You think humans are more adaptable than cockroaches or bacteria?
You're going to be in for a big shock when the nukes start flying.
Seriously, no one is worried that global warming is going to wipe out humanity. It's just going to make life for people living in Africa a whole lot more difficult (fewer viable crops), and force relocation of people who live near coasts.
That in and of itself is a bad thing, but to make matters worse, stochastic events like global warming have played a huge role in shaping evolution over the last few billion years. This was the point of Gould's book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, if you want more information.
Whether anthropogenic or not, global warming may be part of a larger shift away from large-brained mammals as the "dominant" species of the planet. And, speaking as a large-brained mammal, I don't like the idea of that.
We need more objective science, and less scare-mongering.
Seconded. I'd also like to see more environmental awareness (above and beyond just cutting CO2 emissions).
I'm running L4D on my (very) old computer, a 1.6 Ghz AMD single core with a 7600 GS and 1.5GB ram. The game runs fine at medium settings (despite the fact that I am way, way under the minimum system requirements), and when I briefly swapped out the 7600 for a 7900, I was able to turn a few of the settings from medium to high (1024x768, textures low, medium effects -> 1280x1024, textures medium, high effects) and still get a stable 20-25 average frame rate.
Not quality benchmarks, I know, but the engine hasn't changed drastically since HL2 except for graphical improvements (=GPU limited), so claims about it being CPU limited haven't been true since the first public version of the Source engine, and that's assuming they were even true back in 2004.
Let's assume you won't be pirating your games (which is widespread on the PC, and a big cost saver to the unwashed masses, but that's a whole other debate). Assuming you buy games rather than renting them, you'll still save $10 a game by not getting them on the console. Also, I don't know about Wii games, they might be cheaper.
For a PC, I've got to spend a maximum of around $1000 (in reality, less than that. That gets me everything I need to run Crysis at highest settings. Speakers, monitor, keyboard, everything. You can spend a whole lot less if you're just going to upgrade your existing box, too.
For a console, you've got the initial investment of the console, plus all those weird controllers that $random_game requires. Then, you've got to buy a new TV (the majority of people do not yet have HD, though this is changing. Games on the 360/PS3 look terrible without HD. If you say graphics don't matter, why are you upgrading your PC every two years?).
It's pretty variable how much you'll drop on a console vs. a PC, but unless you already have a HD TV and surround sound system, you can expect to spend at least three times as much. All for the privilege of paying $50 a year to use Xbox live?
Also, remember that you have to own a PC anyway, and most people upgrade that every about as often as they buy a new console. A bottom-line Dell is just a video card away from being a great gaming machine.
Perhaps you're confusing this with SchrÃdinger's cat, which may or may not die every time you masturbate, depending on whether masturbation counts as observation. Kinky, huh? (Additionally, he may or may not have an o with an umlaut instead of an Ã, if you're observing from websites with better Unicode support).
Or perhaps you're confusing this whole thing with Kitten Huffing which is the main reason behind Australia's internet filter.
Please. I prefer the term piracy. Calling it copyright infringement makes me feel like some loser sitting in his mothers basement trading 1s and 0s with other losers. Who wants to do that?
Piracy be nothing like yer copyright infringement, it be totally badass. ARRRRGH!
I cannot find any citations for 3D modeling from 2D video, but I didn't look very hard. You're probably right, it's beyond current models.
I think you're missing what I'm trying to say here, though. A sufficiently advanced neural network may be able to play CS without the need for actual 3D processing.
I'm pretty sure that I'm right, but I really can't prove it without more time and a supercomputer to run it on. I'm currently writing proposal for a grant so I can model the selection pressures leading to the evolution of the human brain, if I get funding, it would be simple to modify my proposed algorithm to play CS. I'll get back to you in about 5 years with the results, assuming funding doesn't fall through.
Also, we are a little less that clueless on the design of a roach. Insects are simple, stupid creatures that are still around because they can survive in many environments and reproduce quickly. They are a poor model for any AI, as they don't show nearly as much Hebbian reinforcement as other, more "advanced", species. If we could create a mouse-level intelligence, OTOH, we could "easily" select it up to a strong AI given a few decades.
I hate to respond to a troll, but you may be an unintentional one, so I'll try to explain.
All proteins are broken down and resynthesized in your body, so you don't need to worry about getting some protein from animals. There are 20 amino acids that are common to all life as we know it (needed to make polypeptides), 10 of these can be synthesized from the other 10, so as long as you've got these ten essential amino acids in your diet, you're all set (assuming you've got all the fats, lipids, etc. you need).
The certain macronutrients are stuff like omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, they are harder to obtain from non-meat sources, but it is possible (flax seeds, walnuts).
"Tons of books" is not a citation, not sure what point you're trying to make with that anyway. And as for your anecdotal evidence: I know a guy who's second cousin was vegetarian, and he didn't get severely sick, so there! (Seriously, your friend might not have been getting enough omega-3s, but I'm not a dietitian, so I can't say for sure).
Yes, I do think it's perfectly healthy. It's a bit more work to pick foods that give a complete and balanced diet (and a vegan diet is most definitely not healthy), but it is healthy.
Actually, this DRM is special. I think it could be responsible for the bugs people are seeing. Rockstar has gone out of their way to add in extra crap: dozens of little "easter eggs" like a spinning camera, missing textures, similar stuff, to copies that don't validate. It's more than a simple one time Securom check, there's at least a dozen different hooks that check to see if the version is legit.
This might be why the scene is having such trouble cracking the damned game. FeDOR may have finally cracked it, but it's taken more PROPERs than your average release.
Note/Disclaimer: I'm not going to pirate or buy this game, I'm nowhere near the minimum system requirements, and I don't generally pirate stuff anyway. I'm just following the scene releases so I can be the first one to laugh at Rockstar's "uncrackable, no really this time" DRM.
That's just plain wrong. Many crops, especially soy beans and nuts, will provide tons of proteins.
Pick up any environmental studies textbook and they will confirm that a vegetarian diet is more efficient from an environmental standpoint.
Having said that, the only nutrient that cannot be obtained from plants is Vitamin B12, you must consume some animal product (even a small amount of something like milk or eggs is enough) to get enough of it.
Note: I'm not trying to force a vegetarian diet on you, go on and enjoy your steak. But know that it is possible to do without it.
I am not talking about giving the AI any more information than the user has, nor any special controls/interface. When I say games have rules, I mean in regards to movement speeds, damage, and the like. A machine can process these things and respond to a changing environment quicker than a human.
3D image processing in a game is finite (especially using low-res models like in CS), and there are only 4 different heads to recognize for each side.
In a small data set like this, NNs can and will quickly outcompete humans.
accurate 3D model-building from a (sythetic) video in real-time
I'm not sure if this is exactly how the NN would evolve to function. I'm thinking it would be evolutionary advantageous (shorter processing times) for them just to use a wall following tactic and shoot at anything that matches one of the four enemy heads. That's one of the problems with a genetic algorithm: you can't directly control how it will work. If I could isolate the selection pressure that would give an advantage to NNs that could recreate a 3D environment from a 2D image (even not in real time), I'd happily take your challenge. I don't really know anything about PoV rendering (except that it's almost impossible), so I can't comment beyond that.
Also, your analogy to driving a RC car is flawed: that analogy uses real world data, and Hebbian learning algorithms tend to balk when given completely new data sets (damned environmental stochasticity). Adaptation to new data sets is where our current ANNs models break down compared to actual neurons.
Did the AI improve in later patches? Because I played QW when it first came out, against my brother (LAN) and the bots were as dumb as they come. Constantly driving vehicles into walls, running in front of me while I was shooting to try to give me a med pack, standing up out of cover to reload.
It was a game-ruining experience, and if it's actually been improved since then, it would probably make QW worth playing.
They can, with training (just against themselves!) beat human opponents at simple turn based games (citation). That's the same level playing field you describe.
It's been 10 years of GA optimization and theory, and 10 years of Moore's law since then. Computers have much better reflexes than humans, and you're telling me that a GA couldn't beat a master at CS?
Tell you what: give me $50,000 in funding, six months to train the AI to general FPS rules (headshot, movement, general weapon effectiveness, etc.), and another six months for the GA to advance it for CS, and it will beat anything.
If I had to pick an approach to take right now, I'd partition up the tasks (defuse bomb/identify player/is friend or foe/aim for head/etc.) to various independent, co-evolving, ANNs. There might be a better way, but that approach seems have worked pretty well for these guys (albeit that's not real time).
The point is, games have rules. Once you've learned the rules, you're unstoppable.
a simulation of anything can be done serially given enough time, never mind in parallel. But it will never be an exact representation of the real physical process and in the case of brains
But it may be close enough. You've only got so many inputs and outputs, so just roll through every single neuron in your ANN and simulate what it does at that given step. At time t+1, do the same thing again.
I've seen a number of neural networks that do this, and yes, there's always a little less stochasticity when comparing them to actual neurons in a brain, but that's only to be expected.
given little insight into how they actually work anyway beyond the most basic I/O of neurons.
Also, my understanding is that most ANNs are based on biological models to begin with (largely the Hodgkin-Huxley model), so how would they give new insight into neuron activity? But, if you talk about anything other than individual neurons, ANNs have taught us a bit about to meta structure of the brain (synaptic plasticity) for one example, not to mention that they have given plenty of new insight into biological fields as diverse and unexpected as ecology or bioinformatics. And that's just from a 30 second search on Pubmed.
An evolutionary algorithm applied to neural networks will eventually achieve Turing-complete AI, but right now it's just in its infancy. The question is whether or not we can "intelligently design" an AI quicker than we can brute-force evolve one from a simple beginning. Psuedo-parallel will be good enough to for AI, IMHO, but then again I'm just a wacko biologist with no real experience working with ANNs.
Oh, yeah, on topic: I recommend using Pubmed, Google Scholar and Wikipedia to learn about this stuff, but taking a class in neurobiology is also extremely helpful. (I will definitely be checking out a couple of the books recommended here too, though).
Anyone else think the mouse will be replaced by a neural interface?
We keep the keyboard for quick and accurate input, and allow the brain to control where the pointer is on the screen. If I want to close a window, I concentrate to move the mouse to the corner of the screen, and think "click", the window closes.
Maintains backwards compatibility with legacy apps, makes for an amazing RTS game, and uses existing (currently primitive) tech. Also requires a special hat.
Well, when you're trying to save an endangered species, you admit you can't avoid inbreeding and select for individuals that show the lowest amount of inbreeding depression. That way you could, theoretically, revive the entire species from only a few different clones.
Having said that, elephants (and I assume mammoths) raise few young over the course of their lives, so you'd be hard pressed to eliminate all of the inbreeding depression: if you only get 2-3 individuals/decade to work with, you just won't get the phenotypic variation necessary to eliminate inbreeding.
Chronically endangered species with a constant small population size have undergone just this sort of thing, while populations that have undergone a sudden drop in numbers (Passenger Pigeon comes to mind) simply drop off too fast for natural selection to counteract inbreeding.
All I can say is thank you. That post gave me fantastic information in an easy to understand format. You should repost it to Wikipedia so that more people can see it. Especially the stuff about L1/L2/L3/RAM/Swap, that's the best explanation I've ever heard.
Thanks for techreport.com, I'd somehow missed that site.
I'm not sure why exactly I'd be screwed when USB3.0 comes out. Will it break my existing mouse and keyboard? How about my flash drives?
And if I really need USB3 functionality, I'll be able to buy that PCIE card, so I fail to see what the problem is.
I am well aware of the benefits of a good video card, and I opted for a $25 dollar processor (2800) and a $150 VC (7900GS) several years ago, and they served me (really) well. However, they are in need of an upgrade (especially as I play RTS games and a single-core seems to be holding me back), and I'd like to know what to look for in a good gaming processor.
(Sycraft-fu's post further down really answered my question).
You seem like the right person to ask this of, so, how exactly do I choose what's best for the job?
I want a good, cheap, stable, processor that's going to be able to handle every game made in the next few years (the same thing every home user wants).
I can't really judge by GHz, since my ancient 1.6 GHz processor is enough to handle most modern games when overclocked (2.13 GHz). So what do I look at? L1/L2 cache? FSB? Does the tech (45 nm) factor into speed at all, or is does it just give a general idea of how advanced the chip is?
I want to know more about the underlying technology and how it impacts real-world performance rather than just "buy a Core 2 Quad Yorkfield 2.83GHz 12MB L2 Cache, n00b": if I wanted a recommendation for a specific chip I could use one of a million benchmarks and pick one that's rated highly on Newegg.
I know, I know, JFGI, but I can't find a decent explanation anywhere. Even Wikipedia (while having plenty of great technical info) doesn't really tell me how having (for example) a larger cache will improve performance.
That's not Slashdot, it's human nature in general.
People want to be right, so when something comes out favoring your point of view, you tend to ignore potential problems with it. Having said that, I learned my tech skills due to gaming: I wanted the best power for the lowest cost, so I learned about home system building and overclocking. There you go, a study confirms my anecdotal evidence, and I tend to believe it.
Well, kmcarr, I bow before your expertise. I've never sequenced a genome, let alone the type of massively parallel sequencing you've done (you're the guy that worked on Arabidopsis sequencing, right?)
In my defense, however, I only said that 454 had made life a lot easier for people doing sequencing, not that the algorithm itself was simple. I also note that you yourself used their pyrophosphate technique - to say that it's anything but a huge technological leap forward is to undercredit it. I repeat, 454 pioneered the sequencing techniques we use today.
Wish you'd post more often to Slashdot, we could do with more biology types around here.
The big achievement here is the defragmentation of all that DNA
The folks at 454 Life Sciences made reconstructing a genome from lots of little pieces pretty simple by using an algorithm that looks for common fragments (ex AAGGCTTCTA and CTTCTATCTGG probably go together to form AAGGCTTCTATCTGG).
They also pretty much pioneered modern sequencing techniques.
The news here (IMHO) is that we've been able to read the genome of an extinct animal. That is an impressive achievement, a few BP errors notwithstanding. If we have multiple copies of the genome (multiple cells), we should be able to figure out what the correct sequence is (mutations are random, and no two cells will have the same mutations). Hair is not exactly the prime target for sequencing due to its exposure to UV light (UV light wreaks havoc on DNA), but with a little work we should be able to the actual sequence.
So at the end of the day, the Nobel prize goes to the guy who can figure out how many chromosomes a mammoth had. I'd like to say "just use the number that elephants have" but 7 million years (last common ancester) is easily enough time for chromosome duplication to occur.
Slashdot Mirror
You think humans are more adaptable than cockroaches or bacteria?
You're going to be in for a big shock when the nukes start flying.
Seriously, no one is worried that global warming is going to wipe out humanity. It's just going to make life for people living in Africa a whole lot more difficult (fewer viable crops), and force relocation of people who live near coasts.
That in and of itself is a bad thing, but to make matters worse, stochastic events like global warming have played a huge role in shaping evolution over the last few billion years. This was the point of Gould's book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, if you want more information.
Whether anthropogenic or not, global warming may be part of a larger shift away from large-brained mammals as the "dominant" species of the planet. And, speaking as a large-brained mammal, I don't like the idea of that.
Seconded. I'd also like to see more environmental awareness (above and beyond just cutting CO2 emissions).
Please cite that.
I'm running L4D on my (very) old computer, a 1.6 Ghz AMD single core with a 7600 GS and 1.5GB ram. The game runs fine at medium settings (despite the fact that I am way, way under the minimum system requirements), and when I briefly swapped out the 7600 for a 7900, I was able to turn a few of the settings from medium to high (1024x768, textures low, medium effects -> 1280x1024, textures medium, high effects) and still get a stable 20-25 average frame rate.
Not quality benchmarks, I know, but the engine hasn't changed drastically since HL2 except for graphical improvements (=GPU limited), so claims about it being CPU limited haven't been true since the first public version of the Source engine, and that's assuming they were even true back in 2004.
Freespace 2 open still requires you to own the original game. It's not expensive at gog.com, but still not free.
Are you sure about the whole costs thing?
Let's assume you won't be pirating your games (which is widespread on the PC, and a big cost saver to the unwashed masses, but that's a whole other debate). Assuming you buy games rather than renting them, you'll still save $10 a game by not getting them on the console. Also, I don't know about Wii games, they might be cheaper.
For a PC, I've got to spend a maximum of around $1000 (in reality, less than that. That gets me everything I need to run Crysis at highest settings. Speakers, monitor, keyboard, everything. You can spend a whole lot less if you're just going to upgrade your existing box, too.
For a console, you've got the initial investment of the console, plus all those weird controllers that $random_game requires. Then, you've got to buy a new TV (the majority of people do not yet have HD, though this is changing. Games on the 360/PS3 look terrible without HD. If you say graphics don't matter, why are you upgrading your PC every two years?).
It's pretty variable how much you'll drop on a console vs. a PC, but unless you already have a HD TV and surround sound system, you can expect to spend at least three times as much. All for the privilege of paying $50 a year to use Xbox live?
Also, remember that you have to own a PC anyway, and most people upgrade that every about as often as they buy a new console. A bottom-line Dell is just a video card away from being a great gaming machine.
The phrase is actually Every time you masturbate... God kills a kitten.
Perhaps you're confusing this with SchrÃdinger's cat, which may or may not die every time you masturbate, depending on whether masturbation counts as observation. Kinky, huh? (Additionally, he may or may not have an o with an umlaut instead of an Ã, if you're observing from websites with better Unicode support).
Or perhaps you're confusing this whole thing with Kitten Huffing which is the main reason behind Australia's internet filter.
It's all very confusing, really.
You're not the first to ask.
Please. I prefer the term piracy. Calling it copyright infringement makes me feel like some loser sitting in his mothers basement trading 1s and 0s with other losers. Who wants to do that?
Piracy be nothing like yer copyright infringement, it be totally badass. ARRRRGH!
I cannot find any citations for 3D modeling from 2D video, but I didn't look very hard. You're probably right, it's beyond current models.
I think you're missing what I'm trying to say here, though. A sufficiently advanced neural network may be able to play CS without the need for actual 3D processing.
I'm pretty sure that I'm right, but I really can't prove it without more time and a supercomputer to run it on. I'm currently writing proposal for a grant so I can model the selection pressures leading to the evolution of the human brain, if I get funding, it would be simple to modify my proposed algorithm to play CS. I'll get back to you in about 5 years with the results, assuming funding doesn't fall through.
Also, we are a little less that clueless on the design of a roach. Insects are simple, stupid creatures that are still around because they can survive in many environments and reproduce quickly. They are a poor model for any AI, as they don't show nearly as much Hebbian reinforcement as other, more "advanced", species. If we could create a mouse-level intelligence, OTOH, we could "easily" select it up to a strong AI given a few decades.
All proteins are broken down and resynthesized in your body, so you don't need to worry about getting some protein from animals. There are 20 amino acids that are common to all life as we know it (needed to make polypeptides), 10 of these can be synthesized from the other 10, so as long as you've got these ten essential amino acids in your diet, you're all set (assuming you've got all the fats, lipids, etc. you need).
The certain macronutrients are stuff like omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, they are harder to obtain from non-meat sources, but it is possible (flax seeds, walnuts).
"Tons of books" is not a citation, not sure what point you're trying to make with that anyway. And as for your anecdotal evidence: I know a guy who's second cousin was vegetarian, and he didn't get severely sick, so there! (Seriously, your friend might not have been getting enough omega-3s, but I'm not a dietitian, so I can't say for sure).
Yes, I do think it's perfectly healthy. It's a bit more work to pick foods that give a complete and balanced diet (and a vegan diet is most definitely not healthy), but it is healthy.
Actually, this DRM is special. I think it could be responsible for the bugs people are seeing. Rockstar has gone out of their way to add in extra crap: dozens of little "easter eggs" like a spinning camera, missing textures, similar stuff, to copies that don't validate. It's more than a simple one time Securom check, there's at least a dozen different hooks that check to see if the version is legit.
This might be why the scene is having such trouble cracking the damned game. FeDOR may have finally cracked it, but it's taken more PROPERs than your average release.
Note/Disclaimer: I'm not going to pirate or buy this game, I'm nowhere near the minimum system requirements, and I don't generally pirate stuff anyway. I'm just following the scene releases so I can be the first one to laugh at Rockstar's "uncrackable, no really this time" DRM.
That's just plain wrong. Many crops, especially soy beans and nuts, will provide tons of proteins.
Pick up any environmental studies textbook and they will confirm that a vegetarian diet is more efficient from an environmental standpoint.
Having said that, the only nutrient that cannot be obtained from plants is Vitamin B12, you must consume some animal product (even a small amount of something like milk or eggs is enough) to get enough of it.
Note: I'm not trying to force a vegetarian diet on you, go on and enjoy your steak. But know that it is possible to do without it.
I am not talking about giving the AI any more information than the user has, nor any special controls/interface. When I say games have rules, I mean in regards to movement speeds, damage, and the like. A machine can process these things and respond to a changing environment quicker than a human.
3D image processing in a game is finite (especially using low-res models like in CS), and there are only 4 different heads to recognize for each side.
In a small data set like this, NNs can and will quickly outcompete humans.
I'm not sure if this is exactly how the NN would evolve to function. I'm thinking it would be evolutionary advantageous (shorter processing times) for them just to use a wall following tactic and shoot at anything that matches one of the four enemy heads. That's one of the problems with a genetic algorithm: you can't directly control how it will work. If I could isolate the selection pressure that would give an advantage to NNs that could recreate a 3D environment from a 2D image (even not in real time), I'd happily take your challenge. I don't really know anything about PoV rendering (except that it's almost impossible), so I can't comment beyond that.
Also, your analogy to driving a RC car is flawed: that analogy uses real world data, and Hebbian learning algorithms tend to balk when given completely new data sets (damned environmental stochasticity). Adaptation to new data sets is where our current ANNs models break down compared to actual neurons.
Did the AI improve in later patches? Because I played QW when it first came out, against my brother (LAN) and the bots were as dumb as they come. Constantly driving vehicles into walls, running in front of me while I was shooting to try to give me a med pack, standing up out of cover to reload.
It was a game-ruining experience, and if it's actually been improved since then, it would probably make QW worth playing.
I think you're under-optimistic regarding GAs.
They can, with training (just against themselves!) beat human opponents at simple turn based games (citation). That's the same level playing field you describe.
It's been 10 years of GA optimization and theory, and 10 years of Moore's law since then. Computers have much better reflexes than humans, and you're telling me that a GA couldn't beat a master at CS?
Tell you what: give me $50,000 in funding, six months to train the AI to general FPS rules (headshot, movement, general weapon effectiveness, etc.), and another six months for the GA to advance it for CS, and it will beat anything.
If I had to pick an approach to take right now, I'd partition up the tasks (defuse bomb/identify player/is friend or foe/aim for head/etc.) to various independent, co-evolving, ANNs. There might be a better way, but that approach seems have worked pretty well for these guys (albeit that's not real time).
The point is, games have rules. Once you've learned the rules, you're unstoppable.
But it may be close enough. You've only got so many inputs and outputs, so just roll through every single neuron in your ANN and simulate what it does at that given step. At time t+1, do the same thing again.
I've seen a number of neural networks that do this, and yes, there's always a little less stochasticity when comparing them to actual neurons in a brain, but that's only to be expected.
Also, my understanding is that most ANNs are based on biological models to begin with (largely the Hodgkin-Huxley model), so how would they give new insight into neuron activity? But, if you talk about anything other than individual neurons, ANNs have taught us a bit about to meta structure of the brain (synaptic plasticity) for one example, not to mention that they have given plenty of new insight into biological fields as diverse and unexpected as ecology or bioinformatics. And that's just from a 30 second search on Pubmed.
An evolutionary algorithm applied to neural networks will eventually achieve Turing-complete AI, but right now it's just in its infancy. The question is whether or not we can "intelligently design" an AI quicker than we can brute-force evolve one from a simple beginning. Psuedo-parallel will be good enough to for AI, IMHO, but then again I'm just a wacko biologist with no real experience working with ANNs.
Oh, yeah, on topic: I recommend using Pubmed, Google Scholar and Wikipedia to learn about this stuff, but taking a class in neurobiology is also extremely helpful. (I will definitely be checking out a couple of the books recommended here too, though).
Winozification is not a word. Perhaps you were looking for windozification?
Anyone else think the mouse will be replaced by a neural interface?
We keep the keyboard for quick and accurate input, and allow the brain to control where the pointer is on the screen. If I want to close a window, I concentrate to move the mouse to the corner of the screen, and think "click", the window closes.
Maintains backwards compatibility with legacy apps, makes for an amazing RTS game, and uses existing (currently primitive) tech. Also requires a special hat.
Well, when you're trying to save an endangered species, you admit you can't avoid inbreeding and select for individuals that show the lowest amount of inbreeding depression. That way you could, theoretically, revive the entire species from only a few different clones.
Having said that, elephants (and I assume mammoths) raise few young over the course of their lives, so you'd be hard pressed to eliminate all of the inbreeding depression: if you only get 2-3 individuals/decade to work with, you just won't get the phenotypic variation necessary to eliminate inbreeding.
Chronically endangered species with a constant small population size have undergone just this sort of thing, while populations that have undergone a sudden drop in numbers (Passenger Pigeon comes to mind) simply drop off too fast for natural selection to counteract inbreeding.
All I can say is thank you. That post gave me fantastic information in an easy to understand format. You should repost it to Wikipedia so that more people can see it. Especially the stuff about L1/L2/L3/RAM/Swap, that's the best explanation I've ever heard.
Thanks for techreport.com, I'd somehow missed that site.
I'm not sure why exactly I'd be screwed when USB3.0 comes out. Will it break my existing mouse and keyboard? How about my flash drives?
And if I really need USB3 functionality, I'll be able to buy that PCIE card, so I fail to see what the problem is.
I am well aware of the benefits of a good video card, and I opted for a $25 dollar processor (2800) and a $150 VC (7900GS) several years ago, and they served me (really) well. However, they are in need of an upgrade (especially as I play RTS games and a single-core seems to be holding me back), and I'd like to know what to look for in a good gaming processor.
(Sycraft-fu's post further down really answered my question).
You seem like the right person to ask this of, so, how exactly do I choose what's best for the job?
I want a good, cheap, stable, processor that's going to be able to handle every game made in the next few years (the same thing every home user wants).
I can't really judge by GHz, since my ancient 1.6 GHz processor is enough to handle most modern games when overclocked (2.13 GHz). So what do I look at? L1/L2 cache? FSB? Does the tech (45 nm) factor into speed at all, or is does it just give a general idea of how advanced the chip is?
I want to know more about the underlying technology and how it impacts real-world performance rather than just "buy a Core 2 Quad Yorkfield 2.83GHz 12MB L2 Cache, n00b": if I wanted a recommendation for a specific chip I could use one of a million benchmarks and pick one that's rated highly on Newegg.
I know, I know, JFGI, but I can't find a decent explanation anywhere. Even Wikipedia (while having plenty of great technical info) doesn't really tell me how having (for example) a larger cache will improve performance.
What the fuck?
It's like you're all a bunch of Lemmings and have just seen a Disney documentary photographer.
(punchline if you didn't get the joke).
That's not Slashdot, it's human nature in general.
People want to be right, so when something comes out favoring your point of view, you tend to ignore potential problems with it. Having said that, I learned my tech skills due to gaming: I wanted the best power for the lowest cost, so I learned about home system building and overclocking. There you go, a study confirms my anecdotal evidence, and I tend to believe it.
Slashdot has covered this before.
Well, kmcarr, I bow before your expertise. I've never sequenced a genome, let alone the type of massively parallel sequencing you've done (you're the guy that worked on Arabidopsis sequencing, right?)
In my defense, however, I only said that 454 had made life a lot easier for people doing sequencing, not that the algorithm itself was simple. I also note that you yourself used their pyrophosphate technique - to say that it's anything but a huge technological leap forward is to undercredit it. I repeat, 454 pioneered the sequencing techniques we use today.
Wish you'd post more often to Slashdot, we could do with more biology types around here.
The folks at 454 Life Sciences made reconstructing a genome from lots of little pieces pretty simple by using an algorithm that looks for common fragments (ex AAGGCTTCTA and CTTCTATCTGG probably go together to form AAGGCTTCTATCTGG).
They also pretty much pioneered modern sequencing techniques.
The news here (IMHO) is that we've been able to read the genome of an extinct animal. That is an impressive achievement, a few BP errors notwithstanding. If we have multiple copies of the genome (multiple cells), we should be able to figure out what the correct sequence is (mutations are random, and no two cells will have the same mutations). Hair is not exactly the prime target for sequencing due to its exposure to UV light (UV light wreaks havoc on DNA), but with a little work we should be able to the actual sequence.
So at the end of the day, the Nobel prize goes to the guy who can figure out how many chromosomes a mammoth had. I'd like to say "just use the number that elephants have" but 7 million years (last common ancester) is easily enough time for chromosome duplication to occur.