Some of the best advice I've seen in print is in
Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance". But the details are hazy, so I'll
give you my persoanl take:
- if you're struggling within yourself, you're
lost. Learn to recognise this mental state
(of internal struggle) and drop it immediately.
- instead, look with detachment at the 'lazy'
half of the struggle. The more clearly you
see it, the less power it will have.
- once the laziness is clearly seen, visualise
yourself beginning the task, in detail.
You can do this lying in bed or anywhere, but
the important thing is to get over the initial
hump, and sort out a clear picture of the first
steps you need to take.
It's this startup-barrier that's the real problem,
but reducing it to a manageable size is just a
question of thinking it out clearly (not sweating,
exercising, or promising rewards or threats).
1) The de-fragging routine is built-in, so trying
to speed it up or control its execution will just interfere. The trick is to relax. (I like to think the word 'religion' is related to 'relaxation', but your bible may vary.)
2) Following the movement of your breath is a
useful, neutral focus for your attention. A simple
mantra for this is "hoom-saah".
3) Self-deception (lying to yourself) tends to
come to the surface during the process, so it
encourages honesty.
The way the brain works, in geek terms,
is that if some idea is
bothering you it ties up excess CPU-cycles,
or forces the drive-head to do extra seeks,
or causes memory allocation to thrash.
Meditation is just a way to set everything
else aside until you've de-fragged those resources.
I think the best explanation of this is
Krishnamurti's--
Westerners tend to confuse images with
realities, and stress themselves out trying
to become what the images demand. Even the
gnostic gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying
one must learn to see an image as an image.
Summary: Bateman points out that in biological evolution, most innovation occurs
when new niches open up, usually via a catastrophic
extinction-event. Between these crises, innovation is
mostly incremental, following paths-of-least-resistance
that Waddington (a 1950s embryologist) called 'chreodes'.
In computer gaming, it's usually hardware breakthrus that
open up new niches, with sequels and genre-copycats filling
the between-times. Bateman argues that even the incremental
improvements of sequels and copycats have the potential
to open up new niches. Examples cited: Wolfenstein 3D, Sims,
Gauntlet.
Critiques:
Food to an animal is much like money to a game
Most niches are based on a particular food-source, so
a better analogy might be that food-sources are like
player-motivations: The Sims appeals to different motives
than Doom. Both are effective in extracting money/calories,
but via different food-sources/motives.
[In the early days] Games were unconstrained by preconceptions,
and so explored all manner of directions, only learning the hard
way what would prove profitable, and what wouldn't.
The creativity in games in the early 80s was due to low
entry-barriers and huge consumer demand for novelty.
Most were crap, but the few that weren't made millions,
and inspired imitators.
...hallucigenia which apparently
supports a trunk and globular head on seven pairs of rigid spines
This reconstruction turned out to be bogus-- the spines were
on its back.
Compare the success of the genre exemplified by Taito's 1978
Space Invaders (albiet not the first shooter) which by the 1990's
had evolved into the first person shooter and had codified the genre
into a streamlined, simplistic game structure making it the fish of
the games world.
I think this analogy is valid.
...the mudskipper [1st fish to walk on land] of first person
shooters could appear at any moment, opening up a new chreode and
new possibilities. The question is, what is the equivalent energy
barrier to the fishes' life in water problem in respect of first
person shooters?
In retrospect, it's easy to see that land was begging to be
exploited, but fish were shackled to water for breathing.
By analogy, FPSes are shackled to point-and-shoot, and the
land begging to be exploited is the whole realm of human
interactions seen in movies and books. But where the first
breakthru will occur isn't obvious yet.
Games are designed - why should they show the same slow
rate of change (albeit on the faster scale of decades)?
Bateman misses a useful perspective-- the conservatism of
sexual selection in evolution. Most creatures are
constrained by hardwired sexual stereotypes to avoid mates
that don't fit the stereotype, so innovators are effectively
punished for their daring. This is less true for consumers,
who are hungry for novelty, but applies to game-companies,
who hope to minimise risk.
(It could also be applied to consumers' demand
for state-of-the-art graphics, I guess.)
By working within the existing chreodes, we have
a mechanism for introducing elements of originality with some
confidence that they will still appeal to a significant proportion of
the market.
A big difference between games and species is that game
designers can experiment cheaply on a small scale and then,
when they find something promising, seek funding for a
more expensive commercial release. So promoting
innovation requires promoting those cheap,
small-scale experiments.
Namco/Bally Midway's Pac-Man (1980) typified the arrangement,
with a series of ever-more challenging mazes facing the player
(The maze didn't change!)
The lesson here, perhaps, is that publishers
looking to be at the forefront of change in the industry should
occasionally step outside of their existing brand chreodes and
gamble on new design or technology, becau
That 9% could have been almost pure profit,
so losing it is a disaster. This is why a
small boycott can also cause serious pain,
eg the recent reaction against "Brand
America" products like Coke and Nike, from
people worldwide who detest Bush's insane
arrogance.
If someone could actually implementany system of ethics, that would be the
scientific breakthru of the millennium-- even
if it was a really limited system of ethics--
because better ones could be evolved from it.
But this guy is just a new-age moron offering
a touchy-feely theory of emotions, exactly like
ten thousand others
[timeline]
that have been created since
Plato in 400BC, none of which remotely deserves
a patent!
(When did the Patent Office stop requiring
working models? That was a very bad move...)
Keith Cowing of NasaWatch weblog is one of the Americans doing research at 'Mars Summer Camp' on Devon Island. Illustrated journals are available for last year and for the season just starting: [example and links]
Not a weblog (Was:Mixed feelings)
on
Space Blog
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As the guy who coined the term, I retain a
godlike power to declare what is and isn't
a weblog, and this isn't, sorry.
As a longtime fan of NasaWatch (which is
a weblog), I'd loooove to see a real ISS
weblog, which would be updated continually
with all the tidbits passing thru the crewman's
interest, and addressed to his peers.
But what Lu is doing isn't even a Web journal--
he's writing long essays on set topics that are
targeted for a popular audience by 'talking down'.
I've been watching the status-bar in my empty
browser-window for the last half-hour, as it
loads what appears to be hundreds and hundreds
of very small images-- do they use a separate
gif for each f***ing letter or something?
Slashdotting usually means one long file takes
a long time to load-- but this is a whole
different problem.
I don't know why we haven't heard more about the Cyc project
I think because, like most AI-demos, it only appears to work until you try it yourself. Here's a critique from 1994-- the impression I get is that to answer any question correctly it has to have the answer spelled out in advance, its inference mechanisms just don't cut it.
My take is that its knowledge-representation doesn't really converge on a kernel of most-important-facts-- if it did, it wouldn't get lost wandering among all the little details.
We're actually having a somewhat-related discussion on comp.ai just now.
I think you can take off your aluminum foil hat for now, the Boogeyman of Redmond isn't really hiding under your bed.
Given MS's vile trackrecord for faking 'grassroots' support, isn't it likely they have a pr-team who keep an eye on Slashdot threads, and try to mod-up pro-MS postings?
Re:plenty of toolkits like that already
on
Who Needs XFree86?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I tried to trace the evolution of windowing systems in this timeline. (Lots of links and screenshots.)
It's great to see these issues addressed at all in the popular press-- in the world of artificial intelligence, puzzles like 'how-to-model-diplomacy' are usually classed as 'semantics'... and then swept under the rug!
For at least 100 years, wargamers have understood that to make their models accurate they have to include diplomacy and other subtle sociological factors. [great long history of wargaming]
More recently, when Chris Crawford did his breakthru nuclear-armageddon sim Balance of Power in 1985, he read all the basic texts on international diplomacy and found them almost completely useless-- his model ended up being entirely about 'saving face', which was something the texts hardly ever spelled out. (If you let your enemy get away with anything, you lose face, so to avoid that you have to rattle your nuclear 'sabre'.)
But what's most alarming is that as long as AI's been around (almost 50 years) and as popular as computer games and simulations have gotten, I'm not sure there's any university program yet that surveys how to do this kind of semantics, for games and other simulations. (I've been scouring the Web about this for my timeline.)
The classic text-adventure was alive and living on rec.arts.int-fiction last I looked. The emphasis has shifted away from puzzles to more artistic writing, I think, but there will always be new ideas that can work within the original zork-style format.
Shifting the emphasis to graphics has always been risky because 1) it's expensive 2) the author has less artistic control 3) puzzles are harder to implement. And because there's no replay-value, it's just not cost-effective.
I had great hopes for Chris Crawford's Erasmatron engine as a way to allow multiple story-paths, but it was a huge disappointment. Someday Chris or someone else may yet get it right-- ie, an authoring toolkit that allows more freeform interactive-fictions without an enormous investment of authoring-effort.
The timeline seems to be a bit vague in its point.
I'm definitely testing the boundaries by intuition more than any predefined rule, but the intro-page explains a bit-- it's a history of how our general ability to represent knowledge has evolved.
I've tried to include most borderline cases, but genetic algorithms in the abstract don't represent anything concrete, so I think not.
I'd definitely use it a lot, for searches that Google couldn't handle. Some examples:
- the obvious one is 'stem*' to get all words that begin with a certain string, but sometimes I might want the opposite '*ending' as well
- if I'm unsure of the spelling, 'start?end' could come in handy
- most search-engines are useless for specifying punctuation or capitalization
- I'd like to be able to search for ranges of dates using '18??' or the equivalent
- phrases with gaps or alternate forms ("All your [x] belong to [y]")
My recommendation would be to start with strong-content sites (Project Gutenberg, Wired, etc) and see how computationally expensive it becomes, one step at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Even more recent is Faucounau's plausible approach to the Phaistos disk
I tried to inventory all online translations and most major offline versions here
- if you're struggling within yourself, you're lost. Learn to recognise this mental state (of internal struggle) and drop it immediately.
- instead, look with detachment at the 'lazy' half of the struggle. The more clearly you see it, the less power it will have.
- once the laziness is clearly seen, visualise yourself beginning the task, in detail. You can do this lying in bed or anywhere, but the important thing is to get over the initial hump, and sort out a clear picture of the first steps you need to take.
It's this startup-barrier that's the real problem, but reducing it to a manageable size is just a question of thinking it out clearly (not sweating, exercising, or promising rewards or threats).
..is here. It was written in 1645: [author bio]
1) The de-fragging routine is built-in, so trying to speed it up or control its execution will just interfere. The trick is to relax. (I like to think the word 'religion' is related to 'relaxation', but your bible may vary.)
2) Following the movement of your breath is a useful, neutral focus for your attention. A simple mantra for this is "hoom-saah".
3) Self-deception (lying to yourself) tends to come to the surface during the process, so it encourages honesty.
Meditation is just a way to set everything else aside until you've de-fragged those resources.
I think the best explanation of this is Krishnamurti's-- Westerners tend to confuse images with realities, and stress themselves out trying to become what the images demand. Even the gnostic gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying one must learn to see an image as an image.
In computer gaming, it's usually hardware breakthrus that open up new niches, with sequels and genre-copycats filling the between-times. Bateman argues that even the incremental improvements of sequels and copycats have the potential to open up new niches. Examples cited: Wolfenstein 3D, Sims, Gauntlet.
Critiques:
Food to an animal is much like money to a game
Most niches are based on a particular food-source, so a better analogy might be that food-sources are like player-motivations: The Sims appeals to different motives than Doom. Both are effective in extracting money/calories, but via different food-sources/motives.
[In the early days] Games were unconstrained by preconceptions, and so explored all manner of directions, only learning the hard way what would prove profitable, and what wouldn't.
The creativity in games in the early 80s was due to low entry-barriers and huge consumer demand for novelty. Most were crap, but the few that weren't made millions, and inspired imitators.
This reconstruction turned out to be bogus-- the spines were on its back.
Compare the success of the genre exemplified by Taito's 1978 Space Invaders (albiet not the first shooter) which by the 1990's had evolved into the first person shooter and had codified the genre into a streamlined, simplistic game structure making it the fish of the games world.
I think this analogy is valid.
In retrospect, it's easy to see that land was begging to be exploited, but fish were shackled to water for breathing. By analogy, FPSes are shackled to point-and-shoot, and the land begging to be exploited is the whole realm of human interactions seen in movies and books. But where the first breakthru will occur isn't obvious yet.
Games are designed - why should they show the same slow rate of change (albeit on the faster scale of decades)?
Bateman misses a useful perspective-- the conservatism of sexual selection in evolution. Most creatures are constrained by hardwired sexual stereotypes to avoid mates that don't fit the stereotype, so innovators are effectively punished for their daring. This is less true for consumers, who are hungry for novelty, but applies to game-companies, who hope to minimise risk.
(It could also be applied to consumers' demand for state-of-the-art graphics, I guess.)
By working within the existing chreodes, we have a mechanism for introducing elements of originality with some confidence that they will still appeal to a significant proportion of the market.
A big difference between games and species is that game designers can experiment cheaply on a small scale and then, when they find something promising, seek funding for a more expensive commercial release. So promoting innovation requires promoting those cheap, small-scale experiments.
Namco/Bally Midway's Pac-Man (1980) typified the arrangement, with a series of ever-more challenging mazes facing the player
(The maze didn't change!)
The lesson here, perhaps, is that publishers looking to be at the forefront of change in the industry should occasionally step outside of their existing brand chreodes and gamble on new design or technology, becau
That 9% could have been almost pure profit, so losing it is a disaster. This is why a small boycott can also cause serious pain, eg the recent reaction against "Brand America" products like Coke and Nike, from people worldwide who detest Bush's insane arrogance.
But this guy is just a new-age moron offering a touchy-feely theory of emotions, exactly like ten thousand others [timeline] that have been created since Plato in 400BC, none of which remotely deserves a patent!
(When did the Patent Office stop requiring working models? That was a very bad move...)
Keith Cowing of NasaWatch weblog is one of the Americans doing research at 'Mars Summer Camp' on Devon Island. Illustrated journals are available for last year and for the season just starting: [example and links]
Fans of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials will recognise Svalbard as a major locale: [map]
As a longtime fan of NasaWatch (which is a weblog), I'd loooove to see a real ISS weblog, which would be updated continually with all the tidbits passing thru the crewman's interest, and addressed to his peers.
But what Lu is doing isn't even a Web journal-- he's writing long essays on set topics that are targeted for a popular audience by 'talking down'.
Someone should name a videogame villain after him!
Now that it's an hour, I'm concluding it must have an auto-refresh that times out before the page displays. What losers!
Slashdotting usually means one long file takes a long time to load-- but this is a whole different problem.
Also, the MIT site should put the dang searchbox on the dang frontpage, dang it.
I think because, like most AI-demos, it only appears to work until you try it yourself. Here's a critique from 1994-- the impression I get is that to answer any question correctly it has to have the answer spelled out in advance, its inference mechanisms just don't cut it.
My take is that its knowledge-representation doesn't really converge on a kernel of most-important-facts-- if it did, it wouldn't get lost wandering among all the little details.
We're actually having a somewhat-related discussion on comp.ai just now.
God save us from steaming heaps like the semiosis article. Anyone who takes it seriously will be spoiled forever, for game design and literature.
Given MS's vile trackrecord for faking 'grassroots' support, isn't it likely they have a pr-team who keep an eye on Slashdot threads, and try to mod-up pro-MS postings?
I tried to trace the evolution of windowing systems in this timeline. (Lots of links and screenshots.)
Google's got it.
For at least 100 years, wargamers have understood that to make their models accurate they have to include diplomacy and other subtle sociological factors. [great long history of wargaming]
More recently, when Chris Crawford did his breakthru nuclear-armageddon sim Balance of Power in 1985, he read all the basic texts on international diplomacy and found them almost completely useless-- his model ended up being entirely about 'saving face', which was something the texts hardly ever spelled out. (If you let your enemy get away with anything, you lose face, so to avoid that you have to rattle your nuclear 'sabre'.)
But what's most alarming is that as long as AI's been around (almost 50 years) and as popular as computer games and simulations have gotten, I'm not sure there's any university program yet that surveys how to do this kind of semantics, for games and other simulations. (I've been scouring the Web about this for my timeline.)
Shifting the emphasis to graphics has always been risky because 1) it's expensive 2) the author has less artistic control 3) puzzles are harder to implement. And because there's no replay-value, it's just not cost-effective.
I had great hopes for Chris Crawford's Erasmatron engine as a way to allow multiple story-paths, but it was a huge disappointment. Someday Chris or someone else may yet get it right-- ie, an authoring toolkit that allows more freeform interactive-fictions without an enormous investment of authoring-effort.
I'm definitely testing the boundaries by intuition more than any predefined rule, but the intro-page explains a bit-- it's a history of how our general ability to represent knowledge has evolved.
I've tried to include most borderline cases, but genetic algorithms in the abstract don't represent anything concrete, so I think not.
I'd definitely use it a lot, for searches that Google couldn't handle. Some examples:
- the obvious one is 'stem*' to get all words that begin with a certain string, but sometimes I might want the opposite '*ending' as well
- if I'm unsure of the spelling, 'start?end' could come in handy
- most search-engines are useless for specifying punctuation or capitalization
- I'd like to be able to search for ranges of dates using '18??' or the equivalent
- phrases with gaps or alternate forms ("All your [x] belong to [y]")
My recommendation would be to start with strong-content sites (Project Gutenberg, Wired, etc) and see how computationally expensive it becomes, one step at a time.