A head mounted display doesn't have to have that kind of pixel resolution. The input resolution to your brain is only about ~10 million elements in the eye, so with an up close goggle you can get away with something like 2-3 million pixels with no loss of detail. The head tracking issue is more relevant, though presumably you can again do better with a HUD because you can do fast inertial measurement at the head rather than having to use smart cameras to track. Then assuming you have an equal amount of processing power available to create the scene, the hardware required to render it to goggles will be much cheaper and more conventional.
Lots of games these days are using Mersenne Twister for random number generation, and that RNG has essentially no flaws that would allow you, as the gamer, to tell the difference between it and a hardware generator.
Heh heh. You jokingly suggest that in the old days people had to use a telegraph key instead of a keyboard to program. The humorous truth, though, is that it was actually worse than that: they had to enter binary data using a parallel set of toggle switches.
It's a common misperception that game AI developers are not up on the state of the art in AI research. Most game AI developers are well read, and read not just the books, but also various journals related to the topic. The problem is that there just isn't enough CPU time or memory available for games to make interesting use of any techniques that are not already being used. There are games built using long term development of neural nets, but there's not the computation speed needed to train the neural nets further during gameplay. Genetic algorithms are used similarly, but once you've shipped the game the opportunities to evolve further are basically dead... by the time you learn anything from the player, the player has become bored. Expert systems are common as well, but inevitably have weaknesses that the player finds.
The core problem is quite simply that players are really smart, so much smarter than the AI we have now that a thousand fold increase in the available CPU time for AI wouldn't put a dent in meaningful improvement. Consider playing chess: the best minds in AI have applied themselves to this one game, for decades, and have only recently exceeded the capacity of human players. That's one game, with the most trivial state space you can imagine, with minutes (or hours) of CPU time on enormously parallel hardware available. Compare that to making a decision, in milliseconds, in an FPS or RTS with a state space millions of times larger than chess, and you'll begin to understand why game developers are resorting to methods other than AI for most of their projects, sticking to scripting and other simpler techniques, which deliver better performance than AI because they derive from human design.
The bottom line is that you just won't see a big jump in AI quality for games until the hardware catches up.
That's true, but is it a matter of convenience (single price pumps) or of law... is there some legal reason that gas vendors can't charge you differently based on what kind of car you're driving?
You have to admit, it's a great business model. Any business person in their right mind clearly should want to do this. And if it weren't for the monopoly situation, I would think there was no particular reason to restrict them.
Are you sure the government regulates this? I'm pretty sure a gas station can charge differently for filling lawn mowers and cars if they want to. I believe they don't because it would be a hassle, not because of any legal requirement. Is there really a law on the books that says they can't do this?
I don't think I'm missing the point (but who knows, maybe I am). I think that given the rate of sex crimes is higher than the rate of non-sex violent crimes, then if nudity in games == sex crimes, and violence in games == non-sex violent crimes, it would be reasonable to be more concerned about nudity than about violence. I believe this is a reason why (at least some) people are more alarmed by sex content than by violent content, with the other likely explanation being simply puritanism. And while you don't believe in-game nudity provokes a reaction like game violence, I think there are plenty of people who do believe just that, and those are the people whose concerns our lawmakers are trying to address. Finally, in response to your question of 'shouldn't we be much more alarmed with violent behavior?': I think this is debateable, as suggested above, particularly when considering that most if not all sex crimes are violent ones, and such crimes are much more common than non-sex related violent crime.
It's clearly reasonable to be concerned about sex content in games. There is science to suggest that such content may cause problems. The science is not solid, but clearly the area could use further study. But you don't have to wait for science to become irrefutable to become concerned, or to do something about it (think of the science behind the nicotine to cancer connection: do you not put warning labels on cigarettes just because the link to cancer isn't solidly proven yet?) The same can be said for violent content as well, and which you find more alarming or of greater concern probably depends on personal experience with crime, and of course familiarity with crime statistics.
Again, please feel free to provide a contrary source: I can really only go on information that is available to me. I'd be happy to learn I am wrong, but all of the top 10 google hits agree that the content shipped with Oblivion.
I don't think you can really claim that your base model of a human couldn't have non removable underwear built into the model. Not that you should need to do this, but you could. And given how innaccurate their models are to begin with, I'm not sure the need for accuracy argument holds much water.
And a parallel might not require banning mannequins wholesale. What about banning mannequins with unnecessarily graphic details. For example, do mannequins require coloration of the nipple?
Actually, most of the sources I've read agree that the nude content was shipped with the game, and unlocked pretty much the same as hot coffee. Here's a couple:
Ok, current operating systems are like car engines before carburetors were invented. And SELinux is really like an engine with dynamic piston shutdown for fuel conservation.
Characters were utterly flat. Could the main character be any less interesting? He's a moralizing jerk who thinks he's better than everyone else, and not only does his viewpoint not evolve, we're apparently to imagine that in this far future society he's actually right!
Storyline was self inconsistent (slight spoiler): why didn't he jump? The main character is both implausibly smart and implausibly dumb, as it suits the story. His armor is also conveniently powerful enough to do whatever the story line requires, but can do less when it isn't needed to advance the story.
There were also a number of bizarre inconsistencies in the ways the computer minds decided to act, though I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume he at least tried to explain this in the later stories through computer virus problems, though many of the strange acts come before the supposed release.
Finally, there is the core basis of the book, the memory erasure. It's totally inconsistent: did he do it because he was in total inconsolable grief, or because he was a moral man and knew he would recover his loss through morality, or did he do it because he was completely immoral, but knew that with the proper deletions he could scam everyone? But if he was previously utterly evil and conniving, could he not forsee the problems he would cause himself by becoming such a moralizing jerk? (Not to mention it is hard to see why he would care enough to go through with things in this version). And if we are instead to believe he was good all along, why was his plan so manipulative and evil? And if he was just acting stupid because of inconsolable grief, why the heck didn't he try the emotional filters he later felt perfectly reasonable to use?
I think the interesting question would be whether or not you liked Golden Age better. I wouldn't have claimed Revelation Space was a great novel, but I did feel like it was at least an adequately competent one. But I would find it hard to imagine that anyone with a critical eye could compare Golden Age and Revelation Space and not find Revelation Space the better of the two.
You're the second person to call Wright's Golden Age good. That makes the rest of what you wrote suspect for me, because frankly, that was the worst book I've read in many years. Terrible writing. Flat characters. Self inconsistency. Lots of errors (though those I tend to credit to the editor/publisher not the author). It was an awful book. Awful enough I doubt i'll ever read another book by the author, award nominated or not. I will give it credit for being somewhat inspiring though: reading that book made me believe that I could get my own work published.
The golden age had to be the worst book I have read in years. I strongly urge everyone not to waste their $6 on the paperback. Read the first couple of chapters at Borders if you just have to know just how bad it is. The premise isn't bad, but the writing quality is horrible, and the universe is so painfully self inconsistent that I couldn't bring myself to read the follow up books, and I read all the way through Donaldson's Gap series. Read Alastair Reynolds if you'd like a similar far future premise with characters that are more than a half inch deep, and a writing style that won't leave you thinking you could easily have done a better job.
What does pornography have to do with sex crimes against women? The link is unclear, but studies have found links between levels of pornography consumption and sex crimes, and other studies have found that pornography has a significant addictive quality. It's not hard to see how people jump to the conclusion that pornography causes sex crimes. Though it's true the link is unproven, the statistical associations are scary enough that some people figure why take chances, just put every ban possible on pornography.
It makes a certain kind of sense if you understand the right viewpoint: Sex content => sex crimes against women Violent content => violent crime
Which is worse in this country? According to the stats, sex crimes are far more common than violent crimes (assuming you don't give the violent crime category credit for the violence typically involved in sex crimes).
I think many people would be willing to buy a car with a long recharge as long as the range was higher. Particularly for people who own a commuter car and a driving car. A 360 mile range would take care of nearly the longest of daily commutes (probably 98%) combined with forgetting to plug it in one night.
But you really need to have a hard shell around it, and all the usual safety features that people like.
And one strategy for 'fast charging' is to have lightweight batteries that you can easily swap out. I've read about people working on that solution.
But really, if you remember to stock up before the flu strikes, then you'll be armed with a great weapon for looting: you'll run home to home, threatening anyone who gets in your way with a big bucket full of potential bird flu.
Well, I'm probably one of a few people who has worked on both types of systems, and I can tell you, they are quite different. The financial systems are easier to parallelize, and far more tolerant of delay. A 100ms response time for a transaction is something nasdaq may be shooting for, but would be completely unacceptable to WOW players as horiffically laggy (and would have them complaining nonstop). A max of 33ms, and shooting for 10ms reigns in video game work. That's an order of magnitude difference in the target performance, and if you don't believe an order of magnitude makes a difference in how you build things... well I wouldn't know what to tell you. None of which even talks about keeping sets of simulations in sync across a significant number of servers, which doesn't have to be done by either google or nasdaq (assuming their design is reasonably sane).
Slashdot Mirror
A head mounted display doesn't have to have that kind of pixel resolution. The input resolution to your brain is only about ~10 million elements in the eye, so with an up close goggle you can get away with something like 2-3 million pixels with no loss of detail. The head tracking issue is more relevant, though presumably you can again do better with a HUD because you can do fast inertial measurement at the head rather than having to use smart cameras to track. Then assuming you have an equal amount of processing power available to create the scene, the hardware required to render it to goggles will be much cheaper and more conventional.
Lots of games these days are using Mersenne Twister for random number generation, and that RNG has essentially no flaws that would allow you, as the gamer, to tell the difference between it and a hardware generator.
Heh heh. You jokingly suggest that in the old days people had to use a telegraph key instead of a keyboard to program. The humorous truth, though, is that it was actually worse than that: they had to enter binary data using a parallel set of toggle switches.
It's a common misperception that game AI developers are not up on the state of the art in AI research. Most game AI developers are well read, and read not just the books, but also various journals related to the topic. The problem is that there just isn't enough CPU time or memory available for games to make interesting use of any techniques that are not already being used. There are games built using long term development of neural nets, but there's not the computation speed needed to train the neural nets further during gameplay. Genetic algorithms are used similarly, but once you've shipped the game the opportunities to evolve further are basically dead ... by the time you learn anything from the player, the player has become bored. Expert systems are common as well, but inevitably have weaknesses that the player finds.
The core problem is quite simply that players are really smart, so much smarter than the AI we have now that a thousand fold increase in the available CPU time for AI wouldn't put a dent in meaningful improvement. Consider playing chess: the best minds in AI have applied themselves to this one game, for decades, and have only recently exceeded the capacity of human players. That's one game, with the most trivial state space you can imagine, with minutes (or hours) of CPU time on enormously parallel hardware available. Compare that to making a decision, in milliseconds, in an FPS or RTS with a state space millions of times larger than chess, and you'll begin to understand why game developers are resorting to methods other than AI for most of their projects, sticking to scripting and other simpler techniques, which deliver better performance than AI because they derive from human design.
The bottom line is that you just won't see a big jump in AI quality for games until the hardware catches up.
helf, Va firf un ishn't melfing.
No, obviously, it causes cancer in rats. Everything does!
That's true, but is it a matter of convenience (single price pumps) or of law ... is there some legal reason that gas vendors can't charge you differently based on what kind of car you're driving?
You have to admit, it's a great business model. Any business person in their right mind clearly should want to do this. And if it weren't for the monopoly situation, I would think there was no particular reason to restrict them.
Are you sure the government regulates this? I'm pretty sure a gas station can charge differently for filling lawn mowers and cars if they want to. I believe they don't because it would be a hassle, not because of any legal requirement. Is there really a law on the books that says they can't do this?
I don't think I'm missing the point (but who knows, maybe I am). I think that given the rate of sex crimes is higher than the rate of non-sex violent crimes, then if nudity in games == sex crimes, and violence in games == non-sex violent crimes, it would be reasonable to be more concerned about nudity than about violence. I believe this is a reason why (at least some) people are more alarmed by sex content than by violent content, with the other likely explanation being simply puritanism. And while you don't believe in-game nudity provokes a reaction like game violence, I think there are plenty of people who do believe just that, and those are the people whose concerns our lawmakers are trying to address. Finally, in response to your question of 'shouldn't we be much more alarmed with violent behavior?': I think this is debateable, as suggested above, particularly when considering that most if not all sex crimes are violent ones, and such crimes are much more common than non-sex related violent crime.
It's clearly reasonable to be concerned about sex content in games. There is science to suggest that such content may cause problems. The science is not solid, but clearly the area could use further study. But you don't have to wait for science to become irrefutable to become concerned, or to do something about it (think of the science behind the nicotine to cancer connection: do you not put warning labels on cigarettes just because the link to cancer isn't solidly proven yet?) The same can be said for violent content as well, and which you find more alarming or of greater concern probably depends on personal experience with crime, and of course familiarity with crime statistics.
Again, please feel free to provide a contrary source: I can really only go on information that is available to me. I'd be happy to learn I am wrong, but all of the top 10 google hits agree that the content shipped with Oblivion.
I don't think you can really claim that your base model of a human couldn't have non removable underwear built into the model. Not that you should need to do this, but you could. And given how innaccurate their models are to begin with, I'm not sure the need for accuracy argument holds much water.
And a parallel might not require banning mannequins wholesale. What about banning mannequins with unnecessarily graphic details. For example, do mannequins require coloration of the nipple?
Actually, most of the sources I've read agree that the nude content was shipped with the game, and unlocked pretty much the same as hot coffee. Here's a couple:
r eady-available.htmli ewproject&project_id=191l ls_oblivion_4_nude_patch
http://www.igniq.com/2006/04/oblivion-nude-mod-al
http://www.oblivionsource.com/?page=modforge&op=v
http://grbeta.bolt.com/download/pc/the_elder_scro
Do you have a source that says it did not ship with the game?
Ok, current operating systems are like car engines before carburetors were invented. And SELinux is really like an engine with dynamic piston shutdown for fuel conservation.
Problems I had with Golden Age (some spoilers):
Characters were utterly flat. Could the main character be any less interesting? He's a moralizing jerk who thinks he's better than everyone else, and not only does his viewpoint not evolve, we're apparently to imagine that in this far future society he's actually right!
Storyline was self inconsistent (slight spoiler): why didn't he jump? The main character is both implausibly smart and implausibly dumb, as it suits the story. His armor is also conveniently powerful enough to do whatever the story line requires, but can do less when it isn't needed to advance the story.
There were also a number of bizarre inconsistencies in the ways the computer minds decided to act, though I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume he at least tried to explain this in the later stories through computer virus problems, though many of the strange acts come before the supposed release.
Finally, there is the core basis of the book, the memory erasure. It's totally inconsistent: did he do it because he was in total inconsolable grief, or because he was a moral man and knew he would recover his loss through morality, or did he do it because he was completely immoral, but knew that with the proper deletions he could scam everyone? But if he was previously utterly evil and conniving, could he not forsee the problems he would cause himself by becoming such a moralizing jerk? (Not to mention it is hard to see why he would care enough to go through with things in this version). And if we are instead to believe he was good all along, why was his plan so manipulative and evil? And if he was just acting stupid because of inconsolable grief, why the heck didn't he try the emotional filters he later felt perfectly reasonable to use?
I think the interesting question would be whether or not you liked Golden Age better. I wouldn't have claimed Revelation Space was a great novel, but I did feel like it was at least an adequately competent one. But I would find it hard to imagine that anyone with a critical eye could compare Golden Age and Revelation Space and not find Revelation Space the better of the two.
You're the second person to call Wright's Golden Age good. That makes the rest of what you wrote suspect for me, because frankly, that was the worst book I've read in many years. Terrible writing. Flat characters. Self inconsistency. Lots of errors (though those I tend to credit to the editor/publisher not the author). It was an awful book. Awful enough I doubt i'll ever read another book by the author, award nominated or not. I will give it credit for being somewhat inspiring though: reading that book made me believe that I could get my own work published.
The golden age had to be the worst book I have read in years. I strongly urge everyone not to waste their $6 on the paperback. Read the first couple of chapters at Borders if you just have to know just how bad it is. The premise isn't bad, but the writing quality is horrible, and the universe is so painfully self inconsistent that I couldn't bring myself to read the follow up books, and I read all the way through Donaldson's Gap series. Read Alastair Reynolds if you'd like a similar far future premise with characters that are more than a half inch deep, and a writing style that won't leave you thinking you could easily have done a better job.
What does pornography have to do with sex crimes against women? The link is unclear, but studies have found links between levels of pornography consumption and sex crimes, and other studies have found that pornography has a significant addictive quality. It's not hard to see how people jump to the conclusion that pornography causes sex crimes. Though it's true the link is unproven, the statistical associations are scary enough that some people figure why take chances, just put every ban possible on pornography.
Yeah, but his general theme was all I had to go on.
I'm sorry to tell you your scifi book has already been written by at least a two different authors I can think of.
It makes a certain kind of sense if you understand the right viewpoint:
Sex content => sex crimes against women
Violent content => violent crime
Which is worse in this country? According to the stats, sex crimes are far more common than violent crimes (assuming you don't give the violent crime category credit for the violence typically involved in sex crimes).
I think many people would be willing to buy a car with a long recharge as long as the range was higher. Particularly for people who own a commuter car and a driving car. A 360 mile range would take care of nearly the longest of daily commutes (probably 98%) combined with forgetting to plug it in one night.
But you really need to have a hard shell around it, and all the usual safety features that people like.
And one strategy for 'fast charging' is to have lightweight batteries that you can easily swap out. I've read about people working on that solution.
But really, if you remember to stock up before the flu strikes, then you'll be armed with a great weapon for looting: you'll run home to home, threatening anyone who gets in your way with a big bucket full of potential bird flu.
Well, I'm probably one of a few people who has worked on both types of systems, and I can tell you, they are quite different. The financial systems are easier to parallelize, and far more tolerant of delay. A 100ms response time for a transaction is something nasdaq may be shooting for, but would be completely unacceptable to WOW players as horiffically laggy (and would have them complaining nonstop). A max of 33ms, and shooting for 10ms reigns in video game work. That's an order of magnitude difference in the target performance, and if you don't believe an order of magnitude makes a difference in how you build things ... well I wouldn't know what to tell you. None of which even talks about keeping sets of simulations in sync across a significant number of servers, which doesn't have to be done by either google or nasdaq (assuming their design is reasonably sane).