Rather glum conclusion:-) But there are a few nice things that we have that the movie does not, as I shall explain later on.
In particular, AI has proved to be a *much* more difficult problem than had been imagined a few decades ago. HAL 9000 could easily pass a very broad version of the Turing Test; the most that has been done in real life is to pass in very specialized domains. About Turing himself, he predicted both 10^9 bits of RAM being common and passing the Turing Test in 50 years; those 50 years have passed, and while the first is common, the second is not.
Other things, like advanced spaceflight, have not happened out of lack of political will.
However, we do have several things that the movie did not, as Donald Norman has pointed out. User interfaces are much improved. Instead of a lot of separate screens, we have screens that display virtual screens, which can overlap and which can be moved and resized at will. Furthermore, typewriter-style keyboards have been very successful at being generic sets of control buttons; most of the numerous specialized buttons in the movie are unnecessary.
Furthermore, we have varieties of computer entertainment that the movie has no hint of, such as 3D-graphics virtual-world games. Thus, an alternative to commanding very stylized armies on a very stylized battlefield, which is chess, would be to command armies on a battlefield with everything looking and acting very real-world (Myth or Warcraft/Starcraft). But it may be difficult to picture obituaries like "Dave rides HAL's rocket" or "HAL chews on Dave's boomstick".
But even in such games, it is very apparent that the AI is far behind HAL's standards. For example, I've found that a usually successful tactic is to attract an enemy's attention and then retreat around a corner. That enemy will usually walk right into that trap.
Sin and Villainous Businesswomen...
on
Linux Sin Demo
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· Score: 2
One thing I dislike about SiN is how it tried to make Elexis Sinclaire into some sort of sex symbol, with her strategic-covering outfits and all that. I think that a more appropriate outfit for her might be (say) an expensive-looking pinstriped pantsuit.
I note in this context that the Tomb Raider series has had two villainous businesswomen in it, Jacqueline Natla in #1 and Sophia Lee in #3, and both of them were much more appropriately dressed. And although that series has gotten a lot of criticism for the proportions of its lead character, her outfits are actually fairly reasonable if sometimes too little, and not too different from what many women nowadays wear. There certainly has to be something to be said about a female character whose main footwear is hiking boots instead of high heels.
So dressing women reasonably can certainly be done in a computer game -- what reason would there be to do otherwise other than gratuitous sexploitation?
Why Sin and Not Half-Life?
on
Linux Sin Demo
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· Score: 1
Possibly because its publisher is more open-minded. Consider what happened to Half-Life for the MacOS. It had been in the works for much of a year, but when the game got into beta, its publisher, Sierra, got cold feet and canceled the game.
Despite this failure, there is a Dreamcast version in the works, though it has been taking a long time to appear; there is also a Linux dedicated server for Half-Life. But why a server and not a client?
[Quote from KissTheBlade:]
In many ways, modern multinationals are excellent institutions. They are highly transparent, for example, especially when compared to the government buerocracies that the WTO protestors and the like adore so.
[Me:]
This is an absolutely absurd fantasy that reminds me of Soviet propaganda about how the Soviet Union had been a workers state. KissTheBlade's beloved multinationals are, in fact, big bureaucracies, whether he likes to admit that or not.
Furthermore, the WTO, which KissTheBlade seems to love, is itself a government bureaucracy.
[Quote from KissTheBlade:]
The fact is that these companies are owned by Mr&Mrs Average, and the shareholders put an incredible amount of pressure on them to perform and demand information on their performance & intentions. They are the ones controlling the multinationals.
[Me:]
This is an absolutely absurd fantasy. Stock is essentially adult Pokemon cards, and most stockholders don't get into detailed policy decisions of the companies they hold stock in. Furthermore, the largest chunks of stock are owned by various institutional investors, which makes KissTheBlade's workers-state fantasy look even more absurd.
["Reality Master":] How about the people who worship the Great Oracle of Weather Prediction to "prove" global warming? I got into an argument on this very topic on this very site. It's incredible how much faith people put into weather simulations that try and predict the trends 50 years into the future, yet these models cannot predict the weather more than one day in advance.
[Me:] This kind of comment shows a greater awareness of right-wing propaganda than of reality. One does not need day-to-day predictions of details; one only needs overall averages, and these one can get reasonable results for.
[RM:] I think in a lot of ways this guy is dead-on. The best way to get government grant money is to write a program that "proves" doomsday.
[Me:] Cry me a river. There is even a better way -- to claim that there is some terrible threat to national security. "National defense" is, in a way, the ideal sort of pork barrel, because my experience has been that those who object the loudest to pork barrel have a blind eye to military pork.
[RM's Republican-apparatchik sig did not get through; there is evidence that many Florida votes did not get properly counted.]
Slashdot Mirror
Rather glum conclusion :-) But there are a few nice things that we have that the movie does not, as I shall explain later on.
In particular, AI has proved to be a *much* more difficult problem than had been imagined a few decades ago. HAL 9000 could easily pass a very broad version of the Turing Test; the most that has been done in real life is to pass in very specialized domains. About Turing himself, he predicted both 10^9 bits of RAM being common and passing the Turing Test in 50 years; those 50 years have passed, and while the first is common, the second is not.
Other things, like advanced spaceflight, have not happened out of lack of political will.
However, we do have several things that the movie did not, as Donald Norman has pointed out. User interfaces are much improved. Instead of a lot of separate screens, we have screens that display virtual screens, which can overlap and which can be moved and resized at will. Furthermore, typewriter-style keyboards have been very successful at being generic sets of control buttons; most of the numerous specialized buttons in the movie are unnecessary.
Furthermore, we have varieties of computer entertainment that the movie has no hint of, such as 3D-graphics virtual-world games. Thus, an alternative to commanding very stylized armies on a very stylized battlefield, which is chess, would be to command armies on a battlefield with everything looking and acting very real-world (Myth or Warcraft/Starcraft). But it may be difficult to picture obituaries like "Dave rides HAL's rocket" or "HAL chews on Dave's boomstick".
But even in such games, it is very apparent that the AI is far behind HAL's standards. For example, I've found that a usually successful tactic is to attract an enemy's attention and then retreat around a corner. That enemy will usually walk right into that trap.
I note in this context that the Tomb Raider series has had two villainous businesswomen in it, Jacqueline Natla in #1 and Sophia Lee in #3, and both of them were much more appropriately dressed. And although that series has gotten a lot of criticism for the proportions of its lead character, her outfits are actually fairly reasonable if sometimes too little, and not too different from what many women nowadays wear. There certainly has to be something to be said about a female character whose main footwear is hiking boots instead of high heels.
So dressing women reasonably can certainly be done in a computer game -- what reason would there be to do otherwise other than gratuitous sexploitation?
Possibly because its publisher is more open-minded. Consider what happened to Half-Life for the MacOS. It had been in the works for much of a year, but when the game got into beta, its publisher, Sierra, got cold feet and canceled the game. Despite this failure, there is a Dreamcast version in the works, though it has been taking a long time to appear; there is also a Linux dedicated server for Half-Life. But why a server and not a client?
[Quote from KissTheBlade:]
In many ways, modern multinationals are excellent institutions. They are highly transparent, for example, especially when compared to the government buerocracies that the WTO protestors and the like adore so.
[Me:]
This is an absolutely absurd fantasy that reminds me of Soviet propaganda about how the Soviet Union had been a workers state. KissTheBlade's beloved multinationals are, in fact, big bureaucracies, whether he likes to admit that or not.
Furthermore, the WTO, which KissTheBlade seems to love, is itself a government bureaucracy.
[Quote from KissTheBlade:]
The fact is that these companies are owned by Mr&Mrs Average, and the shareholders put an incredible amount of pressure on them to perform and demand information on their performance & intentions. They are the ones controlling the multinationals.
[Me:]
This is an absolutely absurd fantasy. Stock is essentially adult Pokemon cards, and most stockholders don't get into detailed policy decisions of the companies they hold stock in. Furthermore, the largest chunks of stock are owned by various institutional investors, which makes KissTheBlade's workers-state fantasy look even more absurd.
["Reality Master":] How about the people who worship the Great Oracle of Weather Prediction to "prove" global warming? I got into an argument on this very topic on this very site. It's incredible how much faith people put into weather simulations that try and predict the trends 50 years into the future, yet these models cannot predict the weather more than one day in advance.
[Me:] This kind of comment shows a greater awareness of right-wing propaganda than of reality. One does not need day-to-day predictions of details; one only needs overall averages, and these one can get reasonable results for.
[RM:] I think in a lot of ways this guy is dead-on. The best way to get government grant money is to write a program that "proves" doomsday.
[Me:] Cry me a river. There is even a better way -- to claim that there is some terrible threat to national security. "National defense" is, in a way, the ideal sort of pork barrel, because my experience has been that those who object the loudest to pork barrel have a blind eye to military pork.
[RM's Republican-apparatchik sig did not get through; there is evidence that many Florida votes did not get properly counted.]