Well, imagine that a new type of quark is generated that is much heavier than other quarks. It sucks other nearby matter towards itself. When it bumps into other matter, it turns the quarks in that matter into these new heavy quarks too. It is self-propagating.
Well, as a non-US person, I'm quite glad people are starting to think like this:-) That said, many of the most creative companies and developments continue to be American.
It sucks for non-Americans because it's so hard to get an H1B (at least, few game companies are willing to provide one for example, because they want the game written yesterday, not once the visa arrives in 3 months...).
However, maybe I'm biased, but I feel the creativity coming out of America to be extraordinary. For example, there is: - Microsoft - Google - Blizzard - LindenLab - SOE (maybe Sony itself originated in Japan, but SOE seems to be primarily US-based AFAIK?) - most major search engines: Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo - Slashdot:-)
It is all the more surprising given that salaries in the United States are generally higher than anywhere else in the world, sometimes by an order of magnitude, but it does seem to be true?
In addition, the common perception of AI as being a bunch of rules means that many people dont believe in anything even approaching strong AI.
As far as how to advance down the road to strong AI, maybe a good way is to assume infinite computational, memory and I/O capacity, then create algorithms based on that?
If we look at a previous "impossible" technology, the development of aircraft, that only became possible with the development of the internal combustion engine, steam engines were just too heavy. No reason why we cant generate some sortof learning algorithm today based on the technology of tomorrow.
Note a slight refinement to this: we probably shouldnt *quite* assume infinite computational capacity, since that would allow us to consider k-hard algorithms to be soluble, which they probably are not. This doesnt mean we cant use k-hard algorithms, only that we cant expect to get the "perfect" answer from them, just a rough best-guess answer in finite time... rather like our own brains.
Nuclear waste is a lot better than having another major world war. Energy is fundamental to a modern society, and if we start to run out, or it gets really expensive, its not a Good Thing. Wars can and do happen over this sort of thing.
Energy lies at the heart of the economy of our society. We've automated things such as farming, manufacturing, and so on, so what controls prices is, yes the price of raw materials, but also: energy. Manufacturing aluminium is really expensive for example, simply because of the energy demands of electrolysing the ore. Reducing the price of energy is key to our development and progress.
Using nuclear power is critical to our society, and we should be using it as much as possible. Not to do so is almost criminal.
I'd much rather a little extra radiation each day than a major world war.
Javascript/AJAX is an awesome combination. Scripting languages provide very awesome RAD, whilst using a web browser + javascript + xmlhttprequest provides a very smooth professional appearance to your application..Net and ASP.Net are cool, but my personal experience is that development times tend to be quite long, compared to the same application in Javascript/XMLHttpRequest.
One issue is variable declaration. Declaring a variable as an XMLElement rather than simply typing var takes a half second or so longer each time. Certain results need to be cast to be useful, for example, SelectSingleNode often needs to be cast into an XMLElement. You can't easily write a function that can handle many datatypes, and the datatypes tend to be purvasive throughout your project, difficult to change, at least without using typediffs, which has its own overhead.
ASP.Net provides web form widgets that work along similar lines to VB forms elements. However, plain old html is much easier to work with, more dynamic and more flexible than VB-type widgets. The.Net widgets do provide the illusion that the application is client-based, but AJAX does this too, and is much easier to use. ASP.Net provides a form editor but it tends to work uneasily with custom-edited HTML.
Javascript/XMLHttpRequest rock totally. They provide the separation of display and code that ASP.Net provides. They're lightweight, readily maintainable, easy to read, and very flexible and powerful.
Obviously, it would be unwise to state that AJAX is the best solution for every scenario, but it's certainly a highly optimal solution for a wealth of functional, technical and user specifications. So much so that Microsoft is currently trying to move ASP.Net to use AJAX, the Atlas project!
"Deposit is refundable until after a successful transitioning flight has occurred. Thereafter deposits are refundable only if Final Delivery Price exceeds List Price (as adjusted for CPI-W) by 5%, OR Standard Equipment List has been shortened OR Guaranteed Performance Specifications are not met, OR FAA Certification Date of the M400 Skycar occurs after December 31, 2008 or a Purchase Agreement is executed prior to FAA certification. "
"Your required deposit amount is as follows:
"Delivery Position List Price 25-100 $995,000 101-200 $750,000 201-500 $500,000"
So, they're anticipating obtaining FAA approval by 2008. The price for a car depends on how long you're willing to wait. Starts off at one million, and drops to half a million if you're willing to wait till 200 have already been sold.
It's using ode physics engine, Lua scripting engine, and it will shortly be using Python as a high-level glue language for the application development itself.
If you go to http://sf.net/projects/metaverse, you can click on Monitor to monitor the file releases for new file releases. The current ones are a little old, but there should be a new one out soon.
I'm in China now, reading and submitting to slashdot. As random info, I tried accessing the following sites, from a cybercafe here, with the following results:
reuters.com/news.html -> ok www.iht.com -> ok www.cnn.com -> ok www.lemonde.fr -> ok
> The real problem with user scripting is that once you have the equivalent of magic in the world, you can really piss people off. And that's hard to sandbox or detect algorithmically.
SecondLife has a pretty decent solution to this. The scripts are treated as part of the world and can do no more or less than the avatar that owns them.
You can't do arbitrary things to arbitrary avatars or objects from a script.
What you CAN do is build a script that does what you want, that communicate with other scripts and objects, and you give the script to other players, as part of an attachment.
By accepting to wear the attachment, other players are agreeing to run your script and accept the consequences of that. If they don't like it, they just have to take it off:-)
As a final safeguard, scripts have to ask permissions before doing certain things, eg make their avatar give money to someone else.
It's fairly easy to make a wristband that players wear when they wish to take part in your virtual world.
Yes, SL is unique in the sense that it is a world created by the players. For a 3D online persistant world, this is either a first, or the first to do it really well.
Little bit of background: it's a dynamic world, which downloads as you move around. If I build a house next to you, you see me building it! It appears, and it stays there, even after I log out.
To make the world come alive, you can add scripts to the world, which run server side. Think about that for a second, that's a lot of power! You can make objects do stuff for you and interact. It's really very flexible.
The IP comes into play, because there are players who are professional developers and who want to contribute to the scripting codebase of the game on an OpenSource, GPL'd basis.
I'm not a lawyer, but... from previous Slashdot discussions, a contract is valid only if both parties gain something from the contract.
If I give you a bit of paper which you sign which says just that you will pay me $4000 per month, this is not a valid contract because you don't gain anything from it.
Similarly, if you buy a game from a shop, and when you get it home and install it, you click on something and agree to it, the thing you just agreed to isn't valid because you don't gain anything from it. You already bought the game so it's too late.
However, if you agree to a contract which gives you the right to download and use the game, then it is a valid contract, because you each gain something: the company gains your agreement, and you gain the right to play the game.
Second Life is a *very* interesting MMORPG development. I really want to see where it leads. I tried it a couple of weeks ago and just played it continuously for a week. No time to eat, barely time to sleep, ridiculous hours. I pulled the plug eventually, but will surely go back. This game is ground-breaking.
MMORPGs are fun for me when I believe in the world. Eq is the only game that ever did that for me and I loved it.
I stopped playing for the same reason: things came along and broke my belief. The character models changed totally modifying how I looked. A lot of people left to go to DAOC making the world feel a lot less permanent (real) than before.
Make me believe in a virtual world and give me things to do, fun people to hang out with and that's just fine.
Complexity/levelling/etc. I was an enchanter and I know there were a lot of tactically challenging situations, especially in dungeons and stuff. Situations where you were on the edge of your seat wondering whether you'd survive or not. That castle next to Lesser Fay was a particular favorite or mine. Awesome stuff!
If you don't believe in the world, there's not really much point, might as well just play Renegade or whatever.
Just followed Sparr0's link, and this looks like a very innovative game. I've been looking for somehting like this for a while; used to send emails to Everquest asking for something like this: the ability to plant your own trees and so on.
Today's applications are optimized for single-processor environments, but there's no particular reason why many parts of applications couldn't be parellelized. You only have to look at Word, which is running real-time spell-checking, grammar-checking, paragraph alignment and so on (at least 3 independent threads straight off, and there's no reason why you couldn't have multiple threads for the spell-checking for example).
As far as games, there are a LOT of things going on at the same time. It would be child's play to make each particular module (AI, rendering, physics...) run as it's own thread; and just a little harder to run multiple threads for each module (eg use one thread for each unit in a strategy game).
Parallelization is the future. It's only a question of time before it becomes the norm rather than the exception.
Here's to the day when we have 1 Gig of processors on our main-boards!
> If you have no choice about the matter, you're not really being good, just controlled.
To what extent does it matter why someone is being "good"?
Liberty is not about having the right to do things that impose on the liberty of others, but about being able to do anything you like, as long as it does not impose on the liberty of others.
Law enforcement upholds the perimeters between each person's personal liberty. Of course, the perimeters need to be clearly defined whilst not being destructive
Would it be so bad if it became physically impossible to attack someone?
(Example: network administration tools. Better to give full admin access to the whole user population and fire anyone who abuses it, or just lockdown the system so no-one can even try to cross that "liberty perimeter"?)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, imagine that a new type of quark is generated that is much heavier than other quarks. It sucks other nearby matter towards itself. When it bumps into other matter, it turns the quarks in that matter into these new heavy quarks too. It is self-propagating.
(Source: "End Day" by BBC or Channel 4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/tv/end_day.shtml )
Well, as a non-US person, I'm quite glad people are starting to think like this :-) That said, many of the most creative companies and developments continue to be American.
:-)
It sucks for non-Americans because it's so hard to get an H1B (at least, few game companies are willing to provide one for example, because they want the game written yesterday, not once the visa arrives in 3 months...).
However, maybe I'm biased, but I feel the creativity coming out of America to be extraordinary. For example, there is:
- Microsoft
- Google
- Blizzard
- LindenLab
- SOE (maybe Sony itself originated in Japan, but SOE seems to be primarily US-based AFAIK?)
- most major search engines: Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo
- Slashdot
It is all the more surprising given that salaries in the United States are generally higher than anywhere else in the world, sometimes by an order of magnitude, but it does seem to be true?
Note that C# is free, as in beer, on Windows platforms. It is part of the .Net Framework runtime. Just look for the csc.exe executable.
Totally agree with this.
In addition, the common perception of AI as being a bunch of rules means that many people dont believe in anything even approaching strong AI.
As far as how to advance down the road to strong AI, maybe a good way is to assume infinite computational, memory and I/O capacity, then create algorithms based on that?
If we look at a previous "impossible" technology, the development of aircraft, that only became possible with the development of the internal combustion engine, steam engines were just too heavy. No reason why we cant generate some sortof learning algorithm today based on the technology of tomorrow.
Note a slight refinement to this: we probably shouldnt *quite* assume infinite computational capacity, since that would allow us to consider k-hard algorithms to be soluble, which they probably are not. This doesnt mean we cant use k-hard algorithms, only that we cant expect to get the "perfect" answer from them, just a rough best-guess answer in finite time... rather like our own brains.
Started to put some of these ideas down in a sourceforge project at http://artlearn.sf.net/
Hugh Perkins
Nuclear waste is a lot better than having another major world war. Energy is fundamental to a modern society, and if we start to run out, or it gets really expensive, its not a Good Thing. Wars can and do happen over this sort of thing.
Energy lies at the heart of the economy of our society. We've automated things such as farming, manufacturing, and so on, so what controls prices is, yes the price of raw materials, but also: energy. Manufacturing aluminium is really expensive for example, simply because of the energy demands of electrolysing the ore. Reducing the price of energy is key to our development and progress.
Using nuclear power is critical to our society, and we should be using it as much as possible. Not to do so is almost criminal.
I'd much rather a little extra radiation each day than a major world war.
Hugh
Javascript/AJAX is an awesome combination. Scripting languages provide very awesome RAD, whilst using a web browser + javascript + xmlhttprequest provides a very smooth professional appearance to your application. .Net and ASP .Net are cool, but my personal experience is that development times tend to be quite long, compared to the same application in Javascript/XMLHttpRequest.
.Net provides web form widgets that work along similar lines to VB forms elements. However, plain old html is much easier to work with, more dynamic and more flexible than VB-type widgets. The .Net widgets do provide the illusion that the application is client-based, but AJAX does this too, and is much easier to use. ASP .Net provides a form editor but it tends to work uneasily with custom-edited HTML.
One issue is variable declaration. Declaring a variable as an XMLElement rather than simply typing var takes a half second or so longer each time. Certain results need to be cast to be useful, for example, SelectSingleNode often needs to be cast into an XMLElement. You can't easily write a function that can handle many datatypes, and the datatypes tend to be purvasive throughout your project, difficult to change, at least without using typediffs, which has its own overhead.
ASP
Javascript/XMLHttpRequest rock totally. They provide the separation of display and code that ASP.Net provides. They're lightweight, readily maintainable, easy to read, and very flexible and powerful.
Obviously, it would be unwise to state that AJAX is the best solution for every scenario, but it's certainly a highly optimal solution for a wealth of functional, technical and user specifications. So much so that Microsoft is currently trying to move ASP.Net to use AJAX, the Atlas project!
Hugh
From the website:
"M400 Skycar Deposit Information
"Deposit is refundable until after a successful transitioning flight has occurred. Thereafter deposits are refundable only if Final Delivery Price exceeds List Price (as adjusted for CPI-W) by 5%, OR Standard Equipment List has been shortened OR Guaranteed Performance Specifications are not met, OR FAA Certification Date of the M400 Skycar occurs after December 31, 2008 or a Purchase Agreement is executed prior to FAA certification. "
"Your required deposit amount is as follows:
"Delivery Position List Price
25-100 $995,000
101-200 $750,000
201-500 $500,000"
So, they're anticipating obtaining FAA approval by 2008. The price for a car depends on how long you're willing to wait. Starts off at one million, and drops to half a million if you're willing to wait till 200 have already been sold.
Hugh
http://metaverse.sf.net/ is an opensource SL-like project under development.
It's using ode physics engine, Lua scripting engine, and it will shortly be using Python as a high-level glue language for the application development itself.
If you go to http://sf.net/projects/metaverse, you can click on Monitor to monitor the file releases for new file releases. The current ones are a little old, but there should be a new one out soon.
Hugh Perkins
Bear in mind that the cv of *everyone* above you looks better if they are employing more people, not fewer. This goes right up to a very high level.
The only people who really care about cutting costs are the share-holders.
Actually, if your program requires the user to install MySQL, that counts as "redistributing" MySQL, according to their FAQ.
I'm in China now, reading and submitting to slashdot. As random info, I tried accessing the following sites, from a cybercafe here, with the following results:
reuters.com/news.html -> ok
www.iht.com -> ok
www.cnn.com -> ok
www.lemonde.fr -> ok
and you can see that slashdot is working
Isn't linux missing something called DirectX? Possibly something to include for a forthcoming release.
Yeah, what a waste of thousand's of years of technology!
> The real problem with user scripting is that once you have the equivalent of magic in the world, you can really piss people off. And that's hard to sandbox or detect algorithmically.
:-)
SecondLife has a pretty decent solution to this. The scripts are treated as part of the world and can do no more or less than the avatar that owns them.
You can't do arbitrary things to arbitrary avatars or objects from a script.
What you CAN do is build a script that does what you want, that communicate with other scripts and objects, and you give the script to other players, as part of an attachment.
By accepting to wear the attachment, other players are agreeing to run your script and accept the consequences of that. If they don't like it, they just have to take it off
As a final safeguard, scripts have to ask permissions before doing certain things, eg make their avatar give money to someone else.
It's fairly easy to make a wristband that players wear when they wish to take part in your virtual world.
Bump, bumpety, bump, bump, bump...
Yes, SL is unique in the sense that it is a world created by the players. For a 3D online persistant world, this is either a first, or the first to do it really well.
Little bit of background: it's a dynamic world, which downloads as you move around. If I build a house next to you, you see me building it! It appears, and it stays there, even after I log out.
To make the world come alive, you can add scripts to the world, which run server side. Think about that for a second, that's a lot of power! You can make objects do stuff for you and interact. It's really very flexible.
The IP comes into play, because there are players who are professional developers and who want to contribute to the scripting codebase of the game on an OpenSource, GPL'd basis.
I'm not a lawyer, but... from previous Slashdot discussions, a contract is valid only if both parties gain something from the contract.
If I give you a bit of paper which you sign which says just that you will pay me $4000 per month, this is not a valid contract because you don't gain anything from it.
Similarly, if you buy a game from a shop, and when you get it home and install it, you click on something and agree to it, the thing you just agreed to isn't valid because you don't gain anything from it. You already bought the game so it's too late.
However, if you agree to a contract which gives you the right to download and use the game, then it is a valid contract, because you each gain something: the company gains your agreement, and you gain the right to play the game.
Hugh
Second Life is a *very* interesting MMORPG development. I really want to see where it leads. I tried it a couple of weeks ago and just played it continuously for a week. No time to eat, barely time to sleep, ridiculous hours. I pulled the plug eventually, but will surely go back. This game is ground-breaking.
Hugh
MMORPGs are fun for me when I believe in the world. Eq is the only game that ever did that for me and I loved it.
I stopped playing for the same reason: things came along and broke my belief. The character models changed totally modifying how I looked. A lot of people left to go to DAOC making the world feel a lot less permanent (real) than before.
Make me believe in a virtual world and give me things to do, fun people to hang out with and that's just fine.
Complexity/levelling/etc. I was an enchanter and I know there were a lot of tactically challenging situations, especially in dungeons and stuff. Situations where you were on the edge of your seat wondering whether you'd survive or not. That castle next to Lesser Fay was a particular favorite or mine. Awesome stuff!
If you don't believe in the world, there's not really much point, might as well just play Renegade or whatever.
Just followed Sparr0's link, and this looks like a very innovative game. I've been looking for somehting like this for a while; used to send emails to Everquest asking for something like this: the ability to plant your own trees and so on.
"Endgame Enigma" describes something like this scenario. Pretty fun read.
Today's applications are optimized for single-processor environments, but there's no particular reason why many parts of applications couldn't be parellelized. You only have to look at Word, which is running real-time spell-checking, grammar-checking, paragraph alignment and so on (at least 3 independent threads straight off, and there's no reason why you couldn't have multiple threads for the spell-checking for example). As far as games, there are a LOT of things going on at the same time. It would be child's play to make each particular module (AI, rendering, physics...) run as it's own thread; and just a little harder to run multiple threads for each module (eg use one thread for each unit in a strategy game). Parallelization is the future. It's only a question of time before it becomes the norm rather than the exception. Here's to the day when we have 1 Gig of processors on our main-boards!
Yeah, wicked, then as soon as one dodgy app takes down java.exe, you lose everything else you were working on. Oh the joy!
Vision, 3D rendering, artificial intelligence, moving units around in a strategy game, web server, file server, mail server, MMORPG server...
To what extent does it matter why someone is being "good"?
Liberty is not about having the right to do things that impose on the liberty of others, but about being able to do anything you like, as long as it does not impose on the liberty of others.
Law enforcement upholds the perimeters between each person's personal liberty. Of course, the perimeters need to be clearly defined whilst not being destructive
Would it be so bad if it became physically impossible to attack someone? (Example: network administration tools. Better to give full admin access to the whole user population and fire anyone who abuses it, or just lockdown the system so no-one can even try to cross that "liberty perimeter"?)
Many things are obvious to those working in the field. "Non-obvious" is pretty subjective.