I'm surprised that no one else has commented on this yet. Here we go.
Trying to use Prolog for this would have been a bad, bad idea. Prolog is for logic programming, which is great for theorem provers and any other such problem which depends on logical relations between a bunch of data, but entirely unappropriate for a graphical real-time game. Especially considering that the amount of AI involved in this problem was very small. Especially considering that graphical games require languages appropriate for graphical programming, and Prolog was definitely not designed with graphics in mind.
Now Lisp, on the other hand, would have been appropriate. There is a good reason why it is the language of choice for AI work, after all: it's easy to model most problems using Lisp. In fact, I'm developing a General Game Data Model (GGDM) for Scheme (on RiceU's DrScheme environment, which provides just about everything you can ask for - easy graphical programming, a simple network model, good multithreading support and a lot more), a simple extensible class library indented to turn all of these kind of problems into a simple matter of defining a few objects with behaviour defined on the fly. Anyone interested can email me.
As for C++... well, I can only guess what a mess the code wound up looking like. Maybe the boys care to open the source?;)
Thank you, Mr Hugo, for putting it so very concisely. I wish my writing made half as much sense as yours.:)
On a side note, I'm glad that I could help provoke such intelligent talk with my original post, and help show that good things still come from Slashdot.:)
At the risk of coming off as some unholy Stallman-wannabe, I have to say this.
Linux isn't what's important. Free Software is.
Linux is software, and software comes and goes. Whether some company or other jumps on the Linux bandwagon is irrelevant in the big picture. What is truly important is to spread Free Software in general - not only the software itself, but the accompanying meme that says, essentially, that "sharing is profitable". The catch is to ingrain this idea into our culture in the same way that sharing is already ingrained in the scientific and mathematical communities.
Once we've done that, we'll have achieved something much greated than pressuring a lot of companies to support a Free operating system. We'll have dominated the world. Because world domination is not achieved by actually taking over the world, but by having the world think that you're in control of it.
(Again, sorry for the rant. I'm in extended no-sleep mode.)
In any case... well, needless to say that this is very exciting. It's one of the first steps in the long but exciting way to practical molecular nanotechnology. Interesting times are coming our way!
Much better! My only complaint is about your use of first and second instead of car and cadr. Also, if you're having RAM problems, you might want to consider a smaller dialect such as Scheme, for which there are many excellent interactive systems available as Free Software. Scheme is also conceptually nicer and easier to learn (The Revised[5] Report on Scheme is only 50 pages, about the same size as the index of Common Lisp: the Language).
And how, pray tell, will the format form obtain its parameters? That's right. It won't, because you haven't bothered to actually pass them to format. As long as you're showing off your Lisp wizardliness, you probably want to use a closure instead, as in the much more idiomatic:
It requires that users have a new phone equipped with the GPS technology but allows users to turn the locating system on and off at their leisure, bringing home the issue of privacy for the cell phone user.
With U.S. Wireless' system, the phone is always being tracked, Cunningham said.
``It's constantly monitoring location,'' Cunningham said. ``With ours, it's only working when you want it to. You push the button when you want to be found.''
Brunato says the RadioCamera system doesn't recognize the phone user for traffic management purposes.
``It has no idea of whose phone it is or the number,'' he said. ``Compare it to a helicopter flying overhead monitoring traffic. It can see all the cars and how fast they're moving but has no idea who is driving that car. It just sees the traffic.''
Sure, you Americans have all reason to be paranoid about everything, I grant you that. But every technology has potential to be applied to both "good" and "evil". This one seems useful enough for you guys to take the risk.
Me, I'd be surprised if it reached this tropical hellhole called Brazil within the decade. Heh.
Anyone notice that nowhere in the press release did they bother to mention exactly what constitutes "photonics"?
(Flame retardant: yes, I've conducted a search and found it out. I'm merely pointing out that the PR rants for pages and pages about an undefined word. Maybe it's just my innate dislike for the phony buzzword-heavy writing style. Ah well.)
Anyway, this is really interesting. Obviously there are plenty of "but"'s, as other posters have no doubt pointed out by now, but this is a real step forward in research. And it seems rather close to my primary field of interest (self-replicating artificial molecules) - maybe it will give me a chance to actually do some official work on it. Really makes MIT look better and better to me. Hmmmm, I can see it already... "Rafael Kaufmann, Ph. D."... oh yeah.:)
By the way, I'm still waiting for my nanites!
(P.S.: <spelling-nazi>The correct form is "revolutionise".</spelling-nazi>)
That was the sound of water being expelled from my mouth and onto my computer's monitor at a high velocity after reading the above post.
As someone who uses both Gnome, OpenWindows and CDE regularly (on Intel and Sun workstations), I have to say that, on all accounts, Gnome is by far superior. Much more so when it behaves differently from both OW and CDE than when it behaves like those.
Sure, there's Lesstif, and there's probably a few dozen Free CDE clones around. But a lot of excellent work has been done on Gnome, to the point where it can be considered far superior for worstation use than CDE. As for porting current apps to Gnome, Lesstif makes it perfectly possible.
There isn't even the usual excuse of "eliminating duplication of effort". As long as we're writing software on our own, let's try to go beyond what has already done. I mean, look at what happened the last time someone tried to write an Unix clone:)
Last year, AOL decided to crash into the Brazilian ISP market, with a bang. They were aiming to get at 20-30% of the market by now.
Current situation: not even a full 5%. Market penetration: almost zero. Of course, there was a lot of hype about AOL, but there are already a few very well-established and powerful ISPs around here who were able to set up a defensive strategy. The day after AOL officially announced its Brazilian entry, I received a free Internet CD-ROM from ZAZ, the second largest Brazilian ISP. (I didn't install any of those, mind you. I like my neighbourhood ISP just fine, thank you very much.)
My point is, some people did install AOL's free Internet CD. The result was pretty much as described in the main article. No warning, of course, was included in the CD-ROM cover. But Brazil being Brazil, some of these people decided to avenge their lost setups. They sued AOL. Big time. They made a lot of noise about it. They got it on the cover of just about every major newspaper around here. They successfully managed to spread this meme to the near-entirety of the Brazilian Internet-using public. The end result: AOL is going nowhere here.
Let us celebrate.
(Here's a more-or-less related article; it's in Portuguese, you might want to use your favourite translation program.)
Anyway, here's what troubles me. The largest atoms are about what, 10^-11m, right? So one of these thingies would be merely 2000 to 15000 atoms in length - about the length of some common complex organic molecules. How can a structure be so small and still qualify as alive?
Of course, if it can, that means that we can also build artificial assemblers at least that small. That's very cool.
I thought so too. It just annoys me to see all the Americanocentric nutcases around here automatically assume that the extent of the discussion is limited to the US and that he who doesn't know US law is an idiot.
As a colleague of Faré in the Tunes project (shameless plug) and a subscriber to (and occasional participant in) the cybernethics mailing list, I'd like to point a few things out.
First of all, Faré is French and resides in France. So before attacking his integrity, honesty, manhood, morals, intelligence, competence or whatever, ask yourself this question, American-boy: do you have any idea as to how French law applies to this issue? What if it were the case (perhaps not in France, but somewhere else) that this loophole _were_ applicable and an issue under some other country's law?
Also, as other posters have said, Faré is worried about what might happen if a corporation were created with the express purpose of hoarding otherwise GPL'd code. This might be an issue.
Finally, please don't fuck cybernethics up! If you want to join in on the discussion, that's great, but the membership is really soaring, and it'd be very unfortunate to see the list deteriorate, and I'm afraid that this is going to be the case. So try to keep the S/N ratio up.
Anyway, if anyone cares, Faré and I are on IRC right now (#tunes at openprojects.net). If you've got a problem with him (or me!), come over... we've already got the boxing ring set up.
and as much as we all love being closet-Socialists here
Whoa. Now you got me on rant mode. Run for your life.:)
<rant> I've yet to meet a geek, nerd or hacker who is a socialist in this sense. Fervorous libertarianism seems to be the norm around here. This is good.
And before you get all "where was your beloved free market when the DoJ had to intervene to stop Microsoft?", let me say that I never, not once, advocated the DoJ's meddling with. As much as I hate what Microsoft does, at least I'm consistently radical. </rant>
However, if I were to talk about "big iron", I might think of IRIX as well. But IRIX is being dropped, in favor of? Linux, I believe. If SGI puts resources into extending Linux at the higher levels, I'll be pretty happy.
Heck, if I were to talk about "big iron", I would think of the Crays' mighty-ass UNICOS, not the comparatively flimsy IRIX, which is optimized for - of all things - graphics work! Ever been around a T90? The damn thing screams big iron.
As I tend to mention in just about all of my posts, I'm in Brazil. I'm just wondering whether this drug will ever get here. The thought of a horribly healthy North-American population conquering and enslaving the drug-ridden Third World comes to mind.
The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeOut or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.
Ayway, you guys have fun with your little totalitarian state. Those of you who can, relocate ASAP (Rob and Jeff, the Caribbean is always a good choice...); those who can't, prepare to forget the meaning of freedom in the coming years. Me, I'm in Brazil, which is not exactly the freest of countries either, but just in case anybody tries to bother me, I'm going back into my bunker and get my shotgun - it might turn out to be useful after all...
First of all, the obligatory in a Hemos story: the word "ubiquitous" is misspelled.;)
Why is it that people have such a limited view of nanotech applications? Why is it that nobody mentions Drexler, universal assemblers, nano-built self-modifying neural networks, "true" borgification etc. anymore? This is what really matters; this is the natural path into which technological advances leads. Not some silly one-tool toolbox.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised that no one else has commented on this yet. Here we go.
;)
Trying to use Prolog for this would have been a bad, bad idea. Prolog is for logic programming, which is great for theorem provers and any other such problem which depends on logical relations between a bunch of data, but entirely unappropriate for a graphical real-time game. Especially considering that the amount of AI involved in this problem was very small. Especially considering that graphical games require languages appropriate for graphical programming, and Prolog was definitely not designed with graphics in mind.
Now Lisp, on the other hand, would have been appropriate. There is a good reason why it is the language of choice for AI work, after all: it's easy to model most problems using Lisp. In fact, I'm developing a General Game Data Model (GGDM) for Scheme (on RiceU's DrScheme environment, which provides just about everything you can ask for - easy graphical programming, a simple network model, good multithreading support and a lot more), a simple extensible class library indented to turn all of these kind of problems into a simple matter of defining a few objects with behaviour defined on the fly. Anyone interested can email me.
As for C++... well, I can only guess what a mess the code wound up looking like. Maybe the boys care to open the source?
Otherwise funny post, but... Jesus Christ. Why do people have such difficulty getting foreign names right?
It's not such a complicated name anyway. Look.
Chan.
Dra.
Sekh.
Ar.
Repeat with me: Chandrasekhar.
See, wasn't so hard, now was it?
Now let's try another one. Repeat with me: Schrödinger...
I'm sorry, but why is that? I can't see what's wrong with keeping my default score of 2.
If there is actually a good reason for doing this, I'd be happy to do so.
Thank you, Mr Hugo, for putting it so very concisely. I wish my writing made half as much sense as yours. :)
:)
On a side note, I'm glad that I could help provoke such intelligent talk with my original post, and help show that good things still come from Slashdot.
At the risk of coming off as some unholy Stallman-wannabe, I have to say this.
Linux isn't what's important. Free Software is.
Linux is software, and software comes and goes. Whether some company or other jumps on the Linux bandwagon is irrelevant in the big picture. What is truly important is to spread Free Software in general - not only the software itself, but the accompanying meme that says, essentially, that "sharing is profitable". The catch is to ingrain this idea into our culture in the same way that sharing is already ingrained in the scientific and mathematical communities.
Once we've done that, we'll have achieved something much greated than pressuring a lot of companies to support a Free operating system. We'll have dominated the world. Because world domination is not achieved by actually taking over the world, but by having the world think that you're in control of it.
(Again, sorry for the rant. I'm in extended no-sleep mode.)
In any case... well, needless to say that this is very exciting. It's one of the first steps in the long but exciting way to practical molecular nanotechnology. Interesting times are coming our way!
Much better! My only complaint is about your use of first and second instead of car and cadr. Also, if you're having RAM problems, you might want to consider a smaller dialect such as Scheme, for which there are many excellent interactive systems available as Free Software. Scheme is also conceptually nicer and easier to learn (The Revised[5] Report on Scheme is only 50 pages, about the same size as the index of Common Lisp: the Language).
You said:
((lambda (x z) (format "~a~a")) "lisp" "d00d")
And how, pray tell, will the format form obtain its parameters? That's right. It won't, because you haven't bothered to actually pass them to format. As long as you're showing off your Lisp wizardliness, you probably want to use a closure instead, as in the much more idiomatic:
(let* ((x "lisp")
(z "d00d")
(pr (lambda () (begin (display x) (display z) (new-line)))))
(pr))
From the article (my emphases):
It requires that users have a new phone equipped with the GPS technology but allows users to turn the locating system on and off at their leisure, bringing home the issue of privacy for the cell phone user.
With U.S. Wireless' system, the phone is always being tracked, Cunningham said.
``It's constantly monitoring location,'' Cunningham said. ``With ours, it's only working when you want it to. You push the button when you want to be found.''
Brunato says the RadioCamera system doesn't recognize the phone user for traffic management purposes.
``It has no idea of whose phone it is or the number,'' he said. ``Compare it to a helicopter flying overhead monitoring traffic. It can see all the cars and how fast they're moving but has no idea who is driving that car. It just sees the traffic.''
Sure, you Americans have all reason to be paranoid about everything, I grant you that. But every technology has potential to be applied to both "good" and "evil". This one seems useful enough for you guys to take the risk.
Me, I'd be surprised if it reached this tropical hellhole called Brazil within the decade. Heh.
Anyone notice that nowhere in the press release did they bother to mention exactly what constitutes "photonics"?
:)
(Flame retardant: yes, I've conducted a search and found it out. I'm merely pointing out that the PR rants for pages and pages about an undefined word. Maybe it's just my innate dislike for the phony buzzword-heavy writing style. Ah well.)
Anyway, this is really interesting. Obviously there are plenty of "but"'s, as other posters have no doubt pointed out by now, but this is a real step forward in research. And it seems rather close to my primary field of interest (self-replicating artificial molecules) - maybe it will give me a chance to actually do some official work on it. Really makes MIT look better and better to me. Hmmmm, I can see it already... "Rafael Kaufmann, Ph. D."... oh yeah.
By the way, I'm still waiting for my nanites!
(P.S.: <spelling-nazi>The correct form is "revolutionise".</spelling-nazi>)
*pfffffft*
:)
That was the sound of water being expelled from my mouth and onto my computer's monitor at a high velocity after reading the above post.
As someone who uses both Gnome, OpenWindows and CDE regularly (on Intel and Sun workstations), I have to say that, on all accounts, Gnome is by far superior. Much more so when it behaves differently from both OW and CDE than when it behaves like those.
Sure, there's Lesstif, and there's probably a few dozen Free CDE clones around. But a lot of excellent work has been done on Gnome, to the point where it can be considered far superior for worstation use than CDE. As for porting current apps to Gnome, Lesstif makes it perfectly possible.
There isn't even the usual excuse of "eliminating duplication of effort". As long as we're writing software on our own, let's try to go beyond what has already done. I mean, look at what happened the last time someone tried to write an Unix clone
Moderate this up, people!!! This is the funniest reply to one of my comments EVER!!!!! ROTFL!!!!
Thanks for making my day more fun, Mr. Coward!
Last year, AOL decided to crash into the Brazilian ISP market, with a bang. They were aiming to get at 20-30% of the market by now.
Current situation: not even a full 5%. Market penetration: almost zero. Of course, there was a lot of hype about AOL, but there are already a few very well-established and powerful ISPs around here who were able to set up a defensive strategy. The day after AOL officially announced its Brazilian entry, I received a free Internet CD-ROM from ZAZ, the second largest Brazilian ISP. (I didn't install any of those, mind you. I like my neighbourhood ISP just fine, thank you very much.)
My point is, some people did install AOL's free Internet CD. The result was pretty much as described in the main article. No warning, of course, was included in the CD-ROM cover. But Brazil being Brazil, some of these people decided to avenge their lost setups. They sued AOL. Big time. They made a lot of noise about it. They got it on the cover of just about every major newspaper around here. They successfully managed to spread this meme to the near-entirety of the Brazilian Internet-using public. The end result: AOL is going nowhere here.
Let us celebrate.
(Here's a more-or-less related article; it's in Portuguese, you might want to use your favourite translation program.)
Seriously, I think this would deserve index.pl!
Anyway, here's what troubles me. The largest atoms are about what, 10^-11m, right? So one of these thingies would be merely 2000 to 15000 atoms in length - about the length of some common complex organic molecules. How can a structure be so small and still qualify as alive?
Of course, if it can, that means that we can also build artificial assemblers at least that small. That's very cool.
I thought so too. It just annoys me to see all the Americanocentric nutcases around here automatically assume that the extent of the discussion is limited to the US and that he who doesn't know US law is an idiot.
:)
Anyway, see ya
Okay. So now I know a geek/nerd/hacker who is a socialist. Thanks for the correction; sorry for any inconveniences. Peace!
As a colleague of Faré in the Tunes project (shameless plug) and a subscriber to (and occasional participant in) the cybernethics mailing list, I'd like to point a few things out.
First of all, Faré is French and resides in France. So before attacking his integrity, honesty, manhood, morals, intelligence, competence or whatever, ask yourself this question, American-boy: do you have any idea as to how French law applies to this issue? What if it were the case (perhaps not in France, but somewhere else) that this loophole _were_ applicable and an issue under some other country's law?
Also, as other posters have said, Faré is worried about what might happen if a corporation were created with the express purpose of hoarding otherwise GPL'd code. This might be an issue.
Finally, please don't fuck cybernethics up! If you want to join in on the discussion, that's great, but the membership is really soaring, and it'd be very unfortunate to see the list deteriorate, and I'm afraid that this is going to be the case. So try to keep the S/N ratio up.
Anyway, if anyone cares, Faré and I are on IRC right now (#tunes at openprojects.net). If you've got a problem with him (or me!), come over... we've already got the boxing ring set up.
and as much as we all love being closet-Socialists here
:)
Whoa. Now you got me on rant mode. Run for your life.
<rant>
I've yet to meet a geek, nerd or hacker who is a socialist in this sense. Fervorous libertarianism seems to be the norm around here. This is good.
And before you get all "where was your beloved free market when the DoJ had to intervene to stop Microsoft?", let me say that I never, not once, advocated the DoJ's meddling with. As much as I hate what Microsoft does, at least I'm consistently radical.
</rant>
However, if I were to talk about "big iron", I might think of IRIX as well. But IRIX is being dropped, in favor of? Linux, I believe. If SGI puts resources into extending Linux at the higher levels, I'll be pretty happy.
Heck, if I were to talk about "big iron", I would think of the Crays' mighty-ass UNICOS, not the comparatively flimsy IRIX, which is optimized for - of all things - graphics work! Ever been around a T90? The damn thing screams big iron.
Just a random thought.
We stare at the sky
Shouldn't one be taking care
of one's own wallet?
As I tend to mention in just about all of my posts, I'm in Brazil. I'm just wondering whether this drug will ever get here. The thought of a horribly healthy North-American population conquering and enslaving the drug-ridden Third World comes to mind.
:)
Oh wait, that already happened. Sorry
David Manifold (aka Tril) offers free hosting for open source projects at Bespin.
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Script timed out
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The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeOut or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.
Ayway, you guys have fun with your little totalitarian state. Those of you who can, relocate ASAP (Rob and Jeff, the Caribbean is always a good choice...); those who can't, prepare to forget the meaning of freedom in the coming years. Me, I'm in Brazil, which is not exactly the freest of countries either, but just in case anybody tries to bother me, I'm going back into my bunker and get my shotgun - it might turn out to be useful after all...
(With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke, RMS, Emacs Doctor, Zippy the Pinhead, and of course HAL)
You forgot Joseph Weizenbaum, inventor of the original ELIZA.
First of all, the obligatory in a Hemos story: the word "ubiquitous" is misspelled. ;)
:)
Why is it that people have such a limited view of nanotech applications? Why is it that nobody mentions Drexler, universal assemblers, nano-built self-modifying neural networks, "true" borgification etc. anymore? This is what really matters; this is the natural path into which technological advances leads. Not some silly one-tool toolbox.
And of course... First post! Yay!