit also caries it's own overflow and sign bits, turning the classic serial add-with-carry into a more parallel operation).
It must be remembered that, for floating point numbers, base 2 is *the* most efficient representation, as argued in the classic paper "What Every computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg. The deep understanding behind IEEE754 is a masterpiece of numerical engineering that is often overlooked, IMO.
I was one of the people who worked on the YABasic project at Sony's Technology Group in London, where I worked on the documentation.
The YABasic had two reasons for being done. One, the UK Government was trying to classify the PS2 as a game system only rather than a more general purpose computer to tax imports. Sony has always seen the PS2 as a general purpose machine, and in the future you will see a number of toys, add-ons, applications and software that is non-gaming on the system. There are some very exciting things going on right now that may be announced soon.
The other reason that YABasic was written is that the Technology Group there is tasked with doing things that other companies don't have the time or reason to do. Games companies are busy trying to recoup their costs for the devkits and down-time from learning the system, so somebody had to show the world some of the more interesting things the PS2 could do. Sure, there is a history of hmoe enthusiast programming in the UK and that probably helped. Expect to see updates to YABasic and demo progras on magazine cover-disks and also the ability to freely swap programs on memory cards. We had great fun going retro and trying to recreate all those old-school demos - 8-Bit programs with 128-Bit fill rates!
FYI, YABasic is a fully virtualised machine, so PEEK and POKE only set variables in the interpreter and don't directly address the underlying machine. *IF* management decide to release the specs for the underlying chipsets (and press releases from Sony do suggest that it's at least licensable), then YABasic may be changed to allow direct access to the GIF, DMAC and other chips. Heck, it's all memory mapped at the end of the day.
- Robin Green
Sony R&D, Foster City.
> Studying creationism can be valuable, if only to understand its assumptions.
I was always taught that Genesis was about establishing who the main protagonist in "that book" is. 6 Days, three groups of three interrelated through time:
Day 1: light/dark -> Day 4: sun/moon
Day 2: water/land -> Day 5: fishes/birds
Day 3: trees/fruit -> Day 6: creatures/mankind
All this to establish the protagonist as an artist, a creator and has a multidimensional view of space-time that we can only start to grasp.
But that's Exegesis and Hermenutics, and this is Slashdot. So I'll shut up now.
Chances are slim. EA is a cutthroat company when it comes to only releasing for mass-market platforms. Those SKUs that have been released for Linux have done so because the original programmers personally wanted to and had done so for their own entertainment. It's hard to justify the risk/returns for 30+ person teams in 2-year development of an original title without a *lot* of commitment from corporate.
Worthy as it is, the Linux market will have to hit 10% or more of all gaming platforms before it even gets a sniff. Heck, PC sales are 30% of all games sales and Linux is a fraction of that. We regularly get Playstation titles selling x10 what the PC SKU does.
Darn those confounded consumers!
- Robin Green, Bullfrog Productions Ltd, UK.
> To be completely honest, knowing how to reduce a Nondeterministic Automaton to a Deterministic
> Automaton is not going to help most CS majors in the type of work they will be performing upon
> graduation. True, there do exist positions in which such knowledge is applicable, but most
> graduations are not doing programming of that caliber.
Computer games is one such area. The breadth of knowledge needed to be a gaming guru is startling - AI, finite state machines, fuzzy logic, 3D math, integration, image processing, audio processing, multi-threading, I/O, language design, parsing, OOP, etcetera. The list is endless.
My question is, if all these CS Majors are spewing forth from the halls of academia, why is it so damn difficult to find good games programmers?
Beats me, and I've only been interviewing for the past four years.
- RGreen, Bullfrog, UK.
I'm interested in the reasons that this article, and similar ones, keeping turning up in the press.
Intel keep hyping AI as the "next big thing" because more and more of the hard stuff is being taken off the processor by custom hardware - 3D cards, audio streaming and compression, etc. They want to sell their kick-butt processors so they hype the expensive stuff - currently that's Physical Simulation and "Advanced AIs", even if nobody has done physics well (it's a *very* hard problem and all the demos you'll see are cheap hacks and "special cases") and "Advanced AIs" are pure vapourware.
Having been in the business for a fair few years, I maintain that nothing significant has been invented in gaming AI for ages. Sure, there have been learning systems but they have been reserved for nieche "simulators" and "virtual pets". Mainstream games continue to plod along with rule-based AIs as always.
The only thing that has changed is that we can calculate more and more complex metrics for our rule based AIs - instead of proximity, we can do line-of-sight, instead of closest enemy we can now do spatial searches for the mean positions of groups of nasties.
Why will it always be thus? Because debugging a neural network is impossible (you just have to re-train it with a different working set) and having predictable AIs is key to shipping a game within your launch window. Having an out of control AI where nobody can pinpoint the bugs will get your project canned.
Certainly Dungeon Keeper 2 and Theme Park 2 are simple AIs - the only difference is that we can now run them on huge crowds, use flocking algorithms and have more interacting states to provide emergant behaviours. It's still all rule based though.
- Robin Green, Bullfrog Productions.
Interesting to see the Humanist argument coming up again (i.e. mankind is alone in the world and life is what you make it), especially since the internet was based upon the more austere Libertarian values (i.e. life is what *I* make it so get out of my way). Also interesting to see Postmodernism showing it's confused face in a new form (i.e. the truth is what I believe it to be, your milage may vary).
My comment on the article is that the form of Christianity and "Holy Circle" (those that attempt to control change and say they hold the moral high ground) in the article may be typical of the USA but aren't representative of the rest of the world. Sure, the USA is going through a time of milennial turmoil and change but please, don't believe that the same form of change is happening the world over.
I live in the UK and, although change is happening, it takes a very different form. The power of institutions is very much eroded and is often seen as an irrellevence to the "european" youth. The experience of living and working internationally, creating products for an international market and choosing which country and currency to have your bank account in is a liberating one; the internet is just one of the mechanisms used to make this happen. However language will always be a barrier to free movement, hence the highly intelligent are more free than the uneducated, regardless of computer knowhow.
Summing up, I'd ask you Merkins to please think globally when attempting to characterise the Internet. Anyway, there's more of us than there are of you!