Dijkstra was talking about cognition in general. His thesis, as I always interpreted it, was that every concept should be dealt with solely in terms of language; the best language in this case would be mathematical symbols.
EWD 696 does give some good points supporting this. If you illustrate something with a picture, there's a risk that the picture will trick the viewer into considering only a subset of the cases possible. For example, you might be doing some trigonometric proof, and to help yourself through it, you draw a simple triangle to stare at. You try to be careful, and not make it equilateral, or isoceles, so you move the top vertex over a bit to the right so it's scalene, and as a result you figure that anything you try on that triangle ought to work on any possible triangle. But perhaps you've now tricked yourself into assuming that any triangle's height segment (by which I mean the segment intersecting the top vertex and perpendicular to the base) is contained entirely within that triangle, and divides it into two smaller triangles. It shouldn't be hard to imagine a counterexample, which might not be covered by the "proof" you end up with.
However, as deep as is my respect for Dr. Dijkstra, this was one belief with which I could never fully agree. I would say that every important scientific or logical argument certainly should be expressible as pure math. I would also agree with EWD that the graphical approach is not "more natural". Rather, it's the other way around. One might say that God made the universe out of math; the nice view was just a pleasant outcome.
But I do not believe in forcing oneself to deal solely in terms of the math, though it's surely a worthwhile and underused exercise. I believe the mind's eye for visual patterns can sometimes spark an idea for solving a problem, that would never have been thought of by considering the equations alone. (The Tufte quote is relevant here, btw; there are good illustrations and bad illustrations, and sometimes a good illustration is just fun!)
To me, the optimal approach to thought should be look at the equations (or description, or spec, or what have you), think really hard, and if nothing comes from that after a while, see if the picture helps. Heed EWD 696, though, and don't let yourself be tricked! When you finally arrive at what you think is an answer, express it solely in terms of the math. Only then will it be truly solid.
More to the point, don't get too deeply into the habit of relying on pictures to learn. EWD would say don't do it at all; I think it's fine, but always remember that they're illustrative. They're like analogies. They may help you with a new concept, but you can only take an analogy so far. Always do the math in the end.
I remember playing LPMuds over a 300-baud dialup. Man, those were the days. Each line would take a second or so to print out. By the time you saw who was in a room, you were already PKed...
In what ways would you consider an FPS to stand out? Here's a (probably incomplete) laundry list of neato things in NOLF. Some you might think are important; others less so. Pick yer poison:
Stealth elements, a la Deus Ex. You can get quite far in a lot of the game without killing anything. Indeed, in a few cases, it's much easier that way.
Great AI. Enemies can circle around and flank. They seek cover. If there's no cover, they'll often hit the dirt and fire from a prone position. They run away if disarmed. They sound alarms if available.
Great graphics. I was stunned at the tornado and submarine scenes. And of course, the fake lava.:-)
Great voicing and acting. Especially in NOLF2. People move realistically (they're based on motion capture), lips are synced to speech, and the eyes are expressive. As much as I like Deus Ex, do you remember how horrid the faces looked? (Though I suspect they'll improve in DX2...)
Dynamic music. The music transforms smoothly from normal ambience to sudden surprises to high-pressure chases, in response to what's happening. And BTW, personally, I love the music.
Great engine. Handles narrow streets, many-roomed buildings, and wide open wilderness equally well.
Multiplayer. Various missions, some parallel to the SP game, and some nifty variants such as Doomsday.
Humor. Oh my god, the humor. I loved the sequence in NOLF1 with the scientists doing tests on goats, and the chase scene in NOLF2 (you'll know it when you see it).
Overall, I suppose nothing here reeeeeally stands out, but the collection of features makes for a better experience. Is there something in particular you're expecting when you think of a "stand-out FPS"?
Cooperation and competition are both hallmarks of the human species. If only cooperation worked, communism/socialism would've worked a helluva lot better than it did.
So, OK, cooperation, competition, and self-interest are hallmarks of the human species. And laziness. And hubris. And greed. And sex. And violence. And donuts.
What is wrong with maintaining a "good enough" or "this is the best we got" solution while we look for better solutions? The homeless shelter you mention may not have been up to code, but it was better than nothing.
Well, there's a saying that "good enough" is the enemy of "best". The idea is that people will see the "good enough" solution, and pass on the harder/slower/more costly "best" solution. Then, later on, they find themselves locked into "good enough" long after it stops being "good enough" (Windows, anyone?), or it turns out to be "utterly bad" upon further inspection after the choice has been made.
In this case, one could argue that any homeless person suffering an accident in this shelter could sue the city (or nuns) for millions. Personally, I think that's even more enraging. Too few people understand the consequences of abusing the right to sue for damages, and have driven up the price of getting anything done.
I think your point was a fine one, and were I a nun, I would've set up the shelter anyway. And if I were a homeless person, I would have understood the shelter for what it was and taken my chances with the below-code conditions, offered to help carry my disabled housemates, and if I get injured, hey, this was way better than the street. I suspect this would've been the case here, except for a few bad apples...
...couldn't you simply direct the user to perform a few simple tasks? (e.g. select the bubble with the picture of the fish next to it, then type the last name of the president of the united states in the second box from the left) I doubt AI would be able to cope with as system like this, especially if you had varying combinations of tests. If you had a variety of these tests, you could also make some that accomodated the disabled, too.
Think about the problem some more, and I'm sure you'll see why what you just proposed is harder than it sounds. First, as beavis88 said, not everyone knows trivia. You'd either have to go through a lot of work and money(!) to make a lot of questions, or make so few that a program could memorize them and answer them with an automated script. Same with "selecting the fish" - spend lots of money, or risk a brute-force hack. You could keep modifying the tests and introducing new ones, but that takes human effort and, again, money.
Mangled text is great - it's easy to make a program that can make random text strings and apply random manglings to it, but there's no cheap, reliable program that recovers the original text from the result. Meanwhile, it's assumed that anyone using the Internet can read, and can parse mangled text. (Except not, as is seen here.)
I'll give this a stab. Those visual tests are meant to keep programs from using those forms 100,000,000 times, while allowing actual humans to use them as easily as possible. (They're also designed so that a program could drum up those images fairly easily, on the fly.) An ideal test would be one that accepts any human being, and rejects any program. In other words, the Turing test would be ideal.
With that said, I see no "interesting issues surrounding the Turing test". This visual test is obviously not a Turing test (though it's a clever approach). If it were, blind people wouldn't be complaining about it (unless they're programs... hmmmm). All it's doing is relying on the fact that currently, no one's figured out how to make a cheap, reliable image recognition program. The comment at the end of the article seems to imply the Turing test itself (of which no examples even exist today) would be inapplicable here.
OK, as others have said, bulletproof clothing's purpose is to redistribute kinetic energy, so that a small fast force is turned into a large slower force. And it doesn't necessarily need to be heavy to do that; it just needs to be structured properly. And with that said, all that kinetic energy will still need to go somewhere, whether it's redirected all over the body, absorbed, turned into heat, or a combination of these.
Maybe with "smart skin", you could keep redirecting that energy around and around the garment until it finally dissipates as heat. Of course, get hit a lot (say, from a Thompson), and you turn into a salisbury steak dinner, so that's a problem.
Maybe it could be directed outward in various directions. The skin itself is pushed out, though not so hard as to break it, and then rebounds to its normal shape relatively slowly. I can just see someone getting hit with a bat to the chest and suddenly going all spiky everywhere.
Feel free to correct me on this. I always had the distinct impression that mithril itself wasn't magical, though it might have been forged using magic. It was just really well-made armor. All of its properties once made were accountable using nothing but physics (minus magic). Do the books make any reference to some "aura" or something accompanying mithril afterward to protect the wearer?
I doubt florida is going to have much luck with wind power- it's dead flat, and the best places for wind power tend to be mountain passes, which 'funnel' in the wind.
Actually, during the summer, Florida tends to get much more wind than it knows what to do with.
These days, you aren't considered "competitive" unless you are engaging in anti-competitive behaviour (customer lock-in, standards pollution, collusion, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Dijkstra was talking about cognition in general. His thesis, as I always interpreted it, was that every concept should be dealt with solely in terms of language; the best language in this case would be mathematical symbols.
EWD 696 does give some good points supporting this. If you illustrate something with a picture, there's a risk that the picture will trick the viewer into considering only a subset of the cases possible. For example, you might be doing some trigonometric proof, and to help yourself through it, you draw a simple triangle to stare at. You try to be careful, and not make it equilateral, or isoceles, so you move the top vertex over a bit to the right so it's scalene, and as a result you figure that anything you try on that triangle ought to work on any possible triangle. But perhaps you've now tricked yourself into assuming that any triangle's height segment (by which I mean the segment intersecting the top vertex and perpendicular to the base) is contained entirely within that triangle, and divides it into two smaller triangles. It shouldn't be hard to imagine a counterexample, which might not be covered by the "proof" you end up with.
However, as deep as is my respect for Dr. Dijkstra, this was one belief with which I could never fully agree. I would say that every important scientific or logical argument certainly should be expressible as pure math. I would also agree with EWD that the graphical approach is not "more natural". Rather, it's the other way around. One might say that God made the universe out of math; the nice view was just a pleasant outcome.
But I do not believe in forcing oneself to deal solely in terms of the math, though it's surely a worthwhile and underused exercise. I believe the mind's eye for visual patterns can sometimes spark an idea for solving a problem, that would never have been thought of by considering the equations alone. (The Tufte quote is relevant here, btw; there are good illustrations and bad illustrations, and sometimes a good illustration is just fun!)
To me, the optimal approach to thought should be look at the equations (or description, or spec, or what have you), think really hard, and if nothing comes from that after a while, see if the picture helps. Heed EWD 696, though, and don't let yourself be tricked! When you finally arrive at what you think is an answer, express it solely in terms of the math. Only then will it be truly solid.
More to the point, don't get too deeply into the habit of relying on pictures to learn. EWD would say don't do it at all; I think it's fine, but always remember that they're illustrative. They're like analogies. They may help you with a new concept, but you can only take an analogy so far. Always do the math in the end.
And that was the day when I became a fan of danheskett (178529).
I remember playing LPMuds over a 300-baud dialup. Man, those were the days. Each line would take a second or so to print out. By the time you saw who was in a room, you were already PKed...
Overall, I suppose nothing here reeeeeally stands out, but the collection of features makes for a better experience. Is there something in particular you're expecting when you think of a "stand-out FPS"?
Cooperation and competition are both hallmarks of the human species. If only cooperation worked, communism/socialism would've worked a helluva lot better than it did.
So, OK, cooperation, competition, and self-interest are hallmarks of the human species. And laziness. And hubris. And greed. And sex. And violence. And donuts.
What is wrong with maintaining a "good enough" or "this is the best we got" solution while we look for better solutions? The homeless shelter you mention may not have been up to code, but it was better than nothing.
Well, there's a saying that "good enough" is the enemy of "best". The idea is that people will see the "good enough" solution, and pass on the harder/slower/more costly "best" solution. Then, later on, they find themselves locked into "good enough" long after it stops being "good enough" (Windows, anyone?), or it turns out to be "utterly bad" upon further inspection after the choice has been made.
In this case, one could argue that any homeless person suffering an accident in this shelter could sue the city (or nuns) for millions. Personally, I think that's even more enraging. Too few people understand the consequences of abusing the right to sue for damages, and have driven up the price of getting anything done.
I think your point was a fine one, and were I a nun, I would've set up the shelter anyway. And if I were a homeless person, I would have understood the shelter for what it was and taken my chances with the below-code conditions, offered to help carry my disabled housemates, and if I get injured, hey, this was way better than the street. I suspect this would've been the case here, except for a few bad apples...
...couldn't you simply direct the user to perform a few simple tasks? (e.g. select the bubble with the picture of the fish next to it, then type the last name of the president of the united states in the second box from the left) I doubt AI would be able to cope with as system like this, especially if you had varying combinations of tests. If you had a variety of these tests, you could also make some that accomodated the disabled, too.
Think about the problem some more, and I'm sure you'll see why what you just proposed is harder than it sounds. First, as beavis88 said, not everyone knows trivia. You'd either have to go through a lot of work and money(!) to make a lot of questions, or make so few that a program could memorize them and answer them with an automated script. Same with "selecting the fish" - spend lots of money, or risk a brute-force hack. You could keep modifying the tests and introducing new ones, but that takes human effort and, again, money.
Mangled text is great - it's easy to make a program that can make random text strings and apply random manglings to it, but there's no cheap, reliable program that recovers the original text from the result. Meanwhile, it's assumed that anyone using the Internet can read, and can parse mangled text. (Except not, as is seen here.)
I'll give this a stab. Those visual tests are meant to keep programs from using those forms 100,000,000 times, while allowing actual humans to use them as easily as possible. (They're also designed so that a program could drum up those images fairly easily, on the fly.) An ideal test would be one that accepts any human being, and rejects any program. In other words, the Turing test would be ideal.
With that said, I see no "interesting issues surrounding the Turing test". This visual test is obviously not a Turing test (though it's a clever approach). If it were, blind people wouldn't be complaining about it (unless they're programs... hmmmm). All it's doing is relying on the fact that currently, no one's figured out how to make a cheap, reliable image recognition program. The comment at the end of the article seems to imply the Turing test itself (of which no examples even exist today) would be inapplicable here.
OK, as others have said, bulletproof clothing's purpose is to redistribute kinetic energy, so that a small fast force is turned into a large slower force. And it doesn't necessarily need to be heavy to do that; it just needs to be structured properly. And with that said, all that kinetic energy will still need to go somewhere, whether it's redirected all over the body, absorbed, turned into heat, or a combination of these.
Maybe with "smart skin", you could keep redirecting that energy around and around the garment until it finally dissipates as heat. Of course, get hit a lot (say, from a Thompson), and you turn into a salisbury steak dinner, so that's a problem.
Maybe it could be directed outward in various directions. The skin itself is pushed out, though not so hard as to break it, and then rebounds to its normal shape relatively slowly. I can just see someone getting hit with a bat to the chest and suddenly going all spiky everywhere.
Feel free to correct me on this. I always had the distinct impression that mithril itself wasn't magical, though it might have been forged using magic. It was just really well-made armor. All of its properties once made were accountable using nothing but physics (minus magic). Do the books make any reference to some "aura" or something accompanying mithril afterward to protect the wearer?
More importantly, does it run on either Spinal or Tap?
I doubt florida is going to have much luck with wind power- it's dead flat, and the best places for wind power tend to be mountain passes, which 'funnel' in the wind.
Actually, during the summer, Florida tends to get much more wind than it knows what to do with.
Shouldn't be a problem. I just got some email from somebody who claims they are experts in staff enlargement. I'll forward it to them.
The French took a Russian officer out to dinner, after having plied him with good food and lots of alcohol and just asked the him what the bore was.
In Soviet Russia, the bore is YOU.
(Last time I make that joke, I promise.)
Maaaann, Gibson gets the *best* weed...
Trouble is, Darth Vader is a symbol of -cool- evil. So now churchgoers might be given the suggestion that evil is cool.
They should have put in a grotesque of Dark Helmet instead.
Just below this article, I'm looking at an ad for CipherTrust IronMail.
The next article is about RedHat 9. I wonder if there's an add for SuSe or even Microsoft there...
In-flight entertainment: Duke Nukem Forever.
I don't think it'll be done in time.
If you're gonna put a net connection in the elevator, then you're gonna need a way to shut it down at the top to give the occupant reason to leave.
Including this one.
These days, you aren't considered "competitive" unless you are engaging in anti-competitive behaviour (customer lock-in, standards pollution, collusion, etc).
Oh my. That's one for the quote book.
Port Eliza to it, and it'll listen to your problems as well.
...and a keg of Coors. Egad.
Is that, like, ethnic cleansing of rutabagas or something??
That would be Heinlein's The Number of the Beast.