Just out of curiosity, doesn't this seem like overkill? If you require such a massive amount of computing power, it seems you would take away from any decent AI algorithms and just do brute force computing.
Trust me, 800-core would not be anywhere near enough for a decent brute-force approach of go.
Go is amazingly complex, particularly from a computational point of view. Chess is like tic-tac-toe in comparison.
The 8-dan was a professional 8-dan who are stronger then amateur 8-dan players.
As far as I know (but it's been a while since I was active in that world), there are no 8-dan amateurs. I believe officially amateur grades end at 6-dan, although a few amateurs who are significantly stronger than other 6-dan amateurs have been awarded 7th dan. But that's very rare.
But it's been a while. Maybe things have changed. And maybe things are different in other countries.
Yes. What a lot of people miss is elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be seen as fair.
Enough voters have to be able to look at the elections and say "OK it's been done reasonably fairly, and looks like we lost fair and square".
Exactly! It's important in a democracy that the people can trust the election system, so they can respect their new government.
The last couple of elections in the US have been fraught with irregularities that would fit right in with some of the more questionable democracies in Africa. Any eastern European country where elections were such a mess would receive harsh criticism from the OESO.
The idea that what's arguably the "biggest democracy in the world", "leader of the western world", etc, etc, can get away with this is laughable and frightning. It's bad for Americans' faith in their own country and government, and for the US' credibility in the rest of the world.
A fair and fancy electronic voting system with complex checks and all that might not satisfy Trailer Park Joe (or even Harry the Hacker - since Harry knows how easy it is to hack systems).
Whereas hand counted ballots might, especially when observers from Trailer Park Joe's party can see every vote that's counted, from sealed ballot boxes that never left the polling area (nor the sight of the observers - party and independents).
This is a different but also very good point. It's very questionable whether electronic voting can ever be safe and transparent enough. And even if it can be, will Trailer Park Joe still be able to understand how his votes are counted?
But this issue isn't just an American one. Until recently, Amsterdam was the only municipality in Netherland where voting still happened on paper. Partially due to a group (led by a guy from the Dutch hacker movement) exposing the problems with electronic voting (none anywhere near as bad as the Diebold thing, fortunately), a couple of voting machine models aren't being used anymore so other towns also had to vote by paper again.
But electronic voting itself still happens, despite its inability to stand up to serious scrutiny.
Can Diebold give us our constitution back or raise the dead?
They may be able to pay back a tiny amount of the national debt that has accumulated because of them. And then they go bankrupt and everybody even remotely involved is thrown in prison for the rest of their lives.
Why make it for profit? We're talking about some of the very the tools we use for our democracy to function. It shouldn't be built by a corporate entity. It should be built by those beholden to no one other than the people of the United States.
It doesn't matter who builds them. What matters is that anyone can check if they function correctly, and can verify the voting results. With black-box electronic voting, neither is possible, and it's questionable whether it can be possible at all with electronic voting.
How is what Veto Corp does different from what other corps do? Okay, so they don't claim large tracts of space for themselves (which might be the biggest form of piracy there is in EVE), but any corp will gladly kill you if you look at them the wrong way.
And what's illegal about arms trade in Eve? Is there anything at all that's illegal there? Okay, attacking people in 1.0 space gets you in trouble with the cops, but other than that, anything goes, right?
I guess the two distinguishing features of Veto Corps as far as I can tell are:
1: Mobility. 2: I suppose they're less diplomatic about what they're doing.
Nice try... but wage slaves are able to support themselves (albeit tenuously). I was thinking more of the starving and chronically unemployed -- people who produce absolutely nothing. I'm not about to start sharing the wealth... that is, unless they can produce a good or service in trade for it.
And do you know why they're not doing that? Because they lack the resources. Every time they try, someone richer and more powerful takes advantage of them, reaps the profits, and leaves them broke and broken.
Have you ever tried being a farmer in Africa while western economies come along and bribe your civil servants to wreck your local economy every couple of years? And so farmers go bankrupt and nations starve. (It's not always western economies, though. In the case of Zimbabwe, it was Mugabe's own handiwork, but there too it's the people in power who wreck the economy for everybody else.)
They even have a new business model: pay to play beta at a discounted rate, with the price increasing towards the release price with each new beta version. Many people payed $11 - $14 for the game, and in Sept. it is going to "go gold" for $39.99.
That sounds very similar to what I was planning, except my beta would be free, after release the game would be very limited and cheap, but while I kept adding more and more features, the price would slowly go up.
Don't hold your breath, though. My basic engine isn't even close to being finished.
You can be the greatest programmer in the world, but until the realities of the market are well understood, you're going to be starving.
The fact of the matter is that very few independent programmers make it big.
Another fact of the matter is: independent programmers don't need to make it big. They just need to make a decent living doing what they love, and that's certainly achievable if you know your market well. That last bit is important. You're no longer just a programmer, now you're suddenly also a marketer.
Why should we care just because they're a game developer?
The Escapist cares because they're about games. In fact, so is games.slashdot.org. And at the moment, while big game titles are working with multimillion dollar budgets, indie games seem to be thriving. A look inside that part of the industry is certainly interesting.
But why there's no customdatamanagement.slashdot.org, I have no idea.
Communism is for the weaklings who can't stand on their own. I say let 'em starve, the earth is too crowded. People who can't even support themselves shouldn't continue to breed.
Let's kill the slaves!
Thing is, the economic systems of the rich countries depend on economic differences. We got rich partially by keeping the others poor. We wield or political, military and economic power to gain more economic power over those that are less well off. Ofcourse some leaks back, and they also profit from our wealth, but we profit a lot more from them than they from us.
C has it's place, and sometimes, that place is in business code. There are times when the code has to go really fast, after all. However, using it right out the gate qualifies as premature optimization.
I don't think C has a place in application code, except in highly reusable high performance libraries. For most practical purposes, Java is about as fast as C++ (which I hope is not a lot slower than C). The biggest exception is probably Swing. I don't know what it is about Java user interfaces. Then again, most other UIs are also slower than they should be.
Federation is basically when a group of states (in the technical sense, a defined area of land with a government) get together and decide that acting as one foreign policy unit is a good thing, and there is a weak federal government to enforce the limited agreement between the members.
I think (but am by no means certain) that's a confederation (like Switzerland) and a federation is a bit more centralised than that. At least, that's the impression I've always had.
The USA under the articles of confederation was a federation.
That's odd. Sounds like it should be a confederation.
The CSA, aka "The South" is a federation. The "Russian Federation", not so much. The EU, almost.
Looks like my definition of "federation" fits most political units that call themselves a federation, whereas your definition fits those that call themselves a confederation.
Blizzards shots looks quite fine but you have to admit the photoshops do look really cool
They look cool as a picture, but I can imagine it'd be really annoying to play in that look continously for a long time.
I love darkness as much as the next guy. I have trouble distinguishing between all my black T-shirts in my black-brown wardrobe in my dark purple bedroom. Don't tell me about dark. But when playing a game, I'd like to be able to see what's going on.
The RT/TB-S games you mentioned use what you're thinking of to simulate the military theory Fog -- if you don't have a unit within visual range of a bit of land, you can't see what's on it, even if you have previously explored it.
I'm currently playing Advanced Tactics: WWII, which handles this in a very interesting way: not only can you see or not see a unit, but if it's only on the edge of what you can see, you can get wrong information about it. Often I know there's an enemy unit but have no idea what it is. I move one unit next to the enemy to get some info, then add another unit and the info on the enemy changes; I just got more detailed info. How accurate is it really? No idea.
That's what fog of war is. It's not seeing a haze, it's knowing a haze.
Keeping it in the atmosphere is quite another and is largely a function of gravity.
As I understand it (but I don't have a link at hand), Mars would be able to hold on to an Earth-like atmosphere for a few million years. That's not a lot on an astronomical scale, but plenty for human life and the forseeable future.
Both potassium perchlorate (KClO4) and ammonium perchlorate (NH4ClO4) are used extensively within the pyrotechnics industry, whereas ammonium perchlorate is a component of solid rocket fuel. Lithium perchlorate, which decomposes exothermically to give oxygen, is used in oxygen "candles" on spacecraft, submarines and in other esoteric situations where a reliable backup or supplementary oxygen supply is needed. Most perchlorate salts are soluble in water.
So, it seems to me that the important discovery is that there could be a relatively massive supply of a chemical compound which is able to produce breathable oxygen, if and when we can ever get people to Mars.
So now we only have to send Schwarzenegger to Mars to start the process that releases the oxygen?
The presence of a highly oxidizing substance would imply that organic matter is attacked and degraded quickly. If a high level of perchlorates is present on the surface of mars this could mean that it is a barren place devoid of organic life as we know it.
(This is chlorex after all, remember you use it to kill germs?)
Oxygen was also highly toxic to the first life on earth. Life found a way to cope with it.
So if there's life on Mars, it's breathing perchlorate.
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of curiosity, doesn't this seem like overkill? If you require such a massive amount of computing power, it seems you would take away from any decent AI algorithms and just do brute force computing.
Trust me, 800-core would not be anywhere near enough for a decent brute-force approach of go.
Go is amazingly complex, particularly from a computational point of view. Chess is like tic-tac-toe in comparison.
The 8-dan was a professional 8-dan who are stronger then amateur 8-dan players.
As far as I know (but it's been a while since I was active in that world), there are no 8-dan amateurs. I believe officially amateur grades end at 6-dan, although a few amateurs who are significantly stronger than other 6-dan amateurs have been awarded 7th dan. But that's very rare.
But it's been a while. Maybe things have changed. And maybe things are different in other countries.
Yes. What a lot of people miss is elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be seen as fair.
Enough voters have to be able to look at the elections and say "OK it's been done reasonably fairly, and looks like we lost fair and square".
Exactly! It's important in a democracy that the people can trust the election system, so they can respect their new government.
The last couple of elections in the US have been fraught with irregularities that would fit right in with some of the more questionable democracies in Africa. Any eastern European country where elections were such a mess would receive harsh criticism from the OESO.
The idea that what's arguably the "biggest democracy in the world", "leader of the western world", etc, etc, can get away with this is laughable and frightning. It's bad for Americans' faith in their own country and government, and for the US' credibility in the rest of the world.
A fair and fancy electronic voting system with complex checks and all that might not satisfy Trailer Park Joe (or even Harry the Hacker - since Harry knows how easy it is to hack systems).
Whereas hand counted ballots might, especially when observers from Trailer Park Joe's party can see every vote that's counted, from sealed ballot boxes that never left the polling area (nor the sight of the observers - party and independents).
This is a different but also very good point. It's very questionable whether electronic voting can ever be safe and transparent enough. And even if it can be, will Trailer Park Joe still be able to understand how his votes are counted?
But this issue isn't just an American one. Until recently, Amsterdam was the only municipality in Netherland where voting still happened on paper. Partially due to a group (led by a guy from the Dutch hacker movement) exposing the problems with electronic voting (none anywhere near as bad as the Diebold thing, fortunately), a couple of voting machine models aren't being used anymore so other towns also had to vote by paper again.
But electronic voting itself still happens, despite its inability to stand up to serious scrutiny.
Can Diebold give us our constitution back or raise the dead?
They may be able to pay back a tiny amount of the national debt that has accumulated because of them. And then they go bankrupt and everybody even remotely involved is thrown in prison for the rest of their lives.
So, the anti-virus found the hacked wormy software on the memory cards that helped the republicans cheat and disabled access to that card?
seems like something worked as it should.
I think Diebold just admitted that their own software is recognised as malware. Probably for good reason.
Now the question is why wasn't the design delegated to MIT or NASA
Dude, I'm a NASA contractor. You really don't want NASA to code your voting machine, unless you want it implemented as a scary FORTRAN program... :)
Can't be worse than whatever Diebold is programming in. I'm guessing VB.
Why make it for profit? We're talking about some of the very the tools we use for our democracy to function. It shouldn't be built by a corporate entity. It should be built by those beholden to no one other than the people of the United States.
It doesn't matter who builds them. What matters is that anyone can check if they function correctly, and can verify the voting results. With black-box electronic voting, neither is possible, and it's questionable whether it can be possible at all with electronic voting.
How is what Veto Corp does different from what other corps do? Okay, so they don't claim large tracts of space for themselves (which might be the biggest form of piracy there is in EVE), but any corp will gladly kill you if you look at them the wrong way.
And what's illegal about arms trade in Eve? Is there anything at all that's illegal there? Okay, attacking people in 1.0 space gets you in trouble with the cops, but other than that, anything goes, right?
I guess the two distinguishing features of Veto Corps as far as I can tell are:
1: Mobility.
2: I suppose they're less diplomatic about what they're doing.
Nice try ... but wage slaves are able to support themselves (albeit tenuously). I was thinking more of the starving and chronically unemployed -- people who produce absolutely nothing. I'm not about to start sharing the wealth ... that is, unless they can produce a good or service in trade for it.
And do you know why they're not doing that? Because they lack the resources. Every time they try, someone richer and more powerful takes advantage of them, reaps the profits, and leaves them broke and broken.
Have you ever tried being a farmer in Africa while western economies come along and bribe your civil servants to wreck your local economy every couple of years? And so farmers go bankrupt and nations starve. (It's not always western economies, though. In the case of Zimbabwe, it was Mugabe's own handiwork, but there too it's the people in power who wreck the economy for everybody else.)
They even have a new business model: pay to play beta at a discounted rate, with the price increasing towards the release price with each new beta version. Many people payed $11 - $14 for the game, and in Sept. it is going to "go gold" for $39.99.
That sounds very similar to what I was planning, except my beta would be free, after release the game would be very limited and cheap, but while I kept adding more and more features, the price would slowly go up.
Don't hold your breath, though. My basic engine isn't even close to being finished.
You can be the greatest programmer in the world, but until the realities of the market are well understood, you're going to be starving.
The fact of the matter is that very few independent programmers make it big.
Another fact of the matter is: independent programmers don't need to make it big. They just need to make a decent living doing what they love, and that's certainly achievable if you know your market well. That last bit is important. You're no longer just a programmer, now you're suddenly also a marketer.
Why should we care just because they're a game developer?
The Escapist cares because they're about games. In fact, so is games.slashdot.org. And at the moment, while big game titles are working with multimillion dollar budgets, indie games seem to be thriving. A look inside that part of the industry is certainly interesting.
But why there's no customdatamanagement.slashdot.org, I have no idea.
Communism is for the weaklings who can't stand on their own. I say let 'em starve, the earth is too crowded. People who can't even support themselves shouldn't continue to breed.
Let's kill the slaves!
Thing is, the economic systems of the rich countries depend on economic differences. We got rich partially by keeping the others poor. We wield or political, military and economic power to gain more economic power over those that are less well off. Ofcourse some leaks back, and they also profit from our wealth, but we profit a lot more from them than they from us.
C has it's place, and sometimes, that place is in business code. There are times when the code has to go really fast, after all. However, using it right out the gate qualifies as premature optimization.
I don't think C has a place in application code, except in highly reusable high performance libraries. For most practical purposes, Java is about as fast as C++ (which I hope is not a lot slower than C). The biggest exception is probably Swing. I don't know what it is about Java user interfaces. Then again, most other UIs are also slower than they should be.
Quit pretending to be intellectual and just say what it is. DAMN!!!
My point is that it's several things at the same time. It's like denying you're male because you're already an American citizen.
It's possible to be both at the same time. And that is, in fact, not even all that uncommon.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,
Considering his track record with the constitution so far, it wouldn't surprise me all that much if Bush declared himself king this autumn.
Federation is basically when a group of states (in the technical sense, a defined area of land with a government) get together and decide that acting as one foreign policy unit is a good thing, and there is a weak federal government to enforce the limited agreement between the members.
I think (but am by no means certain) that's a confederation (like Switzerland) and a federation is a bit more centralised than that. At least, that's the impression I've always had.
The USA under the articles of confederation was a federation.
That's odd. Sounds like it should be a confederation.
The CSA, aka "The South" is a federation. The "Russian Federation", not so much. The EU, almost.
Looks like my definition of "federation" fits most political units that call themselves a federation, whereas your definition fits those that call themselves a confederation.
Blizzards shots looks quite fine but you have to admit the photoshops do look really cool
They look cool as a picture, but I can imagine it'd be really annoying to play in that look continously for a long time.
I love darkness as much as the next guy. I have trouble distinguishing between all my black T-shirts in my black-brown wardrobe in my dark purple bedroom. Don't tell me about dark. But when playing a game, I'd like to be able to see what's going on.
This has to do with Blizzard. Ever since Warcraft 3 they have shifted their graphic design to a more cartoonish or anime style.
I think you mean "away from". Warcraft 1 and 2 are cartoonish. These screenshots aren't.
It's not seeing a haze, it's knowing a haze.
A much better way of putting this is: It's not hazy vision, it's hazy knowledge.
The RT/TB-S games you mentioned use what you're thinking of to simulate the military theory Fog -- if you don't have a unit within visual range of a bit of land, you can't see what's on it, even if you have previously explored it.
I'm currently playing Advanced Tactics: WWII, which handles this in a very interesting way: not only can you see or not see a unit, but if it's only on the edge of what you can see, you can get wrong information about it. Often I know there's an enemy unit but have no idea what it is. I move one unit next to the enemy to get some info, then add another unit and the info on the enemy changes; I just got more detailed info. How accurate is it really? No idea.
That's what fog of war is. It's not seeing a haze, it's knowing a haze.
Keeping it in the atmosphere is quite another and is largely a function of gravity.
As I understand it (but I don't have a link at hand), Mars would be able to hold on to an Earth-like atmosphere for a few million years. That's not a lot on an astronomical scale, but plenty for human life and the forseeable future.
Both potassium perchlorate (KClO4) and ammonium perchlorate (NH4ClO4) are used extensively within the pyrotechnics industry, whereas ammonium perchlorate is a component of solid rocket fuel. Lithium perchlorate, which decomposes exothermically to give oxygen, is used in oxygen "candles" on spacecraft, submarines and in other esoteric situations where a reliable backup or supplementary oxygen supply is needed. Most perchlorate salts are soluble in water.
So, it seems to me that the important discovery is that there could be a relatively massive supply of a chemical compound which is able to produce breathable oxygen, if and when we can ever get people to Mars.
So now we only have to send Schwarzenegger to Mars to start the process that releases the oxygen?
The presence of a highly oxidizing substance would imply that organic matter is attacked and degraded quickly. If a high level of perchlorates is present on the surface of mars this could mean that it is a barren place devoid of organic life as we know it.
(This is chlorex after all, remember you use it to kill germs?)
Oxygen was also highly toxic to the first life on earth. Life found a way to cope with it.
So if there's life on Mars, it's breathing perchlorate.
What it means - perchlorate can be used to make bombs. Therefore Mars has terrorists. There is life on Mars, albeit the bad kind.
Ah, so that's how NASA is going to get Bush to fund a mission to Mars: to kill the Martian terrorists!