Sounds easy to me. Rule 1 - Don't abuse prisoners. There, we already have a machine that outperforms humans.
Actually, I think that's the hardest part. Programming a robot to go out and blow shit up isn't such a difficult problem. Programming a robot to recognise when a human adversary is surrendering and to take him prisoner - I don't really know where you'd begin. It's the ED-209 problem: the shooting works fine, the trouble is deciding whether or not you actually ought to do so.
I'd guess what they're aiming for as a benefit in ethical capacity is that a robot does not feel anger. A robot won't get trigger-happy. It won't fire because it's afraid and it won't fire because it's bored and it won't fire because it's seen its friends blown up earlier on in the day. If there's been a ceasefire, the robot will sit still and do nothing even if that means its own destruction by the locals.
Whether the robot can identify friend from foe will be its main problem. But then, it's being built by Americans, so standards there won't be so high. 'Unit insignia: blue background with diagonally broken red and white asterisk across centre... FIRE!'
Baaa, I couldn't think of 8 words starting with F in 60 seconds!
There was a not very scientific documentary on TV recently in which people undergoing sensory deprivation were tested both before and after with this word-listing puzzle. They chose the letter 'F' too. Is it a standard thing?
It seems a very bad choice, to be honest. The TV didn't show it, but I'm sure I know exactly what word number one will be from nearly everyone. I mean, really.
I think the only thing worse as far as "hacking" or tech movies would be the one released recently whose plot revolved around getting killed by a text message or something equally ridiculous.
Not sure which one you mean there, but it gave me the idea of sending the killer video from Ring on my mobile and then Bluetoothing it to people at random. Even more fun than 2girls1cup!
This does bring up the interesting question though, of how one deals with kidporn that's being posted by the kids in the pictures.
You charge the perpetrator with child abuse and with making and distributing indecent images of a minor. And you try them as an adult just for the glorious irony.
I would love to see Scientology's private detectives' report on the predilections of Anonymous. In fact I'd pay to see it. Given how they normally seize on any bit of dirt for character assassination and all, what the hell are they going to make of the people who brought the world Pedobear?
Maybe it's not 100% original... but fresh? There is something much more rewarding about GlaDOS as a antagonist with her split personalities and peculiar musicianship. I found her to be one of the best adversaries in just about any game I've played, and it highlights Valve's ability to create amazing, immersive scenarios with a great deal of depth. Unlike Shub-Niggurath in Quake, or whoever that generic demon was, GlaDOS had a strange attraction in that she (well, discounting the cannons) was the only one who interacted with you in the sterile surroundings, and a certain co-dependency arose between her and Chell.
Look at you, hacker... a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors... how can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?
Yeah, I loved Portal. But as the ancestor post says, you're not at all innovative if you just combine old themes in new ways, which is why Rock Star is just Guitar Hero + SingStar + a drum kit and Portal is just Narbacular Drop + System Shock. Oh, and while we're at it, Shakespeare was an uncreative plagiarist who just copied all but like two of his stories. And Disney's Snow White was in no way a landmark feature because the whole story just got taken from Grimm.
I think Half-Life & Portal in the same game would be too much, and worse than the two games separately.
You're definitely right there. Putting Half-Life 2 and Portal together would be overdoing it. I mean, what next? Throwing Episodes 1 and 2 in there as well, and maybe even Team Fortress 2? Yeah, exactly. Ludicrous combination of doom. Too many games at once equals never play any of them properly. Way overdoing it and far worse than each game individually.
So I'm glad Valve decided not to do it that way, and that I can't get five of the best fucking games on the planet in one box for like 25 quid.
Guitar hero XXXVII: Brittany and the Constantine ROCK THE NEW MILLENNIUM
Britney I'd prefer to avoid, but if they could get a few old Mucous Membrane tracks on the next Guitar Hero I'd be a very happy old Scouse punker.
(Unfortunately, after having 5*'d all of those songs on expert, you suddenly realise that the Hell level is a lot more convincing than it used to be...)
...what I really want to know, since the AI played Baldurs Gate, is of what alignment our new gameplaying artificially intelligent overlords are.
The constructs within the Rubikon Dungeon Research Project are of lawful neutral alignment, although for the purposes of evaluating adventurer responses they are playing a chaotic evil role. Die in the name of the Evil Wizard!
The new AI game playing routines can handle Ms. Pacman, Tetris, and Baldur's Gate. Can their mathematics routines find sums of integers, roots of quadratics, and proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem?
Certainly Baldur's Gate, taken as a three-part epic campaign, is an immeasurably harder problem for AI than the other two; you have to be able to understand a whole lot of English dialogue, for a start. But the core game mechanism is very constrained. It's second-edition Dungeons and Dragons, a standardised rule set which is susceptible to AI attack.
Don't think of the computer working out how best to romance Jaheira. Think of it working out how best to take down Kangaxx. Or how to optimise a character build. It'll be an electronic neural-net munchkin.
There are those of us that believed that it the selection of traits was deterministic, and then there are... creationists. Those that are in between don't make up a significant population in the scientific community.
An unfortunately composed sentence; you've implied there that creationists do make up a significant population in the scientific community:-)
I always pictured Marvin as short with a big head, just like the one that was in the H2G2 movie.
I rather liked the movie's Marvin. Really: look at the TV Marvin, and then the movie Marvin, and ask yourself 'which of these robots is more likely to be marketed with the slogan Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With?'
On the other hand, to play devils advocate (no pun intended!), there is a rather baffling gap in the evolutionary chain with regard to humans. Although there's quite a bit of living and fossilized evidence supporting evolution in many species (incl. mammals) found on Earth, there is bafflingly little evidence for human evolution, considering that we don't share all that much in common with the closest apes, and though there is some evidence for extinct "in-between" species, it's largely constricted to insular areas. Why, for instance, do we know so much about dinosaurs, and so little about our own ancestors?
The previous reply already pointed out your ignorance of the human evolutionary background. In fact human origins are better known than almost any other species on the planet (I think we might have a better history of horses) because by our very nature we're keenly interested in that particular subject, and an awful lot of work has been done on it.
As for dinosaurs, where humans represent maybe half a dozen species living over the course of a few million years at most, dinosaurs represent an entire superorder that lived all over the world for 160 million years. For a sense of scale, instead of comparing 'dinosaurs' to 'humans', compare 'dinosaurs' to 'mammals' or 'birds'. No wonder there are lots of fossils. But there aren't so very many of any single species. We certainly don't know the evolutionary history of T. Rex anywhere near as well as we know our own.
Doesn't everyone? It's a common coping mechanism: when faced with a dire and terrible threat, you laugh at it and thereby diminish its menace through ridicule. I'm sure you've heard the old song about Hitler's anatomical shortcomings, which is a classic example of the genre.
Go visit Lourdes, France, where thousands of miracles have been reported, documented and examined by skepticists who have been unable to find any explanation for them.
Ah yes, the famous healing shrine at Lourdes. There you will see many abandoned wheelchairs and crutches left behind by those who no longer have any need for them. Yet among them all you will see not one single prosthetic limb. What does God have against amputees anyway?
If I am the local man to ask where to buy stolen goods or drugs, does it matter a fuck to the cops that I don't personally have it in my house?
Actually, yes, I think it does. Stealing is a crime. Dealing in stolen goods or in drugs is a crime. Telling people who in town deals in stolen goods or in drugs, that's not a crime as far as I'm aware. The police might certainly be interested in you - they'd love to have you as a grass, for instance - but I don't think there's anything they could arrest you for.
On the contrary, I have read that the only reason for them to remove a torrent is if the description is wrong.
They'll also remove cp, I think. This does rather undermine their argument that they're not holding the material itself, only pointers thereto, but it's a good move from a PR perspective. People are OK with TPB being a place that trades music and movies and thumbs its collective nose at the media cartels, but if it becomes a watering hole for kiddie-fiddlers too then its image will be badly tarnished.
I find piracy highly immoral. Plundering on the seas and taking over ships near certain parts of Africa results in losses of life and property. Of course I know that you were talking about copyright infringement, but I just wanted to hilight the fact that using the wrong expressions can cloud an issue and mislead people. There is no such thing as piracy of copyrighted works.
What if the ship is carrying books, which I and my crew steal and sell in the markets of Port Royal, before spending the proceeds on grog and wenches?
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Actually, I think that's the hardest part. Programming a robot to go out and blow shit up isn't such a difficult problem. Programming a robot to recognise when a human adversary is surrendering and to take him prisoner - I don't really know where you'd begin. It's the ED-209 problem: the shooting works fine, the trouble is deciding whether or not you actually ought to do so.
I'd guess what they're aiming for as a benefit in ethical capacity is that a robot does not feel anger. A robot won't get trigger-happy. It won't fire because it's afraid and it won't fire because it's bored and it won't fire because it's seen its friends blown up earlier on in the day. If there's been a ceasefire, the robot will sit still and do nothing even if that means its own destruction by the locals.
Whether the robot can identify friend from foe will be its main problem. But then, it's being built by Americans, so standards there won't be so high. 'Unit insignia: blue background with diagonally broken red and white asterisk across centre... FIRE!'
There was a not very scientific documentary on TV recently in which people undergoing sensory deprivation were tested both before and after with this word-listing puzzle. They chose the letter 'F' too. Is it a standard thing?
It seems a very bad choice, to be honest. The TV didn't show it, but I'm sure I know exactly what word number one will be from nearly everyone. I mean, really.
Not sure which one you mean there, but it gave me the idea of sending the killer video from Ring on my mobile and then Bluetoothing it to people at random. Even more fun than 2girls1cup!
Rorschach.
You charge the perpetrator with child abuse and with making and distributing indecent images of a minor. And you try them as an adult just for the glorious irony.
I would love to see Scientology's private detectives' report on the predilections of Anonymous. In fact I'd pay to see it. Given how they normally seize on any bit of dirt for character assassination and all, what the hell are they going to make of the people who brought the world Pedobear?
Yes. Scientology is a highly lulzy target, and Anonymous will not rest until their pool is closed.
Going by namechecks on Slashdot, three. Ubuntu, Fedora, and Gentoo. But I don't think anyone's ever finished installing Gentoo.
Peace I'd agree with you... but I'd be interested to hear an anarchist's definition of 'justice'.
Look at you, hacker... a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors... how can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?
Yeah, I loved Portal. But as the ancestor post says, you're not at all innovative if you just combine old themes in new ways, which is why Rock Star is just Guitar Hero + SingStar + a drum kit and Portal is just Narbacular Drop + System Shock. Oh, and while we're at it, Shakespeare was an uncreative plagiarist who just copied all but like two of his stories. And Disney's Snow White was in no way a landmark feature because the whole story just got taken from Grimm.
You're definitely right there. Putting Half-Life 2 and Portal together would be overdoing it. I mean, what next? Throwing Episodes 1 and 2 in there as well, and maybe even Team Fortress 2? Yeah, exactly. Ludicrous combination of doom. Too many games at once equals never play any of them properly. Way overdoing it and far worse than each game individually.
So I'm glad Valve decided not to do it that way, and that I can't get five of the best fucking games on the planet in one box for like 25 quid.
Britney I'd prefer to avoid, but if they could get a few old Mucous Membrane tracks on the next Guitar Hero I'd be a very happy old Scouse punker.
(Unfortunately, after having 5*'d all of those songs on expert, you suddenly realise that the Hell level is a lot more convincing than it used to be...)
The constructs within the Rubikon Dungeon Research Project are of lawful neutral alignment, although for the purposes of evaluating adventurer responses they are playing a chaotic evil role. Die in the name of the Evil Wizard!
Certainly Baldur's Gate, taken as a three-part epic campaign, is an immeasurably harder problem for AI than the other two; you have to be able to understand a whole lot of English dialogue, for a start. But the core game mechanism is very constrained. It's second-edition Dungeons and Dragons, a standardised rule set which is susceptible to AI attack.
Don't think of the computer working out how best to romance Jaheira. Think of it working out how best to take down Kangaxx. Or how to optimise a character build. It'll be an electronic neural-net munchkin.
I doubt it. The Americans have always had a bit of a blind spot for incoming Japanese planes.
Tell him he owes me! 50 million zeni or I expose him as a fraud to his public and kick his arse for him again.
An unfortunately composed sentence; you've implied there that creationists do make up a significant population in the scientific community :-)
I rather liked the movie's Marvin. Really: look at the TV Marvin, and then the movie Marvin, and ask yourself 'which of these robots is more likely to be marketed with the slogan Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With?'
NO... I have been PRACTICING.
(Unfortunately, only to the extent that I can finish 'Knights of Cydonia' on Hard about three-quarters of the time...)
The previous reply already pointed out your ignorance of the human evolutionary background. In fact human origins are better known than almost any other species on the planet (I think we might have a better history of horses) because by our very nature we're keenly interested in that particular subject, and an awful lot of work has been done on it.
As for dinosaurs, where humans represent maybe half a dozen species living over the course of a few million years at most, dinosaurs represent an entire superorder that lived all over the world for 160 million years. For a sense of scale, instead of comparing 'dinosaurs' to 'humans', compare 'dinosaurs' to 'mammals' or 'birds'. No wonder there are lots of fossils. But there aren't so very many of any single species. We certainly don't know the evolutionary history of T. Rex anywhere near as well as we know our own.
Doesn't everyone? It's a common coping mechanism: when faced with a dire and terrible threat, you laugh at it and thereby diminish its menace through ridicule. I'm sure you've heard the old song about Hitler's anatomical shortcomings, which is a classic example of the genre.
Ah yes, the famous healing shrine at Lourdes. There you will see many abandoned wheelchairs and crutches left behind by those who no longer have any need for them. Yet among them all you will see not one single prosthetic limb. What does God have against amputees anyway?
Actually, yes, I think it does. Stealing is a crime. Dealing in stolen goods or in drugs is a crime. Telling people who in town deals in stolen goods or in drugs, that's not a crime as far as I'm aware. The police might certainly be interested in you - they'd love to have you as a grass, for instance - but I don't think there's anything they could arrest you for.
They'll also remove cp, I think. This does rather undermine their argument that they're not holding the material itself, only pointers thereto, but it's a good move from a PR perspective. People are OK with TPB being a place that trades music and movies and thumbs its collective nose at the media cartels, but if it becomes a watering hole for kiddie-fiddlers too then its image will be badly tarnished.
What if the ship is carrying books, which I and my crew steal and sell in the markets of Port Royal, before spending the proceeds on grog and wenches?