I tied the computer on Veteran by choosing as randomly as I could each time. Here's a way to actually choose a more or less random number between 0 and 2 in a RoShamBo setting. Say three numbers between 0 and 9 in your head. Now take each number mod 3 and add those up. You get something between 0 and 6; take that mod 3 again and that's your number. The two-step process is a somewhat chaotic system, in that it's hard to predict the outcome while you're making up the original numbers, and you're just as likely to get 0, 1, or 2. And it's easy to do mod-3 arithmetic in your head, so with a little practice you can actually apply it while playing against real people.
That's my foolproof system for at least breaking even no matter what your opponent's strategy is.
Mathematically speaking, to say that a space has n dimensions roughly means that you need n coordinates to refer to a position on that space. In two dimensions (like your computer screen) a pixel is uniquely determined by its x and y coordinates; in three dimensions, a point also has a depth, and so you need x, y, and z coordinates to determine its position (hence a z-buffer). So to say that this game takes place in four-dimensional space just means that the world is a space that requires four coordinates to describe, say x,y,z, and w. Since the "visible" part of the world appears three-dimensional (albeit projected on a 2-D screen), what is presumably happening is that at any given time you're seeing a "slice" of the 4-D world -- probably you start off seeing all the objects contained in the slice where w=0, and you can "shift" objects into other slices, say where w=1 or w=-1. In the example of connecting rings, the player is moving the one ring from the w=0 slice into the w=1 slice, which looks to be pretty empty; then he can move it around as he likes before taking it back into the w=0 slice, where it's now locked into the other ring.
I would simply think of the game world as a bunch of parallel 3-D worlds. Exactly like a Linux (or Mac) desktop with 4 workspaces is really four parallel 2-D worlds, which have little to do with each other, except you can move windows from one to the other.
Non-mathematicians generally get hung up on the need to assign a physical interpretation to the fourth coordinate. But if you think of a four-dimensional space simply as the set of all four-tuples of numbers, then you've divorced the space from its interpretation as spacetime or whatever, and it becomes much easier to think about.
EA actually spent a lot of time and money making Command and Conquer 3 into a viable spectator sport with their Battlecast viewer. You can stream current matches or watch archived ones. They even have an online TV show, Battlecast Primetime, where they show some of the best matches with commentary. It's fun to watch if you've ever played the game, and I have no trouble believing a gamer could make money with that kind of forum.
My girlfriend listens to her iTunes playlist on shuffle too, but every time she finishes a song, she fast-forwards at least ten times to find one she likes... I asked her why she doesn't just delete the bad ones, and she said because she enjoys the process of rejecting them:)
I don't think this applies to Fritz. From the interview with #2 player Vladimir Kramnik after his 2002 match with Fritz, when asked if he's trying to play "anti-computer chess", he replies:
In my preparation I tried to play this kind of anti-computer strategy, in some rapid training games. I could see clearly that it's not working anymore. The positional technique of this program is so much higher than years ago. It pushes pawns, builds the center, and begins activity on the flank. You cannot play like this anymore against computers. So many things I looked at in my preparations simply didn't work. I was shocked to see the level of positional improvement they had made.
Good point -- who decides whether or not to accept the logo, anyway? Should we have a Slashdot poll? (I can see it now -- our logo will be a picture of CowboyNeal.) Or maybe after all of Slashdot's icons get turned to the game of life symbol, THEN it's the new hacker logo.
Otherwise Back to the Future II might be future-historically inaccurate! It would sure be a shame if it turned out that window shades couldn't actually broadcast beautiful views 24 hours a day in 2015...
I heard a talk on this about six months ago (when the largest quantum computer was a whopping two bits) and I think it should be made more clear that this type of computer does not do procedural computations (it'd have to be reset every time if I understood right) -- its main application would be mathematical algorithms. The example I was given was in prime-factoring numbers (which is where all of the cryptography comes in), and as far as I know, this is the only use anyone has invented for such a computer.
I disagree with the majority of the posts; although a bit of a rant, this editorial is indeed on topic. To summarize, jesse argues that "we should not waste energy banning digital violence until we have successfully eradicated violence in the real world."
While the argument is legitimate, it is, however, wrong. The way I understand it, such censorship laws are meant to reduce the amount of violence in the real world, by reducing the amount our children (those who will cause the violence of tomorrow) are exposed to it. (Whether this will work is a different story, which I'll leave to the ever-verbose JonKatz.)
RH can (and did) expand to other products, for instance selling corporate packages which include support. If they play it right, the CD won't be their only moneymaker. Joe Rabinoff
...our everyday appliances have become quite sophisticated and complex to operate...
I would think that adding a web interface to our household appliances would make them more complicated and difficult to operate. I mean, how hard is it to press "play" on your DVD player? Joe Rabinoff
While I don't believe Katz was so unbearably wrong in his opinions to warrant this pointless personal character attack, I agree with jabber. You'll notice that in all publications and interviews with anyone involved with the film, one rarely gets a straight answer as to whether the story is fictional or not. People who hear about the movie by word of mouth hear that it's real from some people and fake from others, so they go into the theater open to the possibility that it's real. The low-tech filmmaking only helps to encourage that thought. The movie was so good because one could empathize with the characters as real people instead of just characters (they used their real names for this effect).
BTW, I think there should be some spoiler warnings above this feature. Katz tells us what is real and what is fake, which is detrimental to the effect if one isn't sure. Joe Rabinoff
Exactly -- what I always liked about open source was the complete lack of accountability (other than one's reputation being based on one's code). Once you start getting paid, you all of a sudden have much less freedom in what you write, because the goal has changed -- you're trying to make a company happy, not code what you're really enthusiastic about. Coding for its own sake is the real basis of open source -- sXc is just a better way for freelance programmers to find work. Joe Rabinoff
I heartily agree with you. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- speaking as an open source programmer, I really don't give a flying rat's booty if W2K burns Linux's pants off in the market, as long as I still get to use it. The biggest mistake people like Metcalfe and Gates make is to think that people like us care that they have a pulse.
I think Salon misunderstood Brown's "arrogance" -- Brown didn't really care. Benchmarks, etc. are interesting but irrelevant. Speaking as an open source contributor, I program stuff because it's fun, because I get a "kick out of it," and because I'm not satisfied with the current status of software. We're making this stuff for us, not to bring down Microsoft or win converts. Really, as long as there were a solid base of open source programmers, I personally wouldn't care if every other person and corporation on earth ran Microsoft software.
It's by us for us, the rest of the world be damned. We geeks think it's cool.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned one of the niftier implications of such research -- if we know how to receive computer input from a neuron, we might be able to, say, put a sensor in the neuron group that corresponds to the letter 'a' -- forget keyboards, I can imagine computer input by thinking.
Scientific research means nothing to me when I have my own experience to trust. I learned QWERTY in fourth grade and Dvorak in seventh; I now type 10-15 wpm faster in Dvorak. Hey CmdrTaco -- How about a Dvorak vs Qwerty survey?
Slashdot Mirror
I tied the computer on Veteran by choosing as randomly as I could each time. Here's a way to actually choose a more or less random number between 0 and 2 in a RoShamBo setting. Say three numbers between 0 and 9 in your head. Now take each number mod 3 and add those up. You get something between 0 and 6; take that mod 3 again and that's your number. The two-step process is a somewhat chaotic system, in that it's hard to predict the outcome while you're making up the original numbers, and you're just as likely to get 0, 1, or 2. And it's easy to do mod-3 arithmetic in your head, so with a little practice you can actually apply it while playing against real people.
That's my foolproof system for at least breaking even no matter what your opponent's strategy is.
Mathematically speaking, to say that a space has n dimensions roughly means that you need n coordinates to refer to a position on that space. In two dimensions (like your computer screen) a pixel is uniquely determined by its x and y coordinates; in three dimensions, a point also has a depth, and so you need x, y, and z coordinates to determine its position (hence a z-buffer). So to say that this game takes place in four-dimensional space just means that the world is a space that requires four coordinates to describe, say x,y,z, and w. Since the "visible" part of the world appears three-dimensional (albeit projected on a 2-D screen), what is presumably happening is that at any given time you're seeing a "slice" of the 4-D world -- probably you start off seeing all the objects contained in the slice where w=0, and you can "shift" objects into other slices, say where w=1 or w=-1. In the example of connecting rings, the player is moving the one ring from the w=0 slice into the w=1 slice, which looks to be pretty empty; then he can move it around as he likes before taking it back into the w=0 slice, where it's now locked into the other ring.
I would simply think of the game world as a bunch of parallel 3-D worlds. Exactly like a Linux (or Mac) desktop with 4 workspaces is really four parallel 2-D worlds, which have little to do with each other, except you can move windows from one to the other.
Non-mathematicians generally get hung up on the need to assign a physical interpretation to the fourth coordinate. But if you think of a four-dimensional space simply as the set of all four-tuples of numbers, then you've divorced the space from its interpretation as spacetime or whatever, and it becomes much easier to think about.
I take offense to that -- I water-cooled my system so it wouldn't sound like a hair dryer in a box.
Okay, and because it looks cool.
I guess bragging rights too. (Hence this post.)
EA actually spent a lot of time and money making Command and Conquer 3 into a viable spectator sport with their Battlecast viewer. You can stream current matches or watch archived ones. They even have an online TV show, Battlecast Primetime, where they show some of the best matches with commentary. It's fun to watch if you've ever played the game, and I have no trouble believing a gamer could make money with that kind of forum.
Metal Gear Solid 4 had a fantastic ending! And is likely to have a sequel apparently.
My girlfriend listens to her iTunes playlist on shuffle too, but every time she finishes a song, she fast-forwards at least ten times to find one she likes... I asked her why she doesn't just delete the bad ones, and she said because she enjoys the process of rejecting them :)
Somebody's got to get his computer one of these:
:)
code poet T-shirt
I've already got mine
I should note that IANAGM though.
Good point -- who decides whether or not to accept the logo, anyway? Should we have a Slashdot poll? (I can see it now -- our logo will be a picture of CowboyNeal.) Or maybe after all of Slashdot's icons get turned to the game of life symbol, THEN it's the new hacker logo.
Otherwise Back to the Future II might be future-historically inaccurate! It would sure be a shame if it turned out that window shades couldn't actually broadcast beautiful views 24 hours a day in 2015...
Why do people write Windows and put a star in UNIX? Is Bell Labs more likely to jump down someone's throat for copyright violation than Microsoft?
[ Windows is (C) (TM) Microsoft Corporation. UNIX is (C) (TM) Bell Labs. ]
I dunno when this page was last modified, but he gives explicit credit to linux.com here.
I heard a talk on this about six months ago (when the largest quantum computer was a whopping two bits) and I think it should be made more clear that this type of computer does not do procedural computations (it'd have to be reset every time if I understood right) -- its main application would be mathematical algorithms. The example I was given was in prime-factoring numbers (which is where all of the cryptography comes in), and as far as I know, this is the only use anyone has invented for such a computer.
I disagree with the majority of the posts; although a bit of a rant, this editorial is indeed on topic. To summarize, jesse argues that "we should not waste energy banning digital violence until we have successfully eradicated violence in the real world."
While the argument is legitimate, it is, however, wrong. The way I understand it, such censorship laws are meant to reduce the amount of violence in the real world, by reducing the amount our children (those who will cause the violence of tomorrow) are exposed to it. (Whether this will work is a different story, which I'll leave to the ever-verbose JonKatz.)
Joe Rabinoff
RH can (and did) expand to other products, for instance selling corporate packages which include support. If they play it right, the CD won't be their only moneymaker.
Joe Rabinoff
I would think that adding a web interface to our household appliances would make them more complicated and difficult to operate. I mean, how hard is it to press "play" on your DVD player?
Joe Rabinoff
That sounds like a bigger pain in the butt than URL's. If you're out to save money, that's not the way to do it.
Joe Rabinoff
BTW, I think there should be some spoiler warnings above this feature. Katz tells us what is real and what is fake, which is detrimental to the effect if one isn't sure.
Joe Rabinoff
Exactly -- what I always liked about open source was the complete lack of accountability (other than one's reputation being based on one's code). Once you start getting paid, you all of a sudden have much less freedom in what you write, because the goal has changed -- you're trying to make a company happy, not code what you're really enthusiastic about. Coding for its own sake is the real basis of open source -- sXc is just a better way for freelance programmers to find work.
Joe Rabinoff
Cheers
Joe Rabinoff
I think Salon misunderstood Brown's "arrogance" -- Brown didn't really care. Benchmarks, etc. are interesting but irrelevant. Speaking as an open source contributor, I program stuff because it's fun, because I get a "kick out of it," and because I'm not satisfied with the current status of software. We're making this stuff for us, not to bring down Microsoft or win converts. Really, as long as there were a solid base of open source programmers, I personally wouldn't care if every other person and corporation on earth ran Microsoft software.
It's by us for us, the rest of the world be damned. We geeks think it's cool.
Regards,
QBobWatson
Joe Rabinoff
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned one of the niftier implications of such research -- if we know how to receive computer input from a neuron, we might be able to, say, put a sensor in the neuron group that corresponds to the letter 'a' -- forget keyboards, I can imagine computer input by thinking.
Joe Rabinoff
Scientific research means nothing to me when I have my own experience to trust. I learned QWERTY in fourth grade and Dvorak in seventh; I now type 10-15 wpm faster in Dvorak. Hey CmdrTaco -- How about a Dvorak vs Qwerty survey?