First of all the selection process doesn't have to be done real time while playing, so it's no big deal to have the machine searching all of the possible branches for 6 months prior to the match to get as many as possible preconfigged and discard all of the paths that result in a loss for the machine. It seems like that would be the best choice, just discard any route that would result in a loss for the machine.
Hrmmm, I find this viewpoint odd, I liked the Ewoks, I thought they were kickass, fuzzy little bears. They beat up stormtroopers and ATATs with rocks and logs, how much more badass can you get? JarJar on the otherhand has a voice that grates on my nerves the same why hearing any other human being completely mangle the english language does. His mannerisms are over exaggerated, his lines are blatantly supposed to be funny but they only come off as stupid. Han Solo and Chewbacca had some great interactions with Leia in the first trilogy, the were funny, they were subtle, they were usually moderately clever. Some of them were of course simply insult hurling, but come on! You gotta give props to 'Scruffy Looking Nerf Herder' as an insult over 'Weeza Gonna Die!!' as a rallying cry. Hell, 'I have a bad feeling about this' is just classic... There were so many more memorable lines from the original trilogy yet about all I remember from TPM is JarJars annoying ass going 'Weeza Gonna Die!' over and over again.
And for the record, I like Pokemon, Ewoks, Smurgfs, the Gummi Bears, and Koalas. I also like Cowboy Bebop, Fist of the North Star, Iguanas, and Spawn.
I think my tastes probably run closer to the average section of slashdot than your projection. I believe we're all pretty eclectic people...
In chess, there are 16 pieces per side. This means there are 16*16 possible combinations of first move (for each side). Assuming you are storing chess moves in 2 bytes (possible, but compact - given no index space is given here), that's 512 bytes for the first move. when you get to the second move, though, you hit 16*16*16*16 possibilities. Suddenly, that's 131072 bytes - 128K. For each additional move, using these raw calculations, you need 256 times more space.
The problem with that supposition is that it is false. There are not 16*16 legal moves in the first move of a game. There are 20. There are also 20 on the second move, however there can be a possible of somewhere around 40 on the 3rd and 4th moves. The number of legal moves goes up rapidly towards the mid game, then begins to decline again towards the end game as pieces are removed or trapped.
So yes, while there are theoretically 16x16 first moves, only 20 of those are legal moves. The rest can be discarded. That means there are 20 branches to explore, in each of those 20 branches there are varying numbers of continued paths, certain opening moves result in there being 19 moves available on the second move, others result in there being 38.
Most of this is probably irrelevant to the point though, I've only had 3.5 hours of sleep and I'm a little woozy, but I was getting somewhere with this... Oh yeah!
Say there are 1 billion relevant chess matches to store, that would be those chess matches where the moves conform to the standards of a master chess player, that means you can throw out all of the games where the person just systematically moves their pawns up 1 space each turn from left to right, and stuff like that. Anyway, 1 billion chess matches, stored in 40 bytes per match would be 40gb, That's 320 bits, so 256 bits to store moves in and then 64 bits to store a key in to define the notation. I think that could be done...
So while you may not be able to store EVERY chess game in 40gb, you can certainly store every relevant chess game in 40gb...
These American Chan films have a similar failing...they never show his limbs! Watch "Shanghai Noon" and try to count the number of times you actually see him connect with his foot when he kicks something, as compared to the number of times he lashes out and then they show a guy stumbling back. Count also the number of times you can see a character's face or upper body during an attack. It may be more "graphic novel" to show action in close up, but it's also more artificial.
This is somewhat related to the fact that in Hong Kong flicks the actors actually make contact with each other, not crippling contact, but actual contact none the less. Whereas in American movies there is a 1 inch air zone where all of the techniques go and no actual contact is made. This difference of technique leads to the necessity of using different camera angles to make sure that no one notices the lack of contact. If you want to see some really brutal old school Kung Fu movies check out Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, Tai Chi Master, and Young Master. Those are some of the best movies you'll ever see, and Young Master contains a VERY cool chinese dragon fight.
It is FAR FAR more likely that China will be our new competition in the Space Race. They are prepared to send a manned mission to the moon within the next few years, and I doubt they will stop there simply because they have the whole Fascist government Pride thing going for them and a whole lot of cheap labor.
My guess is that unless we step up our space program China will get up there, find a way to start mining some asteroids (or hell, the moon...) and get extremely rich extremely quickly, possibly even begin to export part of its population into space within the next 100 years. Maybe sooner if they beg/borrow/steal a lot of US/Japanese technology.
The problem is that a Mac costs more, is less powerful, less expandable and has fewer applications at a higher average price than a PC. Why would anyone pay more to do less? The salesmen know this and are just trying to do the right thing for the customers.
*this space is filled with uncontrollable laughter*
Maybe you should spend 10 minutes comparing Macs and PCs in real world situations? Say, throw the latest consumer OS version on them both, 256 megs of RAM on both of 'em, and the top of the line processors on both of them, then run every application that you can get a copy for both systems on them. You'll notive that the Mac consistently outperforms the PC. Then come back and tell us how sorry you are for spreading disinformation.
DISCLAIMER: I do not like Macs, I am impressed with their hardware, and I kind of like MacOS X, but I prefer Windows 2000. I like PCs for the ease with which I can screw with the components. But that feature is not one that most consumers have any need or desire for.
Woah! I dunno where you got that idea, but the US Consitution applies to every human being within the US borders. Even illegal aliens are protected by the constitution.
Some people don't take that much time at all...
The guy I'm talking about only took 4 days to get that Sorc up to level 80 with all of that EQ. And he'll probably get 400-500$ for it. Not a bad haul for 4 days work. Much better than minimum wage.
Speaking of this, I think this event might have totally screwed over a good friend of mine who was levelling characters up, getting them good EQ and selling them on ebay for $150+ this was practically his Job. In fact, he just finished and put up for bid a level 80 expansion sorcerous with no skill points or stat points used and a crapload of good Sorc EQ. Tons of the good Uniques. If this bug made him lose that EQ he's going to be REALLY pissed....
I play cut-throat like that in clan matches or in serious honor duels. But in regular deathmatch play I'm usually honing one particular skill, like Rocket Dodging, or Sniping, or some other thing I think I need to be a little better at. So I usually will spend a game or two sucking while I use only one technique, or run around in the middle of fire fights trying to predict rocket fire. Then, just to teach the other players a lesson I'll win by a hefty margin.
I 've hit the Zone in Q3:A... That place where everything is reflex, where no one on the map can even touch you. You win games by 30 or 40 frags over the second place person and barely get touched. You breeze through crowds of enemies leaving only a fine mist of blood in your wake... Then 3 hours later you finally snap out of it drenched in sweat, heart pounding, on a massive adrenaline high. It's just like running a marathon or competing in an all day martial arts tournament. It's great!
Yeah, but if you crack the encryption on every piece of software known to man while you are living in Washington DC, then fly to China after alerting every government agent that you, a notorious hacker type, are on the way you won't get so much as a single officer meeting you at the airport. Because it's not illegal in China for you to do what you did, you've broken no chinese laws.
Hell, you could probably call them up and tell them that you just finished killing a bunch of americans and when you arrived they still wouldn't care because it's not illegal for you to kill people in America according to Chinese law.
The US shouldn't be messing with this guy.
I work for the state of Ga too, and we'd probably end up having to patch up some kind of certif for all of the SCO servers... Of course, all of our MS stuff is compliant, so There! >:)
It's akin to a government office being budgeted too much money to build a highway, so they use the remainder on strippers. (Okay, so it's an over-the-top analogy; work with me here.)
What makes you think that's over the top? Government agencies will spend money on ANYTHING at the end of the fiscal year just to make sure their budget doesn't get cut.
I live in Athens, in fact, I live on the UGA campus. I'll have to hunt this guy down and talk to him....
Just basking in my indirect association with a now famous person.
Heh, centralization of information may very well be a bad thing. But using 3 sources that each have 30 sources is still preferably to me having to hunt down 90 sources and check them all to find out what's going on. It's just not possible for me to constantly skim as many news sources as are quantified in Slashdot and CNN alone and still have time left for anything else. Maybe I sometimes get my stories with spin and bias, but I can look past the spin and read more on anything that catches me as VERY IMPORTANT. But I leave it up to a few other people to gather the Somewhat Important, or even Mildly Interesting items together for me to check over.
That's the point though, people are theoretically closer to knowing everything about everything now than they were 10 years ago due to the volume of information available to them, but with that much info at hand how do you retrieve the string of random numbers that make up your locker combination without mixing it up with the random numbers that make up your phone number? How do you get the information you WANT out of the information you HAVE? That's the point of the article. People who are able to collect and catalogue data in such a way that regular people can easily find what they want to know are going to be able to make a lot of money.
explains why Slashdot is so useful to some of us. It allows us to concentrate our attention down to one site instead of haveing to spread it out amongst dozens to find the same info.
It's also true for places like CNN and many other portal sites, it's the reason that portals actually manage to break even and sometimes turn a profit. People like to be able to focus their attention on one thing and get the information they want. If someone came up with a REALLY good, easily customisable portal site they might actually be able to charge directly for access to it. Though I guess that's kind of what AOL does...
Anyways, information concentration is going to be a key area of web development in the future. People who are able to get a lot of information from a lot of places and condense it down into a few pages on one site should be able to make considerable amounts of money...
It's not like the planet gives a rats ass anyways... The worst possible result of mans existance is that we annihilate ourselves and every other living thing on this rock, but I don't believe that even the simultaneous detonation of all of the nuclear weapons on earth would destroy the rock beyond the point that the matter would recoalesce and sometime before the sun burnt out new intelligent life would be here. So don't worry, the earth isn't in danger, WE ARE...
Guess why those characters are in there? Because the audience can relate to them! Shakespeare did the same thing with his characters. You try to make them familiar to your audience. Shakespeare was good at making money off of his work, but he was writing for money, not for the artistic love of it.
The thing is, that language was nothing special for the time. It was poetry, yes. But it wasn't exceptional poetry for the period. And the subject matter was the same as many hollywood crapfests. Especially Hamlet. The cast of characters is just as inane as anything coming out of lalaland today.
I'm not saying his plays aren't great to read and watch, but they just aren't automatically better than anything the modern world turns out simply because they are old.
You MUST be kidding me!
Shakespeare wrote sex and violence enough for 3 or 4 rambo movies. He wrote to appeal to the lowest common denominator as much as possible, he had to write this way because his main competition was bear baiting across the river.
The only reason everyone thinks he was so great is because we still enjoy sex and violence in our entertainment today so his work withstood the test of time. I garauntee that American Beauty will stand that test of time just as well.
Shakespeare was nothing more than a 2 bit hack that wrote crap to appeal to the masses, just like any sitcom writer today, he just happened to do it in imabic pentameter so everyone thinks he's a god...
Slashdot Mirror
First of all the selection process doesn't have to be done real time while playing, so it's no big deal to have the machine searching all of the possible branches for 6 months prior to the match to get as many as possible preconfigged and discard all of the paths that result in a loss for the machine. It seems like that would be the best choice, just discard any route that would result in a loss for the machine.
Kintanon
Hrmmm, I find this viewpoint odd, I liked the Ewoks, I thought they were kickass, fuzzy little bears. They beat up stormtroopers and ATATs with rocks and logs, how much more badass can you get? JarJar on the otherhand has a voice that grates on my nerves the same why hearing any other human being completely mangle the english language does. His mannerisms are over exaggerated, his lines are blatantly supposed to be funny but they only come off as stupid. Han Solo and Chewbacca had some great interactions with Leia in the first trilogy, the were funny, they were subtle, they were usually moderately clever. Some of them were of course simply insult hurling, but come on! You gotta give props to 'Scruffy Looking Nerf Herder' as an insult over 'Weeza Gonna Die!!' as a rallying cry. Hell, 'I have a bad feeling about this' is just classic... There were so many more memorable lines from the original trilogy yet about all I remember from TPM is JarJars annoying ass going 'Weeza Gonna Die!' over and over again.
And for the record, I like Pokemon, Ewoks, Smurgfs, the Gummi Bears, and Koalas. I also like Cowboy Bebop, Fist of the North Star, Iguanas, and Spawn.
I think my tastes probably run closer to the average section of slashdot than your projection. I believe we're all pretty eclectic people...
Kintanon
In chess, there are 16 pieces per side. This means there are 16*16 possible combinations of first move (for each side). Assuming you are storing chess moves in 2 bytes (possible, but compact - given no index space is given here), that's 512 bytes for the first move. when you get to the second move, though, you hit 16*16*16*16 possibilities. Suddenly, that's 131072 bytes - 128K. For each additional move, using these raw calculations, you need 256 times more space.
The problem with that supposition is that it is false. There are not 16*16 legal moves in the first move of a game. There are 20. There are also 20 on the second move, however there can be a possible of somewhere around 40 on the 3rd and 4th moves. The number of legal moves goes up rapidly towards the mid game, then begins to decline again towards the end game as pieces are removed or trapped.
So yes, while there are theoretically 16x16 first moves, only 20 of those are legal moves. The rest can be discarded. That means there are 20 branches to explore, in each of those 20 branches there are varying numbers of continued paths, certain opening moves result in there being 19 moves available on the second move, others result in there being 38.
Most of this is probably irrelevant to the point though, I've only had 3.5 hours of sleep and I'm a little woozy, but I was getting somewhere with this... Oh yeah!
Say there are 1 billion relevant chess matches to store, that would be those chess matches where the moves conform to the standards of a master chess player, that means you can throw out all of the games where the person just systematically moves their pawns up 1 space each turn from left to right, and stuff like that. Anyway, 1 billion chess matches, stored in 40 bytes per match would be 40gb, That's 320 bits, so 256 bits to store moves in and then 64 bits to store a key in to define the notation. I think that could be done...
So while you may not be able to store EVERY chess game in 40gb, you can certainly store every relevant chess game in 40gb...
Kintanon
These American Chan films have a similar failing...they never show his limbs! Watch "Shanghai Noon" and try to count the number of times you actually see him connect with his foot when he kicks something, as compared to the number of times he lashes out and then they show a guy stumbling back. Count also the number of times you can see a character's face or upper body during an attack. It may be more "graphic novel" to show action in close up, but it's also more artificial.
This is somewhat related to the fact that in Hong Kong flicks the actors actually make contact with each other, not crippling contact, but actual contact none the less. Whereas in American movies there is a 1 inch air zone where all of the techniques go and no actual contact is made. This difference of technique leads to the necessity of using different camera angles to make sure that no one notices the lack of contact. If you want to see some really brutal old school Kung Fu movies check out Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, Tai Chi Master, and Young Master. Those are some of the best movies you'll ever see, and Young Master contains a VERY cool chinese dragon fight.
Kintanon
It is FAR FAR more likely that China will be our new competition in the Space Race. They are prepared to send a manned mission to the moon within the next few years, and I doubt they will stop there simply because they have the whole Fascist government Pride thing going for them and a whole lot of cheap labor.
My guess is that unless we step up our space program China will get up there, find a way to start mining some asteroids (or hell, the moon...) and get extremely rich extremely quickly, possibly even begin to export part of its population into space within the next 100 years. Maybe sooner if they beg/borrow/steal a lot of US/Japanese technology.
Kintanon
The problem is that a Mac costs more, is less powerful, less expandable and has fewer applications at a higher average price than a PC. Why would anyone pay more to do less? The salesmen know this and are just trying to do the right thing for the customers.
*this space is filled with uncontrollable laughter*
Maybe you should spend 10 minutes comparing Macs and PCs in real world situations? Say, throw the latest consumer OS version on them both, 256 megs of RAM on both of 'em, and the top of the line processors on both of them, then run every application that you can get a copy for both systems on them. You'll notive that the Mac consistently outperforms the PC. Then come back and tell us how sorry you are for spreading disinformation.
DISCLAIMER: I do not like Macs, I am impressed with their hardware, and I kind of like MacOS X, but I prefer Windows 2000. I like PCs for the ease with which I can screw with the components. But that feature is not one that most consumers have any need or desire for.
Kintanon
Woah! I dunno where you got that idea, but the US Consitution applies to every human being within the US borders. Even illegal aliens are protected by the constitution.
Kintanon
Some people don't take that much time at all...
The guy I'm talking about only took 4 days to get that Sorc up to level 80 with all of that EQ. And he'll probably get 400-500$ for it. Not a bad haul for 4 days work. Much better than minimum wage.
Kintanon
Speaking of this, I think this event might have totally screwed over a good friend of mine who was levelling characters up, getting them good EQ and selling them on ebay for $150+ this was practically his Job. In fact, he just finished and put up for bid a level 80 expansion sorcerous with no skill points or stat points used and a crapload of good Sorc EQ. Tons of the good Uniques. If this bug made him lose that EQ he's going to be REALLY pissed....
Kintanon
I play cut-throat like that in clan matches or in serious honor duels. But in regular deathmatch play I'm usually honing one particular skill, like Rocket Dodging, or Sniping, or some other thing I think I need to be a little better at. So I usually will spend a game or two sucking while I use only one technique, or run around in the middle of fire fights trying to predict rocket fire. Then, just to teach the other players a lesson I'll win by a hefty margin.
Kintanon
I 've hit the Zone in Q3:A... That place where everything is reflex, where no one on the map can even touch you. You win games by 30 or 40 frags over the second place person and barely get touched. You breeze through crowds of enemies leaving only a fine mist of blood in your wake... Then 3 hours later you finally snap out of it drenched in sweat, heart pounding, on a massive adrenaline high. It's just like running a marathon or competing in an all day martial arts tournament. It's great!
Kintanon
For more mp3s also try #mp3_collective and #mp3jukebox both of those channels are packed full of fast fserves packed full of mp3s.
Kintanon
Yeah, but if you crack the encryption on every piece of software known to man while you are living in Washington DC, then fly to China after alerting every government agent that you, a notorious hacker type, are on the way you won't get so much as a single officer meeting you at the airport. Because it's not illegal in China for you to do what you did, you've broken no chinese laws.
Hell, you could probably call them up and tell them that you just finished killing a bunch of americans and when you arrived they still wouldn't care because it's not illegal for you to kill people in America according to Chinese law.
The US shouldn't be messing with this guy.
Kintanon
This was my opinion as well, I expected the movie to be around 45 minutes longer. I think it would have done much better if it was a 2.5 hour movie...
Kintanon
OMG! What are you smoking? King of The Hill is the worst piece of animated trash I've ever seen! It makes Beavis and Butthead look intelectual!
Kintanon
I work for the state of Ga too, and we'd probably end up having to patch up some kind of certif for all of the SCO servers... Of course, all of our MS stuff is compliant, so There! >:)
Kintanon
It's akin to a government office being budgeted too much money to build a highway, so they use the remainder on strippers. (Okay, so it's an over-the-top analogy; work with me here.)
What makes you think that's over the top? Government agencies will spend money on ANYTHING at the end of the fiscal year just to make sure their budget doesn't get cut.
Kintanon
I live in Athens, in fact, I live on the UGA campus. I'll have to hunt this guy down and talk to him....
Just basking in my indirect association with a now famous person.
Kintanon
Heh, centralization of information may very well be a bad thing. But using 3 sources that each have 30 sources is still preferably to me having to hunt down 90 sources and check them all to find out what's going on. It's just not possible for me to constantly skim as many news sources as are quantified in Slashdot and CNN alone and still have time left for anything else. Maybe I sometimes get my stories with spin and bias, but I can look past the spin and read more on anything that catches me as VERY IMPORTANT. But I leave it up to a few other people to gather the Somewhat Important, or even Mildly Interesting items together for me to check over.
Kintanon
That's the point though, people are theoretically closer to knowing everything about everything now than they were 10 years ago due to the volume of information available to them, but with that much info at hand how do you retrieve the string of random numbers that make up your locker combination without mixing it up with the random numbers that make up your phone number? How do you get the information you WANT out of the information you HAVE? That's the point of the article. People who are able to collect and catalogue data in such a way that regular people can easily find what they want to know are going to be able to make a lot of money.
Kintanon
explains why Slashdot is so useful to some of us. It allows us to concentrate our attention down to one site instead of haveing to spread it out amongst dozens to find the same info.
It's also true for places like CNN and many other portal sites, it's the reason that portals actually manage to break even and sometimes turn a profit. People like to be able to focus their attention on one thing and get the information they want. If someone came up with a REALLY good, easily customisable portal site they might actually be able to charge directly for access to it. Though I guess that's kind of what AOL does...
Anyways, information concentration is going to be a key area of web development in the future. People who are able to get a lot of information from a lot of places and condense it down into a few pages on one site should be able to make considerable amounts of money...
Kintanon
It's not like the planet gives a rats ass anyways... The worst possible result of mans existance is that we annihilate ourselves and every other living thing on this rock, but I don't believe that even the simultaneous detonation of all of the nuclear weapons on earth would destroy the rock beyond the point that the matter would recoalesce and sometime before the sun burnt out new intelligent life would be here. So don't worry, the earth isn't in danger, WE ARE...
Kintanon
Guess why those characters are in there? Because the audience can relate to them! Shakespeare did the same thing with his characters. You try to make them familiar to your audience. Shakespeare was good at making money off of his work, but he was writing for money, not for the artistic love of it.
Kintanon
The thing is, that language was nothing special for the time. It was poetry, yes. But it wasn't exceptional poetry for the period. And the subject matter was the same as many hollywood crapfests. Especially Hamlet. The cast of characters is just as inane as anything coming out of lalaland today.
I'm not saying his plays aren't great to read and watch, but they just aren't automatically better than anything the modern world turns out simply because they are old.
Kintanon
You MUST be kidding me!
Shakespeare wrote sex and violence enough for 3 or 4 rambo movies. He wrote to appeal to the lowest common denominator as much as possible, he had to write this way because his main competition was bear baiting across the river.
The only reason everyone thinks he was so great is because we still enjoy sex and violence in our entertainment today so his work withstood the test of time. I garauntee that American Beauty will stand that test of time just as well.
Shakespeare was nothing more than a 2 bit hack that wrote crap to appeal to the masses, just like any sitcom writer today, he just happened to do it in imabic pentameter so everyone thinks he's a god...
Kintanon