That would suck a lot. Man, that would suck a lot.
Personally I would love to play as a nazi. What's with this anti-nazi thing anyway? No one sees anything bad playing a terrorist etc. but as soon as it is nazi, everyone is "shocked". Blah.
So you feel that design by interface isn't practical? Millions of Java programmers would like to disagree with you. You
almost never need MI if you have interfaces.
Ah, you said it yourself.. ALMOST never. From experience with C++ and Java I can say I very very rarely need multiple inheritance, and interface do the job. But my god, when I do need the multiple inheritance I'm really cursing at Java and blessing C++. I'm all for multiple inheritance. I frankly don't understand why people oppose them. They don't lead into messy interfaces, experience with C++ has already shown it.
I don't think SGI likes that at all, but they have anticipated it. As probably everyone knows they've been developing their stuff on Linux for quite some time now getting ready for this kind of things.
Of course SGI would've liked everyone to use their machine and OS. They would get better profits that way (in a way it's a bit comparable to what Apple is doing, closed platform better revenues). But they saw this decline years ago and knew they gotta change. Probably everyone remembers they were supposed to build their own NT boxes. Good thing they got into their senses and got into Linux. I think this will make everyone happy. Linux will benefit from the push, and SGI has a good platform that's widely available on different architectures.
I thought it was a shame when SGI started to move to other OSs as I like IRIX and their machines had that geeky factor. But in retrospect, they did a very smart move.
[BLOCKQUOTE]How often do you think about your own thoughts? My guess is something like less than 5% of the time, the rest of the time you just act. Being self conscious to me is not observing one's own thoughts, but observing one's own actions.
[/BLOCKQUOTE]
Ok... My opinion is greatly affected by my personal experience. And that was the day when I suddenly realized "hey, I'm thinking.. this is cool!". And you're probably quite right about that 5%, we don't think about it often. And my opinion is most of the time we are not very self-conscious. We're just as you said acting. But it gives me still to this day shivers when I start thinking that I can think and I exist.
How can you be so sure of this? I for one am fully self-aware, and I strongly doubt that my own thoughts are observable by introspection, except for a very small part of them. AFAIK there isn't yet a man made self-aware system that works the way you prescribe.
Oh but you can and do observe your own thinking. Every time you do a conscious decision you are able to observe, and in fact change your decision based on your observation. If you didn't have this ability you wouldn't think it over, you would just act.
I guess what you want to say is you can't observe your sub-consciousness. But that's irrelevant, you only need to be able to observe the higher levels that make _conscious_ decisions. I could draw a parallel here to the AI, saying that the implementation and what goes on in the deeper levels of the program, the algorithms etc, the AI does not know. It only knows the higher level of that, some subset of it's inner workings. That's an artificial example and not quite valid, but if you're a programmer maybe you understand the point. Of course as we program what it knows, we could potentially make it more self-aware of it's inner workings than humans are of their own.
The drivers will decide...
on
ATi Radeon 8500
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The card itself seems cool, and I hope it does well.
But what about the drivers? They are the real issue. I bought an ATI Radeon when they came out. And even on Windows, the drivers were quite buggy. Not just unoptimized, which I think they were too. But also buggy. Many games had clear visual bugs, and you had to be switching options on and off to find something that works. Maybe it's also because the card was new and game makers hadn't been able to test with it to get around the bugs, but I dont think so. I think the drivers were just immature.
I really hope the drivers have matured. We need something besides NVidia in good consumer level 3D cards. And as ATI has been quite good with releasing the specs for their cards, I wouldn't be sad at all to see ATI gaining some market share from NVidia.
To get AI working you need lots of horse power. And some pretty fancy algorithms. I'm not even sure if we can do real AI with the formal computers we have right now. With quantum computers? Who knows.
The basics to get self-aware systems is to define a self looping reasoning for the system. That is, the system must be able to observe it's OWN thoughts not only what is happening outside. It must be able to react and change it's thoughts by it's own thinking. That is very important. That also means you need to create a basic language system of some sorts for those underlying systems.
All in all it's complex but very interesting problem. Complex as in figuring out the basic underlying system and the defining parameters. If we get those done correctly, the AI will 'grow' and build upon them like a learning human would, by interacting with it's surroundings and with it's own thoughts.
and many europeans neither, is that software patents have been for some time common practice in European Union. Officially pure software patents are not allowed, but unofficially they are approved. The patents are just labeled as being in the domain of "electronic information processing and data communications" and as such are not pure software patents.
Check EPC article 52(1)c that says computer software is not patentable, and article 52(3) that has the infamous "as such" clause that EPO uses as a loop hole to grant software patents.
Unfortunately it seems europe has lost this race even before anyone knew it was an issue.
I'm not sure I would want to see those things televised. But I can SEE that happening.
It's already big thing in South Korea. These gamers are there "professionals". They get their money by playing in these events that are shown in television too. I'm not sure if it's crazy or not, but I wouldn't mind getting my bills paid by playing;).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it was the negro who shares more than 99% of it's DNA with humans. If I don't recall wrongly, them apes shared 98.something% with us.
That would suck a lot. Man, that would suck a lot.
Personally I would love to play as a nazi. What's with this anti-nazi thing anyway? No one sees anything bad playing a terrorist etc. but as soon as it is nazi, everyone is "shocked". Blah.
It seems nice by the web-page, but I haven't taken a look into it yet. Would like to hear some opinions though.
Of course SGI would've liked everyone to use their machine and OS. They would get better profits that way (in a way it's a bit comparable to what Apple is doing, closed platform better revenues). But they saw this decline years ago and knew they gotta change. Probably everyone remembers they were supposed to build their own NT boxes. Good thing they got into their senses and got into Linux. I think this will make everyone happy. Linux will benefit from the push, and SGI has a good platform that's widely available on different architectures.
I thought it was a shame when SGI started to move to other OSs as I like IRIX and their machines had that geeky factor. But in retrospect, they did a very smart move.
Ok... My opinion is greatly affected by my personal experience. And that was the day when I suddenly realized "hey, I'm thinking.. this is cool!". And you're probably quite right about that 5%, we don't think about it often. And my opinion is most of the time we are not very self-conscious. We're just as you said acting. But it gives me still to this day shivers when I start thinking that I can think and I exist.
But opinions vary and that's great.
Oh but you can and do observe your own thinking. Every time you do a conscious decision you are able to observe, and in fact change your decision based on your observation. If you didn't have this ability you wouldn't think it over, you would just act.
I guess what you want to say is you can't observe your sub-consciousness. But that's irrelevant, you only need to be able to observe the higher levels that make _conscious_ decisions. I could draw a parallel here to the AI, saying that the implementation and what goes on in the deeper levels of the program, the algorithms etc, the AI does not know. It only knows the higher level of that, some subset of it's inner workings. That's an artificial example and not quite valid, but if you're a programmer maybe you understand the point. Of course as we program what it knows, we could potentially make it more self-aware of it's inner workings than humans are of their own.
But what about the drivers? They are the real issue. I bought an ATI Radeon when they came out. And even on Windows, the drivers were quite buggy. Not just unoptimized, which I think they were too. But also buggy. Many games had clear visual bugs, and you had to be switching options on and off to find something that works. Maybe it's also because the card was new and game makers hadn't been able to test with it to get around the bugs, but I dont think so. I think the drivers were just immature.
I really hope the drivers have matured. We need something besides NVidia in good consumer level 3D cards. And as ATI has been quite good with releasing the specs for their cards, I wouldn't be sad at all to see ATI gaining some market share from NVidia.
The basics to get self-aware systems is to define a self looping reasoning for the system. That is, the system must be able to observe it's OWN thoughts not only what is happening outside. It must be able to react and change it's thoughts by it's own thinking. That is very important. That also means you need to create a basic language system of some sorts for those underlying systems.
All in all it's complex but very interesting problem. Complex as in figuring out the basic underlying system and the defining parameters. If we get those done correctly, the AI will 'grow' and build upon them like a learning human would, by interacting with it's surroundings and with it's own thoughts.
Check EPC article 52(1)c that says computer software is not patentable, and article 52(3) that has the infamous "as such" clause that EPO uses as a loop hole to grant software patents.
Unfortunately it seems europe has lost this race even before anyone knew it was an issue.
I'm not sure I would want to see those things televised. But I can SEE that happening. It's already big thing in South Korea. These gamers are there "professionals". They get their money by playing in these events that are shown in television too. I'm not sure if it's crazy or not, but I wouldn't mind getting my bills paid by playing ;).