his main point seems to be a fairly articulate position that features in virtual worlds are not selected on good long time design merits, but rather on short term individual wants.
I have quite a bit of experience of this sort of world evolution from the rubber sword wielding Live Action Role Play communities in England. As most of them started very small and grew in dribs and drabs, it is fair to say the systems owe more to evolution than overall design.
To take the first point Permanent Death, you are absolutely right that people dislike it because they don't enjoy losing their investment, and i have seen many LARP systems with quick and permanent death evolve into Nerf love fests by the players (who are also the monsters in their spare time) because of precisely that reason, players hate to lose their investment, and so no one ever gets killed. The bitter twist however that those systems become very dull and because there is no real risk, and with no risk there is no sense of achievement.
Other systems that have a more gradual Perm Death System (three strikes and you're out - type affairs) don't tend to have the self-nerfing evolution, and such systems have more achievement and excitement because characters perm die.
the reason i think is simple... people choose what is good for them, not what is good for the game, and so if they have the power they will actually destroy the game they are playing...
(btw the games you designed were they stand-alone or MMOGS? I ask, because he makes the point that the design evolution of the two are quite different.)
With the amount of money required to produce games, and the increasing levels of expectation on the part of the consumer, do you see the distinction,(and independance) between say the film industry and the immersive games industry blurring further, or do you see them as intrinsically separate art forms?
Come on, we all know nothing can ever be truly scratch-proof.
Not a troll, but a genuine query... how do we know nothing can be scratch proof?
its been more years than i care to remember since i did chemistry and i only vaguely recall mohr's scale, and i seem to recall then that it was flawed (no pun intended) and needed to go to 11 or some such due to new material chemistry {or have i just been watching too much spinal tap?]
my point is, do we have a good enough understanding of the physics/chemistry of scratching and hardness to be able to make that assertation?
Or to put it another way what's the hard evidence?
Yeah, we're probably setting her up to get ostrasized in school, but then again, if she'd just pick up on some of those fighting techniques, that might not happen either!,
Indeed! Once she can master shooting fireballs from her fists and jumping over buildings, i doubt she'll have much trouble in kindergarten!
Re:RTFM is the fix?
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
from TFM
Alenia Spazio's insistence on confidentiality may have played a role in this oversight. NASA reviewers were never given the specs of the receiver..."Alenia Spazio considered JPL to be a competitor and treated the radio design as proprietary data."
...NASA probably could have insisted on seeing the design if it had agreed to sign standard nondisclosure agreements, but NASA didn't consider the effort worthwhile, automatically assuming Alenia Spazio would compensate for the changing data rate.
so in this case the problem was indeed caused by the fact they couldn't RTFM to check the supplier had done the job correctly.
I think it is all summed up with the line "An Alenia Spazio spokeswoman said that none of the company's officials were available to comment because of a company-wide summer vacation period."
So, next time you're about to make a joke about water recycling, spare a thought for those of us not living in the British Isles, with its endless wet season;)
ah you are obviously unaware that most of the rainfall in the UK is "the wrong sort of rain" and due to a victorian water system with cronic lack of maintenance for years, we frequently have extensive hose pipe bans here too...
Although i will grant you not as bad as the ones down under. They are perhaps a little bit more frustrating considering the relative amounts of rainfall.
The result of my own personal study: after 71F, I start to get WPS (Warm Puppy Syndrome). To see what I am talking about, take one (1) puppy and apply heat and food liberally.
ok i've done some testing on this but do you really start drooling, twitching slightly and smelling of slightly sweet puppy poo?
Of course after WPS comes Hot Puppy Syndrome, tongue out, tendency to fall over and chew at the air making whiney noises till someone comes and takes you out of the hot sun.(insert comment about maddogs and englishmen here)
Interestingly under UK heath and safety law there is a minimum temperature the working office needs to be, but no maximum.
(AOL-user)
No we need to suport Microsoft otherwise pepople will get linux, I'm not sure what that is but Mr Ballmer makes it sound like some sort of disease, you get these "open sores" or something, anyway it kills programmers or something...ooo shiney!
(/AOL-user)
I have yet to pick up one of mr Stephenson's books, (have made note to self to pick some up next shop) but on the subject of poor endings, may i recommend anything by Iain M Banks.
I don't see his name floated on slashdot that often, so i suspect he isn't quite as big in the states as perhaps he deserves to be.
his Culture novels are a joy to read, and his story telling is state of the art. His books are strong throughout, and are crafted as a whole, none of the 90% syndrome that quite a lot of other science fiction i've read suffers from.
he has a rare talent for pacing and suprise. He is particuarly fond of starting a story in the middle, showing the history at the same time as advancing the plot, and of course it is only when we discover exactly how the path began, that we fully appreciate where the plot has ended up (quite often in a radically different place than we had assumed).
has a successful track record of improving the performance of public agencies...His tenure at ODJFS has demonstrated once again that he knows how to bring the best out of his employees.
yeah calling people stupid really helps to bring out the best in them...
my favourite quote though is "... what I am most looking forward to now is spending more time with my family"..Sounds like Tom has been talked to by the legal dept to me.
Yes, not knowing if a phone is working in Podunk, WI is the same as 10s of Millions of people dying. Excellent analogy, you broke Godwin without even putting up a fight. You lose!
do you even have any idea what you are talking about? clearly not I think you'll find the horrific death toll of the Holocaust to be between 5-6 million Jews and a similar number of non-Jewish victims, (the gypsies and the homosexuals for example) a quite horrific enough figure without being misrepresented as 10s of millions.
The number of victims of Stalin's death camps and mass executions is certainly in the 10's of millions however.
Now who do you think the German and Russian People were to allow such terrible actions to be done in their name? They were people like you and me who had their freedoms and rights taken from them slowly and under the guise of Just Cause and Security. They were given monsters to be scared of, and more importantly to blame, and they lost control of their country to very evil dictators.
There is an old adage about the best way to boil a frog is to turn the heat up slowly, so it doesn't notice. From what I can see America is having the gas turned up notch by notch.
As for the very trivial banning of phone outage records, it is not that they are being withheld... it is that the reason given is "Homeland Security".
I seem to recall a fairly convincing documentry (probably BBC) regarding a former KGB controller who took large numbers of records with him with the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
The files demonstrated that where as much of the millitary might of the Soviet empire was bluff, their intelligence work was first rate.
The thing I found darkly funny and quite ironic was that the files showed there WERE large numbers of communist agents in the state department. (although probably not the ones Joe "mad staring eyes" McCarthy could see.
Still as you state, it's a good job we don't have witch hunts in this age, we clearly have learnt the lessons of history... hmm the news is just teling me i'm now required to be fingerprinted and photographed on entering the US... no no... I'm sure we've learned.
But it's still better then not being able to bare arms at all.
A gilded cage is still a cage, the right to bear arms (as opposed to bare arms which means you can wear a t-shirt) is a vestigal and useless right.
The only thing bearing arms against the US govenment will achieve is a quick and violent death for the said bearer. Have a look at how violently the unarmed anti-war demonstrations were put down in the US, what do you think the response would have been if those protesters were armed?
Dissent is now being touted as un-american, armed dissent will be labeled as terrorist uprising, and we all know what a fair trial "terrorists" get in the US.
The right of any american to form an oranized militia is long gone, if you manage not to be shot, you'd be shipped off to guantanamo bay faster than you can say "but it's in the constitution....."
the reason for the concern over low turnout is of course because it means that a small well motivated group can swing the vote significantly.
Just look at the havoc UKIP caused in the local elections, no actual political insight, but some vacant guy off the telly and mindless prejudice... one of the costs of giving everyone the vote i suppose.. (half of them are below average intelligence you know!)
1) Evolution doesn't find global optima very well, it tends to get stuck in local optima.
very true, in much the same way molecules settle to local energy states, (i always get a mental image of mercury flowing over rocky terrain, settling in little local pools).
of course the fact that the local stabilities occur, is bloody good news for us, skipping over the bland simplicity of the universe if molecules found their lowest energy states, it's hard to imagine what a globaly optimised evolutionary landscape would be like... bugger all diversity that's for sure. I wonder how long before our ability to model the world will give us the ability to envisage some of these globaly optimised life-forms?
2) We can do it carrying stuff!
yes indeed,and as we all know.." the secret is to bang the rocks together guys!"
yes I recall they concluded that they were coprophages, much like rabbits, although there were no actual observations of the re-ingesting of faeces, there was no other way the researchers could account for the missing energy, other than from a second go at digesting the plants.
IIRC "sikafa" means something like "lasts all week" in the indigious tongue, refering to the amount of meat you get off a dead one. Something like a turkey perhaps?
which of gould's ideas were you thinking? i know a lot of the work on the burgess shale has been re-evaluated lately, but i can't off the top of my head think of anything else really contentious (apart from the whole progress thing he and dawkins differed on)...
as for Dawkin, its hard to fault the man who winds up marrying lala ward (romana II) after being introduced on the set of Dr Who, by one the writers, a certain Douglas Adams.
He is far more bracing than Gould's gentle style however, the man doesn't tolerate fools period. As such i would recommend gould's easy to tackle short essays, as an introduction, before tackling Dawkins no-holds-barred approach.
i think i'd recommend "A Devil's Chaplain:..." as the first of Dawkin's books to read, before "watchmaker"
Slashdot Mirror
did you actually RTFA or just skim it?
his main point seems to be a fairly articulate position that features in virtual worlds are not selected on good long time design merits, but rather on short term individual wants.
I have quite a bit of experience of this sort of world evolution from the rubber sword wielding Live Action Role Play communities in England. As most of them started very small and grew in dribs and drabs, it is fair to say the systems owe more to evolution than overall design.
To take the first point Permanent Death, you are absolutely right that people dislike it because they don't enjoy losing their investment, and i have seen many LARP systems with quick and permanent death evolve into Nerf love fests by the players (who are also the monsters in their spare time) because of precisely that reason, players hate to lose their investment, and so no one ever gets killed. The bitter twist however that those systems become very dull and because there is no real risk, and with no risk there is no sense of achievement.
Other systems that have a more gradual Perm Death System (three strikes and you're out - type affairs) don't tend to have the self-nerfing evolution, and such systems have more achievement and excitement because characters perm die.
the reason i think is simple... people choose what is good for them, not what is good for the game, and so if they have the power they will actually destroy the game they are playing...
(btw the games you designed were they stand-alone or MMOGS? I ask, because he makes the point that the design evolution of the two are quite different.)
where do you see the future of gaming going?
With the amount of money required to produce games, and the increasing levels of expectation on the part of the consumer, do you see the distinction,(and independance) between say the film industry and the immersive games industry blurring further, or do you see them as intrinsically separate art forms?
Come on, we all know nothing can ever be truly scratch-proof.
Not a troll, but a genuine query... how do we know nothing can be scratch proof?
its been more years than i care to remember since i did chemistry and i only vaguely recall mohr's scale, and i seem to recall then that it was flawed (no pun intended) and needed to go to 11 or some such due to new material chemistry {or have i just been watching too much spinal tap?]
my point is, do we have a good enough understanding of the physics/chemistry of scratching and hardness to be able to make that assertation?
Or to put it another way what's the hard evidence?
Indeed! Once she can master shooting fireballs from her fists and jumping over buildings, i doubt she'll have much trouble in kindergarten!
so in this case the problem was indeed caused by the fact they couldn't RTFM to check the supplier had done the job correctly.
I think it is all summed up with the line "An Alenia Spazio spokeswoman said that none of the company's officials were available to comment because of a company-wide summer vacation period."
ah you are obviously unaware that most of the rainfall in the UK is "the wrong sort of rain" and due to a victorian water system with cronic lack of maintenance for years, we frequently have extensive hose pipe bans here too...
Although i will grant you not as bad as the ones down under. They are perhaps a little bit more frustrating considering the relative amounts of rainfall.
ok i've done some testing on this but do you really start drooling, twitching slightly and smelling of slightly sweet puppy poo?
Of course after WPS comes Hot Puppy Syndrome, tongue out, tendency to fall over and chew at the air making whiney noises till someone comes and takes you out of the hot sun.(insert comment about maddogs and englishmen here)
Interestingly under UK heath and safety law there is a minimum temperature the working office needs to be, but no maximum.
(AOL-user)
No we need to suport Microsoft otherwise pepople will get linux, I'm not sure what that is but Mr Ballmer makes it sound like some sort of disease, you get these "open sores" or something, anyway it kills programmers or something...ooo shiney!
(/AOL-user)
I have yet to pick up one of mr Stephenson's books, (have made note to self to pick some up next shop) but on the subject of poor endings, may i recommend anything by Iain M Banks.
I don't see his name floated on slashdot that often, so i suspect he isn't quite as big in the states as perhaps he deserves to be.
his Culture novels are a joy to read, and his story telling is state of the art. His books are strong throughout, and are crafted as a whole, none of the 90% syndrome that quite a lot of other science fiction i've read suffers from.
he has a rare talent for pacing and suprise. He is particuarly fond of starting a story in the middle, showing the history at the same time as advancing the plot, and of course it is only when we discover exactly how the path began, that we fully appreciate where the plot has ended up (quite often in a radically different place than we had assumed).
Tom Hayes to leave after three years at helm of agency
according to the news release he...
yeah calling people stupid really helps to bring out the best in them...
my favourite quote though is "... what I am most looking forward to now is spending more time with my family"..Sounds like Tom has been talked to by the legal dept to me.
confess quickly.. think of your credit rating!
do you even have any idea what you are talking about? clearly not I think you'll find the horrific death toll of the Holocaust to be between 5-6 million Jews and a similar number of non-Jewish victims, (the gypsies and the homosexuals for example) a quite horrific enough figure without being misrepresented as 10s of millions.
The number of victims of Stalin's death camps and mass executions is certainly in the 10's of millions however.
Now who do you think the German and Russian People were to allow such terrible actions to be done in their name? They were people like you and me who had their freedoms and rights taken from them slowly and under the guise of Just Cause and Security. They were given monsters to be scared of, and more importantly to blame, and they lost control of their country to very evil dictators.
There is an old adage about the best way to boil a frog is to turn the heat up slowly, so it doesn't notice. From what I can see America is having the gas turned up notch by notch.
As for the very trivial banning of phone outage records, it is not that they are being withheld... it is that the reason given is "Homeland Security".
I seem to recall a fairly convincing documentry (probably BBC) regarding a former KGB controller who took large numbers of records with him with the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The files demonstrated that where as much of the millitary might of the Soviet empire was bluff, their intelligence work was first rate. The thing I found darkly funny and quite ironic was that the files showed there WERE large numbers of communist agents in the state department. (although probably not the ones Joe "mad staring eyes" McCarthy could see. Still as you state, it's a good job we don't have witch hunts in this age, we clearly have learnt the lessons of history... hmm the news is just teling me i'm now required to be fingerprinted and photographed on entering the US ... no no ... I'm sure we've learned.
A gilded cage is still a cage, the right to bear arms (as opposed to bare arms which means you can wear a t-shirt) is a vestigal and useless right.
The only thing bearing arms against the US govenment will achieve is a quick and violent death for the said bearer. Have a look at how violently the unarmed anti-war demonstrations were put down in the US, what do you think the response would have been if those protesters were armed?
Dissent is now being touted as un-american, armed dissent will be labeled as terrorist uprising, and we all know what a fair trial "terrorists" get in the US.
The right of any american to form an oranized militia is long gone, if you manage not to be shot, you'd be shipped off to guantanamo bay faster than you can say "but it's in the constitution....."
Remember if the JPEG artifacts don't fit... you must acquit.
Is there a word for that, then? You know, being run down by an ambulance or something?
annoying?
Excellent! you probably also advocate those annoying "you sent a mail with a virus" return messages that just clog up bandwidth.
the problem with vigilante action is that it causes almost as much damage as the thing it's reacting to.
Not even going into the obvious problems of spoofed attacks, designed to cause the vigilante systems to attack innoncent targets.
this solution does little to cure the problem, and everything to needlessly waste bandwidth
the reason for the concern over low turnout is of course because it means that a small well motivated group can swing the vote significantly.
Just look at the havoc UKIP caused in the local elections, no actual political insight, but some vacant guy off the telly and mindless prejudice... one of the costs of giving everyone the vote i suppose.. (half of them are below average intelligence you know!)
1) Evolution doesn't find global optima very well, it tends to get stuck in local optima.
very true, in much the same way molecules settle to local energy states, (i always get a mental image of mercury flowing over rocky terrain, settling in little local pools).
of course the fact that the local stabilities occur, is bloody good news for us, skipping over the bland simplicity of the universe if molecules found their lowest energy states, it's hard to imagine what a globaly optimised evolutionary landscape would be like... bugger all diversity that's for sure. I wonder how long before our ability to model the world will give us the ability to envisage some of these globaly optimised life-forms?
2) We can do it carrying stuff!
yes indeed,and as we all know.." the secret is to bang the rocks together guys!"
ah they do in the UK, as i just posted
funnily enough, that was exactly the same story that came to my mind. You would have though they would have got more than $3000 though
over here in the UK the machines tended to be built into brick walls (hence the expression "i'm just getting some cash from the hole in the wall")
this has led to enterprising thieves using a JCB to steal the whole damn thing netting a cool $140,000.
just goes to show, that like so much in life, the real money isn't in making something, it's in stealing someone elses.
I take your point, so essentially a learned trait might enable a new set of selection pressures.
sort of like suggesting the hot water bathing macaques of japan may develop webbed feet, as a flippant example.
yes I recall they concluded that they were coprophages, much like rabbits, although there were no actual observations of the re-ingesting of faeces, there was no other way the researchers could account for the missing energy, other than from a second go at digesting the plants.
IIRC "sikafa" means something like "lasts all week" in the indigious tongue, refering to the amount of meat you get off a dead one. Something like a turkey perhaps?
that's humans three, gazelle nil, then :)
which of gould's ideas were you thinking? i know a lot of the work on the burgess shale has been re-evaluated lately, but i can't off the top of my head think of anything else really contentious (apart from the whole progress thing he and dawkins differed on)...
as for Dawkin, its hard to fault the man who winds up marrying lala ward (romana II) after being introduced on the set of Dr Who, by one the writers, a certain Douglas Adams.
He is far more bracing than Gould's gentle style however, the man doesn't tolerate fools period. As such i would recommend gould's easy to tackle short essays, as an introduction, before tackling Dawkins no-holds-barred approach.
i think i'd recommend "A Devil's Chaplain:..." as the first of Dawkin's books to read, before "watchmaker"