I think that's a vastly oversimplified, and annoyingly compelling, view. It's not like physicists actively try to produce trivial theories that explain all experimental evidence by just sticking in a horrific number of arbitrary constants. They add a new constant to explain a physical property, like the speed of light, when it's relevant to the rest of the theory. A good physicist would probably point out how erratic the derivatives of your polynomial interpolations are and suggest requiring differentiability and bounded derivatives is a good idea. As in this example, hopefully physicists have some good reason--physical intuition, mathematical elegance, behavior in a limit, etc.--to modify their theory the way they do.
Interestingly, general relativity had no experimental basis for years after it was first proposed--though that's not to say it didn't make theoretically testable predictions.
Do you have any hard evidence to back up your claims? (I might agree with bits of them, but implying physicists actively discourage questioning of an unproven theory without evidence shouldn't be allowed.)
Lorentz ether theory is possibly an example of an old theory replaced by a new one not because their predictions were different but because the newer was conceptually simpler.
The constancy of the speed of light was postulated by Albert Einstein in 1905, motivated by Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and the lack of evidence for the luminiferous ether but not, contrary to widespread belief, the null result of the Michelson–Morley experiment.
Also, there are quite a few alternatives to string theory; it's not as if alternatives have been abandoned by any stretch. In fact, string theory fell out of favor for a while in the 70's and 80's (though it's changed quite a bit over the years).
Yeah, I agree Saruman and the Harrowing of the Shire getting cut didn't agree well with me. But the movies were already obscenely long. Sometimes a movie just doesn't need yet another sub plot, even if a book series does. In any case, I was happy with so much of what *was* included it outweighs my annoyance by quite a ways. I also understand why they might have felt the need to cut those plot lines, and I think respect for the source material is the only thing that kept the movies from cutting far more.
That's a nice sound byte, but it glosses over the other 9 hours of the films. I'd be sad if a few minutes of running joke can determine whether a trilogy respected the plot of its source material or not.
If you meant my post by "Parent assumes that other gamers will be attempting to maximize ease of compleation as a primary desirable attribute of said game", I did not. There's a difference between enjoyable challenge and tedious challenge. For instance, if I made a game requiring you to move the mouse around a 500x500 pixel square without moving the mouse off a 1 pixel wide border, that would be challenging. I think almost nobody would find it enjoyable, and almost everybody would find it tedious. Waiting on mana regen due to high mob HP in Oblivion was tedious and not enjoyable, in a similar vein. I'm very happy with challenging but fun mechanics.
A poor reading of my post might give the impression you mention, since I wanted a console on the console version, and the console can be used to cheat. I actually listed the reason as fixing bugs. On Morrowind, due to dialog bugs I wasn't able to become grandmaster of Telvanni, which was just plain annoying. If I had been playing on the PC version it could have been fixed.
A friend of mine seems to play with ease of completion in mind. If you're going to play a game but you want to beat it easily, why not "not" play the game, since that's even easier? (The answer in his case is that he enjoys games for other reasons and is a bit inconsistent.)
Did you mean "to not being a computational linguist"? Also, the size of the corpus needed to fit decently to Zipf's law isn't necessarily the size needed for statistically significant conclusions in other power law scenarios. However, I must admit myself that I've never checked Zipf's law on anything.
What would you consider "respecting a plot"? There's no way in the world to fit the LotR books in their entirety in a trilogy, so many parts had to get cut. Any other book should be the same. Book plots and movie plots have vastly different implementation details, too, and it's unsurprising changes have to be made. Perhaps you think it's impossible to respect a plot of some books in making a movie version? I have my pet annoyances with the changes in the recent LotR movies, but I still think they did a very good job overall of respecting the story as much as possible for a movie adaptation.
Now that you mention high HP enemies, I do remember in Oblivion that I used a magic weakness + DoT combo towards the end, just to kill things without having to regen all my mana afterward. I played the game normally with respect to the tactic you mention (i.e. ignored it). I'd be happy if that bit of tedium was done away with--be it caused by too low mana regen at high levels, low magic DPS, too high mob health, or something else.
Certainly a game seemingly encouraging you not to use your main skills is... silly:).
The summary mentions tens of thousands of data points were used. This is an order of magnitude below "the number of words in a book" (depending on its length), but I think you just picked that number because Zipf's law's canonical example deals with word frequencies in books. I doubt your conclusion doubting more than I doubt the summary's conclusion (TFA is/.'d right now for me).
You clearly don't understand. I suppose it's possible terrorists would lay off small-scale attacks, which would cause someone using the power law predictively to conclude a large-scale attack was unlikely. That seems unlikely itself, and shouldn't be a new strategy in any case. As for your "double-binds", supposing a statistical model could predict specific terrorist attacks, it could simply say "those terrorists unaware of this model will do X" and "those other terrorists will do Y". There's no conundrum if you just break the set of all terrorists into two pieces.
Is that a joke? What are terrorists going to do with this information? Oh, I can see it now: "we attacked 10 times in the last week for 5 casualties per attack. To screw up their power law, we must attack 50 times for 100 casualties per attack this week!" The power law prediction is akin to the following trivial example. If I toss a fair die for a hundred years, statistics says I will have rolled "1" almost exactly 1/6th of the time. However, it's not able to say whether or not in the next roll I'll get a "1". The analogy is that a high-level pattern can be observed, but the specifics are too uncertain to give predictions on.
Why do some people think math is magical? Mathematicians are almost real-life wizards to some people. Math just uses the information you have as cleverly as possible. It's ridiculous to think a statistical analysis giving a power law would in any way threaten the role of human intelligence. There's just not enough information to put into the model for it to predict a specific attack. Sometimes TV shows use this type of analysis ("he attacked in these 5 locations, so the computer says he'll attack here next!") but it's just BS used for dramatic effect--like visually enhancing images way past the resolution they were taken with.
There were quite a few "easy win" tactics in Oblivion and Morrowind. Neither was difficult enough to require them by any stretch, so saying what you describe is "the" way to victory might be a bit strong. Avoid 'em if you don't like 'em, IMO (though the underlying mechanic you describe remains stupid). One of my biggest hopes in mechanic changes is that they give me a non-tedious way to carry a whole bunch of loot. How about a feather spell that scales quadratically with player level? Simple, not overpowered early game, and makes weight irrelevant late game, assuming it doesn't need to be recast a lot. Oh, and adding a console to the console versions might be nice--big bugs you can't fix just because you're not on a PC are really annoying.
I'm curious how much the two audiences overlap. For me, I'd never buy CoD just because it's not my type of game, while I'm certain I'll get TES5 sometime.
TFA includes a number of quotes from a Eurogamer interview with Todd Howard--executive producer at Bethesda--from August 16th of this year. One was
One thing I can say is that from when you first hear about it to when it's out will be the shortest it's been for us.
. He was actually responding to the question
You've been working on something secret now for two years. Do you have any sense yet of when you will be able to talk about it or even say what it is? Are going to be sat here next year answering the same question?
So, TES5 has apparently been in development for years and we're now up to the "you first hear about it" bit. I read the rest as Bethesda trying to pull a Blizzard inasmuch as they want to either meet a release schedule or not give one, to avoid raising and crushing hardcore fan expectations. Maybe they'll be timely this time?
What that clause meant was unclear, which was my point--it wasn't "obvious" what was meant, so I assumed symbolic integration. After I do that I get insulted obliquely, which annoyed me. The type of generalization your post contained comes up a lot on/. and also annoys me. In retrospect, I was more angry than I should have been, and I apologize for the insult.
(I agree that I was pedantic with the part you quoted. That wasn't the part under consideration, though.)
It's not obvious, and I wasn't trying to be pedantic. The next clause was "not just learned how to solve a couple of integrals"--which would mean symbolic integration and not numeric, as near as I can interpret. So, screw you you smug jerk.
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I think that's a vastly oversimplified, and annoyingly compelling, view. It's not like physicists actively try to produce trivial theories that explain all experimental evidence by just sticking in a horrific number of arbitrary constants. They add a new constant to explain a physical property, like the speed of light, when it's relevant to the rest of the theory. A good physicist would probably point out how erratic the derivatives of your polynomial interpolations are and suggest requiring differentiability and bounded derivatives is a good idea. As in this example, hopefully physicists have some good reason--physical intuition, mathematical elegance, behavior in a limit, etc.--to modify their theory the way they do.
Interestingly, general relativity had no experimental basis for years after it was first proposed--though that's not to say it didn't make theoretically testable predictions.
I think it was supposed to be 10^12, for those who forget what the prefix Tera means. I was confused at first too.
Do you have any hard evidence to back up your claims? (I might agree with bits of them, but implying physicists actively discourage questioning of an unproven theory without evidence shouldn't be allowed.)
Lorentz ether theory is possibly an example of an old theory replaced by a new one not because their predictions were different but because the newer was conceptually simpler.
The constancy of the speed of light was postulated by Albert Einstein in 1905, motivated by Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and the lack of evidence for the luminiferous ether but not, contrary to widespread belief, the null result of the Michelson–Morley experiment.
Also, there are quite a few alternatives to string theory; it's not as if alternatives have been abandoned by any stretch. In fact, string theory fell out of favor for a while in the 70's and 80's (though it's changed quite a bit over the years).
Yeah, I agree Saruman and the Harrowing of the Shire getting cut didn't agree well with me. But the movies were already obscenely long. Sometimes a movie just doesn't need yet another sub plot, even if a book series does. In any case, I was happy with so much of what *was* included it outweighs my annoyance by quite a ways. I also understand why they might have felt the need to cut those plot lines, and I think respect for the source material is the only thing that kept the movies from cutting far more.
That's a nice sound byte, but it glosses over the other 9 hours of the films. I'd be sad if a few minutes of running joke can determine whether a trilogy respected the plot of its source material or not.
If you meant my post by "Parent assumes that other gamers will be attempting to maximize ease of compleation as a primary desirable attribute of said game", I did not. There's a difference between enjoyable challenge and tedious challenge. For instance, if I made a game requiring you to move the mouse around a 500x500 pixel square without moving the mouse off a 1 pixel wide border, that would be challenging. I think almost nobody would find it enjoyable, and almost everybody would find it tedious. Waiting on mana regen due to high mob HP in Oblivion was tedious and not enjoyable, in a similar vein. I'm very happy with challenging but fun mechanics.
A poor reading of my post might give the impression you mention, since I wanted a console on the console version, and the console can be used to cheat. I actually listed the reason as fixing bugs. On Morrowind, due to dialog bugs I wasn't able to become grandmaster of Telvanni, which was just plain annoying. If I had been playing on the PC version it could have been fixed.
A friend of mine seems to play with ease of completion in mind. If you're going to play a game but you want to beat it easily, why not "not" play the game, since that's even easier? (The answer in his case is that he enjoys games for other reasons and is a bit inconsistent.)
Did you mean "to not being a computational linguist"? Also, the size of the corpus needed to fit decently to Zipf's law isn't necessarily the size needed for statistically significant conclusions in other power law scenarios. However, I must admit myself that I've never checked Zipf's law on anything.
That's an unfounded generalization. Not everyone plays games for the single-minded purpose of gameplay. Maybe you'd like storyless flash games?
What would you consider "respecting a plot"? There's no way in the world to fit the LotR books in their entirety in a trilogy, so many parts had to get cut. Any other book should be the same. Book plots and movie plots have vastly different implementation details, too, and it's unsurprising changes have to be made. Perhaps you think it's impossible to respect a plot of some books in making a movie version? I have my pet annoyances with the changes in the recent LotR movies, but I still think they did a very good job overall of respecting the story as much as possible for a movie adaptation.
Now that you mention high HP enemies, I do remember in Oblivion that I used a magic weakness + DoT combo towards the end, just to kill things without having to regen all my mana afterward. I played the game normally with respect to the tactic you mention (i.e. ignored it). I'd be happy if that bit of tedium was done away with--be it caused by too low mana regen at high levels, low magic DPS, too high mob health, or something else.
:).
Certainly a game seemingly encouraging you not to use your main skills is... silly
The summary mentions tens of thousands of data points were used. This is an order of magnitude below "the number of words in a book" (depending on its length), but I think you just picked that number because Zipf's law's canonical example deals with word frequencies in books. I doubt your conclusion doubting more than I doubt the summary's conclusion (TFA is /.'d right now for me).
You clearly don't understand. I suppose it's possible terrorists would lay off small-scale attacks, which would cause someone using the power law predictively to conclude a large-scale attack was unlikely. That seems unlikely itself, and shouldn't be a new strategy in any case. As for your "double-binds", supposing a statistical model could predict specific terrorist attacks, it could simply say "those terrorists unaware of this model will do X" and "those other terrorists will do Y". There's no conundrum if you just break the set of all terrorists into two pieces.
Is that a joke? What are terrorists going to do with this information? Oh, I can see it now: "we attacked 10 times in the last week for 5 casualties per attack. To screw up their power law, we must attack 50 times for 100 casualties per attack this week!" The power law prediction is akin to the following trivial example. If I toss a fair die for a hundred years, statistics says I will have rolled "1" almost exactly 1/6th of the time. However, it's not able to say whether or not in the next roll I'll get a "1". The analogy is that a high-level pattern can be observed, but the specifics are too uncertain to give predictions on.
Why do some people think math is magical? Mathematicians are almost real-life wizards to some people. Math just uses the information you have as cleverly as possible. It's ridiculous to think a statistical analysis giving a power law would in any way threaten the role of human intelligence. There's just not enough information to put into the model for it to predict a specific attack. Sometimes TV shows use this type of analysis ("he attacked in these 5 locations, so the computer says he'll attack here next!") but it's just BS used for dramatic effect--like visually enhancing images way past the resolution they were taken with.
There were quite a few "easy win" tactics in Oblivion and Morrowind. Neither was difficult enough to require them by any stretch, so saying what you describe is "the" way to victory might be a bit strong. Avoid 'em if you don't like 'em, IMO (though the underlying mechanic you describe remains stupid). One of my biggest hopes in mechanic changes is that they give me a non-tedious way to carry a whole bunch of loot. How about a feather spell that scales quadratically with player level? Simple, not overpowered early game, and makes weight irrelevant late game, assuming it doesn't need to be recast a lot. Oh, and adding a console to the console versions might be nice--big bugs you can't fix just because you're not on a PC are really annoying.
Neither will happen, but I can dream....
I'm curious how much the two audiences overlap. For me, I'd never buy CoD just because it's not my type of game, while I'm certain I'll get TES5 sometime.
No marketing, no sequel. I like TES, so I'll take the marketing. How sad, though :(.
One thing I can say is that from when you first hear about it to when it's out will be the shortest it's been for us.
. He was actually responding to the question
You've been working on something secret now for two years. Do you have any sense yet of when you will be able to talk about it or even say what it is? Are going to be sat here next year answering the same question?
So, TES5 has apparently been in development for years and we're now up to the "you first hear about it" bit. I read the rest as Bethesda trying to pull a Blizzard inasmuch as they want to either meet a release schedule or not give one, to avoid raising and crushing hardcore fan expectations. Maybe they'll be timely this time?
What that clause meant was unclear, which was my point--it wasn't "obvious" what was meant, so I assumed symbolic integration. After I do that I get insulted obliquely, which annoyed me. The type of generalization your post contained comes up a lot on /. and also annoys me. In retrospect, I was more angry than I should have been, and I apologize for the insult.
(I agree that I was pedantic with the part you quoted. That wasn't the part under consideration, though.)
Cool, thanks.
I could work up quite a list here
I'm genuinely curious--when would, say, my ER doctor use material from an intro physics course, specifically?
It's not obvious, and I wasn't trying to be pedantic. The next clause was "not just learned how to solve a couple of integrals"--which would mean symbolic integration and not numeric, as near as I can interpret. So, screw you you smug jerk.
Q. How does a chemist integrate a curve?
A. They cut out the plot and weigh the piece of paper. Then compare this with the weight of a piece of paper of known area.
Well, they already have very accurate scales :).