Ah, yet another book which uses cute language and twisting analogies to make us believe we're seeing something that isn't there. If I were to tell you that I created a potato in a computer, and then invited you to eat it, you'd laugh at me. When dealing with solid examples of real things, computer simulations of them seem laughably easy to separate from the real mccoy, however, when you come to abstract concepts for which nobody has a clear definition ( Life, Intelligence, etc. ) its actually much easier to fool people ( including yourself ). It becomes especially easy when you take the time to spin yarns about the structure of the universe, from subatomics upwards, in order that it all fit your end goal.
Formula: Uncertainty + sophisticated language = plausible story.
Now don't get me wrong here, I'm sure the book is a great and valuable work in the field of ALife, which is a very intriguing field in computing today. But to make claims that one has actually created life in a computer that is equivalent to even the simplest forms we see around us in the natural world is just plain ridiculous.
I'm not going to waste time debating the particulars of the systems involved here and whether they do or don't meet the criteria for living things as abstracted by whomever, or whether those criteria are a sufficient definition for life. I just want to point out something that all too often gets forgotten when dealing with informational systems - the gulf between a simulation and the simulated.
Firstly it is a necessary element of all simulations that they are a reduced set of the properties of the system being simulated. You cannot pefectly simulate a real system - the only perfect simulation is the original system itself. But this is a minor point. Attached to this, and more importantly is the fact that informational simulations HAVE NO CAUSAL POWERS! Having no physical existance, they cannot cause or affect anything except what is formally defined for them in the simulation. If I say that I have simulated a tornado in my computer, nobody is going to worry that it might destroy my city. If you put a lovely roaring log fire screensaver on your computer it will never keep you awake at night worrying if the fire will melt your monitor. A computer will never be crushed by the weight of the eifel tower if it has a 3d model of it. All of these are informational simulations of NON-FORMAL systems and therefore do not entail the be-all and end-all of the systems they simulate, and therefore ( finally... ) are not equivalent to the real thing. Only formal systems ( ie like a game of chess ) can be said to exist entirely in any medium in which they are rendered. Non-formal systems can only exist as a simulation when rendered in other media. Life is not a formal system.
Why is it that stories like these are so easy to fool us? Well probably because humans are informational creatures - we are the makers and consumers of our own information. Therefore we sometimes find it difficult to see the line between simulations and the simulated - because both get represented to our minds by roughly equivalent information. Add to that the above mentioned confusion and elaborate talk and its a marvelous act of intellectual slight-of-hand that makes us see life where it doesn't exist.
Well the rangers look like they might be able to handle working on many different terrain types, but those scounts are gonn have a tough time on anything other than a smoothe man made surface. I don't think these bots are very practical in anything but a very urban setting.
Chilled to a thousandth of a kelvin
on
Quantum Computers
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· Score: 2
so its not exactly the sort of room-temperature you'd want to have in your cube - unless you happen to be Mr. Freeze.
Yeah, and then when the stressed out guy at the end of the hall who's wife just left him finally goes postal, he can just slap on some VR goggles and he'll be sure not to miss out on anyone.
And because all the moths released cannot reproduce, then this controls the spread of the modified genes in the population, and means that these "modified" creatures will not spread beyond the control of the people breeding them.
So we're not really in any danger of altering the bollworm species and endangering the ecosystem.
This article is quite silly. Laser light communication would be excellent for communicating to a civilization - but only once you knew where they were. The problem with lasers is that they are highly directional. you need to point them in the direction you want to make a broadcast to and then send you're message. This would entail that any aliens sending out a general "hello and welcome to the club" message, or even just the ambient signals of their civilization, would need to have established the exact position of our planet from very far away.
Think about how many stars are visible to the naked eye - hundreds of thousands. Then think about how many are visible through high powered telescopes - millions. now think of the task of analyzing each star to establish to a high degree of accuracy its particular movement so that you can know exactly where it will be in the thousands of years in the future when your signal will actually arrive at it. And even once you'd done that you'd have to broadcast in such a wide area around the stars position such that the signal could be received by any orbiting planets. That's a computational job on a scale many millions of times greater than simply sending out an all points radio broadcast. and radio waves still travel at the same speed as laser light.
Plus with a laser the beam is so narrow that any dark matter ( think planets, large dust / gas clouds ) which might float by in the time between broadcast and receipt, and happen into its path could block the signal or alter its direction in uncalculable ways.
Overall radio is much more efficient for sending out a general "welcome to the sentience club - wanna play the swap ideas game?" type message.
In their most fiendish and heart-chilling conspiracy ever they are targetting the free worlds most valuable intellectual resource! First they created a godless empire ranging across europe and asia. Then they sent their agents to infiltrate america. Then they tried to corrupt the youth of the free world with their underground beatniks and seducing the young into the sloth of hippydom with drugs and satanic music. Then they tricked us all by pretending to dismantle their empire, lulling us all into a false sense of security.
Don't be fooled by marxist plots! They are still hard at work, and they have infiltrated into the most valuable resource of the information age - they are corrupting our programmers!
They have put their best agents into key positions in the programming world, and unleashed the most mostrously conceived pinko commie plot since the flurodation of water!
Boris and Natash say: "Java and C++ vill destroy the evil capitalist pig-dogs".
B: "Gorsh Rocky, what can we do? Boris and Natasha are running amok!"
R: "I don't know Bullwinkle - but we must warn the honest IT managers of America to reject OOP"
B: "Hey Rocky, watch me pull Fortran out of my hat!"
This is the famous problemn in philosophy around qualia. We can test the visible spectrum of light in terms of the wavelength and measure any individuals perception of it, but we can never truly know that the actual experience of that colour is the same for another person. We just have to assume based on the fact that we communicate consistently and experience for ourselves consistently that another person has the same experience, but we can never truly know.
The issue is further complicated by cultural definitions of what makes a colour. Not all cultures divide the spectrum into colour groups the way we do. This has nothing to do with any physiological difference or any actual difference in the way that those colours are "experienced", but is a difference in where groups of colours begin and end. We have groupings of red, green, blue, yellow, etc. that we decided as a culture are meaningful groupings for colours - they begin and end at specific points in the spectrum. Some other cultures not only give different names to these groupings, but actually have the borders of them in quite different places. For example two colours that we might think of as different shades of green ( say lime green, and a very blue turquoise colour ) a person from another culture may say are actually two very different colours - as different as red and green are for us. And colours we consider to be very different - purple and red, they might say are very much the same. So how one is brought up in a culture also has a big impact on what you end up thinking about colours, even if the qualia ( the "experience" ) of the colour is the same, and the segment of spectrum is the same.
The issue of the qualia though - what one truly senses and experiences, is made even clearer when you try to imagine what must be experienced by animals who have sense totally other than our own. For example dolphins and bats have the sense of echo-location. We can test their abilities with this, but we simply don't have the neural hardware to process these types of signals and we can't possibly imagine what it must be like. Is it like a sense of hearing? Is it like a sense of sight? Is it like a strong intuition? We really have no way of knowing.
There have been interesting experiments done with people who are blind not because of a failing in their eyes or optical nerves as is normally the case, but because the optical center of their brains is significantly damaged for whatever reason. A blind person cannot see, but they knows that they cannot see. These people are interesting because they don't know that they cannot see - they simply have no concept of what seeing is like - because they don't have any working optical centre to their brain which might give them even the slightest intuition about what sight is like. Very often they will maintain that they can see despite huge evidence that they cannot - that evidence is meaningless to them, because they have no way of correlating it to what we consider to be sight. For example they might tell you you are wearing a green tie, but you are not wearing a tie at all - and they furiously maintain that they know you are, they can see it. Perhaps its all just imagination on their part, but because they don't have the optical hardware to understand the rudiments of sight, they don't realize that there is any difference between such an imaginated "image" ( if the word can even be applied to them ) and what we consider to be factual seeing.
So the issue becomes much more complexe than simply adding a few cones and guessing what the result is.
I'm sorry, but now you're mixing your colour wheels. Mixin blue and yellow only gives you green in a subtractive colour system like with paint. In an additive colour system, like visible light ( which is what our photoreceptors use ) you can't mix anything to make green, because green is a primary - hence we use red green and blue pixels in a computer monitor, not red, yellow and blue.
"within a couple of decades, gene therapy will make tetrachromacy just another option that wealthy parents could check off on the list when they are designing their daughters"
Forget tetrachromacy, I want to have daughters with 6 arms like a shiva... that would be cool =)
You wouldn't even need to define different namespace roots, or "universes" as you call them.
A dns response is generally of two types, when queried for a particular name:
1. I know this guy - his address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
2. I don't know this guy - why don't you ask the server at xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
In the case of the second type of response, you could list more than one possible entries. this would allow the icann "universe" to coexist with other "universes" without any real namespace conflicts. For example if there are more than one root servers for the.poop domain, you can query all of them, and any complete collisions like
my.dogs.poop from the icann "official".poop dns server
and
my.dogs.poop from the freds-world.poop dns server
could be resolved either by a rule set ( always prefer icann, or always prefer freds-world ) or by user choice, as I said.
So a user could create aliases
and the server my.dogs.poop from freds-world
could be his default, and then he has a local dns alias which binds
my.dogs.poop^2 to the server from the icann universe.
In actual practice such a system would likely rarely create collisions, because it would be against the interest of most people to choose names that are in collision with others - perhaps something like
www.dogs.poop would collide, but a more qualified domain like fifi.poodles.dogs.poop would likely not collide, because even given to seperate dogs.poop domains, chances are only one would have such a named host.
I thought some more about dns conflicts since I posted my above comments, and it strikes me that almost all of the nasty and undesireable bickering and squabbling that happens whith regards to domain names is all because they are a limited resource. They are limited because the space allowed for them is tightly controlled, this makes them rare, which makes them valuable.
Why should two companies squabble over amazon.biz if they could equally well register amazon.business, amazon.store, amazon.shop, amazon.books, whatever. Given an unlimited number of potential TLDs, then such activities as domain squatting would be meaningless. And it would be stupid to try to sue everybody who had a domain *.amazon.* in a world of unlimited TLD space.
All the more reason to have an open DNS architecture, and get rid of these hopelessly ridicuulous moderation bodies like ICANN and WIPO. Changing the way the internet is used doesn't require legal battles or desperate struggles with any of these organizations - all it requires is altering your dns records. That's it. If enough people did this, then the internet would be structured differently by the defacto use of its participants.
So coming down to the nuts and bolts of how does one manage resolution of domains in an unlimitedly large name space? I would see it as the same as we manage usenet - or something analogous to that. Anyone who wants to maintain an as-of-yet unmaintained TLD puts up a server. Or in the case of popular ones like.com,.biz whatever, we implement an OpenSRS system for negotiating the creation of new domains between multiple registrars etc.
In the extreme case that there are two different databases for the same TLD with conflicting entries for the same domain name - we let the user decide which one they want to use, and allow them to make custom macros to the others.
For example if you have a collision between foo.bar in one.bar database with foo.bar in another, you prompt the user to choose which one becomes his/her default ( naturally this could be edited at any point later ), and the other entries now appear in this users dns cache as things like:
foo.bar^2
foo.bar^3
foo.bar^junksite
foo.bar^coolstuffhere
( the caret ^ is an invalid dns name character anyway )
Here we see beautifully two of the inherent principles of the internet coming into conflict:
universality vs. openness. Unfortunately in order to have the internet work universally, some degree of openness needs to be sacrificed. You simply can't have 5 different networks all using foo.com and have them all resolve properly. Unique host names are a must for universality, and that requires some sacrifice to openness.
However on the other hand, strangling access to domain possibilities in the interest of maintaining universality ( what ICANN is doing ), is taking this principle WAY TOO FAR imho.
We need to find an appropriate balance. The internet can be a very populist playground if we choose to make it so. I'd like to know if anyone knows of any of the current Open DNS/NIC services that have been mentioned provide for such distributed maintainable DNS database that would avoid colliding DNS names without sacrificing too much accessibility.
Quite honestly I think that if ICANN is going to strangle access to TLDs than we should simply stop using their databases wherever possible - how much power are they really going to hold if in actual practice the majority of internet users are not respecting their "authoratative" presence? Do you think big business is going to give a damn about anything ICANN says if their audience is somewhere else?
We all know that when it comes to computers TMTOWTDI - always! And in the past its the smarter ideas that win out - not the ones with corporate muscle. So let's do it - let's build and use our own DNS network.
or if this service starts to bug the script kiddies they just set up a few boxes to autosubmit garbage and BS logs, and flood the database with rubbish making it a useless tool.
could be a useful site if the php didn't keep breaking.
Re:Enough with the polygons - lets get some physic
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
Yes, I do know exactly what is involved in doing physics simulations for games. Perhaps you need to do some research on what exactly constitutes a hardware accelerator. The complexity of the operations involved is completely meaningless to whether it is possible to accelerate. What is important is that the operations can be formatted into a set of operations that can be implemented in hardware. All of the things you mentioned: collision detection, constrained rigid-body dynamics, soft-body dynamics, too name a few of the many applications of a physics engine are always going to be implemented in a particular fashion involving a pipeline of specific manipulations in specific order. This is perfect for hardware acceleration. The more complexe the better actually because that means its a greater burden lifted from the cpu.
As for CPUs being accelerators. The whole premise of an accelerator is that they ( surprise, surprise ) accelerate - ie. to make faster. Faster than what?? Faster than the CPU !! If you're using a cpu than it can't be faster than a cpu now can it??
Re:Enough with the polygons - lets get some physic
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
I wasn't thinking so much of gameplay and story taking up processor time as I was thinking of it taking up project time.
I agree there is definitely a different culture around PC games as there is around console games - I think to a large extent this has been the japanese / american cultural differences playing a large part. And also that console makers have always been used to having hardware that is really the cutting edge of what one can do graphically - so they end up devoting much more time to the depth of the story etc. I think this may come with time for PC games - but its still a relatively new thing in the culture of the game development community.
As for a unified physics API - I don't think it necessarily needs to handicap, it just needs to be flexible. When OpenGL was first being developped many said that it would flop because no single API could ever be able to do all the things developpers would want out of 3d graphics, and that we would always be living with custom coded rendering systems for every app. Thankfully that proved to be false - otherwise we never would have seen the emergence of 3d accelerators. I think for a physics API to be multipurpose enough one really needs only to attain the right level of abstraction to give it the correct level of variability to work all around.
Re:Enough with the polygons - lets get some physic
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
2 points.
1. CPUs cannot be accelerators by definition - an accelerator is a seperate piece of hardware that is designed for one specific task, and because it is hardwired for that one specific task, and not made to be as general purpose as possible ( ie like a CPU ) it can do it faster than a CPU can.
2. If you read my original post I did say that one needs a standardized physics API before one can make an accelerator. The creation of graphics accelerators weren't possible until the realm of 3d graphics had settled into a small group of APIs to handle this ( OpenGL and DirectX ).
Your point about the horribly complicated code for doing matrices is totally backwards - this is exactly the kind of operations that would be perfect for implementing in hardware.
Anyone else get frustrated by these constant claims:
"Today we have the intelligence of insects in our computers - tomorrow dogs, soon they will be smarter than people"
There is no correlation between computer processing power and intelligence. There is no computer in the world that can do what and insect can do. These are totally bogus statistics. Until we figure out a way of duplicating the type of control of biological neurons in a computer system any comparison between computing power and intelligence - human or animal is totally meaningless.
I know I am opening a huge can of worms here, and lots of pro-AI people will start hurling things my way, but I think I can argue very strongly that as of yet there is nothing in the field of AI that can be said to be comparable to biological ( neuronal ) intelligence. Moore's law has no bearing on this - it doesn't matter how much we increase our processing capabilities, until we have the algorithms to direct that processing in the manner of intelligence its just stupid number crunching - regardless of how fast it happens.
Re:3D Realism is becoming dangerous.
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
The difference between knowing reality from fantasy is as old a problem as the human race. Ever since people have been having dreams in our sleep ( or while awake for that matter ), we have pondered whether we can ever be sure of the "reality" of any of our existence.
The advances in media over the last years have only given new form to the same fantasies we've always had. Every kind of media, from verbal storytelling to books to television etc. has had its own particular "alice through the lookinglass" type problems and tales of where does this fantasy begin and end.
Perhaps because we've been having something of a revolution in the area of advancing these media in the last years it might seem as though this is a pressing issue today, but it has really only just brought to the forefront something that is really just an inherent part of the human condition.
You can't legislate away the human condition with warning labels or censorship boards. There is no "this dream brought to you by..." floating in the corner of your field of vision while you sleep, nor when you daydream.
This is a problem of philosophy, not of technology.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not at all. Why would this make it count as life?
Ah, yet another book which uses cute language and twisting analogies to make us believe we're seeing something that isn't there. If I were to tell you that I created a potato in a computer, and then invited you to eat it, you'd laugh at me. When dealing with solid examples of real things, computer simulations of them seem laughably easy to separate from the real mccoy, however, when you come to abstract concepts for which nobody has a clear definition ( Life, Intelligence, etc. ) its actually much easier to fool people ( including yourself ). It becomes especially easy when you take the time to spin yarns about the structure of the universe, from subatomics upwards, in order that it all fit your end goal.
Formula: Uncertainty + sophisticated language = plausible story.
Now don't get me wrong here, I'm sure the book is a great and valuable work in the field of ALife, which is a very intriguing field in computing today. But to make claims that one has actually created life in a computer that is equivalent to even the simplest forms we see around us in the natural world is just plain ridiculous.
I'm not going to waste time debating the particulars of the systems involved here and whether they do or don't meet the criteria for living things as abstracted by whomever, or whether those criteria are a sufficient definition for life. I just want to point out something that all too often gets forgotten when dealing with informational systems - the gulf between a simulation and the simulated.
Firstly it is a necessary element of all simulations that they are a reduced set of the properties of the system being simulated. You cannot pefectly simulate a real system - the only perfect simulation is the original system itself. But this is a minor point. Attached to this, and more importantly is the fact that informational simulations HAVE NO CAUSAL POWERS! Having no physical existance, they cannot cause or affect anything except what is formally defined for them in the simulation. If I say that I have simulated a tornado in my computer, nobody is going to worry that it might destroy my city. If you put a lovely roaring log fire screensaver on your computer it will never keep you awake at night worrying if the fire will melt your monitor. A computer will never be crushed by the weight of the eifel tower if it has a 3d model of it. All of these are informational simulations of NON-FORMAL systems and therefore do not entail the be-all and end-all of the systems they simulate, and therefore ( finally... ) are not equivalent to the real thing. Only formal systems ( ie like a game of chess ) can be said to exist entirely in any medium in which they are rendered. Non-formal systems can only exist as a simulation when rendered in other media. Life is not a formal system.
Why is it that stories like these are so easy to fool us? Well probably because humans are informational creatures - we are the makers and consumers of our own information. Therefore we sometimes find it difficult to see the line between simulations and the simulated - because both get represented to our minds by roughly equivalent information. Add to that the above mentioned confusion and elaborate talk and its a marvelous act of intellectual slight-of-hand that makes us see life where it doesn't exist.
Nice try guys, keep it up - its a fun show =)
Well the rangers look like they might be able to handle working on many different terrain types, but those scounts are gonn have a tough time on anything other than a smoothe man made surface. I don't think these bots are very practical in anything but a very urban setting.
so its not exactly the sort of room-temperature you'd want to have in your cube - unless you happen to be Mr. Freeze.
Yeah, and then when the stressed out guy at the end of the hall who's wife just left him finally goes postal, he can just slap on some VR goggles and he'll be sure not to miss out on anyone.
And because all the moths released cannot reproduce, then this controls the spread of the modified genes in the population, and means that these "modified" creatures will not spread beyond the control of the people breeding them.
So we're not really in any danger of altering the bollworm species and endangering the ecosystem.
This article is quite silly. Laser light communication would be excellent for communicating to a civilization - but only once you knew where they were. The problem with lasers is that they are highly directional. you need to point them in the direction you want to make a broadcast to and then send you're message. This would entail that any aliens sending out a general "hello and welcome to the club" message, or even just the ambient signals of their civilization, would need to have established the exact position of our planet from very far away.
Think about how many stars are visible to the naked eye - hundreds of thousands. Then think about how many are visible through high powered telescopes - millions. now think of the task of analyzing each star to establish to a high degree of accuracy its particular movement so that you can know exactly where it will be in the thousands of years in the future when your signal will actually arrive at it. And even once you'd done that you'd have to broadcast in such a wide area around the stars position such that the signal could be received by any orbiting planets. That's a computational job on a scale many millions of times greater than simply sending out an all points radio broadcast. and radio waves still travel at the same speed as laser light.
Plus with a laser the beam is so narrow that any dark matter ( think planets, large dust / gas clouds ) which might float by in the time between broadcast and receipt, and happen into its path could block the signal or alter its direction in uncalculable ways.
Overall radio is much more efficient for sending out a general "welcome to the sentience club - wanna play the swap ideas game?" type message.
this is actually a flash cartoon that was on the scifi.com seeing ear theatre - go have a look.
oops, I forgot the where clause, oh well it must have been a registration error
Yes, those dastardly Lenninists are at it again!
In their most fiendish and heart-chilling conspiracy ever they are targetting the free worlds most valuable intellectual resource! First they created a godless empire ranging across europe and asia. Then they sent their agents to infiltrate america. Then they tried to corrupt the youth of the free world with their underground beatniks and seducing the young into the sloth of hippydom with drugs and satanic music. Then they tricked us all by pretending to dismantle their empire, lulling us all into a false sense of security.
Don't be fooled by marxist plots! They are still hard at work, and they have infiltrated into the most valuable resource of the information age - they are corrupting our programmers!
They have put their best agents into key positions in the programming world, and unleashed the most mostrously conceived pinko commie plot since the flurodation of water!
Boris and Natash say: "Java and C++ vill destroy the evil capitalist pig-dogs".
B: "Gorsh Rocky, what can we do? Boris and Natasha are running amok!"
R: "I don't know Bullwinkle - but we must warn the honest IT managers of America to reject OOP"
B: "Hey Rocky, watch me pull Fortran out of my hat!"
R: "But that trick never works!"
B: "This time for sure. Presto!"
This is the famous problemn in philosophy around qualia. We can test the visible spectrum of light in terms of the wavelength and measure any individuals perception of it, but we can never truly know that the actual experience of that colour is the same for another person. We just have to assume based on the fact that we communicate consistently and experience for ourselves consistently that another person has the same experience, but we can never truly know.
The issue is further complicated by cultural definitions of what makes a colour. Not all cultures divide the spectrum into colour groups the way we do. This has nothing to do with any physiological difference or any actual difference in the way that those colours are "experienced", but is a difference in where groups of colours begin and end. We have groupings of red, green, blue, yellow, etc. that we decided as a culture are meaningful groupings for colours - they begin and end at specific points in the spectrum. Some other cultures not only give different names to these groupings, but actually have the borders of them in quite different places. For example two colours that we might think of as different shades of green ( say lime green, and a very blue turquoise colour ) a person from another culture may say are actually two very different colours - as different as red and green are for us. And colours we consider to be very different - purple and red, they might say are very much the same. So how one is brought up in a culture also has a big impact on what you end up thinking about colours, even if the qualia ( the "experience" ) of the colour is the same, and the segment of spectrum is the same.
The issue of the qualia though - what one truly senses and experiences, is made even clearer when you try to imagine what must be experienced by animals who have sense totally other than our own. For example dolphins and bats have the sense of echo-location. We can test their abilities with this, but we simply don't have the neural hardware to process these types of signals and we can't possibly imagine what it must be like. Is it like a sense of hearing? Is it like a sense of sight? Is it like a strong intuition? We really have no way of knowing.
There have been interesting experiments done with people who are blind not because of a failing in their eyes or optical nerves as is normally the case, but because the optical center of their brains is significantly damaged for whatever reason. A blind person cannot see, but they knows that they cannot see. These people are interesting because they don't know that they cannot see - they simply have no concept of what seeing is like - because they don't have any working optical centre to their brain which might give them even the slightest intuition about what sight is like. Very often they will maintain that they can see despite huge evidence that they cannot - that evidence is meaningless to them, because they have no way of correlating it to what we consider to be sight. For example they might tell you you are wearing a green tie, but you are not wearing a tie at all - and they furiously maintain that they know you are, they can see it. Perhaps its all just imagination on their part, but because they don't have the optical hardware to understand the rudiments of sight, they don't realize that there is any difference between such an imaginated "image" ( if the word can even be applied to them ) and what we consider to be factual seeing.
So the issue becomes much more complexe than simply adding a few cones and guessing what the result is.
I'm sorry, but now you're mixing your colour wheels. Mixin blue and yellow only gives you green in a subtractive colour system like with paint. In an additive colour system, like visible light ( which is what our photoreceptors use ) you can't mix anything to make green, because green is a primary - hence we use red green and blue pixels in a computer monitor, not red, yellow and blue.
Forget tetrachromacy, I want to have daughters with 6 arms like a shiva... that would be cool =)
You wouldn't even need to define different namespace roots, or "universes" as you call them.
.poop domain, you can query all of them, and any complete collisions like
.poop dns server
.poop dns server
A dns response is generally of two types, when queried for a particular name:
1. I know this guy - his address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
2. I don't know this guy - why don't you ask the server at xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
In the case of the second type of response, you could list more than one possible entries. this would allow the icann "universe" to coexist with other "universes" without any real namespace conflicts. For example if there are more than one root servers for the
my.dogs.poop from the icann "official"
and
my.dogs.poop from the freds-world
could be resolved either by a rule set ( always prefer icann, or always prefer freds-world ) or by user choice, as I said.
So a user could create aliases
and the server my.dogs.poop from freds-world
could be his default, and then he has a local dns alias which binds
my.dogs.poop^2 to the server from the icann universe.
In actual practice such a system would likely rarely create collisions, because it would be against the interest of most people to choose names that are in collision with others - perhaps something like
www.dogs.poop would collide, but a more qualified domain like fifi.poodles.dogs.poop would likely not collide, because even given to seperate dogs.poop domains, chances are only one would have such a named host.
I thought some more about dns conflicts since I posted my above comments, and it strikes me that almost all of the nasty and undesireable bickering and squabbling that happens whith regards to domain names is all because they are a limited resource. They are limited because the space allowed for them is tightly controlled, this makes them rare, which makes them valuable.
.com, .biz whatever, we implement an OpenSRS system for negotiating the creation of new domains between multiple registrars etc.
.bar database with foo.bar in another, you prompt the user to choose which one becomes his/her default ( naturally this could be edited at any point later ), and the other entries now appear in this users dns cache as things like:
Why should two companies squabble over amazon.biz if they could equally well register amazon.business, amazon.store, amazon.shop, amazon.books, whatever. Given an unlimited number of potential TLDs, then such activities as domain squatting would be meaningless. And it would be stupid to try to sue everybody who had a domain *.amazon.* in a world of unlimited TLD space.
All the more reason to have an open DNS architecture, and get rid of these hopelessly ridicuulous moderation bodies like ICANN and WIPO. Changing the way the internet is used doesn't require legal battles or desperate struggles with any of these organizations - all it requires is altering your dns records. That's it. If enough people did this, then the internet would be structured differently by the defacto use of its participants.
So coming down to the nuts and bolts of how does one manage resolution of domains in an unlimitedly large name space? I would see it as the same as we manage usenet - or something analogous to that. Anyone who wants to maintain an as-of-yet unmaintained TLD puts up a server. Or in the case of popular ones like
In the extreme case that there are two different databases for the same TLD with conflicting entries for the same domain name - we let the user decide which one they want to use, and allow them to make custom macros to the others.
For example if you have a collision between foo.bar in one
foo.bar^2
foo.bar^3
foo.bar^junksite
foo.bar^coolstuffhere
( the caret ^ is an invalid dns name character anyway )
What do people think about this?
Here we see beautifully two of the inherent principles of the internet coming into conflict:
universality vs. openness. Unfortunately in order to have the internet work universally, some degree of openness needs to be sacrificed. You simply can't have 5 different networks all using foo.com and have them all resolve properly. Unique host names are a must for universality, and that requires some sacrifice to openness.
However on the other hand, strangling access to domain possibilities in the interest of maintaining universality ( what ICANN is doing ), is taking this principle WAY TOO FAR imho.
We need to find an appropriate balance. The internet can be a very populist playground if we choose to make it so. I'd like to know if anyone knows of any of the current Open DNS/NIC services that have been mentioned provide for such distributed maintainable DNS database that would avoid colliding DNS names without sacrificing too much accessibility.
Quite honestly I think that if ICANN is going to strangle access to TLDs than we should simply stop using their databases wherever possible - how much power are they really going to hold if in actual practice the majority of internet users are not respecting their "authoratative" presence? Do you think big business is going to give a damn about anything ICANN says if their audience is somewhere else?
We all know that when it comes to computers TMTOWTDI - always! And in the past its the smarter ideas that win out - not the ones with corporate muscle. So let's do it - let's build and use our own DNS network.
or if this service starts to bug the script kiddies they just set up a few boxes to autosubmit garbage and BS logs, and flood the database with rubbish making it a useless tool.
could be a useful site if the php didn't keep breaking.
Yes, I do know exactly what is involved in doing physics simulations for games. Perhaps you need to do some research on what exactly constitutes a hardware accelerator. The complexity of the operations involved is completely meaningless to whether it is possible to accelerate. What is important is that the operations can be formatted into a set of operations that can be implemented in hardware. All of the things you mentioned: collision detection, constrained rigid-body dynamics, soft-body dynamics, too name a few of the many applications of a physics engine are always going to be implemented in a particular fashion involving a pipeline of specific manipulations in specific order. This is perfect for hardware acceleration. The more complexe the better actually because that means its a greater burden lifted from the cpu.
As for CPUs being accelerators. The whole premise of an accelerator is that they ( surprise, surprise ) accelerate - ie. to make faster. Faster than what?? Faster than the CPU !! If you're using a cpu than it can't be faster than a cpu now can it??
LOL - ok that was funny
I wasn't thinking so much of gameplay and story taking up processor time as I was thinking of it taking up project time.
I agree there is definitely a different culture around PC games as there is around console games - I think to a large extent this has been the japanese / american cultural differences playing a large part. And also that console makers have always been used to having hardware that is really the cutting edge of what one can do graphically - so they end up devoting much more time to the depth of the story etc. I think this may come with time for PC games - but its still a relatively new thing in the culture of the game development community.
As for a unified physics API - I don't think it necessarily needs to handicap, it just needs to be flexible. When OpenGL was first being developped many said that it would flop because no single API could ever be able to do all the things developpers would want out of 3d graphics, and that we would always be living with custom coded rendering systems for every app. Thankfully that proved to be false - otherwise we never would have seen the emergence of 3d accelerators. I think for a physics API to be multipurpose enough one really needs only to attain the right level of abstraction to give it the correct level of variability to work all around.
2 points.
1. CPUs cannot be accelerators by definition - an accelerator is a seperate piece of hardware that is designed for one specific task, and because it is hardwired for that one specific task, and not made to be as general purpose as possible ( ie like a CPU ) it can do it faster than a CPU can.
2. If you read my original post I did say that one needs a standardized physics API before one can make an accelerator. The creation of graphics accelerators weren't possible until the realm of 3d graphics had settled into a small group of APIs to handle this ( OpenGL and DirectX ).
Your point about the horribly complicated code for doing matrices is totally backwards - this is exactly the kind of operations that would be perfect for implementing in hardware.
Anyone else get frustrated by these constant claims:
"Today we have the intelligence of insects in our computers - tomorrow dogs, soon they will be smarter than people"
There is no correlation between computer processing power and intelligence. There is no computer in the world that can do what and insect can do. These are totally bogus statistics. Until we figure out a way of duplicating the type of control of biological neurons in a computer system any comparison between computing power and intelligence - human or animal is totally meaningless.
I know I am opening a huge can of worms here, and lots of pro-AI people will start hurling things my way, but I think I can argue very strongly that as of yet there is nothing in the field of AI that can be said to be comparable to biological ( neuronal ) intelligence. Moore's law has no bearing on this - it doesn't matter how much we increase our processing capabilities, until we have the algorithms to direct that processing in the manner of intelligence its just stupid number crunching - regardless of how fast it happens.
They were deactivated for refusing to assimilate.
The difference between knowing reality from fantasy is as old a problem as the human race. Ever since people have been having dreams in our sleep ( or while awake for that matter ), we have pondered whether we can ever be sure of the "reality" of any of our existence.
The advances in media over the last years have only given new form to the same fantasies we've always had. Every kind of media, from verbal storytelling to books to television etc. has had its own particular "alice through the lookinglass" type problems and tales of where does this fantasy begin and end.
Perhaps because we've been having something of a revolution in the area of advancing these media in the last years it might seem as though this is a pressing issue today, but it has really only just brought to the forefront something that is really just an inherent part of the human condition.
You can't legislate away the human condition with warning labels or censorship boards. There is no "this dream brought to you by..." floating in the corner of your field of vision while you sleep, nor when you daydream.
This is a problem of philosophy, not of technology.