Atmosphere on Mars is 95% CO2, 3% N, 1.6% Ar + trace. I'd guess you can't smell the Ar (you can't smell.9% Ar on earth), and you can't smell Nitrogen, so that pretty much leaves us with the strongly acidic smell of CO2.
This is all based on conjecture, so things may changes in local areas, during various weather conditions, or if/when we get more accurate measurements from the surface.
They're able to communicate with humans using hand signals, able to solve tasks multiple ways, and can even learn behaviors by copying other individuals.
I read somewhere (but don't quote me on this) that some monkeys have around the same intelligence as a 2-year-old humans.
I'd say that makes 'em pretty smart, especially if you look at why they do these things: their brains are remarkably similar to ours, except that their cerebral cortex is less developed.
There you go, monkeys are just like us, only not quite as specialized in language and culture.
I would like to request that any older games which you are no longer making any direct profit from (Lost Vikings, Warcraft 1&2, perhaps even Diablo 1) be made open source.
You would gain a considerable amount of fan support/respect for this action.
These games could be ported to run natively on Linux, and, could be updated for better compatibility with OS X, XP, and Vista; and the core engines behind Warcraft and Diablo would be amazing platforms to develop new and interesting fan-made titles (assuming their engines are easy to understand and create new content for. Without the source code I'm just guessing).
In particular, Lost Vikings is a prime candidate for open sourcing; it's old but extremely fun, and fan-made levels would really bring new life to a vastly under-appreciated classic.
Diablo is an amazingly fun game (I'm replaying it just now for the first time in almost 10 years), but it lacks all of the UI features that make D2 so great. It would require trivial amounts of effort to update this game to 2008 playability standards, if we had the source.
One other point: you don't have to give up any of your existing IP, simply release the source code, and have players take data and sound files off their original CDs. This way you protect your amazing franchises, we get cool new engines to play with, and you get free advertising amongst the tech news sites (a strategic open sourcing of Diablo 1 a couple of weeks before D3 launches would do wonders to raise hype for the game.
I know you've had your disputes with the Open Source community in the past (Freecraft, bnetd), but I think you'll find we're a forgiving lot, especially if you're willing to give back to your fans.
Please, at least consider it. Sincerely, A hardcore gamer who loves open source and owns ever Blizzard game ever released.
I was one of the guys who originally asked about LAN play, and I was interested in knowing why it was removed.
Instead I got this marketing drivel:
We're not supporting LAN play.[...fluff which contains no mention of whether or not we'll at least be allowed to play our single player characters in private open Battle.net games...] It going to be really awesome.
Let me repeat what I said before, I still have no decent internet connection at home with which to play this game. With all the multiplayer hype D3 is getting, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have a second rate experience.
I really, really hope a mod that allows LAN play will come along.
Exactly. People voting for the candidate with the better haircut (or, for an actual example, against someone who has a foreign-sounding name) do not need to vote.
Please, if you're going to vote without knowing the issues well, don't. This is slightly less important when voting for president, because the news does a pretty good job hitting the issues, but it goes double for local voting, where the winner is within a hundred uninformed votes of the loser.
You could easily write a script that unscrambled the words based on the first and last letters by comparing them to a dictionary list of words.
Games have rules, so you could theoretically pass that test by giving the bot all the rules to commonly played games (Calvinball, OTOH, that would be a good test).
Open ended questions are great, but I'm not sure how they're not wiki friendly. If I ask a bot, "what is love", I'd expect to get back an answer not dissimilar to what's on wikipedia - "emotions relating to a sense of strong affection".
Obviously, Wikipedia is not sentient, so you're going to have to do better than just asking facts/dates (any good ELISA will have a solid backstory).
No, I'd bet that a sufficiently good bot would be able to pass the Turing test with 100% accuracy - but still be not sentient.
Let me throw this out there, though: Intelligence is those processes by which animals obtain and retain
information about their environments, and use
that information to make behavioral decisions (Kamil, A. C. 1987 A synthetic approach to the study of animal intelligence. Nebr. Symp. Motiv. 7, 257â"308.). Cognition, by my own definition, is the ability to solve a single problem multiple ways (quotidian expedience) and the ability to copy behaviors seen in other individuals (mimicry). It's not a perfect definition, but it's a damn sight closer to a true AI than trying to get ELISAs to pass the Turing Test.
Have you RTFA? Obviously not, because they actually cite the sources they use (as in the first time that 750,000 jobs figure came up, decades ago). If you can find other evidence that invalidates this claim, theres a shitload of absence dollars to be made on your blog.
This story was incredibly well researched, and was one of the better Slashdot stories I've seen in a while.
NN is easily in my top 10 issues (below environment, corruption, privacy, and other life-and-death stuff).
It (along side global warming) is going to be looked back on as the single biggest issue of the 2020's.
Either we slack off now and let corporations filter traffic and then desperately try to repeal that power when we realize what a bad idea corporate control of information is, or we do things right and never give them the chance.
For a good analogy, look at Linux. If they bundle proprietary drivers and software in the kernel/distro, they would gain a pretty large marketshare quickly. But they don't, instead choosing to stick with stuff that's totally free, knowing that, in the long run (10 years+), there'll be a better user experience.
You're using the term "evolution" (that is, any change caused by mutation, migration, selection or drift) when you want to be using the term "selection".
As I and others have pointed out in other threads here, selection on humans is currently decreasing, while evolution (through mutations) is actually occurring faster than ever before.
I read a paper yesterday (can't find it now, should have bookmarked it) that speculated that humans were getting close to being saturated with mutations - that is, for every gene that can be mutated and still remain non-lethal, some human, somewhere has that mutation on that gene.
Obviously, that was a pretty baseless claim, but we are definitely moving in that direction.
Evolution works on the basis of mutation, migration, selection and drift.
We are, at the moment, building up huge amounts of mutations, which is actually good: it means that when a selection event comes along (AIDS, bird flu, whatever), odds are we'll have enough phenotypic variation to survive it. Most of us will die, but as a species we may just pull through.
This isn't the end of human evolution; we've probably just come through a bottleneck, and are now generating new phenotypes fairly rapidly. If anything, evolution is proceeding faster now than at any time in the last 1000 years. The difference is there is less selection pressure today than ever before. It makes sense, and we will eventually revert back to "survival of the fittest", once we've maximized the differences in phenotypes allowed by modern medicine (this may not happen for a few hundred years yet).
We don't have any one single gene nailed down for intelligence, and, as far as we can see, a good portion of it is simply environment, with little to do with genes at all.
I just gave some pretty strong logical evidence that the Turing test is useless from a scientific standpoint (falsifiable hypothesis). The "AI deniers", if they really exist at this point will point to my logic when they want to refute AI.
The burdon of proof still rests with us, the AI researchers, to create and administer a new metric that shows that a machine is capable of cognitive abilities without communication in English.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I will not buy a game that has ads in it. If the game is "free" then I may try it, but if I'm paying for it (even reduced price) there had better be no ads at all.
You're correct; product placement is somewhat more palatable in theory, but I've yet to see a game that had product placement where the placement didn't also suck (Splinter Cell's Sony Ericsson=ummm, what?).
Obviously, gamers' opinions will change when some major ad company (Google, maybe) gets behind an AAA title (read: not Flash based) that also features tasteful, well done ads, but I really hope we don't ever see that.
Speak for yourself. I, for one, am trying to wipe out humanity in a flood of maniacal, laser-wielding, sentient kill-bots.
We'll see who has the last laugh! You've turned me down for a date for the last time, women of earth! Muahah ah ah ah HA!
Speaking of the last laugh, we've known for quite a while that true AI will probably replace humans completely (that article is totally hilarious apart from a couple of valid concepts, BTW. "Hyborgs" WTF ROFL).
I'm pleased to note that I've come a bit further on defining intelligence ("thinking") since then: The difference is whatever separates the great ape's cerebral cortex from the rest of the mammal brains; it's bound to be something to do with the differences in myelination of the neurons in the CC compared to the rest of the brain. How that contributes to consciousness, I don't know.
Incidentially, the proposed model for AI that I linked to here would not work because the odds are staked against you. It took millions of years to get people to the point where we could really think; and to attempt to randomly generate that (and hope for success) has about the same odds as a nuclear missile suddenly turning into a bowl of petunias. We must start with something really, really simple, make that work, reverse engineer the human brain (we're making progress), and then try to recreate that using the simple neuron model we had developed.
Anyone want to throw me a grant so I can quit my day job?
It does matter, because the Turing test is a pretty metric of an AI.
I can't find where I saw this (some blog linked to from/. years ago, IIRC), but if you take a human which cannot speak your language, a human who suffers from a severe mental disorder, a young child, a machine which does not want to appear sentient, or a bunch of other things, you'll effectively get useless results.
Similarly, if you put a fancy ELISA in front of a Turing test (sound familiar?), you might be able to pass the test without them actually being sentient (I've mistaken people for bots on IRC before, idiots rly make no sense at al lol zomg).
And, lastly and most importantly, you can miss a true AI that is currently too oversimplified to be able to even attempt communication with you (BUT CAN ACTUALLY THINK). Imagine a simple creature that's nothing more than a "brain" - in reality a stack of randomly generated matrices which are filled with numbers, either 1 (=neuron) or a 0 (=glial cell) and can send signals back and forth to nearby points on the various matrices. You select for brain creatures which are able to "outwit" each other (outwit remains to be defined, if you know it, post a link - the only hint I have is that it's whatever makes up the difference between cerebral cortex brain cells and normal brain cells), and pretty soon you've got a fairly smart little population going, none of which would have any hope of passing the Turing test.
We need a new metric for judging AI's. I don't know what it should be, but the Turing test is broken to the point of useless.
Slashdot Mirror
This is all based on conjecture, so things may changes in local areas, during various weather conditions, or if/when we get more accurate measurements from the surface.
They're able to communicate with humans using hand signals, able to solve tasks multiple ways, and can even learn behaviors by copying other individuals.
I read somewhere (but don't quote me on this) that some monkeys have around the same intelligence as a 2-year-old humans.
I'd say that makes 'em pretty smart, especially if you look at why they do these things: their brains are remarkably similar to ours, except that their cerebral cortex is less developed.
There you go, monkeys are just like us, only not quite as specialized in language and culture.
Well, the expansion will include a tube of K-Y jelly along with the DRM, if that makes any difference to you.
You would gain a considerable amount of fan support/respect for this action.
These games could be ported to run natively on Linux, and, could be updated for better compatibility with OS X, XP, and Vista; and the core engines behind Warcraft and Diablo would be amazing platforms to develop new and interesting fan-made titles (assuming their engines are easy to understand and create new content for. Without the source code I'm just guessing).
In particular, Lost Vikings is a prime candidate for open sourcing; it's old but extremely fun, and fan-made levels would really bring new life to a vastly under-appreciated classic.
Diablo is an amazingly fun game (I'm replaying it just now for the first time in almost 10 years), but it lacks all of the UI features that make D2 so great. It would require trivial amounts of effort to update this game to 2008 playability standards, if we had the source.
One other point: you don't have to give up any of your existing IP, simply release the source code, and have players take data and sound files off their original CDs. This way you protect your amazing franchises, we get cool new engines to play with, and you get free advertising amongst the tech news sites (a strategic open sourcing of Diablo 1 a couple of weeks before D3 launches would do wonders to raise hype for the game.
I know you've had your disputes with the Open Source community in the past (Freecraft, bnetd), but I think you'll find we're a forgiving lot, especially if you're willing to give back to your fans.
Please, at least consider it.
Sincerely, A hardcore gamer who loves open source and owns ever Blizzard game ever released.
Instead I got this marketing drivel:
Let me repeat what I said before, I still have no decent internet connection at home with which to play this game. With all the multiplayer hype D3 is getting, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have a second rate experience.
I really, really hope a mod that allows LAN play will come along.
Please, if you're going to vote without knowing the issues well, don't. This is slightly less important when voting for president, because the news does a pretty good job hitting the issues, but it goes double for local voting, where the winner is within a hundred uninformed votes of the loser.
The news is that we now know why the worms do this. This is very much news for nerds. Science nerds, anyway.
Games have rules, so you could theoretically pass that test by giving the bot all the rules to commonly played games (Calvinball, OTOH, that would be a good test).
Open ended questions are great, but I'm not sure how they're not wiki friendly. If I ask a bot, "what is love", I'd expect to get back an answer not dissimilar to what's on wikipedia - "emotions relating to a sense of strong affection".
Obviously, Wikipedia is not sentient, so you're going to have to do better than just asking facts/dates (any good ELISA will have a solid backstory).
No, I'd bet that a sufficiently good bot would be able to pass the Turing test with 100% accuracy - but still be not sentient.
Let me throw this out there, though: Intelligence is those processes by which animals obtain and retain information about their environments, and use that information to make behavioral decisions (Kamil, A. C. 1987 A synthetic approach to the study of animal intelligence. Nebr. Symp. Motiv. 7, 257â"308.). Cognition, by my own definition, is the ability to solve a single problem multiple ways (quotidian expedience) and the ability to copy behaviors seen in other individuals (mimicry). It's not a perfect definition, but it's a damn sight closer to a true AI than trying to get ELISAs to pass the Turing Test.
I see. I guess I'll use DHL from now on, then.
If you're worried about them opening it, don't be. It's a federal crime for USPS employees to tamper with mail, too.
The minus side to this solution is that it may cost you $50+ to mail the damned thing, so you're probably better off with TrueCrypt.
Do people really not know how to use TrueCrypt or run their own server that they're willing to trust anyone over the government?
(Note: I did not say they should trust the gov, merely that they shouldn't trust $randomCompany either).
This story was incredibly well researched, and was one of the better Slashdot stories I've seen in a while.
It (along side global warming) is going to be looked back on as the single biggest issue of the 2020's.
Either we slack off now and let corporations filter traffic and then desperately try to repeal that power when we realize what a bad idea corporate control of information is, or we do things right and never give them the chance.
For a good analogy, look at Linux. If they bundle proprietary drivers and software in the kernel/distro, they would gain a pretty large marketshare quickly. But they don't, instead choosing to stick with stuff that's totally free, knowing that, in the long run (10 years+), there'll be a better user experience.
Hell, just take it. I hardly ever use the damn thing and it keeps using up all my glucose.
Yeah, I'm really crying over not having to track down a keygen every time I reinstall my photo editor.
You're using the term "evolution" (that is, any change caused by mutation, migration, selection or drift) when you want to be using the term "selection".
As I and others have pointed out in other threads here, selection on humans is currently decreasing, while evolution (through mutations) is actually occurring faster than ever before.
I read a paper yesterday (can't find it now, should have bookmarked it) that speculated that humans were getting close to being saturated with mutations - that is, for every gene that can be mutated and still remain non-lethal, some human, somewhere has that mutation on that gene.
Obviously, that was a pretty baseless claim, but we are definitely moving in that direction.
I don't buy it, personally, but it's interesting nonetheless.
You are confusing Social Darwinism and biological evolution. Your last sentence is correct, though.
We are, at the moment, building up huge amounts of mutations, which is actually good: it means that when a selection event comes along (AIDS, bird flu, whatever), odds are we'll have enough phenotypic variation to survive it. Most of us will die, but as a species we may just pull through.
This isn't the end of human evolution; we've probably just come through a bottleneck, and are now generating new phenotypes fairly rapidly. If anything, evolution is proceeding faster now than at any time in the last 1000 years. The difference is there is less selection pressure today than ever before. It makes sense, and we will eventually revert back to "survival of the fittest", once we've maximized the differences in phenotypes allowed by modern medicine (this may not happen for a few hundred years yet).
We don't have any one single gene nailed down for intelligence, and, as far as we can see, a good portion of it is simply environment, with little to do with genes at all.
The burdon of proof still rests with us, the AI researchers, to create and administer a new metric that shows that a machine is capable of cognitive abilities without communication in English.
You're correct; product placement is somewhat more palatable in theory, but I've yet to see a game that had product placement where the placement didn't also suck (Splinter Cell's Sony Ericsson=ummm, what?).
Obviously, gamers' opinions will change when some major ad company (Google, maybe) gets behind an AAA title (read: not Flash based) that also features tasteful, well done ads, but I really hope we don't ever see that.
Speak for yourself. I, for one, am trying to wipe out humanity in a flood of maniacal, laser-wielding, sentient kill-bots.
We'll see who has the last laugh! You've turned me down for a date for the last time, women of earth! Muahah ah ah ah HA!
Speaking of the last laugh, we've known for quite a while that true AI will probably replace humans completely (that article is totally hilarious apart from a couple of valid concepts, BTW. "Hyborgs" WTF ROFL).
Yep, you sure will. I brought up some similar ideas a while ago (browse down through that thread).
I'm pleased to note that I've come a bit further on defining intelligence ("thinking") since then: The difference is whatever separates the great ape's cerebral cortex from the rest of the mammal brains; it's bound to be something to do with the differences in myelination of the neurons in the CC compared to the rest of the brain. How that contributes to consciousness, I don't know.
Incidentially, the proposed model for AI that I linked to here would not work because the odds are staked against you. It took millions of years to get people to the point where we could really think; and to attempt to randomly generate that (and hope for success) has about the same odds as a nuclear missile suddenly turning into a bowl of petunias. We must start with something really, really simple, make that work, reverse engineer the human brain (we're making progress), and then try to recreate that using the simple neuron model we had developed.
Anyone want to throw me a grant so I can quit my day job?
I can't find where I saw this (some blog linked to from /. years ago, IIRC), but if you take a human which cannot speak your language, a human who suffers from a severe mental disorder, a young child, a machine which does not want to appear sentient, or a bunch of other things, you'll effectively get useless results.
Similarly, if you put a fancy ELISA in front of a Turing test (sound familiar?), you might be able to pass the test without them actually being sentient (I've mistaken people for bots on IRC before, idiots rly make no sense at al lol zomg).
And, lastly and most importantly, you can miss a true AI that is currently too oversimplified to be able to even attempt communication with you (BUT CAN ACTUALLY THINK). Imagine a simple creature that's nothing more than a "brain" - in reality a stack of randomly generated matrices which are filled with numbers, either 1 (=neuron) or a 0 (=glial cell) and can send signals back and forth to nearby points on the various matrices. You select for brain creatures which are able to "outwit" each other (outwit remains to be defined, if you know it, post a link - the only hint I have is that it's whatever makes up the difference between cerebral cortex brain cells and normal brain cells), and pretty soon you've got a fairly smart little population going, none of which would have any hope of passing the Turing test.
We need a new metric for judging AI's. I don't know what it should be, but the Turing test is broken to the point of useless.