> The guiness of Einstein was that he synthesized some more arcane work into some fairly simple equations, continuing to refine what we knew about the universe [...] I can't help but wonder if someone will come along in the next decade or so and synthesize these more complex equations into another step forward for mankind.
> But it's already common knowledge that we don't have a GUT yet, and everything we do have seems very complex and overdone, much the same as it was before E=mc2
FYI, Einstein didn't make things simpler; he made them more accurate.
If the universe is complex and overdone, we'll just have to live with complex and overdone theories.
> And just think -- under today's copyright laws of life+70, these papers would still be under copyright until 2025. Wikipedia is able to publish these today because copyright law was more sane a century ago.
> I am sorry, nothing deserves 120 years of copyright protection. I doubt almost anything needs even 28 years. I weep for those who will be looking back 100 years from now.
Nobody will be looking back, because there won't be anything for them to see without a fee.
> One of the more famous cases may well be an urban legend but it's exactly the type of thing that happens every day: The army is training image analysis software to locate enemy tanks in the field. They feed it 10,000 images and over time develop the perfect weights so it performs expertly. They move on to test it in the field and find that it's not even close to accurate! What happened? In their test images, the pictures with enemy tanks had all been taken at night, and the others during the day.
When I heard it, it was clear photos vs noisy photos.
But the point remains, urban legend or not. If you dig around the web you can find lots of first-hand stories along these lines, especially when genetic algorithms were used. They have an annoying habit of finding bugs in your simulator program too; I've read about a guy whose GA discovered it could win by causing an overflow in a variable.
This isn't really surprising, because GAs know nothing about the problem they're supposed to solve. They only see better scores and worse scores, and have no idea why any particular solution's score is better or worse than another's.
> At the end of the day, when all things are factored in, there is simply not enough money in the budget of the average game to make this type of advanced artificial intelligence worth the risk and expense, at least right now.
More to the point, it's in a game company's best interest to ship a brittle AI that people will learn to beat handily after a few weeks of play, so they'll be back to the trough for the next offering.
The game industry's worst nightmare is a game that stays fun for two years. An AI that learns the game with you, and adapts its strategies to yours so that you have to keep innovating, might make that possible.
> Call me short sighted, but isn't it at least possible that training soldiers is different to training tic-tac-toe players?
Yes. Tic-tac-toe has a manageable decision tree, and all MENACE did was prune branches that led to losing. It still required many playings, because it always pruned at the last decision that led to the loss. (Thus it trimmed the decision tree from back to front.) It would be completely untractable for chess, let alone for continuous-state games or simulations.
Still, MENACE was a brilliant insight for the time. IIRC it was done way back in the 50's -- practically the beginning of time so far as computer science is concerned -- and brought to public attention when Martin Gardner covered it in his Scientific American column in the early 60's.
> Not unless companies like Sony start making their hardware with ideas like this in mind. 2 TFLOPS is impressive for insane real-time graphics operations, but floating point operations aren't exactly optimal for things like AI.
For AI based on neural networks, 2 TFLOPS might be just the thing.
> If you can't be bothered to figure out for yourself which books you "ought" to read to get a good grasp of western literature, are you going to read the books some people at Amazon think you "ought" to read if they just end up on your shelves?
It's not really an "ought to read" list; it's a collection of everything that has been released in the Penguin "classics" line. Notice that a number of titles appear repeatedly:
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid by Virgil
I don't think they're saying you should have read it three times.
> Seriously, though, this is a damned shame...although at $4 mil, this was a relatively inexpensive debacle.
And far better than other types of failure, such as if they had accidentally launched a tube with an ICBM in it instead of the one with the sail's rocket.
Also, presumably the % piracy is a function of the price, and the goal of the music industry will be to maximize (number_of_downloads * price_each).
Which, BTW, suggests that RSN we'll see a hamfisted attempt at DRM-based region coding for music downloads, so that they can optimized that formula independently for the different economic regions of the planet.
> Given the level of integration between something like iTunes and my iPod, it is much easier (for me) to browse, pay, and download, music, rather than search for and obtain an uncontrolled copy.
I think slashdotters have been saying for years that the problem was the music industry's (non existant) business model, and if they would make it cheap enough to download a song, people would pay for it.
Also, presumably the % piracy is a function of the price, and the goal of the music industry will be to maximize (number_of_downloads * price_each).
Of course, they could virtually eliminate piracy by pushing the price toward zero, but that's probably not what maximizes profit.
> Batman isn't from outer space and wasn't born with a mutant gene --he uses his riches, raw determination and technological know-how to equip himself to fight evil. So why couldn't the average geek do the same?
Slashdot Mirror
> The guiness of Einstein was that he synthesized some more arcane work into some fairly simple equations, continuing to refine what we knew about the universe [...] I can't help but wonder if someone will come along in the next decade or so and synthesize these more complex equations into another step forward for mankind.
I'm sure more guiness will help.
> But it's already common knowledge that we don't have a GUT yet, and everything we do have seems very complex and overdone, much the same as it was before E=mc2
FYI, Einstein didn't make things simpler; he made them more accurate.
If the universe is complex and overdone, we'll just have to live with complex and overdone theories.
> And just think -- under today's copyright laws of life+70, these papers would still be under copyright until 2025. Wikipedia is able to publish these today because copyright law was more sane a century ago.
> I am sorry, nothing deserves 120 years of copyright protection. I doubt almost anything needs even 28 years. I weep for those who will be looking back 100 years from now.
Nobody will be looking back, because there won't be anything for them to see without a fee.
> I thought that part of the difficulty in reproducing a mechanical brain was preciously it's shades of grey.
It's even made of grey matter.
Gee, that's a surprize.
> Am special, not tarded.
Yeah, but 'fuqspecial' just doesn't have the right ring to it.
> One of the more famous cases may well be an urban legend but it's exactly the type of thing that happens every day: The army is training image analysis software to locate enemy tanks in the field. They feed it 10,000 images and over time develop the perfect weights so it performs expertly. They move on to test it in the field and find that it's not even close to accurate! What happened? In their test images, the pictures with enemy tanks had all been taken at night, and the others during the day.
When I heard it, it was clear photos vs noisy photos.
But the point remains, urban legend or not. If you dig around the web you can find lots of first-hand stories along these lines, especially when genetic algorithms were used. They have an annoying habit of finding bugs in your simulator program too; I've read about a guy whose GA discovered it could win by causing an overflow in a variable.
This isn't really surprising, because GAs know nothing about the problem they're supposed to solve. They only see better scores and worse scores, and have no idea why any particular solution's score is better or worse than another's.
> At the end of the day, when all things are factored in, there is simply not enough money in the budget of the average game to make this type of advanced artificial intelligence worth the risk and expense, at least right now.
More to the point, it's in a game company's best interest to ship a brittle AI that people will learn to beat handily after a few weeks of play, so they'll be back to the trough for the next offering.
The game industry's worst nightmare is a game that stays fun for two years. An AI that learns the game with you, and adapts its strategies to yours so that you have to keep innovating, might make that possible.
> Call me short sighted, but isn't it at least possible that training soldiers is different to training tic-tac-toe players?
Yes. Tic-tac-toe has a manageable decision tree, and all MENACE did was prune branches that led to losing. It still required many playings, because it always pruned at the last decision that led to the loss. (Thus it trimmed the decision tree from back to front.) It would be completely untractable for chess, let alone for continuous-state games or simulations.
Still, MENACE was a brilliant insight for the time. IIRC it was done way back in the 50's -- practically the beginning of time so far as computer science is concerned -- and brought to public attention when Martin Gardner covered it in his Scientific American column in the early 60's.
> Not unless companies like Sony start making their hardware with ideas like this in mind. 2 TFLOPS is impressive for insane real-time graphics operations, but floating point operations aren't exactly optimal for things like AI.
For AI based on neural networks, 2 TFLOPS might be just the thing.
which can be found in
> If you can't be bothered to figure out for yourself which books you "ought" to read to get a good grasp of western literature, are you going to read the books some people at Amazon think you "ought" to read if they just end up on your shelves?
It's not really an "ought to read" list; it's a collection of everything that has been released in the Penguin "classics" line. Notice that a number of titles appear repeatedly:
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- The Aeneid by Virgil
I don't think they're saying you should have read it three times.> Most usage policies that I've seen explicitly state something along the lines of 'criminal computer damage' or 'charges may be filed'.
So, does the state constitution allow school administrators to establish rules that would be a felony to violate?
> Why destroy when you can simply have everything be encrypted?
These are probably for people who collect kiddie porn, and don't want to go to jail for failing to deliver the password when subpoena'd.
Also, as others have pointed out, encryption schemes haven't exactly proven to be enduring.
> are belong to us.
(Score:5, Funny)
I knew the old nag was good for one more lap.
> Of course the Pentagon is going to do this kind of thing. They are in desperate need of recruits.
I hear that the "Cannonfodder Wanted" ads didn't produce the desired results, nor the "It's sweet and proper to die for one's Cheny" ads either.
are belong to us.
> > The end of free Internet content will come when Web browsers start blocking online advertisements by default
> Then let it end. I'm fed up with the business model of running intrusive advertizing that means nothing but annoying to the viewers.
Does web advertising actually work? It seems more and more sites are wanting you to buy a paid subscription anymore.
> Funny to see the word's "genuine" and "microsoft" in the same story.
How 'bout "genuine microsoft fuck-up"?
> Seriously, though, this is a damned shame...although at $4 mil, this was a relatively inexpensive debacle.
And far better than other types of failure, such as if they had accidentally launched a tube with an ICBM in it instead of the one with the sail's rocket.
Also, presumably the % piracy is a function of the price, and the goal of the music industry will be to maximize (number_of_downloads * price_each).
Which, BTW, suggests that RSN we'll see a hamfisted attempt at DRM-based region coding for music downloads, so that they can optimized that formula independently for the different economic regions of the planet.
> Given the level of integration between something like iTunes and my iPod, it is much easier (for me) to browse, pay, and download, music, rather than search for and obtain an uncontrolled copy.
I think slashdotters have been saying for years that the problem was the music industry's (non existant) business model, and if they would make it cheap enough to download a song, people would pay for it.
Also, presumably the % piracy is a function of the price, and the goal of the music industry will be to maximize (number_of_downloads * price_each).
Of course, they could virtually eliminate piracy by pushing the price toward zero, but that's probably not what maximizes profit.
> So if you want to be a real Batman, figure in another several hundred thousand dollars for advanced degrees in science and criminology.
Or he could just watch CSI:Gotham instead of downloading porn every night.
> Batman isn't from outer space and wasn't born with a mutant gene --he uses his riches, raw determination and technological know-how to equip himself to fight evil. So why couldn't the average geek do the same?
Did you miss the part about riches?
> When he does all that, he is a qualified researcher.
Good point.