It depends what kinda new thing you're looking for. If you're going to make comparisons just on theme then you can always find similarities. "Hey look, there's nothing new - they're all just shapes and stuff moving on the screen!"
If Spore really works as advertised then the reason it will be somewhat different is because everything is procedural. You get to design your own creature and the system makes it walk or swim or whatever based on the mechanics of the body parts. It's not limited to a preset number of creatures that the game designers thought of in advance.
I think this represents the true path to innovation in the game industry - making things open-ended. This is hard and it will come slowly. I remember a PS2 game a while back called "Red Faction" that was supposed to be different because the environment was supposed to be modifiable. In other words you could do things like shoot the walls and pieces would fall off. But in reality, I found it to be just like every other FPS. Modifying the environment only really helped when the designers had already thought of it in advance.
Just think of all the ways you could make a game open ended. Modifying characters is one. Modifying the world could also be cool in different ways. Then you could do all kinds of things with open ended story line as technology improves. That will be really hard but I think it will happen to some degree eventually.
Once we've got this kind of AI, I also think there is the potential to use games to improve education and society in general. Read The Diamond Age, for example. Anyway, I don't think game creativity will plateau for a long time.
In fact, computer use has been shown in studies not to be a major risk factor for carpal tunnel. Here's one article from a quick google search.
I can also personally confirm these claims. I worked in a bus factory for a couple summers and my hands would continually go to sleep at night after my 9 hours at the factory. Yet I have never had a problem from coding, even with weeks of 11-12 hour days.
Also, beyond all the other problems people have pointed out with using speech as input, it also interferes with the cognitive tasks needed for coding. Check out the article, for example.
Yes, but that kind of loss is limited to their already-manufactured inventory. If buying Xboxen for Linux use becomes popular, there's the potential for the cumulative sum of losses per sale to exceed what they might have lost in unsold units.
Yes, that's true. But for now, this setup isn't practical so that's not likely. And I think you're right that if it did catch on, MS would bring out the lawyers.
Also, I think most slashdotters would much rather see the headline "XBox a Total Failure" than "XBox Sales Skyrocket - Reasons Unclear."
Not to belabor this discussion but you are wrong about how weather and meteorology works. Historical records are pretty much useless for day to day weather prediction and provide ambiguous data at best about the future. Look at the American meterological society web page (under "What tools do meteorologists use?") and you'll see that models play a big part in short-term weather forecasting. As to long term climate prediction, they play an even bigger part. Why do you think there is controversy over global warming? It all comes down to models. Look at the NASA page for example.
Your assertion that if we had a model we would have a certainty rather than a probability is inaccurate too. That is why future global warming is a probability rather than a certainty - even though we have some fairly detailed models. Why is that? Because once you have enough particles interacting, the system becomes too complex to have a perfect simulation. So you make a bunch of simplifying assumptions and try to calculate the error of those assumptions.
So what you're advocating with your one in a thousand probability is basically a reliance on ignorance. In other words, since we don't know any better, let's just use history as our guide. You can certainly do that but if you want to have any credibility you have to calculate some margin of error. And even in the best case, this margin of error is going to be much greater than 100% if we only use recorded history.
Also, insurance companies do use models. They aren't very open about what they are though. But anyway these kinds of predictions are a little different. They are all based on assumptions like people are pretty reasonable on average so the world economy won't entirely implode and throw us into total chaos. These insurance probabilities don't take that into account but it doesn't matter cause, in that case, we're all broke. In contrast, you can't make this "reasonableness" assumption for asteroids or particles in the atmosphere.
I'm sure NASA has calculated the probability of dangers from certain meteors. I'm just saying that if they told me their assumptions and margins of error, I probably wouldn't put much stock in them.
I mostly agree with you about Science as dogma - but I'm curious as to what this evidence for a creator might look like.
If you think about the world in the movie 'The Matrix' for example, what evidence could one use to prove that the orginal world is a computer simulation. It seems like you would need evidence outside the simulation, no?
Would you look for violations of physical laws? I don't think this would work because we can just modify our thinking on how the physical laws work to explain any observed deviations. When it comes down to it, the basic problem is that there is no reason a creator of the universe needs to violate the laws of his own creation.
My own personal view is that this evidence can only be obtained and interpreted by the individual. As a contrived example, suppose I am walking in a desert (where I can see for miles) and I come across a snake. Just as the snake strikes to bite my leg, a very small meteor falls out of the sky and kills the snake. Now based on the physical laws of the universe, there is nothing that technically prohibits such an event from happening. So from a scientific perspective it is not evidence of a creator. But from an individual perspective, it seems like a pretty wild combination of random events. A naturalist would probably tell themself "as time->infinity anything can happen" while a religious person would see this as further evidence of an intelligence at work in the universe.
Did you have any evidence in mind? If you can think of something, then you could use science to search for that evidence. I just can't think of anything that couldn't be doubted.
What I am disputing is that no one has much of a shot at computing such a probability for future meteors showers. The arguments you gave for computing the probability were based on history. If you really want to know this probability you need to build a good model for our current universe - down to the asteroid level. Given the current state of n-body research that doesn't seem too likely. For one thing, most n-body researchers are working almost exclusively with stars - not planets and definitely not asteroids. For another, these models are usually limited to millions of stars, not even a trillionth of the 10^21 estimated in the universe.
For a rough approximation, you could make a model of the neighborhood around earth. Of course, then you would still need accurate knowledge of most of the asteroid sized (and larger) objects within a specified radius of earth - depending on the period you want to compute the probability for. This neighborhood is pretty complicated though since the earth is moving in several frames at once. I can probably stop my argument there because we don't have a very complete picture of that data. But even assuming we did, that still just gives us some initial conditions for a massive n-body simulation. I have no idea how many particles we're talking about but it has got to be beyond the millions range. Still, its only a simulation so even if you could run this thing in reasonable time - you still have a bunch of initial conditions to tweak. So run that a few hundred times and what have you got? An estimate from a simplified simulation.
Given that we can't predict the weather, I can't say that I've got a lot of confidence in our ability to predict this probability.
I'm just pointing out that past performance in meteors is no guarantee of future results. So:
How many meteors hit the earth over a given period?
is exactly what I'm disputing. Given recent stories like this one, we clearly can't make many predictions about the chances of a huge influx of small meteors.
I hate it when news stories give stupid statistics like that.
How do they know the odds of being hit by a meteor. The odds of winning a lottery are probably pretty predictable because a lottery is defined as having only a small number of randomly chosen winners.
We have no such assurance with meteors on the other hand. Who's to say that the Earth won't pass through some huge asteroid field. Then the chances of being struck by a meteor could suddenly skyrocket.
"In this context, isn't it obvious that Chicken Little represents the sane vision?"
Slashdot Mirror
It depends what kinda new thing you're looking for. If you're going to make comparisons just on theme then you can always find similarities. "Hey look, there's nothing new - they're all just shapes and stuff moving on the screen!"
If Spore really works as advertised then the reason it will be somewhat different is because everything is procedural. You get to design your own creature and the system makes it walk or swim or whatever based on the mechanics of the body parts. It's not limited to a preset number of creatures that the game designers thought of in advance.
I think this represents the true path to innovation in the game industry - making things open-ended. This is hard and it will come slowly. I remember a PS2 game a while back called "Red Faction" that was supposed to be different because the environment was supposed to be modifiable. In other words you could do things like shoot the walls and pieces would fall off. But in reality, I found it to be just like every other FPS. Modifying the environment only really helped when the designers had already thought of it in advance.
Just think of all the ways you could make a game open ended. Modifying characters is one. Modifying the world could also be cool in different ways. Then you could do all kinds of things with open ended story line as technology improves. That will be really hard but I think it will happen to some degree eventually.
Once we've got this kind of AI, I also think there is the potential to use games to improve education and society in general. Read The Diamond Age, for example. Anyway, I don't think game creativity will plateau for a long time.
Everyone's favorite, the US Patent Office, provides a free PDF writer called ABXPDF. It's allegedly based on CutePDF.
Or if Otto Titzling really did invent the bra
In fact, computer use has been shown in studies not to be a major risk factor for carpal tunnel. Here's one article from a quick google search.
I can also personally confirm these claims. I worked in a bus factory for a couple summers and my hands would continually go to sleep at night after my 9 hours at the factory. Yet I have never had a problem from coding, even with weeks of 11-12 hour days.
Also, beyond all the other problems people have pointed out with using speech as input, it also interferes with the cognitive tasks needed for coding. Check out the article, for example.
Also, dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
Compare both to apples and they both look inferior.
Yes, but what if we compare them to oranges...
Yes, but that kind of loss is limited to their already-manufactured inventory. If buying Xboxen for Linux use becomes popular, there's the potential for the cumulative sum of losses per sale to exceed what they might have lost in unsold units.
Yes, that's true. But for now, this setup isn't practical so that's not likely. And I think you're right that if it did catch on, MS would bring out the lawyers.
Also, I think most slashdotters would much rather see the headline "XBox a Total Failure" than "XBox Sales Skyrocket - Reasons Unclear."
I keep reading MS is losing money on every single xbox they sell.
Yeah, but as so many have already pointed out, they lose even more money on every xbox they don't sell.
Also, what respectable geek isn't going to be just a little bit tempted to buy Halo if they have the system sitting around anyway.
Not to belabor this discussion but you are wrong about how weather and meteorology works. Historical records are pretty much useless for day to day weather prediction and provide ambiguous data at best about the future. Look at the American meterological society web page (under "What tools do meteorologists use?") and you'll see that models play a big part in short-term weather forecasting. As to long term climate prediction, they play an even bigger part. Why do you think there is controversy over global warming? It all comes down to models. Look at the NASA page for example.
Your assertion that if we had a model we would have a certainty rather than a probability is inaccurate too. That is why future global warming is a probability rather than a certainty - even though we have some fairly detailed models. Why is that? Because once you have enough particles interacting, the system becomes too complex to have a perfect simulation. So you make a bunch of simplifying assumptions and try to calculate the error of those assumptions.
So what you're advocating with your one in a thousand probability is basically a reliance on ignorance. In other words, since we don't know any better, let's just use history as our guide. You can certainly do that but if you want to have any credibility you have to calculate some margin of error. And even in the best case, this margin of error is going to be much greater than 100% if we only use recorded history.
Also, insurance companies do use models. They aren't very open about what they are though. But anyway these kinds of predictions are a little different. They are all based on assumptions like people are pretty reasonable on average so the world economy won't entirely implode and throw us into total chaos. These insurance probabilities don't take that into account but it doesn't matter cause, in that case, we're all broke. In contrast, you can't make this "reasonableness" assumption for asteroids or particles in the atmosphere.
I'm sure NASA has calculated the probability of dangers from certain meteors. I'm just saying that if they told me their assumptions and margins of error, I probably wouldn't put much stock in them.
Why do you think I specifically said 6.0
BTW, it was a joke. Your hostility is appreciated though.
A Visual Basic 6.0 programming challenge?
I mostly agree with you about Science as dogma - but I'm curious as to what this evidence for a creator might look like.
If you think about the world in the movie 'The Matrix' for example, what evidence could one use to prove that the orginal world is a computer simulation. It seems like you would need evidence outside the simulation, no?
Would you look for violations of physical laws? I don't think this would work because we can just modify our thinking on how the physical laws work to explain any observed deviations. When it comes down to it, the basic problem is that there is no reason a creator of the universe needs to violate the laws of his own creation.
My own personal view is that this evidence can only be obtained and interpreted by the individual. As a contrived example, suppose I am walking in a desert (where I can see for miles) and I come across a snake. Just as the snake strikes to bite my leg, a very small meteor falls out of the sky and kills the snake. Now based on the physical laws of the universe, there is nothing that technically prohibits such an event from happening. So from a scientific perspective it is not evidence of a creator. But from an individual perspective, it seems like a pretty wild combination of random events. A naturalist would probably tell themself "as time->infinity anything can happen" while a religious person would see this as further evidence of an intelligence at work in the universe.
Did you have any evidence in mind? If you can think of something, then you could use science to search for that evidence. I just can't think of anything that couldn't be doubted.
This is why it's called probability, not history.
I'm not disputing the power of probability.
What I am disputing is that no one has much of a shot at computing such a probability for future meteors showers. The arguments you gave for computing the probability were based on history. If you really want to know this probability you need to build a good model for our current universe - down to the asteroid level. Given the current state of n-body research that doesn't seem too likely. For one thing, most n-body researchers are working almost exclusively with stars - not planets and definitely not asteroids. For another, these models are usually limited to millions of stars, not even a trillionth of the 10^21 estimated in the universe.
For a rough approximation, you could make a model of the neighborhood around earth. Of course, then you would still need accurate knowledge of most of the asteroid sized (and larger) objects within a specified radius of earth - depending on the period you want to compute the probability for. This neighborhood is pretty complicated though since the earth is moving in several frames at once. I can probably stop my argument there because we don't have a very complete picture of that data. But even assuming we did, that still just gives us some initial conditions for a massive n-body simulation. I have no idea how many particles we're talking about but it has got to be beyond the millions range. Still, its only a simulation so even if you could run this thing in reasonable time - you still have a bunch of initial conditions to tweak. So run that a few hundred times and what have you got? An estimate from a simplified simulation.
Given that we can't predict the weather, I can't say that I've got a lot of confidence in our ability to predict this probability.
I'm just pointing out that past performance in meteors is no guarantee of future results. So:
How many meteors hit the earth over a given period?
is exactly what I'm disputing. Given recent stories like this one, we clearly can't make many predictions about the chances of a huge influx of small meteors.
I hate it when news stories give stupid statistics like that.
How do they know the odds of being hit by a meteor. The odds of winning a lottery are probably pretty predictable because a lottery is defined as having only a small number of randomly chosen winners.
We have no such assurance with meteors on the other hand. Who's to say that the Earth won't pass through some huge asteroid field. Then the chances of being struck by a meteor could suddenly skyrocket.
"In this context, isn't it obvious that Chicken Little represents the sane vision?"
Well, there were the Reese's Pieces in ET for Atari but that was probably just because they made it in the movie. Here's a gratuitous link.