Recursive ray tracing can produce wonderfully realistic images. But most video games don't use it, because they don't need to use it. They can get a 'good enough' image using short cuts (such as imposters) for most of it.
If we were living in a simulation of the planet Earth, would the Architect need to use a full implementation of quantum mechanics on every atom of the Earth in order to fool us? Or could large bits of it be done by cheaper approximations, except for the short time periods when they are being looked at in detail by the instruments of physicists?
Since they run the servers on Amazon's cloud, it is more likely that, if they won't support it, they'll let a fan organisation keep servers going if the fans want to pay for them.
There's already a single player mode, for days when you don't feel like interacting with other players, and a 'friends only' mode where you only interact with people on your friends list.
Your ships and money are shared between modes. If they added an off-line mode too, then they'd face complaints like "I've just spent 60 hours in off-line mode working my way up to an Asp, and now you're telling me that I can't use it when I play with my friends??!? W.T.H. You guys suck!"
" a game-changing intellectual endeavour achieved by applying sustained effort to original insights afforded by superlative mastery of one or more subjects gained through outstanding intelligence and endless learning. "
Re:Because RTFA is too much...
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
Gary Taubes is an advocate of high-fat/low-carbohydrate diets. He seriously overstates the importances of the source of calories, compared to the calorie total itself, and willfully ignores the strong evidence linking saturated fats to heart disease.
He has a habit of jumping on any bandwagon that supports his conclusions, regardless of whether the bandwagon is valid or not.
His support should therefore not be given much weight in your deliberations.
The interesting question is not whether all crowds are wise. (THEY'RE NOT.)
Nor is it whether a crowd can be arranged in such a way that it makes better decisions than the average person in the crowd. (THEY CAN.)
It is whether you can arrange the decision making process among a crowd to consistently make wise decisions, even if no individual member of the crowd is consistently wise.
Since, in any sufficiently large crowd, somebody is going to come up with a wise answer to any particular question, the key problem is getting members of the crowd to agree on which of two answers is the wiser. One solution is to get the members who don't have a clue to delegate that decision to others who they think are, in general, good at picking winners. With a sufficient track record, you have an objective basis to decide who is or is not good at recognition, provided there is some correlation between past and future problems, or at least some way to categorise which sort of expertise is relevant to each problem.
Fluid intelligence (Gf) refers to the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge. Gf is critical for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, and it is considered one of the most important factors in learning. Moreover, Gf is closely related to professional and educational success, especially in complex and demanding environments. Although performance on tests of Gf can be improved through direct practice on the tests themselves, there is no evidence that training on any other regimen yields increased Gf in adults. Furthermore, there is a long history of research into cognitive training showing that, although performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of this learning to other tasks remains poor. Here, we present evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf. This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of gain in intelligence critically depends on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in Gf. That is, the training effect is dosage-dependent. Thus, in contrast to many previous studies, we conclude that it is possible to improve Gf without practicing the testing tasks themselves, opening a wide range of applications.
I played MUD1 very briefly, but I made wizard on MIST, the later mud run at Essex by Lorry. MIST was fast, furious, biased and addictively fun. You waited in a chilling university lab until it opened in the wee hours of the morning, using a BBC micro over JANET.
In later years I played Abermud run by Alan Cox, and a lot of LPmuds, from Ephemeral Dales, Discworld and Genesis to Nightmare and TMI; but I'll always have fond memories of MIST and that damn gun.
Soldiers in the army don't spend a majority of their time doing the sort of things they do in the game America's Army. That's ok. The game designers took the bits that would make a compelling game experience and used them.
There are plenty of cool things NASA do, that could be turned into compelling game play.
* design a new space ship or habitat (think sim city in space)
* launch your ship, explore the solar system and see Saturn's rings up close (obviously you'd have a 'skip ahead in time' function) - learn to do sling shot manoveurs and compete to find more and more fuel efficient tactics (NASA has amazing footage that could be turned into very realistic 3D models)
* land on a planet or moon, reach your objective and perform an experiment against a deadline (ever play "lunar lander" ?)
But if they want to inspire the current generation of children, I believe they need to go beyond the current state of the art. Don't show the current space program. Show how NASA would like to see things in 20 or 50 years time. Have a colony on Mars that needs supply trips from Earth, and scouting for mineral resources on Mars. Have asteroid mining missions. Have competing commercial groups setting up self-sufficient Lunar bases. Have carbon nanotube bean stalks and off-planet trade. Inspire them!
metrometro wrote: > > Here's a challenge to all of Slashdot: Cut out the middlemen. > > Gold-farming isn't going away, but at least it could be a > positive social force, fighting global inequality while > building IT capacity in the developing world. As it is, > most of the money is going to middlemen.
What can you tell us about your plans for future changes to add political elements to the system? For instance, kinship halls or balance of power between the Grand Masters of the different crafting professions?
As an addition or follow up to the parent question:
Are there any plans to add a reputation system for musicians? While special music stages, competitions and titles would be nice, the big advantage to adding such a system would be a UI option to let players ignore the 'music' generated by those rated as 'still learning' (to use a euphamism)
Also, perhaps a tip jar that doesn't require popping up a trade window?
(Why do bug and suggestion commands in game require a seperate registration and login to a website?)
Maybe have a base reputation for a user, and a topic-specific variation on that reputation?
I think adding a well thought out reputation system to wikipedia (or popular wikis in general) would help more than it would hurt, because even if such a system could be gamed with enough effort, most of the pages on the wiki will not be worth that effort.
There's a lot more thinking about this in the essay on AmiCogs
Whois to make sure that these online casinos don't have
'lucky' dealers that always seem to hit the blackjacks?
The current situation is that players just have to trust the casino, or the auditors the casino claims to have do regular audits of them.
There is a better way. Project Fairdice has produced a free open source implementation of a cryptographic protocol that let's players verify that a game has not been rigged.
You don't have to trust the house not to fix the host software.
Find somewhere that uses the cryptographic software from the open source Project Fairdice to produce validatedly fair card shuffles.
What do corporations want from education?
on
Feed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their book
The Third Wave make the point that industry doesn't just want the education system to turn out consumers. Industry also needs workers.
We are seeing in the debates over the Japanese and Singaporean education systems the pressures being brought to bear by modern information, science and technology based industries upon the education system to turn out more creative, less regimented, adults.
If the mass illiteracy future happens, it ain't going to be because that's what companies want.
Douglas
--
All speeling mistaks shoud be consedered intentionel irony
I see the long term danger to Wikipedia being that control over the key data, the trust metric, is centralised.
Do you see any way in which readers of a future version of the Wikipedia could choose for themselves on an individual basis who they trust, and be presented with an edited view of the data based on that preference?
Methods of verification for online casinos do exist.
In the simplest form, each gambler (at, say, a roulette wheel) uses an open source client that does the following 7 stage process:
1. generate a random number 2. produce a one way hash from that number 3. everyone sends their hash to the server 4. everyone sends their bet to the server 5. the server sends all hashes back to everyone 6. everyone reveals their number 7. the server adds the numbers and takes the modulo to get the result then pays off the winners
(There are various things you can add to stop some obscure things the casino could do, but that's the basic idea.)
What this would mean is, if a casino using this system tried to lie, you could prove it.
Slashdot Mirror
Recursive ray tracing can produce wonderfully realistic images. But most video games don't use it, because they don't need to use it. They can get a 'good enough' image using short cuts (such as imposters) for most of it.
If we were living in a simulation of the planet Earth, would the Architect need to use a full implementation of quantum mechanics on every atom of the Earth in order to fool us? Or could large bits of it be done by cheaper approximations, except for the short time periods when they are being looked at in detail by the instruments of physicists?
Since they run the servers on Amazon's cloud, it is more likely that, if they won't support it, they'll let a fan organisation keep servers going if the fans want to pay for them.
There's already a single player mode, for days when you don't feel like interacting with other players, and a 'friends only' mode where you only interact with people on your friends list.
Your ships and money are shared between modes. If they added an off-line mode too, then they'd face complaints like "I've just spent 60 hours in off-line mode working my way up to an Asp, and now you're telling me that I can't use it when I play with my friends??!? W.T.H. You guys suck!"
" a game-changing intellectual endeavour achieved by applying sustained effort to original insights afforded by superlative mastery of one or more subjects gained through outstanding intelligence and endless learning. "
Gary Taubes is an advocate of high-fat/low-carbohydrate diets. He seriously overstates the importances of the source of calories, compared to the calorie total itself, and willfully ignores the strong evidence linking saturated fats to heart disease.
He has a habit of jumping on any bandwagon that supports his conclusions, regardless of whether the bandwagon is valid or not.
His support should therefore not be given much weight in your deliberations.
Nor is it whether a crowd can be arranged in such a way that it makes better decisions than the average person in the crowd. (THEY CAN.)
It is whether you can arrange the decision making process among a crowd to consistently make wise decisions, even if no individual member of the crowd is consistently wise.
Since, in any sufficiently large crowd, somebody is going to come up with a wise answer to any particular question, the key problem is getting members of the crowd to agree on which of two answers is the wiser. One solution is to get the members who don't have a clue to delegate that decision to others who they think are, in general, good at picking winners. With a sufficient track record, you have an objective basis to decide who is or is not good at recognition, provided there is some correlation between past and future problems, or at least some way to categorise which sort of expertise is relevant to each problem.
Abstract
Fluid intelligence (Gf) refers to the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge. Gf is critical for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, and it is considered one of the most important factors in learning. Moreover, Gf is closely related to professional and educational success, especially in complex and demanding environments. Although performance on tests of Gf can be improved through direct practice on the tests themselves, there is no evidence that training on any other regimen yields increased Gf in adults. Furthermore, there is a long history of research into cognitive training showing that, although performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of this learning to other tasks remains poor. Here, we present evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf. This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of gain in intelligence critically depends on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in Gf. That is, the training effect is dosage-dependent. Thus, in contrast to many previous studies, we conclude that it is possible to improve Gf without practicing the testing tasks themselves, opening a wide range of applications.
A card version of the memory task used in their research is available at: http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?DouglasReay/SnapBackGameRules
I played MUD1 very briefly, but I made wizard on MIST, the later mud run at Essex by Lorry. MIST was fast, furious, biased and addictively fun. You waited in a chilling university lab until it opened in the wee hours of the morning, using a BBC micro over JANET. In later years I played Abermud run by Alan Cox, and a lot of LPmuds, from Ephemeral Dales, Discworld and Genesis to Nightmare and TMI; but I'll always have fond memories of MIST and that damn gun.
Soldiers in the army don't spend a majority of their time doing the sort of things they do in the game America's Army. That's ok. The game designers took the bits that would make a compelling game experience and used them.
There are plenty of cool things NASA do, that could be turned into compelling game play.
* design a new space ship or habitat (think sim city in space)
* launch your ship, explore the solar system and see Saturn's rings up close (obviously you'd have a 'skip ahead in time' function) - learn to do sling shot manoveurs and compete to find more and more fuel efficient tactics (NASA has amazing footage that could be turned into very realistic 3D models)
* land on a planet or moon, reach your objective and perform an experiment against a deadline (ever play "lunar lander" ?)
But if they want to inspire the current generation of children, I believe they need to go beyond the current state of the art. Don't show the current space program. Show how NASA would like to see things in 20 or 50 years time. Have a colony on Mars that needs supply trips from Earth, and scouting for mineral resources on Mars. Have asteroid mining missions. Have competing commercial groups setting up self-sufficient Lunar bases. Have carbon nanotube bean stalks and off-planet trade. Inspire them!
metrometro wrote:
n /
>
> Here's a challenge to all of Slashdot: Cut out the middlemen.
>
> Gold-farming isn't going away, but at least it could be a
> positive social force, fighting global inequality while
> building IT capacity in the developing world. As it is,
> most of the money is going to middlemen.
Challenge accepted.
I've created a list for anyone who would like to come discuss the next step:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/eve_revolutio
I've called the list: Ethical Virtual Economics
Do you have any plans to help the Gold Farmers? Help them, not to farm gold, but to escape slavery, as revealed in recent documentaries:
- chinese-kids-forced-to-play-wow-for-12-hours-daily /
e ling.php?gid=14
http://www.gamingblog.org/entry/chinese-gold-farm
http://zestgames.com/?p=88
It is not just gold. Power leveling is also for sale:
http://www.coolingame.com/powerleveling/power-lev
Surely this sort of repetitive behaviour can be detected?
What can you tell us about your plans for future changes to add political elements to the system? For instance, kinship halls or balance of power between the Grand Masters of the different crafting professions?
Are there any plans to add a reputation system for musicians? While special music stages, competitions and titles would be nice, the big advantage to adding such a system would be a UI option to let players ignore the 'music' generated by those rated as 'still learning' (to use a euphamism)
Also, perhaps a tip jar that doesn't require popping up a trade window?
(Why do bug and suggestion commands in game require a seperate registration and login to a website?)
Maybe have a base reputation for a user, and a topic-specific variation on that reputation?
I think adding a well thought out reputation system to wikipedia (or popular wikis in general) would help more than it would hurt, because even if such a system could be gamed with enough effort, most of the pages on the wiki will not be worth that effort.
There's a lot more thinking about this in the essay on AmiCogs
There is a better way. Project Fairdice has produced a free open source implementation of a cryptographic protocol that let's players verify that a game has not been rigged.
Find somewhere that uses the cryptographic software from the open source Project Fairdice to produce validatedly fair card shuffles.
We are seeing in the debates over the Japanese and Singaporean education systems the pressures being brought to bear by modern information, science and technology based industries upon the education system to turn out more creative, less regimented, adults.
If the mass illiteracy future happens, it ain't going to be because that's what companies want.
Douglas -- All speeling mistaks shoud be consedered intentionel irony
Do you see any way in which readers of a future version of the Wikipedia could choose for themselves on an individual basis who they trust, and be presented with an edited view of the data based on that preference?
This might require third order mediated trust
Methods of verification for online casinos do exist.
In the simplest form, each gambler (at, say, a roulette wheel) uses an open source client that does the following 7 stage process:
1. generate a random number
2. produce a one way hash from that number
3. everyone sends their hash to the server
4. everyone sends their bet to the server
5. the server sends all hashes back to everyone
6. everyone reveals their number
7. the server adds the numbers and takes the modulo to get the result then pays off the winners
(There are various things you can add to stop some obscure things the casino could do, but that's the basic idea.)
What this would mean is, if a casino using this system tried to lie, you could prove it.