Or conversely: what do we lose by moving away from C++?
Six years of C++ development, and all the corresponding skill development.
Even with the C++ to guide you, and assuming you had all the manpower to do the full conversion to Java that you had to write the C++ in the first place, you'll need at least a third of that time again to re-write the whole thing in Java, most likely. And that's being conservative; if you're good with C++ it's extremely likely to borderline-certain that you have used idioms that will translate poorly or effectively not translate at all into Java.
That's a shitload of stuff to just throw away to be buzzword compliant.
My suggestions would be to do one of two things.
Research JNI and see if that would allow you to incrementally pull things over to Java as you need them, while leaving the rest C++. C++ is so wonderfully... ahh... I'll go with "powerful" that it's hard to tell how things will interact, but if you can pull things over incrementally, you can at least not toss everything all at once. Because that's a guaranteed recipe for disaster.
Research your choice of Python or Ruby. My recommendation would be the former as it's more mature in a lot of little ways (and some big ones, like Unicode from what I hear). There are several technologies for using C++ objects in Python. I presume there are some in Ruby. Incrementally wrap pieces of your code in Python handlers as you need them, write Python or C++ as the situation warrents. There are other such languages to consider too; you'll have to evaluate them for your needs.
The key word here is not Java or JNI or Ruby or Python; those are really incidental to my point. The key word is incremental. Incremental might succeed. Attempting Total Switchover is just writing a check to the consultants for no return this decade.
And while you're incremental-ing and maybe wrapping, be sure to write unit tests if you haven't already got them. If you do manage to not toss out your entire code base, a good first step for any of this is to write unit tests on the parts of the code you're going to manhandle.
How to read reviews. The short version of an already short point is "just read the negatives and see if you agree that they are negatives".
Even with a 10/10 "review", you can often glean useful information this way. So far the only real negative I wish I'd see more reviewers mention is when you have unskippable cut scenes, which royally piss me off. (I've heard FFXII finally gets this right... arrogant jackasses took long enough... but I digress.)
You're missing the point. The string "0 but true" is literally what it says it is. It's a perl value that evaluates as true, but numerically is 0.
Ruby shouldn't have an equivalent. No language should, not right there is the base language with no operator overloading or anything. Not even Perl.
You could probably program a (near) equivalent in Ruby, because I know you could in Python with some evil code. You can also code an object that isn't == to itself, as another example, but that is also evil.
Basically, it's this evil perl wart; I doubt Intron is claiming this is a Perl feature. (If so, he's evil.:) ) Putting 0 on the left side of your ? wasn't the point at all.
That might explain why the Wii's default orientation seems to be "leaning"; if you put a position sensor in the front bottom and the back top you'd get a little more separation with the console leaning, and make it that much more unlikely that the sensor bar will be co-planar. With four non-coplanar sensors you get full, unambiguous 3D.
Plus that would solve another problem I've been thinking about, which is that the Wii needs enough sensors to be able to figure out where the sensor bar is, too. Technically, 4 sensors isn't enough; you also need to know where those four sensors are. If you don't know their position a priori you need even more sensors to figure it out.
It'll be interesting when somebody first tears one apart.
American Idol has the oldest plot in the book: X defeats Y.
In fact there have been a lot of otherwise plotless shows lately that take the "audience votes someone off every week" or "remaining players vote someone off every week" approach to manufactoring tension. It can be very powerful; shows otherwise completely uninteresting can at least borrow some sort of tension from it, like those "Who Will Be The Next Host Of Show X?" contests.
Yes, without a non-colinear sensor 3D shouldn't be possible.
One possibility is the Wii itself has a sensor. Wii + two sensors on the end of the bar would be the required three sensors. This still leaves an ambiguity about which side of the plane defined by those three points you're on, but you can discard the plane that is behind the TV.
Having only two sensors leaves you ambiguous about where you are in the rotation of the line defined by those two sensors, and I'm having a hard time imagining how you could write reliable hueristics that would resolve that ambiguity precisely and correctly.
So I'm going to guess the Wii has a sensor in it as well. We'll be able to test that once we have one by seeing if the system goes crazy if the sensor bar is colinear with the Wii.
You can subtract out the effect of the force feedback on acceleration fairly successfully, but not perfectly. It'd cause the controller to noticably drift, probably in a matter of seconds of force feedback, so that where a straight controller was driving the car straight a moment ago, now it's 5 degrees to the right. It'd add up fast. Expensive precision components might limit this to an acceptable degree but it'll be too expensive.
The reason Nintendo can "get away with" having force feedback in their controller is they have a second (and probably third and possibly fourth) point of reference in the sensor bar, so they can correct drift by referencing this other point (or points). (I don't have inside info, but the bar is presumably a bar because it has a position sensor on each end, or it'd be a "sensor button", and since accuracy is probably a big deal, I'd add one in the middle for another reference point; not as good as having a non-colinear reference point but still better than just 2; how much better would depend on a math analysis.) Or, more accurately, they never have drift problems because they don't have to try to trust the controller in the first place, just the sensor bar's assessment of the position and velocity, and the controller's report of acceleration.
So, my conclusion is Sony removed their rumble because it was far too late to add a sensor bar to their package, and so the only other choice was dropping force feedback. Their controllers will still need periodic re-zeroing, although clever programming and a bit of guesswork can minimize the need to do this explicitly. Still, it could have some tricky cases; if you've ever powered up your console while an analog stick wasn't centered, you've experienced this already. Make sure your new PS3 controllers are correctly horizontal when powering them up.
You can extend the logic out further. I can't eat a full chicken in anything less than three or four days, probably more, and that chicken isn't living more than a week longer than it has to get to the target weight. In that time period, it will only be able to produce so much waste, which of course is also not pure gasoline, it's energy density is relatively low, which is why we have to concentrate it.
If you add up all the energy sources you sort of use "in passing", it's not enough to get you off of oil. For one thing, remember that you're already paying for it; when you buy a chicken, you're paying for the feed it ate. When you buy fries at McDonald's, you're paying for an amortized amount of the frying oil. Any major untapped energy sources in our lives would show up in your budget.
When thinking about "all of the chickens in the US" it's easy to be blinded by the big numbers and think it might solve the oil problem. Dealing with it on a personal level is easier, and thank to the magic of money you can make some very powerful arguments by using money as a limiting factor. If you can't solve one person's oil problems with "incidental biodiesel", it's not going to solve everybody's problems when you multiply all parts of the problem by 300 million Americans.
Still, it's a start, it's progress, it's a good thing. It's something that we ought to do anyhow, really... although to some extent we do already. Waste turned into biodiesel isn't being turned into fertilizer. But for all the failings of the market system sometimes, it is the best thing around at efficiently allocating resources for problems like this.
You know, Ken, if the gaming press is saying that's probably too expensive, and a lot of hard-core gamers are looking at your price and honestly wondering if they can even afford it, maybe you should listen.
On the other hand, by E3 it was already too late to change course on that.
It's amazing how badly E3 went for Sony. I'd say Microsoft at least broke even, Nintendo scored in a big way, almost entirely at the expense of Sony, which lost big.
On Slashdot, digg, and other gaming sites I've been looking at, the Sony fanboy has overnight become an endangered species. That is what is really telling me Sony has a problem. If even the Retardusfuckwitis Internetus, a species Sony nearly owned last week, is defecting, you're gonna die.
Actually, caterpillars are a well-known threat to the internet, although they tend to affect hardware more than software. (So you're still correct the icon is wrong, of course.)
You seem to be incorrectly assuming that anyone, anywhere, is suggesting that we entirely switch over to this for our oil needs.
In fact, in terms of oil dependency this is almost entirely useless. If my waste was pure gasoline coming out of my body with the same mass, I'd still be right on the edge of being able to supply my own driving needs. So it's not going to get us off of oil.
However, a "waste shortage" sounds like a good thing to me. Much better than a surplus, no?
It's just one of many steps towards increasing the efficiency of our society. Long-term, we're going to beat the oil shortage by decreasing our energy usage, not increasing our oil production, but it's technologically infeasible to jump straight to that. This is one step of many towards better efficiency, recovering energy we're currently tossing out.
The PS2 has more raw power in every conventional measure than the Dreamcast. In particular, it can pump out more polygons per second by a significant margin.
However, the Dreamcast puts out higher quality polygons than the PS2. I've not gotten explicit confirmation on this but I'm pretty sure the PS2 doesn't do mipmapping, which causes a sparkle effect on many textures, especially ground textures as you move around. Even now, I still find that distracting (that is, even after years I'm still not used to it).
The Dreamcast polygons don't have that problem. For a good while early on the DC also held a texture advantage, but eventually the PS2 programmers worked out how to keep the pipelines full.
The PS2 can do more detailed scenes, and it's got more processing power for other things. But a Dreamcast game will look sharper than a PS2 game for the same polygons, and has fewer (i.e., no) motion-induced artefacts.
Which you say has "more powerful" graphics depends on your priority.
Ever since the name was announced, I've had this odd compulsion to visit several local gaming stores, run inside and shout something to the effect of "Wiiiiiiii! Wiiiiiii! Wiiii? Wiii! Wii wii wii wii wii wii wii! Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!" Also, during the first couple of "Wiiiiiii!"s, I'm running around the store using my arms as airplane wings.
I haven't done it yet, but the temptation is oddly strong. I don't really have the time, though....
But they're not just "going through my desk drawers" with my permission. They are searching for the purpose of determining if a crime has been committed. Unlike the First, the Fourth has nothing nothing about it only applying to the government.
As the title says, I honestly doubt this is legal in the US. The mere existance of a DVD doesn't constitute probable cause.
I don't recall signing any contract with FedEx that says they can search my goods, but even if I did the Constitution trumps that. I haven't got a problem with them opening it for technical reasons (repacking a mangled package, perhaps, which I'd accept gladly), but opening them for the purposes of determing if you've broken some law probably won't pass 4th Amendment muster.
As a positive example, while I'm not a fan of the drug war, a trained drug dog identifying a package as containing an illegal drug would probably be probable cause, because whatever small quantity of legal cocaine in the country (for research), if any, is unlikely to be sent through FedEx. But the mere existance of a DVD is nowhere near probable cause by any reasonable standard; I can't imagine that anything but the vast majority of optical media going through Fedex is perfectly legal.
However, my guess is the MPAA knows this, and this is a publicity stunt only.
(Finally, I'm not a dog, but I wouldn't be surprised they're not smelling DVDs so much as the packaging they usually come in, which has that New Plastic smell so strongly a human might be able to do this. If so, this is almost funny, because they'll never come up with the illegal DVDs that way. It'd depend on the training, and we don't have enough data to be sure either way.)
Because the easy way to beat this sort of AI is generally to find a trick or three that works, then ram the tricks down the AI's throat. The latter takes a bit of practice, admittedly, but compared to the level of skill necessary to beat a dedicated human opponent, the level of skill to defeat even a pumped up and cheating AI is much lower.
What happens in Alpha Centauri is that as you pump up the AI's cheat factor, the only practical difference is that it affects the odds of AI stomping on me in the first hundred turns or not. Once I get established, the AI loses almost no matter what.
I strongly suspect that this is a general pattern; as you throw resources at a bad AI, it gets linearly stronger, but at least in a Civ game, the human is getting geometrically stronger as the game progresses. The game at high cheat levels becomes a matter of luck, not skill.
Moreover, it tends to limit the experiences the human can have, vs. the full range of what is possible. I know the AI will come at me with the screaming hordes in a single mass, because while it has resources, it can't do anything with them. I never get to experience setting up a proper, in-depth defense, because I only have to defend against the relatively small subset of the possible set of attacks that the computer knows how to launch, that sort of thing.
I agree with you at low human skill levels, but a better AI really should provide a better gaming experience for moderate skill levels and above.
Why can't the computer in Warcraft III figure out it needs to chop down some trees in order to reach me (for the few maps that isolate players in forests)?
That's another good example concept: When considering how to get from here to here, consider whether you can "terraform" your way there successfully. This was another major AI weakness in Alpha Centauri, too; if you built a ring around a continent, the computer was effectively unable to get to you until they can build an air force, and they still aren't very effective with the air force without the land support to back it up.
It's going to be a long time before an AI can derive that concept from just the bare information about its terraforming options, so cheat. Watche the smart beta testers and steal their tricks.
I have to guess how AIs are implemented in current software for this answer, and perhaps these already exist in some games. But I'm sure I haven't seen many.
What I'd like to see is more AIs that are fed some concepts a priori, and then are able to manipulate those concepts in some way. Let me take a Civilization-type game as my example, since it is there I really wish I could see this.
I'd like to see an AI that has some concept of "launching an attack", beyond just massing troops and attacking in force. I'd like to see it know about "pincer", and "distraction", and other such concepts, and then use those to simplify its planning phases. Traditional AI techniques are still a long way from being fed the rules of Civ and deriving such things de novo, so I'd like to see some cheating, not with resources but by not starting almost from scratch with planning.
I'd like to see the computer have concepts of building a city vs. exploiting it, with corresponding "cheating" done in the computations, so the computer does a better job of building cities rather than just being handed resources to cheat. (Disclaimer: The last Civ game I played was Alpha Centauri, so maybe Civ 4 has addressed this, and cities actually get built; in AC it is not uncommon to take cities near the end of the game that have the AC equivalent of a Granary, and nothing else. However, I still bet human cities are still significantly better than computer-built cities. Feedback welcomed.)
I'd like extensive simulations to be run by the game author to adjust the weights of these concepts by playing tournaments. I'd like to see the AI guys have some time to actually refine the AI post-release because there's just no other way you're going to get a good, balanced AI.
While I've used Civ as an example, this generally extends to other genres reasonable well. In the FPS examples everyone is citing, I'm not sure about the exact concepts I'd choose, but what I'd like to see is the AI guys having time to load up some set of concepts and then firing a Genetic-Programming tournament at the concepts to see what happens, then iteratively refine the set of operators and concepts based on feedback from the results. (Most likely collapsing some obivously-useful trees into single nodes in some cases, breaking other concepts out, and adding new ones as needed.)
GP could be really interesting here because that is known to produce some interesting interactions with differentiated participants; you could evolve an entire squad with specialized members relatively easily, if your program nodes were rich enough.
Note: I'm not saying to run this on the client machine; GP techiniques would be inappropriate in general on a single, isolated client. On the other hand, for something like an XBox360 game played over live, that would be large enough to run a GP-based tournament against human players as "just another AI".
I'm not sure that game AI needs much more than more respect and more resources allocated to it so that you can do something other than The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. The required ideas don't seem like they're that hard, it's just that they pretty much all involve having some time to work with them and not just slamming out code and shipping it.
I didn't really intend my post to be a flame, I just thought your seemingly bragging about being able to buy things which you later tended to find fun to use a bit excessive.
I understand.
But I've learned the hard way that writing things like that and peppering it with enough disclaimers to make people happy tends to result in nobody reading it at all. Effective at preventing compliants, but not what I'm trying to accomplish.
And anything positive about yourself is automatically bragging to someone, somewhere.
So I quit caring, about this specifically and in general about the possibility that somebody, somewhere will take offense. It's a given that it will, so you can't let it be a stopper. Yes, take reasonable precautions, but that's all you can do, and they won't be anywhere near %100 effective.
I hope not. Flopping from "you can't possibly pick which games are good for you" to "of course you can pick what games are good for you" in quick succession doesn't make for a compelling argument.
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In addition to my other comment, be sure to read Things You Should Never Do, Part I from JoelOnSoftware.
People have varying opinions on his work, but in this situation, if you can't answer his objects you should not rewrite.
Six years of C++ development, and all the corresponding skill development.
Even with the C++ to guide you, and assuming you had all the manpower to do the full conversion to Java that you had to write the C++ in the first place, you'll need at least a third of that time again to re-write the whole thing in Java, most likely. And that's being conservative; if you're good with C++ it's extremely likely to borderline-certain that you have used idioms that will translate poorly or effectively not translate at all into Java.
That's a shitload of stuff to just throw away to be buzzword compliant.
My suggestions would be to do one of two things.
- Research JNI and see if that would allow you to incrementally pull things over to Java as you need them, while leaving the rest C++. C++ is so wonderfully... ahh... I'll go with "powerful" that it's hard to tell how things will interact, but if you can pull things over incrementally, you can at least not toss everything all at once. Because that's a guaranteed recipe for disaster.
- Research your choice of Python or Ruby. My recommendation would be the former as it's more mature in a lot of little ways (and some big ones, like Unicode from what I hear). There are several technologies for using C++ objects in Python. I presume there are some in Ruby. Incrementally wrap pieces of your code in Python handlers as you need them, write Python or C++ as the situation warrents. There are other such languages to consider too; you'll have to evaluate them for your needs.
The key word here is not Java or JNI or Ruby or Python; those are really incidental to my point. The key word is incremental. Incremental might succeed. Attempting Total Switchover is just writing a check to the consultants for no return this decade.And while you're incremental-ing and maybe wrapping, be sure to write unit tests if you haven't already got them. If you do manage to not toss out your entire code base, a good first step for any of this is to write unit tests on the parts of the code you're going to manhandle.
How to read reviews. The short version of an already short point is "just read the negatives and see if you agree that they are negatives".
Even with a 10/10 "review", you can often glean useful information this way. So far the only real negative I wish I'd see more reviewers mention is when you have unskippable cut scenes, which royally piss me off. (I've heard FFXII finally gets this right... arrogant jackasses took long enough... but I digress.)
It's the same bullshit video tape of a monkey falling out of a tree or something, just now it's got 16 times the pixels.
Hey man, if every time you turn on the TV you rush straight for the America's Funniest Home Video re-run, you've got nobody to blame but yourself.
You're missing the point. The string "0 but true" is literally what it says it is. It's a perl value that evaluates as true, but numerically is 0.
:) ) Putting 0 on the left side of your ? wasn't the point at all.
Ruby shouldn't have an equivalent. No language should, not right there is the base language with no operator overloading or anything. Not even Perl.
You could probably program a (near) equivalent in Ruby, because I know you could in Python with some evil code. You can also code an object that isn't == to itself, as another example, but that is also evil.
Basically, it's this evil perl wart; I doubt Intron is claiming this is a Perl feature. (If so, he's evil.
That might explain why the Wii's default orientation seems to be "leaning"; if you put a position sensor in the front bottom and the back top you'd get a little more separation with the console leaning, and make it that much more unlikely that the sensor bar will be co-planar. With four non-coplanar sensors you get full, unambiguous 3D.
Plus that would solve another problem I've been thinking about, which is that the Wii needs enough sensors to be able to figure out where the sensor bar is, too. Technically, 4 sensors isn't enough; you also need to know where those four sensors are. If you don't know their position a priori you need even more sensors to figure it out.
It'll be interesting when somebody first tears one apart.
American Idol has the oldest plot in the book: X defeats Y.
In fact there have been a lot of otherwise plotless shows lately that take the "audience votes someone off every week" or "remaining players vote someone off every week" approach to manufactoring tension. It can be very powerful; shows otherwise completely uninteresting can at least borrow some sort of tension from it, like those "Who Will Be The Next Host Of Show X?" contests.
Yes, without a non-colinear sensor 3D shouldn't be possible.
One possibility is the Wii itself has a sensor. Wii + two sensors on the end of the bar would be the required three sensors. This still leaves an ambiguity about which side of the plane defined by those three points you're on, but you can discard the plane that is behind the TV.
Having only two sensors leaves you ambiguous about where you are in the rotation of the line defined by those two sensors, and I'm having a hard time imagining how you could write reliable hueristics that would resolve that ambiguity precisely and correctly.
So I'm going to guess the Wii has a sensor in it as well. We'll be able to test that once we have one by seeing if the system goes crazy if the sensor bar is colinear with the Wii.
"DPD"?
You can subtract out the effect of the force feedback on acceleration fairly successfully, but not perfectly. It'd cause the controller to noticably drift, probably in a matter of seconds of force feedback, so that where a straight controller was driving the car straight a moment ago, now it's 5 degrees to the right. It'd add up fast. Expensive precision components might limit this to an acceptable degree but it'll be too expensive.
The reason Nintendo can "get away with" having force feedback in their controller is they have a second (and probably third and possibly fourth) point of reference in the sensor bar, so they can correct drift by referencing this other point (or points). (I don't have inside info, but the bar is presumably a bar because it has a position sensor on each end, or it'd be a "sensor button", and since accuracy is probably a big deal, I'd add one in the middle for another reference point; not as good as having a non-colinear reference point but still better than just 2; how much better would depend on a math analysis.) Or, more accurately, they never have drift problems because they don't have to try to trust the controller in the first place, just the sensor bar's assessment of the position and velocity, and the controller's report of acceleration.
So, my conclusion is Sony removed their rumble because it was far too late to add a sensor bar to their package, and so the only other choice was dropping force feedback. Their controllers will still need periodic re-zeroing, although clever programming and a bit of guesswork can minimize the need to do this explicitly. Still, it could have some tricky cases; if you've ever powered up your console while an analog stick wasn't centered, you've experienced this already. Make sure your new PS3 controllers are correctly horizontal when powering them up.
You can extend the logic out further. I can't eat a full chicken in anything less than three or four days, probably more, and that chicken isn't living more than a week longer than it has to get to the target weight. In that time period, it will only be able to produce so much waste, which of course is also not pure gasoline, it's energy density is relatively low, which is why we have to concentrate it.
If you add up all the energy sources you sort of use "in passing", it's not enough to get you off of oil. For one thing, remember that you're already paying for it; when you buy a chicken, you're paying for the feed it ate. When you buy fries at McDonald's, you're paying for an amortized amount of the frying oil. Any major untapped energy sources in our lives would show up in your budget.
When thinking about "all of the chickens in the US" it's easy to be blinded by the big numbers and think it might solve the oil problem. Dealing with it on a personal level is easier, and thank to the magic of money you can make some very powerful arguments by using money as a limiting factor. If you can't solve one person's oil problems with "incidental biodiesel", it's not going to solve everybody's problems when you multiply all parts of the problem by 300 million Americans.
Still, it's a start, it's progress, it's a good thing. It's something that we ought to do anyhow, really... although to some extent we do already. Waste turned into biodiesel isn't being turned into fertilizer. But for all the failings of the market system sometimes, it is the best thing around at efficiently allocating resources for problems like this.
Torrent for the Sony 2006 conference. I haven't watched it, but I watched the Nintendo one, and it's pretty hard to hear the crowd in that one unless they're being very loud.
The site I got these from seems to have a lot of great torrents from E3.
You know, Ken, if the gaming press is saying that's probably too expensive, and a lot of hard-core gamers are looking at your price and honestly wondering if they can even afford it, maybe you should listen.
On the other hand, by E3 it was already too late to change course on that.
It's amazing how badly E3 went for Sony. I'd say Microsoft at least broke even, Nintendo scored in a big way, almost entirely at the expense of Sony, which lost big.
On Slashdot, digg, and other gaming sites I've been looking at, the Sony fanboy has overnight become an endangered species. That is what is really telling me Sony has a problem. If even the Retardusfuckwitis Internetus, a species Sony nearly owned last week, is defecting, you're gonna die.
Actually, caterpillars are a well-known threat to the internet, although they tend to affect hardware more than software. (So you're still correct the icon is wrong, of course.)
You seem to be incorrectly assuming that anyone, anywhere, is suggesting that we entirely switch over to this for our oil needs.
In fact, in terms of oil dependency this is almost entirely useless. If my waste was pure gasoline coming out of my body with the same mass, I'd still be right on the edge of being able to supply my own driving needs. So it's not going to get us off of oil.
However, a "waste shortage" sounds like a good thing to me. Much better than a surplus, no?
It's just one of many steps towards increasing the efficiency of our society. Long-term, we're going to beat the oil shortage by decreasing our energy usage, not increasing our oil production, but it's technologically infeasible to jump straight to that. This is one step of many towards better efficiency, recovering energy we're currently tossing out.
The PS2 has more raw power in every conventional measure than the Dreamcast. In particular, it can pump out more polygons per second by a significant margin.
However, the Dreamcast puts out higher quality polygons than the PS2. I've not gotten explicit confirmation on this but I'm pretty sure the PS2 doesn't do mipmapping, which causes a sparkle effect on many textures, especially ground textures as you move around. Even now, I still find that distracting (that is, even after years I'm still not used to it).
The Dreamcast polygons don't have that problem. For a good while early on the DC also held a texture advantage, but eventually the PS2 programmers worked out how to keep the pipelines full.
The PS2 can do more detailed scenes, and it's got more processing power for other things. But a Dreamcast game will look sharper than a PS2 game for the same polygons, and has fewer (i.e., no) motion-induced artefacts.
Which you say has "more powerful" graphics depends on your priority.
Nintendo: Wiiiiiii!!!
Audience: Wiiii?!
Nintendo: WIIIIIIIIII!!!!
Audience: Wii!!
Ever since the name was announced, I've had this odd compulsion to visit several local gaming stores, run inside and shout something to the effect of "Wiiiiiiii! Wiiiiiii! Wiiii? Wiii! Wii wii wii wii wii wii wii! Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!" Also, during the first couple of "Wiiiiiii!"s, I'm running around the store using my arms as airplane wings.
I haven't done it yet, but the temptation is oddly strong. I don't really have the time, though....
But they're not just "going through my desk drawers" with my permission. They are searching for the purpose of determining if a crime has been committed. Unlike the First, the Fourth has nothing nothing about it only applying to the government.
As the title says, I honestly doubt this is legal in the US. The mere existance of a DVD doesn't constitute probable cause.
I don't recall signing any contract with FedEx that says they can search my goods, but even if I did the Constitution trumps that. I haven't got a problem with them opening it for technical reasons (repacking a mangled package, perhaps, which I'd accept gladly), but opening them for the purposes of determing if you've broken some law probably won't pass 4th Amendment muster.
As a positive example, while I'm not a fan of the drug war, a trained drug dog identifying a package as containing an illegal drug would probably be probable cause, because whatever small quantity of legal cocaine in the country (for research), if any, is unlikely to be sent through FedEx. But the mere existance of a DVD is nowhere near probable cause by any reasonable standard; I can't imagine that anything but the vast majority of optical media going through Fedex is perfectly legal.
However, my guess is the MPAA knows this, and this is a publicity stunt only.
(Finally, I'm not a dog, but I wouldn't be surprised they're not smelling DVDs so much as the packaging they usually come in, which has that New Plastic smell so strongly a human might be able to do this. If so, this is almost funny, because they'll never come up with the illegal DVDs that way. It'd depend on the training, and we don't have enough data to be sure either way.)
Because the easy way to beat this sort of AI is generally to find a trick or three that works, then ram the tricks down the AI's throat. The latter takes a bit of practice, admittedly, but compared to the level of skill necessary to beat a dedicated human opponent, the level of skill to defeat even a pumped up and cheating AI is much lower.
What happens in Alpha Centauri is that as you pump up the AI's cheat factor, the only practical difference is that it affects the odds of AI stomping on me in the first hundred turns or not. Once I get established, the AI loses almost no matter what.
I strongly suspect that this is a general pattern; as you throw resources at a bad AI, it gets linearly stronger, but at least in a Civ game, the human is getting geometrically stronger as the game progresses. The game at high cheat levels becomes a matter of luck, not skill.
Moreover, it tends to limit the experiences the human can have, vs. the full range of what is possible. I know the AI will come at me with the screaming hordes in a single mass, because while it has resources, it can't do anything with them. I never get to experience setting up a proper, in-depth defense, because I only have to defend against the relatively small subset of the possible set of attacks that the computer knows how to launch, that sort of thing.
I agree with you at low human skill levels, but a better AI really should provide a better gaming experience for moderate skill levels and above.
It's going to be a long time before an AI can derive that concept from just the bare information about its terraforming options, so cheat. Watche the smart beta testers and steal their tricks.
I have to guess how AIs are implemented in current software for this answer, and perhaps these already exist in some games. But I'm sure I haven't seen many.
What I'd like to see is more AIs that are fed some concepts a priori, and then are able to manipulate those concepts in some way. Let me take a Civilization-type game as my example, since it is there I really wish I could see this.
I'd like to see an AI that has some concept of "launching an attack", beyond just massing troops and attacking in force. I'd like to see it know about "pincer", and "distraction", and other such concepts, and then use those to simplify its planning phases. Traditional AI techniques are still a long way from being fed the rules of Civ and deriving such things de novo, so I'd like to see some cheating, not with resources but by not starting almost from scratch with planning.
I'd like to see the computer have concepts of building a city vs. exploiting it, with corresponding "cheating" done in the computations, so the computer does a better job of building cities rather than just being handed resources to cheat. (Disclaimer: The last Civ game I played was Alpha Centauri, so maybe Civ 4 has addressed this, and cities actually get built; in AC it is not uncommon to take cities near the end of the game that have the AC equivalent of a Granary, and nothing else. However, I still bet human cities are still significantly better than computer-built cities. Feedback welcomed.)
I'd like extensive simulations to be run by the game author to adjust the weights of these concepts by playing tournaments. I'd like to see the AI guys have some time to actually refine the AI post-release because there's just no other way you're going to get a good, balanced AI.
While I've used Civ as an example, this generally extends to other genres reasonable well. In the FPS examples everyone is citing, I'm not sure about the exact concepts I'd choose, but what I'd like to see is the AI guys having time to load up some set of concepts and then firing a Genetic-Programming tournament at the concepts to see what happens, then iteratively refine the set of operators and concepts based on feedback from the results. (Most likely collapsing some obivously-useful trees into single nodes in some cases, breaking other concepts out, and adding new ones as needed.)
GP could be really interesting here because that is known to produce some interesting interactions with differentiated participants; you could evolve an entire squad with specialized members relatively easily, if your program nodes were rich enough.
Note: I'm not saying to run this on the client machine; GP techiniques would be inappropriate in general on a single, isolated client. On the other hand, for something like an XBox360 game played over live, that would be large enough to run a GP-based tournament against human players as "just another AI".
I'm not sure that game AI needs much more than more respect and more resources allocated to it so that you can do something other than The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. The required ideas don't seem like they're that hard, it's just that they pretty much all involve having some time to work with them and not just slamming out code and shipping it.
Any sane retailer will happily switch your pre-order to the Wii version if you also pre-order a Wii.
I didn't really intend my post to be a flame, I just thought your seemingly bragging about being able to buy things which you later tended to find fun to use a bit excessive.
I understand.
But I've learned the hard way that writing things like that and peppering it with enough disclaimers to make people happy tends to result in nobody reading it at all. Effective at preventing compliants, but not what I'm trying to accomplish.
And anything positive about yourself is automatically bragging to someone, somewhere.
So I quit caring, about this specifically and in general about the possibility that somebody, somewhere will take offense. It's a given that it will, so you can't let it be a stopper. Yes, take reasonable precautions, but that's all you can do, and they won't be anywhere near %100 effective.
Are you the same AC?
I hope not. Flopping from "you can't possibly pick which games are good for you" to "of course you can pick what games are good for you" in quick succession doesn't make for a compelling argument.