PPE was developed by Oxford back in the 1920s because they thought a largely humanities driven syllabus centered around ancient history wasn't very practical. Many universities offer it these days, and is one of the best non-STEM courses around.
Just curious how many people have read Robert Pirsig's book(s) and subscribe to his ideas?
In a nutshell his conclusion is that the irreducible factor of life and the universe is a creation force he calls Quality. Another way to look at it is if everything is a state transition diagram, the mysterious factor is something to be found in the transitions (dynamic Quality) rather than in the states (static Quality). Akin to some aspects of Zen and Eastern philosophy. He goes on to develop these ideas to say that you can build up increasingly complex static Qualities like atomic elements, compounds, even life, from what seems like nothing... but that intangible creative dynamic Quality is there, and yet not so easy to pin down. It isn't so much a thing as it is a force.
Right or wrong I find an odd sort of comfort in this understanding.
We were taught Miranda (very similar to Haskell) in my bachelor's program. It was the primary language for most of our exercises across many courses. It is an effective lnguage for teaching many fundamental aspects of programming like recursion, and algorithms - expressing quicksort in a functional language is not only more elegant and considerably shorter when compared with c or Java. That was over twenty years ago, but to this day these functional programming abstractions have been invaluable in shaping my designs, and thought processes involving any kind of programming whatever the actual language I'm using.
There's a huge difference when IT is considered a competitive advantage as opposed to a cost. Generally speaking when IT is simply a cost, then it'll always be short staffed and barely able to keep up with what it needs to do - and will often be targeted first when costs need to be cut. While the idea of turning IT into a competitive advantage sounds good, it isn't easy to execute because they often need to expand their roles and need an objective means of measuring their contributions, but the basic idea is to get IT involved in the company's bottom line - in this case to find out what can they do to improve manufacturing processes.
In practice, today we can solve any control logic problem with existing programming techniques as long as we can specify all the inputs, states/transitions, and outputs. There are techniques to formally verify these programs so you can trust them for mission critical systems - they do exactly what they're designed to do, nothing more, nothing less.
I don't see this approach changing anytime soon. An AI designing a complex system is for the foreseeable future, science fiction. However what's interesting about The Human Brain Project is that it doesn't make any claims about AI, which is actually a good thing. If they start emphasizing AI research I seriously doubt they'd get very far. From what we understand about neural networks and machine learning, which incidentally have very little to do with AI, often turn out to be very good at solving very hard to describe problems like image recognition.
I think if The Human Brain Project focuses on better understanding our neurons and how they work, and are able to translate it to advanced neural networks - these systems could turn out to be adept at solving certain problems. That's a good thing.
Still, I'd like to stress that picking the right language for your task can greatly reduce problem complexity.
For instance, algorithms are much more compact and easier to understand using a functional programming language. E.g. compare quicksort in Haskell and C - see http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction.
Complex concurrent programs remains challenging even with an excellent (IMO) concurrency library like the one in Java 1.5+. But switch to Erlang, and you'd find many concurrency patterns are expressed more naturally.
Indeed! Identifying what proxies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_%28statistics%29) to use is one of the trickier aspects in the soft sciences and statistics. If you read the Economist, you'd see proxies for just about everything (e.g. http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/), and a lot of research is required just to show what a given proxy measures.
programming can be taught with any language. problem solving can be taught with any language. it is better to teach these using a language they WILL use when they actually get into industry, than with stuff they may rarely come up against.
I disagree as it depends on what you're teaching. Concepts like recursion and algorithms are best taught with functional languages. E.g. quicksort is a lot shorter and easier to understand in Haskell than in C - see http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction.
We generally agree that you need to pick the right language for a given task - the task of teaching various computer science concepts is no different. Also, a good curriculum should impart students with the ability to pick the right language for a given task too.
If you're interested in pursuing a computer science degree at university, you might be better off without a background in a imperative/procedural language. Many students who knew C/Pascal seemed to have a tougher time grasping functional languages than those who didn't know anything at all.
As you already suggested what you need to do is you need to separate the core engine and game content.
I agree that content development is hard to open source and seem best developed by an individual or a small group.
The successful open source projects you mention all have a plugin/module system. Ensure the game engine supports a good scripting language for content creation, and plugin system that can modify any aspect of the game, and I expect it will do well in the open source world. Your game in effect should just be a plugin/module to your engine.
You want a game engine that is able to foster development of plugins that can completely change the game's underlying mechanics (e.g. Oblivion), as well as plugins/modules that can tell rich and complex story lines (e.g. Neverwinter Nights).
Getting a bit off topic here, but you raise an interesting issue.
I bet that the frequency of certain searches can predict whether a company stock will increase or decrease, e.g. lots of searches for " problems" is a precursor to that company stock crashing.
I wonder what policies are in place regarding usage of such aggregate information within Google (or other search companies).
Indeed, and there's actual research supporting usage of the Wii Balance board for physiotherapy. Research was conducted by the University of Melbourne, which the Australian doctor probably read about and decided to recommend to his patient.
Market Capitalization = Share Price x Number of Shares in Market
Obviously, Oracle has a lot more shares in the market than Red Hat. Over time, companies can also do a stock split, e.g. halve the share price, but double the number of shares; or a reverse split where price doubles but shares are halved - either way, market cap remains the same.
I take white hat to mean Good, i.e. you're not using the exploit for personal gain.
You're Lawful Good if you're working on behalf of some legal authority. Chaotic Good if you're exposing it to shame/antagonize the companies. Neutral Good if just out of your own personal reasons.
FTA: One puzzle to be solved is why there is similar filamentary structure on both the large and the small scale. "That's a big question," says Tauber.
We still don't truly understand the nature of intelligence, and we won't be able to manufacture it unless we can define it formally in some mathematical/logical notation.
I've done some work with neural networks, and we can simulate neurons with any number of connections (inputs and outputs), but having a bunch of neurons work together discerning things is not intelligence.
Yes, especially for games, and I don't mean the obvious 3D computations, which in any case is most likely handled by the GPU anyway, but rather parallelism in the game workflow.
Read an article last year on Communications of the ACM (3/2009) entitled "Better Scripts, Better Games" that talked about common design patterns in programming games. I'll focus on the state-effect pattern, which breaks each simulation loop into two phases: effect and update. Effect phase is where each game object is subject to an action and determines its own effect of that action. In the update phase, all the effects are combined, and updates the game state for the next iteration of the loop. Since calculations in the effects do not influence each other, they can be parallelized. The update phase can also be parallelized since it consists only of the aggregation of effects and updates to state variables. Idea is similar to Google's MapReduce.
Still a lot of exploration to do in our solar system - probes and robots are the best way to go about it right now.
I don't see what incentive private enterprise would have in landing rovers on Mars, whereas this is something that NASA is very good at doing, and is able to conduct experiments for the sake of science and discovery.
While I attended university in England, one of my professors remarked my English was excellent and was better than most natives. That was almost twenty years ago!
Sad thing is my English is only what I consider good - I received a 5 (out of 7) for English in the International Baccalaureate.
I tried out Tabula Rasa a few months before it was shut down, at a point when most of its serious problems were sorted out. But poor game mechanics was its biggest weakness.
What annoyed me most was how it was touted as a FPS/RPG hybrid. IMO for anything to be deemed an FPS, it must rely on players to aim their weapons and the game would utilize collision detect to ascertain hits. Tabula Rasa did not do this - you had to select what enemies to shoot at, and it was all chance based like most MMOs out there. To make things worse, you had to look at your opponents in order to select them - you couldn't do it explicitly by clicking on them with your mouse.
I think the game would have been successful if they figured out how to do a proper MMO FPS with proper collision detect. Even if the world was largely instanced, and they limited player numbers in these zones, it would be a good start. It doesn't even need complex character builds.
Parent's post helps reinforce OP's view that people in general do not like to be heavily penalized.
While the mechanics in EVE allow for losses that can make any player cringe, most players will only engage in combat with ships they can afford to lose, with clones possessing relatively cheap implants, and utilize risk adverse tactics. If you don't have medical insurance, you lose a small percentage of your skill points when your pilot is killed, but you cannot lose all your accumulated skills due to a momentary lapse of judgement.
Although there is ample evidence to suggest the universe as we know it began with a Big Bang, it never made any sense to me how anything could come out of nothing, much less anything of such magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
PPE was developed by Oxford back in the 1920s because they thought a largely humanities driven syllabus centered around ancient history wasn't very practical. Many universities offer it these days, and is one of the best non-STEM courses around.
Just curious how many people have read Robert Pirsig's book(s) and subscribe to his ideas?
In a nutshell his conclusion is that the irreducible factor of life and the universe is a creation force he calls Quality. Another way to look at it is if everything is a state transition diagram, the mysterious factor is something to be found in the transitions (dynamic Quality) rather than in the states (static Quality). Akin to some aspects of Zen and Eastern philosophy. He goes on to develop these ideas to say that you can build up increasingly complex static Qualities like atomic elements, compounds, even life, from what seems like nothing... but that intangible creative dynamic Quality is there, and yet not so easy to pin down. It isn't so much a thing as it is a force.
Right or wrong I find an odd sort of comfort in this understanding.
We were taught Miranda (very similar to Haskell) in my bachelor's program. It was the primary language for most of our exercises across many courses. It is an effective lnguage for teaching many fundamental aspects of programming like recursion, and algorithms - expressing quicksort in a functional language is not only more elegant and considerably shorter when compared with c or Java. That was over twenty years ago, but to this day these functional programming abstractions have been invaluable in shaping my designs, and thought processes involving any kind of programming whatever the actual language I'm using.
There's a huge difference when IT is considered a competitive advantage as opposed to a cost. Generally speaking when IT is simply a cost, then it'll always be short staffed and barely able to keep up with what it needs to do - and will often be targeted first when costs need to be cut. While the idea of turning IT into a competitive advantage sounds good, it isn't easy to execute because they often need to expand their roles and need an objective means of measuring their contributions, but the basic idea is to get IT involved in the company's bottom line - in this case to find out what can they do to improve manufacturing processes.
In practice, today we can solve any control logic problem with existing programming techniques as long as we can specify all the inputs, states/transitions, and outputs. There are techniques to formally verify these programs so you can trust them for mission critical systems - they do exactly what they're designed to do, nothing more, nothing less.
I don't see this approach changing anytime soon. An AI designing a complex system is for the foreseeable future, science fiction. However what's interesting about The Human Brain Project is that it doesn't make any claims about AI, which is actually a good thing. If they start emphasizing AI research I seriously doubt they'd get very far. From what we understand about neural networks and machine learning, which incidentally have very little to do with AI, often turn out to be very good at solving very hard to describe problems like image recognition.
I think if The Human Brain Project focuses on better understanding our neurons and how they work, and are able to translate it to advanced neural networks - these systems could turn out to be adept at solving certain problems. That's a good thing.
Irreducible complexity is irreducible.
Still, I'd like to stress that picking the right language for your task can greatly reduce problem complexity.
For instance, algorithms are much more compact and easier to understand using a functional programming language. E.g. compare quicksort in Haskell and C - see http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction.
Complex concurrent programs remains challenging even with an excellent (IMO) concurrency library like the one in Java 1.5+. But switch to Erlang, and you'd find many concurrency patterns are expressed more naturally.
According to the article Slashdot uses an HTTP cache called Varnish, which uses the B-heap. Can any /. ed/admin comment on how effective it is?
Also, this idea seems similar to the locality optimizations proposed in algorithms like merge sort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_sort#Optimizing_merge_sort.
Indeed! Identifying what proxies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_%28statistics%29) to use is one of the trickier aspects in the soft sciences and statistics. If you read the Economist, you'd see proxies for just about everything (e.g. http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/), and a lot of research is required just to show what a given proxy measures.
programming can be taught with any language. problem solving can be taught with any language. it is better to teach these using a language they WILL use when they actually get into industry, than with stuff they may rarely come up against.
I disagree as it depends on what you're teaching. Concepts like recursion and algorithms are best taught with functional languages. E.g. quicksort is a lot shorter and easier to understand in Haskell than in C - see http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction.
We generally agree that you need to pick the right language for a given task - the task of teaching various computer science concepts is no different. Also, a good curriculum should impart students with the ability to pick the right language for a given task too.
If you're interested in pursuing a computer science degree at university, you might be better off without a background in a imperative/procedural language. Many students who knew C/Pascal seemed to have a tougher time grasping functional languages than those who didn't know anything at all.
As you already suggested what you need to do is you need to separate the core engine and game content.
I agree that content development is hard to open source and seem best developed by an individual or a small group.
The successful open source projects you mention all have a plugin/module system. Ensure the game engine supports a good scripting language for content creation, and plugin system that can modify any aspect of the game, and I expect it will do well in the open source world. Your game in effect should just be a plugin/module to your engine.
You want a game engine that is able to foster development of plugins that can completely change the game's underlying mechanics (e.g. Oblivion), as well as plugins/modules that can tell rich and complex story lines (e.g. Neverwinter Nights).
Getting a bit off topic here, but you raise an interesting issue.
I bet that the frequency of certain searches can predict whether a company stock will increase or decrease, e.g. lots of searches for " problems" is a precursor to that company stock crashing.
I wonder what policies are in place regarding usage of such aggregate information within Google (or other search companies).
Indeed, and there's actual research supporting usage of the Wii Balance board for physiotherapy. Research was conducted by the University of Melbourne, which the Australian doctor probably read about and decided to recommend to his patient.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527435.300-wii-board-helps-physios-strike-a-balance-after-strokes.html?full=true&print=true
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf
Although the H.264 licensing terms appear reasonable, I still prefer a free option.
Right!
Market Capitalization = Share Price x Number of Shares in Market
Obviously, Oracle has a lot more shares in the market than Red Hat. Over time, companies can also do a stock split, e.g. halve the share price, but double the number of shares; or a reverse split where price doubles but shares are halved - either way, market cap remains the same.
I take white hat to mean Good, i.e. you're not using the exploit for personal gain.
You're Lawful Good if you're working on behalf of some legal authority. Chaotic Good if you're exposing it to shame/antagonize the companies. Neutral Good if just out of your own personal reasons.
FTA: One puzzle to be solved is why there is similar filamentary structure on both the large and the small scale. "That's a big question," says Tauber.
Interesting that these filaments could probably be modeled using fractals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
http://intellinuxgraphics.org/
Intel has provided open source drivers and specs for their graphics hardware for several years now.
3D chips will not take us any closer to true AI.
We still don't truly understand the nature of intelligence, and we won't be able to manufacture it unless we can define it formally in some mathematical/logical notation.
I've done some work with neural networks, and we can simulate neurons with any number of connections (inputs and outputs), but having a bunch of neurons work together discerning things is not intelligence.
Yes, especially for games, and I don't mean the obvious 3D computations, which in any case is most likely handled by the GPU anyway, but rather parallelism in the game workflow.
Read an article last year on Communications of the ACM (3/2009) entitled "Better Scripts, Better Games" that talked about common design patterns in programming games. I'll focus on the state-effect pattern, which breaks each simulation loop into two phases: effect and update. Effect phase is where each game object is subject to an action and determines its own effect of that action. In the update phase, all the effects are combined, and updates the game state for the next iteration of the loop. Since calculations in the effects do not influence each other, they can be parallelized. The update phase can also be parallelized since it consists only of the aggregation of effects and updates to state variables. Idea is similar to Google's MapReduce.
Everyone has different tastes. You ought to get people presents they like rather than something you like.
Still a lot of exploration to do in our solar system - probes and robots are the best way to go about it right now.
I don't see what incentive private enterprise would have in landing rovers on Mars, whereas this is something that NASA is very good at doing, and is able to conduct experiments for the sake of science and discovery.
While I attended university in England, one of my professors remarked my English was excellent and was better than most natives. That was almost twenty years ago!
Sad thing is my English is only what I consider good - I received a 5 (out of 7) for English in the International Baccalaureate.
I tried out Tabula Rasa a few months before it was shut down, at a point when most of its serious problems were sorted out. But poor game mechanics was its biggest weakness.
What annoyed me most was how it was touted as a FPS/RPG hybrid. IMO for anything to be deemed an FPS, it must rely on players to aim their weapons and the game would utilize collision detect to ascertain hits. Tabula Rasa did not do this - you had to select what enemies to shoot at, and it was all chance based like most MMOs out there. To make things worse, you had to look at your opponents in order to select them - you couldn't do it explicitly by clicking on them with your mouse.
I think the game would have been successful if they figured out how to do a proper MMO FPS with proper collision detect. Even if the world was largely instanced, and they limited player numbers in these zones, it would be a good start. It doesn't even need complex character builds.
Parent's post helps reinforce OP's view that people in general do not like to be heavily penalized.
While the mechanics in EVE allow for losses that can make any player cringe, most players will only engage in combat with ships they can afford to lose, with clones possessing relatively cheap implants, and utilize risk adverse tactics. If you don't have medical insurance, you lose a small percentage of your skill points when your pilot is killed, but you cannot lose all your accumulated skills due to a momentary lapse of judgement.
Although there is ample evidence to suggest the universe as we know it began with a Big Bang, it never made any sense to me how anything could come out of nothing, much less anything of such magnitude.
Clearly, our current laws of physics are incomplete. For example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy.
I wonder when we finally figure it out whether we'd also discover a new source of energy that'll solve all our energy needs once and for all.