It all comes down to how much cheating is involved. The game knows your position before the fake player should, does the fake player factor that in? If so, it doesn't matter that its quicker, it's still cheating. If it doesn't, then the bot will get smoked in any FPS game.
I don't think theres ever been a bot in any FPS game I've played capable of beating a well skilled human without cheating or luck. Yeah, Frogbot can perfectly predict rockets with ungodly skill and keep a 100% lightning gun percentage.. what good does that do it when I can keep control of the only rocket launcher and lightning gun on the map?
Yeah, PODBot can lock to your head and instantly shoot you the second you're exposed, but it's still going to be an idiot and camp the obvious places that I can spam through a wall without even exposing myself. Or keep it fully blind and kill it before it can react(again, unless it cheats away the flashbangs.)
In the end instant calculations will only take you so far, macro-skill like map control, strategy analysis, etc are all just as important if not moreso and no AI really can match a human at that without cheating at the micro(calculating things the player shouldn't know, not factoring in things that should be a disadvantage)
You're sarcastic, but Honestly thanks OP, I loved that game and knew about the bananapeels as a special ability but never noticed Mario bros had invincibility whenever they wanted.
Interesting idea, but I think the most interesting approach for teaching is to figure out a way to make it so a bot can parse demos. Rather than just playing a stupid bot for 500 games and eventually the bot figuring it out, you could just feed it demos of all the top players from all the big competitions and have a bot really know how to play well. Would keep it from learning mistakes off bad players, and could be done in a batch job at maximum speed instead of realtime.
Bonus points if you could feed it all demos from one player and see if it starts to duplicate the player's movement patterns (especially if you could duplicate accuracy percentages and weapon preferences too)
Some games actually do cheat though, like Empires: Dawn of the modern world. On difficulty 4-5 it's amazingly easy. On difficulty 6+, the opponent has a bigger base with more army than is remotely possible at the start of the game (tested using the 'reveal part of the map' ability of one of the races).
Wasn't impossible to beat, but just kind of takes the fun out of it.
Want to make GOOD ai? Program it like a client, not into the server. That way you can't let it cheat by givign it unfair advantages or unfair knowledge of the game.
Thats actually why I don't like watching movies in general. Theres not enough time to set up a scene, develop characters, AND have some meaningful happen to them without somehow rushing at least part of that. Then at the end of the 2 hours, bam, you throw it all away unless the movie made enough money for a sequel.
I'd much rather watch a nice tv series, which thanks to the wonders of tivo we now can actually reliably watch. Before you miss an episode or let comercials ruin the pacing, but now that you can just watch every episode uninterupted it definitely beats movies. Compare your generic action movie to say 24. I'd much rather take a season of 24, thanks. Or a one off sci-fi movie to say BSG. Even good movies like the xmen or spiderman series.. I'd trade them both for Heroes where so much more can and will happen.
Note that that only works with good plot driven continuous tv shows. Obviously your typical sitcom doesn't really count, nor does your star trek style do-over show(where every episode ends with an implied yelling of DO-OVERS! as the next episode is reset and any plot development of the previous episode is entirely ignored. See any time a star trek series had the crew discover new technology but never use it again. DS9 broke this mold, and VOY tried to sometimes but still had too many thrown away episodes)
then how would you know if either of you isn't that great?
Maybe thats part of the point? If you're spending the rest of your lives together(as religion says you should) then would you really want to spend it thinking gee, my last girlfriend was much better?
You seem to imply that bad sex would be enough to end the relationship. Maybe it is, maybe it should be, but it doesnt sound like something religion would want to encourage.
and it is plain to see who their main competition is.
uh... iTunes? iFilm maybe? Definitely isn't youtube, as this is a site for disributing the kind of content youtube doesn't even allow, rather than a bunch of home made americas funniest home videos meets public access like youtube is.
Yes dead tree is nice at times, but the content indexing and searching facilities of electronic media far outweigh the deadtree advantages, at least for me.
Agreed, and if you want it on a deadtree you can always print it for offline reading. Not nearly as easy to get it back digital (yeah, you could scan paper into an image, but OCR really isn't where it needs to be for that to be viable for searching and indexing)
Not really. If you read the advisory and saw how Theo handled it you'll see nothing has changed in OpenBSD-land and that you're still liable to be left out in the cold if someone doesn't force Theo's hand on the disclosure. This is exactly how its happened many times before, someone finds some serious issue with openbsd and Theo denies it or covers it up, or if he finds it first it never gets announced (see the ntalkd scandal years ago).
The fact that OpenBSD is secure is purely luck, the policies and standards are outright dangerous and I'd not trust any sensitive data to an OS whos leadership would rather cover things up than get users patched.
Theo saying OpenBSD is secure is like Bush saying he supports our troops. Just doesn't mean much.
I won't go on again about how i can't get cs:s to work on my Athlon 64x2 setup as someone will tell me to try stuff i've already tried.
Have you tried giving up and switching to a game where developers actually support and improve their products? Pretty much the only option when dealing with Valve.
What turned me against steam was when my copy of Counterstrike (a game I paid for years ago) suddenly developed ingame ads. Didn't fix the numerous bugs that have been around since day 1, or update any of the games content in any way, just..threw some adverts in there that lag you every time the round restarts. Thanks Valve.
I was actually for steam before at least somewhat, but it's just a lot of examples of a good idea that Valve did wrong.
Streamed content: Possible with steam, but just doesn't really happen, definitely not as well as it could (thats where you download the engine/core data files first, then the first level or two, then start playing the game while level 3 and 4 download in the background.)
Episodic content: Neat idea,if they stuck to it. Instead HL2:E2 gets pushed absurdly far back to the point where I'm no longer remotely involved in the E1 story. And they bundled in two additional games, which goes against the entire premise of episodic content (release often, develop quickly).
Game data stored online: Many possibilities, like weekly map additions or updates. Nothing happens.
I could go on and on, but frankly its not even worth it. Valve fucks up everything they touch, sometimes not enough to ruin it, but never enough to make it come out as good as it could have and should have been.
they've decided that we're all morons and that we'll take what they're feeding us.
Not that I disagree with your point or anything, but its not their decision, it's their (arguably accurate) observation and most profitable means of continuing their business.
Why spend millions an episode for some high end well written scifi that 5% of the market will love and 95% won't like when you can spend a few hundred thousand at best a season on some reality tv show that 60-70% of the market will watch?*
It's just not cost effective to make what you or I consider "good tv". The cheapest they can make something that will get people to watch their advertisements is what they go for.
If their advertisement of "unlimited bandwidth" is several hundred of gigs each month then that is effectively "unlimited."
I'll use a 12megabit line as an example as I think thats what comcast offers, or I know is at least offered by many. for "several houndred gigs", let's go with 300GB, I think thats often the limit.
300 gigabytes / (12 megabits per second * 1 month) = 0.08(rounded)
Assuming my 5:00am google math is correct, I don't think that 8% of maximum capacity is anywhere NEAR "unlimited". Even if you bump up that cut off limit, we're still talking theoretical line capacity of 12 terabytes. Unless they explicitly tell you how little they're offering it's wrong to cut you off anywhere less than the industry standard 95th percentile.
Cap all you want, but be fully upfront and offer some kind of monitoring and notification so you know if you're going to go over. A few drones(even ~10 highschool kids on slow dsl or even dialup lines) could cause enough idle traffic on your line to put you over your cap without you even noticing it until your service was shut off or bill thousands higher.
Or if you wanted to give that lunix thing a try so you installed the redhat6.2 cd you had laying around from last time you tried and you instantly become a public FTP/xdcc to some dalnet irc channel. By the time you notice you'll be way screwed without much of a valid excuse.
Not that I can even think of a good notification for bandwidth going near a limit. I never go to roadrunners site, they don't know my email or any real instant contact methods unless they're sniffing my line for them, they don't have a valid phone number afaik, and by the time mail gets here I'd go from "near the cap" to "over".
Is it built in to the latest version of office? If not it's all fluff. I can't publish an odf document to an internal mailing list and tell 80 co-workers to "just download this plugin to open it", that's silly. Granted people seem more than willing to download plugins, codecs, archivers, etc just to get to some content that shouldn't be using it.. but that really shouldn't be encouraged, it's horrible for security and an annoyance on users.
Maybe they shouldn't have started calling them podcasts to be trendy and continued with some combination of the terms internet radio and talkshow like people have been using for decades? I know I used to crontab a bash script to record the weekly Hackermind shoutcast, really no different than 'podcasts' only without being trendy and hip.
Instant vote tallying, then using the paper trail for recounts and verification. Also ease of voting assuming the system is designed right, you get rid of the 'hanging chad' type issues.
Second, you have to do it in the right order, at about the same time. If you update the server, then clients who schedule appointments will be off until they update.
Er, I'll admit I'm not entirely well versed on the issue, but don't you just have to deal with this at some point in the year+ since it was announced? It seems like there would be no possible issue if you fixed ahead of time and just made sure all N thousand machines under your control were patched before DST in 2007.
What happens if you use your valid key to install on two different machines? Obviously not allowed by your license.
What defines "two different machines"? What if you put the HD, ram, video card into a new mobo +case? New computer or old? Which has a valid claim to the license? What if the old computer dies instantly with no time to go through some kind of 'key deactivation' process?
Thats what WGA tries to help with, but apparently doesn't do too well.
Just look at any other 'protected media' market. All it takes is one person to break it and make it public, then EVERYBODY can just use that person's broken copy. If the Videogame or App scene is any indication, this usually happens about a week or two before the game hits retail. Don't think audio will be any special The first time they put out an unprotected copy (say, an actual cd, the only way you could make significant money off of selling music) it will be ripped and spread. Even if you went all 'secured', all it takes is one of the 'secured' formats having a bug and you'll have lost. Then theres the analog hole (cable running from your line out to your line in on soundcard). Then theres just sniffing your computers memory or using hacked drivers to grab the PCM raw. Or any other number of ways you ca get it out, admittedly mostly beyond the common user but all it takes is the first person to break it.
Want my money? Give me something worth paying for, and incentive to pay for it. I'll gladly pay for music when I believe its's going to actually support an artist that I want to support (like local bands that are unsigned and truely need the money). I'm not going to pay for some top40 song where paying equates to giving money to the very people treating me like criminals so they can fund their next law they need passed, assinine DRM scheme to slow down my computer even further like whatever the audio equiv of Safedisc will be.
Honestly the only thing preventing me from paying more for music right now is its just inconvenient. Those artists that are actually worth supporting are probably the hardest to get money too. Ordering CDs from half the world away via creditcard just doesn't seem like the most convenient way to do things. Maybe if one of these online music stores would open up and allow indy artists to put their music on them and not ruin it with DRM then you'd see a rise in people paying for music. Until then we're stuck with p2p, which has been here since before computers and isn't going away now. Even if we had to resort back to the equiv of copying tapes for people..thats what people will do.
How come downloading a WoW patch over the built in bittorrent client is slower than loading up firefox and searching for the same patch on a traditional download site, even including the manual searching for the file?
It also depends on your definition of "fast" really. If the files ETA is more than 15 minutes I'm usually going to spend at least the first 5 looking for a better way to download it.
Some of those flaws are needed to do what it does, others arn't major enough that anyone would switch -- If someone came out with a p2p app that corrected just those minor things people would say "who cares?" and stick to pirating things with their shiny copy of utorrent.
Really, I've always prefered downloads split between multiple fast mirrors(split http, FTP as done by the actual piracy scene) rather than multiple slow client peers (utorrent, kazaa, any other common 'end user' piracy). I hope this metalink thing takes off as its exactly what I wanted -- I've looked at download pages before where theres this long list of hosts and you're supposed to pick one and I just can't help but think..why only one? Why am I switching from host to host trying to find which one gives me more than 20K/s when I could just be hitting all 5 of these 20K/s hosts at once?
The fact that it uses xml as pointed out elsehwhere means its possible its more buzzwordy and complex than helpful, but the idea is simple enough that it might not be too bad.
I'd argue the opposite -- Theres no such thing as a finished product. We're just releasing way too early now. If theres ever going to be a patch, new feature, new version, or any change then the product obviously wasn't finished. The only time something is truely 'finished' is if theres something better to replace it and the original is abandoned.
I think it's pretty amazing that peoples attitudes to piracy have got so bad that a major criminal gets peoples sympathy but this guy should "suffer dearly".
The amazing thing is that even with a growing majority of people thinking piracy is right the laws are only getting worse. Maybe in another decade or two with the kids growing up with Napster throughout their college life start to become politicians will we have the laws actually start reflecting what more people believe.
Slashdot Mirror
It all comes down to how much cheating is involved. The game knows your position before the fake player should, does the fake player factor that in? If so, it doesn't matter that its quicker, it's still cheating. If it doesn't, then the bot will get smoked in any FPS game.
I don't think theres ever been a bot in any FPS game I've played capable of beating a well skilled human without cheating or luck. Yeah, Frogbot can perfectly predict rockets with ungodly skill and keep a 100% lightning gun percentage.. what good does that do it when I can keep control of the only rocket launcher and lightning gun on the map?
Yeah, PODBot can lock to your head and instantly shoot you the second you're exposed, but it's still going to be an idiot and camp the obvious places that I can spam through a wall without even exposing myself. Or keep it fully blind and kill it before it can react(again, unless it cheats away the flashbangs.)
In the end instant calculations will only take you so far, macro-skill like map control, strategy analysis, etc are all just as important if not moreso and no AI really can match a human at that without cheating at the micro(calculating things the player shouldn't know, not factoring in things that should be a disadvantage)
You're sarcastic, but Honestly thanks OP, I loved that game and knew about the bananapeels as a special ability but never noticed Mario bros had invincibility whenever they wanted.
Interesting idea, but I think the most interesting approach for teaching is to figure out a way to make it so a bot can parse demos. Rather than just playing a stupid bot for 500 games and eventually the bot figuring it out, you could just feed it demos of all the top players from all the big competitions and have a bot really know how to play well. Would keep it from learning mistakes off bad players, and could be done in a batch job at maximum speed instead of realtime.
Bonus points if you could feed it all demos from one player and see if it starts to duplicate the player's movement patterns (especially if you could duplicate accuracy percentages and weapon preferences too)
Some games actually do cheat though, like Empires: Dawn of the modern world. On difficulty 4-5 it's amazingly easy. On difficulty 6+, the opponent has a bigger base with more army than is remotely possible at the start of the game (tested using the 'reveal part of the map' ability of one of the races).
Wasn't impossible to beat, but just kind of takes the fun out of it.
Want to make GOOD ai? Program it like a client, not into the server. That way you can't let it cheat by givign it unfair advantages or unfair knowledge of the game.
Thats actually why I don't like watching movies in general. Theres not enough time to set up a scene, develop characters, AND have some meaningful happen to them without somehow rushing at least part of that. Then at the end of the 2 hours, bam, you throw it all away unless the movie made enough money for a sequel.
I'd much rather watch a nice tv series, which thanks to the wonders of tivo we now can actually reliably watch. Before you miss an episode or let comercials ruin the pacing, but now that you can just watch every episode uninterupted it definitely beats movies. Compare your generic action movie to say 24. I'd much rather take a season of 24, thanks. Or a one off sci-fi movie to say BSG. Even good movies like the xmen or spiderman series.. I'd trade them both for Heroes where so much more can and will happen.
Note that that only works with good plot driven continuous tv shows. Obviously your typical sitcom doesn't really count, nor does your star trek style do-over show(where every episode ends with an implied yelling of DO-OVERS! as the next episode is reset and any plot development of the previous episode is entirely ignored. See any time a star trek series had the crew discover new technology but never use it again. DS9 broke this mold, and VOY tried to sometimes but still had too many thrown away episodes)
Maybe thats part of the point? If you're spending the rest of your lives together(as religion says you should) then would you really want to spend it thinking gee, my last girlfriend was much better?
You seem to imply that bad sex would be enough to end the relationship. Maybe it is, maybe it should be, but it doesnt sound like something religion would want to encourage.
uh... iTunes? iFilm maybe? Definitely isn't youtube, as this is a site for disributing the kind of content youtube doesn't even allow, rather than a bunch of home made americas funniest home videos meets public access like youtube is.
Agreed, and if you want it on a deadtree you can always print it for offline reading. Not nearly as easy to get it back digital (yeah, you could scan paper into an image, but OCR really isn't where it needs to be for that to be viable for searching and indexing)
Not really. If you read the advisory and saw how Theo handled it you'll see nothing has changed in OpenBSD-land and that you're still liable to be left out in the cold if someone doesn't force Theo's hand on the disclosure. This is exactly how its happened many times before, someone finds some serious issue with openbsd and Theo denies it or covers it up, or if he finds it first it never gets announced (see the ntalkd scandal years ago).
The fact that OpenBSD is secure is purely luck, the policies and standards are outright dangerous and I'd not trust any sensitive data to an OS whos leadership would rather cover things up than get users patched.
Theo saying OpenBSD is secure is like Bush saying he supports our troops. Just doesn't mean much.
Have you tried giving up and switching to a game where developers actually support and improve their products? Pretty much the only option when dealing with Valve.
Wait, what?
What turned me against steam was when my copy of Counterstrike (a game I paid for years ago) suddenly developed ingame ads. Didn't fix the numerous bugs that have been around since day 1, or update any of the games content in any way, just..threw some adverts in there that lag you every time the round restarts. Thanks Valve.
I was actually for steam before at least somewhat, but it's just a lot of examples of a good idea that Valve did wrong.
Streamed content: Possible with steam, but just doesn't really happen, definitely not as well as it could (thats where you download the engine/core data files first, then the first level or two, then start playing the game while level 3 and 4 download in the background.)
Episodic content: Neat idea,if they stuck to it. Instead HL2:E2 gets pushed absurdly far back to the point where I'm no longer remotely involved in the E1 story. And they bundled in two additional games, which goes against the entire premise of episodic content (release often, develop quickly).
Game data stored online: Many possibilities, like weekly map additions or updates. Nothing happens.
I could go on and on, but frankly its not even worth it. Valve fucks up everything they touch, sometimes not enough to ruin it, but never enough to make it come out as good as it could have and should have been.
Not that I disagree with your point or anything, but its not their decision, it's their (arguably accurate) observation and most profitable means of continuing their business.
Why spend millions an episode for some high end well written scifi that 5% of the market will love and 95% won't like when you can spend a few hundred thousand at best a season on some reality tv show that 60-70% of the market will watch?*
It's just not cost effective to make what you or I consider "good tv". The cheapest they can make something that will get people to watch their advertisements is what they go for.
*Numbers Pulled Out Of My Ass.
I'll use a 12megabit line as an example as I think thats what comcast offers, or I know is at least offered by many.
for "several houndred gigs", let's go with 300GB, I think thats often the limit.
300 gigabytes / (12 megabits per second * 1 month) = 0.08(rounded)
Assuming my 5:00am google math is correct, I don't think that 8% of maximum capacity is anywhere NEAR "unlimited".
Even if you bump up that cut off limit, we're still talking theoretical line capacity of 12 terabytes. Unless they explicitly tell you how little they're offering it's wrong to cut you off anywhere less than the industry standard 95th percentile.
Cap all you want, but be fully upfront and offer some kind of monitoring and notification so you know if you're going to go over. A few drones(even ~10 highschool kids on slow dsl or even dialup lines) could cause enough idle traffic on your line to put you over your cap without you even noticing it until your service was shut off or bill thousands higher.
Or if you wanted to give that lunix thing a try so you installed the redhat6.2 cd you had laying around from last time you tried and you instantly become a public FTP/xdcc to some dalnet irc channel. By the time you notice you'll be way screwed without much of a valid excuse.
Not that I can even think of a good notification for bandwidth going near a limit. I never go to roadrunners site, they don't know my email or any real instant contact methods unless they're sniffing my line for them, they don't have a valid phone number afaik, and by the time mail gets here I'd go from "near the cap" to "over".
Is it built in to the latest version of office? If not it's all fluff. I can't publish an odf document to an internal mailing list and tell 80 co-workers to "just download this plugin to open it", that's silly. Granted people seem more than willing to download plugins, codecs, archivers, etc just to get to some content that shouldn't be using it.. but that really shouldn't be encouraged, it's horrible for security and an annoyance on users.
Maybe they shouldn't have started calling them podcasts to be trendy and continued with some combination of the terms internet radio and talkshow like people have been using for decades? I know I used to crontab a bash script to record the weekly Hackermind shoutcast, really no different than 'podcasts' only without being trendy and hip.
Instant vote tallying, then using the paper trail for recounts and verification.
Also ease of voting assuming the system is designed right, you get rid of the 'hanging chad' type issues.
Er, I'll admit I'm not entirely well versed on the issue, but don't you just have to deal with this at some point in the year+ since it was announced? It seems like there would be no possible issue if you fixed ahead of time and just made sure all N thousand machines under your control were patched before DST in 2007.
What happens if you use your valid key to install on two different machines? Obviously not allowed by your license.
What defines "two different machines"? What if you put the HD, ram, video card into a new mobo +case? New computer or old? Which has a valid claim to the license? What if the old computer dies instantly with no time to go through some kind of 'key deactivation' process?
Thats what WGA tries to help with, but apparently doesn't do too well.
Just look at any other 'protected media' market. All it takes is one person to break it and make it public, then EVERYBODY can just use that person's broken copy. If the Videogame or App scene is any indication, this usually happens about a week or two before the game hits retail. Don't think audio will be any special
The first time they put out an unprotected copy (say, an actual cd, the only way you could make significant money off of selling music) it will be ripped and spread. Even if you went all 'secured', all it takes is one of the 'secured' formats having a bug and you'll have lost. Then theres the analog hole (cable running from your line out to your line in on soundcard). Then theres just sniffing your computers memory or using hacked drivers to grab the PCM raw. Or any other number of ways you ca get it out, admittedly mostly beyond the common user but all it takes is the first person to break it.
Want my money? Give me something worth paying for, and incentive to pay for it. I'll gladly pay for music when I believe its's going to actually support an artist that I want to support (like local bands that are unsigned and truely need the money). I'm not going to pay for some top40 song where paying equates to giving money to the very people treating me like criminals so they can fund their next law they need passed, assinine DRM scheme to slow down my computer even further like whatever the audio equiv of Safedisc will be.
Honestly the only thing preventing me from paying more for music right now is its just inconvenient. Those artists that are actually worth supporting are probably the hardest to get money too. Ordering CDs from half the world away via creditcard just doesn't seem like the most convenient way to do things. Maybe if one of these online music stores would open up and allow indy artists to put their music on them and not ruin it with DRM then you'd see a rise in people paying for music. Until then we're stuck with p2p, which has been here since before computers and isn't going away now. Even if we had to resort back to the equiv of copying tapes for people..thats what people will do.
How come downloading a WoW patch over the built in bittorrent client is slower than loading up firefox and searching for the same patch on a traditional download site, even including the manual searching for the file?
It also depends on your definition of "fast" really. If the files ETA is more than 15 minutes I'm usually going to spend at least the first 5 looking for a better way to download it.
Some of those flaws are needed to do what it does, others arn't major enough that anyone would switch -- If someone came out with a p2p app that corrected just those minor things people would say "who cares?" and stick to pirating things with their shiny copy of utorrent.
Really, I've always prefered downloads split between multiple fast mirrors(split http, FTP as done by the actual piracy scene) rather than multiple slow client peers (utorrent, kazaa, any other common 'end user' piracy). I hope this metalink thing takes off as its exactly what I wanted -- I've looked at download pages before where theres this long list of hosts and you're supposed to pick one and I just can't help but think..why only one? Why am I switching from host to host trying to find which one gives me more than 20K/s when I could just be hitting all 5 of these 20K/s hosts at once?
The fact that it uses xml as pointed out elsehwhere means its possible its more buzzwordy and complex than helpful, but the idea is simple enough that it might not be too bad.
I'd argue the opposite -- Theres no such thing as a finished product. We're just releasing way too early now. If theres ever going to be a patch, new feature, new version, or any change then the product obviously wasn't finished. The only time something is truely 'finished' is if theres something better to replace it and the original is abandoned.
The amazing thing is that even with a growing majority of people thinking piracy is right the laws are only getting worse. Maybe in another decade or two with the kids growing up with Napster throughout their college life start to become politicians will we have the laws actually start reflecting what more people believe.
as far as I remember, CDDB goes only by track lengths. Works some of the times, but is really a crapshoot (hence genre splitting to lower overlap).
It doesn't do any real music analysis like Musicbrainz('audio checksums') or even Pandora(manualy defined audio qualities)