I think sharing an office works much better if people are working on the same project. I'm currently in a large shared office where no one is doing anything relevant to me, and I hate it. I have to constantly endure long conversations that are nothing to do with me. Although even those are better than the long personal phonecalls.
"Classic" genetic algorithms are little more than a pretty efficient search algorithms.
GAs are nothing more than search algorithms, but then pretty much all AI is search.
The complexity of any modern programming language is so high that using genetic algorithms to search for "a program in C that calculates fibonacci numbers" seems completely outlandish.
It may seem outlandish to you but using a form of GA known as Genetic Programming, programs to calculate Fibonacci numbers have already been evolved. It is certainly possible to generate C, assembly, and code from other languages in a meaningful way.
The cost in electricity to find such a program would be higher than just giving the same specifications to a programmer.
Remember, natural selection in the real world, which evolutionary algorithms are an abstraction of, have produced those programmers.
I remember years ago (c. 15) playing a game called 'Pick Up Artist' on the C64 or Amiga. Fairly primitive, but fun for about 4 seconds, or slightly longer if you were playing it with some mates. Might have been this one. Was released in the UK at least.
I can't imagine a game like that becoming really popular, though it might attract some interest as a coin-op or a web based game.
This bolsters my impression that RMS is always trying to keep the positive associations of the word 'Linux', while at the same time insisting that the work of Linus et al. is a disposable commodity. Weasel words, if you ask me.
This bolsters my impression that you are an eejit. RMS didn't write that, that was the reporter. He is always careful to make the distinction between Linux and GNU. If any weasel words are being used, they are yours.
It seems to me like this is engineering, not science. It's an interesting idea, and a novel use of technology but it doesn't really advance the sphere of human knowledge. However, maybe they can use this new design of robot to produce new science (which I expect is their goal anyway).
I just don't understand this point of view. Nothing paid for by advertising is free - the consumer still pays for it in some way. If Nike is paying for a park bench in return for an advertisement then Nike is able to make that money back from the consumer by charging more for its trainers, their desirability having been raised by the advertising. In fact, it makes it even more expensive because Nike wouldn't do it simply to cover its costs - it must know it will make a profit on the deal.
Paying for things through advertising actually costs more than paying for it directly, and as an added bonus you have to endure the ads as well. The only difference is that the person benefitting from the service is not necessarily the same person who pays for it, but it probably averages out fairly well in the end.
How about launching a probe in the direction of Voyager to create a relay? If it accelerates fast enough it should be able to keep within communication distance.
And when we start to lose contact with the new probe we can launch a new probe in the same direction and begin to create a communication chain across the universe:)
If by 'fairly solid' you mean that the idea is still being considered, then yes. If you mean that it's a leading theory, then not at all. The great majority of climatologists consider climate change to be mostly an effect of increased CO2 emissions. If you look at a graph of how temperature has changed over the last couple of centuries, and compare it to graphs of CO2 emissions and sunspot activity, you can see that there is a strong correlation with the former and no obvious correlation at all to the latter.
Where are the slashdotters complaining that Fox News was thin-skinned, censoring or plain evil now?
Right here! Fox News is thin-skinned, censoring and plain evil.
Hopefully you would think they'd be man enough to apologize and admit they were wrong.
Why the hell would anyone need to apologise for accepting a report that was presented as true, and quoted straight from the horse's mouth? And that holds true even if it had been falsified, which it hasn't. You fuckwit.
My God(s)! If you haven't tried it out yet, then download it now. Provided you don't mind losing a few months, that is.
NetHack is the one of the most vicious, amusing, intelligent, fun games of all time. It has its own insane rules that it follows to their illogical conclusion and more cool ideas and quotable lines than you can shake a wand at. It's also extremely challenging and requires considerable dedication to beat even if you take all the easy options.
Example: there is a cockatrice monster that can turn you to stone if it hits you. But if you kill one, you can hit monsters with its corpse and turn them to stone (assuming you're wearing gloves, naturally). But what happens if you get swallowed whole by a huge worm and then you hit it from the inside with a cockatrice corpse? Try it and find out.
Just try not to read the spoilers - the most fun part of the game is working out how it works.
Evolution is not brute-force. Evolution is a learning method in that each new generation is based on the results of the previous generation.
Your nucleic DNA contains approx 3*10^9 bases. That's 4^(3 billion) permutations. Just how long do you think it would take if you worked through AAAA...AAAA , AAAA...AAAT etc. before you came up with something as workable as the human genome? Same deal with a random walk.
Ah, I see I am talking to either a teenager or a troll. No wonder you have time to play games all day.
I beg to differ
You fucktard! No wait, actually having an alternative opinion is OK. This is an approach to life that you may find useful when you reach adulthood.
It was a joke, and if you noticed I said about as bad as me, which indicates that I myself am not that great
Jokes should a) be funny and b) make sense. Neither criteria were fulfilled by your "joke". I can tell you can't write for shit, but why insult my writing for no reason?
Couldn't care less makes about as much sense as could care less
I couldn't care less = it is not possible for me to care less about this subject because my the quality of my caring is at a nadir.
I could care less = the level of my caring could be at any point except for nothing / I am a fuckwit.
The second statement is meaningless, except for the implication of its second definition.
I'm sure you felt so good about yourself for getting back at me, eh?
Oh stop fucking whining about criticism. My heart is bleeding.
So you're saying most new games are either long and dilluted or short and dilluted? Okay..
I was saying that this is the case according to my experience, and was asking for alternative views. If you feel it is not true, then give me counter example. Or you could just call me a cunt for having a different viewpoint.
It's your money and if you want to spend $60 for a couple hours of entertainment, I think you're stupid, but okay.
If anyone following this conversation is actually interested in the point (clearly not you) I would expect that shorter games should cost less. Not as a linear function of length, but they should be cheaper. And I don't pay for things in dollars Yank boy.
As far as the movie analogy.. Well, if people weren't willing to do something similiar we wouldn't have had any successful miniseries things..
Yes, but there isn't really the equivalent to single-sitting films in the game market.
A person can enjoy one or two of the Star Wars movies without having to watch them all to see how it ends..
I wouldn't bother watching them unless I had at least the expectation that I would watch the other films. But that's irrelevant because they're designed to be self-contained to a large extent.
Suggestion.. If you care more about getting the storyline over quickly than you are interested in experiencing the game.. Well.. Why don't you try going to the library and picking up a children's book? They're usually pretty short and have interesting conclusions.
Oh great, I express a preference and I get fucking insulted. Clearly you do not have the mental capacity to grasp alternate points of view. I shall spell it out for you: quantity != quality./1984/ is not an inferior book to/War and Peace/ despite being about 1/10 of the length.
Sad.. You write about as bad as me..
Excuse me? What part of my writing do you not like? By the way, ellipses are conventionally written with three dots and your post makes little sense with 'could care less' - it should be 'couldn't care less'.
There are plenty of short games with 'less dilute content' out there.
Such as?
if I can beat the game in a few minutes
Did I say 'minutes'? Straw man argument.
Why not have longer games with less dilute content?
Because I like to have a chance to finish them. My time is limited and I simply do not have enough of it to play games for 20+ hours. Even if I did I would prefer to play several different games in that time unless the game was very original.
That is my preference and would buy such games if they were available.
Well I can only guess you're trolling because no one should get that pissed off from someone's opinion about game length. If not, go and have a drink or have a wank or something.
So, any complaint that a film is too long is irrelevant because no one has to watch it to the end? Seems like an odd sentiment to me. I like to finish games, but a lot of the current ones are just too long to play through in a couple of evenings.
The problem is of course is that it doesn't cost much more to develop a 20-hour game to a 10-hour game. Once you've designed a monster to shoot it can be added into the game 100 times at no extra cost, and extra perceived value, at least by some. I would personally prefer shorter games, with less dilute content. There aren't any of these around however, so it's hard to gauge what the public want.
China probably has 4-5 times the population as the US, so the total output probably isn't that much different
Approx 4 times the population, so it is still a good chunk less than the US's even in real terms.
Allowing China to get to 1.5 or 2 would mean a major increase in CO2 being released.
Yes! And that's exactly what Kyoto is designed to stop.
Look at it from China's point of view. They only generate a fraction of the CO2 p/c that the US does. From where they stand, they have the 'right' to increase CO2 production by a factor of at least 4.
So what to do? Is it fair to subject 3rd world countries with their developing industries to the same restrictions as the far greater polluters of the first world's mature industries? A simple compromise, forming the basis of Kyoto is to allow the 3rd world countries to expand their industries, but to ensure that any extra CO2 output is restricted to less than that achieved by the cuts in CO2 production by more developed countries.
This is a reasonable plan to allow 3rd world development whilst not hitting developed countries unduly and ensuring a net reduction in CO2 emissions. Practically every country of any importance in the world thought so, the exception being of course the US (who, being the most prolific producer with some of the least controls over CO2 emissions, would find it the easiest to make the cuts).
The Kyoto restrictions will probably help the countries that implement them in the long term anyway; oil is the 20th century's fuel.
This just isn't true. Overall there is a net reduction.
If it is anything but politics targeting certain countries, change it so that all countries are treated the same in it.
So a country producing 5.5 tons of CO2 carbon per year per capita should reduce their emissions by the same amount as a country producing less than 1 ton per capita? You're insane if you think that is either practical or fair.
But per capita the US produces about 5.5 metric tons of CO2 carbon, by far the world's largest. The figure for China on the other hand is considerably less than 1. Surely, unless the treaty was so restrictive as to bring the US's CO2 emissions down to Chinese levels, some increase must be allowed for China?
Slashdot Mirror
I think sharing an office works much better if people are working on the same project. I'm currently in a large shared office where no one is doing anything relevant to me, and I hate it. I have to constantly endure long conversations that are nothing to do with me. Although even those are better than the long personal phonecalls.
Why would anyone want to create another product called 'Millenium'? Millennium on the other hand...
A fad?? They were invented about 30 years ago. How long does something have to be around before they stop being a fad?
There has been lots of research done on what class of problems evolutionary algorithms are good at - google for it or look on citeseer!
"Classic" genetic algorithms are little more than a pretty efficient search algorithms.
GAs are nothing more than search algorithms, but then pretty much all AI is search.
The complexity of any modern programming language is so high that using genetic algorithms to search for "a program in C that calculates fibonacci numbers" seems completely outlandish.
It may seem outlandish to you but using a form of GA known as Genetic Programming, programs to calculate Fibonacci numbers have already been evolved. It is certainly possible to generate C, assembly, and code from other languages in a meaningful way.
The cost in electricity to find such a program would be higher than just giving the same specifications to a programmer.
Remember, natural selection in the real world, which evolutionary algorithms are an abstraction of, have produced those programmers.
There are still plenty of spammers who do ask for replies - the Nigerian scams for instance. This method would take care of them.
I remember years ago (c. 15) playing a game called 'Pick Up Artist' on the C64 or Amiga. Fairly primitive, but fun for about 4 seconds, or slightly longer if you were playing it with some mates. Might have been this one. Was released in the UK at least.
I can't imagine a game like that becoming really popular, though it might attract some interest as a coin-op or a web based game.
As long as they don't cock up and send it early ;-)
Welsh actually, but I watch Father Ted.
Maith? Something like that?
This bolsters my impression that RMS is always trying to keep the positive associations of the word 'Linux', while at the same time insisting that the work of Linus et al. is a disposable commodity. Weasel words, if you ask me.
This bolsters my impression that you are an eejit. RMS didn't write that, that was the reporter. He is always careful to make the distinction between Linux and GNU. If any weasel words are being used, they are yours.
It seems to me like this is engineering, not science. It's an interesting idea, and a novel use of technology but it doesn't really advance the sphere of human knowledge. However, maybe they can use this new design of robot to produce new science (which I expect is their goal anyway).
Rather brave of them if they do put RMS up on the stand. Of all the people in the world I would like to interrogate, Stallman comes close to last.
I expect a couple of students nicked it on the way back from the pub.
I just don't understand this point of view. Nothing paid for by advertising is free - the consumer still pays for it in some way. If Nike is paying for a park bench in return for an advertisement then Nike is able to make that money back from the consumer by charging more for its trainers, their desirability having been raised by the advertising. In fact, it makes it even more expensive because Nike wouldn't do it simply to cover its costs - it must know it will make a profit on the deal.
Paying for things through advertising actually costs more than paying for it directly, and as an added bonus you have to endure the ads as well. The only difference is that the person benefitting from the service is not necessarily the same person who pays for it, but it probably averages out fairly well in the end.
How about launching a probe in the direction of Voyager to create a relay? If it accelerates fast enough it should be able to keep within communication distance.
:)
And when we start to lose contact with the new probe we can launch a new probe in the same direction and begin to create a communication chain across the universe
If by 'fairly solid' you mean that the idea is still being considered, then yes. If you mean that it's a leading theory, then not at all. The great majority of climatologists consider climate change to be mostly an effect of increased CO2 emissions. If you look at a graph of how temperature has changed over the last couple of centuries, and compare it to graphs of CO2 emissions and sunspot activity, you can see that there is a strong correlation with the former and no obvious correlation at all to the latter.
Where are the slashdotters complaining that Fox News was thin-skinned, censoring or plain evil now?
Right here! Fox News is thin-skinned, censoring and plain evil.
Hopefully you would think they'd be man enough to apologize and admit they were wrong.
Why the hell would anyone need to apologise for accepting a report that was presented as true, and quoted straight from the horse's mouth? And that holds true even if it had been falsified, which it hasn't. You fuckwit.
My God(s)! If you haven't tried it out yet, then download it now. Provided you don't mind losing a few months, that is.
NetHack is the one of the most vicious, amusing, intelligent, fun games of all time. It has its own insane rules that it follows to their illogical conclusion and more cool ideas and quotable lines than you can shake a wand at. It's also extremely challenging and requires considerable dedication to beat even if you take all the easy options.
Example: there is a cockatrice monster that can turn you to stone if it hits you. But if you kill one, you can hit monsters with its corpse and turn them to stone (assuming you're wearing gloves, naturally). But what happens if you get swallowed whole by a huge worm and then you hit it from the inside with a cockatrice corpse? Try it and find out.
Just try not to read the spoilers - the most fun part of the game is working out how it works.
Evolution is not brute-force. Evolution is a learning method in that each new generation is based on the results of the previous generation.
Your nucleic DNA contains approx 3*10^9 bases. That's 4^(3 billion) permutations. Just how long do you think it would take if you worked through AAAA...AAAA , AAAA...AAAT etc. before you came up with something as workable as the human genome? Same deal with a random walk.
Ah, I see I am talking to either a teenager or a troll. No wonder you have time to play games all day.
I beg to differ
You fucktard! No wait, actually having an alternative opinion is OK. This is an approach to life that you may find useful when you reach adulthood.
It was a joke, and if you noticed I said about as bad as me, which indicates that I myself am not that great
Jokes should a) be funny and b) make sense. Neither criteria were fulfilled by your "joke". I can tell you can't write for shit, but why insult my writing for no reason?
Couldn't care less makes about as much sense as could care less
I couldn't care less = it is not possible for me to care less about this subject because my the quality of my caring is at a nadir.
I could care less = the level of my caring could be at any point except for nothing / I am a fuckwit.
The second statement is meaningless, except for the implication of its second definition.
I'm sure you felt so good about yourself for getting back at me, eh?
Oh stop fucking whining about criticism. My heart is bleeding.
So you're saying most new games are either long and dilluted or short and dilluted? Okay..
I was saying that this is the case according to my experience, and was asking for alternative views. If you feel it is not true, then give me counter example. Or you could just call me a cunt for having a different viewpoint.
It's your money and if you want to spend $60 for a couple hours of entertainment, I think you're stupid, but okay.
If anyone following this conversation is actually interested in the point (clearly not you) I would expect that shorter games should cost less. Not as a linear function of length, but they should be cheaper. And I don't pay for things in dollars Yank boy.
As far as the movie analogy.. Well, if people weren't willing to do something similiar we wouldn't have had any successful miniseries things..
/1984/ is not an inferior book to /War and Peace/ despite being about 1/10 of the length.
Yes, but there isn't really the equivalent to single-sitting films in the game market.
A person can enjoy one or two of the Star Wars movies without having to watch them all to see how it ends..
I wouldn't bother watching them unless I had at least the expectation that I would watch the other films. But that's irrelevant because they're designed to be self-contained to a large extent.
Suggestion.. If you care more about getting the storyline over quickly than you are interested in experiencing the game.. Well.. Why don't you try going to the library and picking up a children's book? They're usually pretty short and have interesting conclusions.
Oh great, I express a preference and I get fucking insulted. Clearly you do not have the mental capacity to grasp alternate points of view. I shall spell it out for you: quantity != quality.
Sad.. You write about as bad as me..
Excuse me? What part of my writing do you not like? By the way, ellipses are conventionally written with three dots and your post makes little sense with 'could care less' - it should be 'couldn't care less'.
There are plenty of short games with 'less dilute content' out there.
Such as?
if I can beat the game in a few minutes
Did I say 'minutes'? Straw man argument.
Why not have longer games with less dilute content?
Because I like to have a chance to finish them. My time is limited and I simply do not have enough of it to play games for 20+ hours. Even if I did I would prefer to play several different games in that time unless the game was very original.
That is my preference and would buy such games if they were available.
Well I can only guess you're trolling because no one should get that pissed off from someone's opinion about game length. If not, go and have a drink or have a wank or something.
So, any complaint that a film is too long is irrelevant because no one has to watch it to the end? Seems like an odd sentiment to me. I like to finish games, but a lot of the current ones are just too long to play through in a couple of evenings.
The problem is of course is that it doesn't cost much more to develop a 20-hour game to a 10-hour game. Once you've designed a monster to shoot it can be added into the game 100 times at no extra cost, and extra perceived value, at least by some. I would personally prefer shorter games, with less dilute content. There aren't any of these around however, so it's hard to gauge what the public want.
China probably has 4-5 times the population as the US, so the total output probably isn't that much different
Approx 4 times the population, so it is still a good chunk less than the US's even in real terms.
Allowing China to get to 1.5 or 2 would mean a major increase in CO2 being released.
Yes! And that's exactly what Kyoto is designed to stop.
Look at it from China's point of view. They only generate a fraction of the CO2 p/c that the US does. From where they stand, they have the 'right' to increase CO2 production by a factor of at least 4.
So what to do? Is it fair to subject 3rd world countries with their developing industries to the same restrictions as the far greater polluters of the first world's mature industries? A simple compromise, forming the basis of Kyoto is to allow the 3rd world countries to expand their industries, but to ensure that any extra CO2 output is restricted to less than that achieved by the cuts in CO2 production by more developed countries.
This is a reasonable plan to allow 3rd world development whilst not hitting developed countries unduly and ensuring a net reduction in CO2 emissions. Practically every country of any importance in the world thought so, the exception being of course the US (who, being the most prolific producer with some of the least controls over CO2 emissions, would find it the easiest to make the cuts).
The Kyoto restrictions will probably help the countries that implement them in the long term anyway; oil is the 20th century's fuel.
Instead, it allows to increase them
This just isn't true. Overall there is a net reduction.
If it is anything but politics targeting certain countries, change it so that all countries are treated the same in it.
So a country producing 5.5 tons of CO2 carbon per year per capita should reduce their emissions by the same amount as a country producing less than 1 ton per capita? You're insane if you think that is either practical or fair.
this treaty allows for an increase in overall greenhouse gas emissions.
Compared to a complete freeze on CO2 level rises, yes (actually no, but for the sake of argument...)
Compared to no treaty at all, and unrestrained CO2 emissions, then don't talk bollocks.
But per capita the US produces about 5.5 metric tons of CO2 carbon, by far the world's largest. The figure for China on the other hand is considerably less than 1. Surely, unless the treaty was so restrictive as to bring the US's CO2 emissions down to Chinese levels, some increase must be allowed for China?