As a 6 year veteran of the games industry, my best advice for someone who wants to be a game designer is simple: make games. Make games every day. Make board games, make flash games, invent physical games played with sports equipment, whatever. The medium is less important than just spending time designing fun games and then watching real people play them in front of you. Make a mod for an existing game or engine, make your own twist on a classic game like Tetris or even chess. Just make games.
If making games isn't something you'd do every day for fun anyway, then it's not the career for you.
One of the robots fakes human interaction by tracking fast motion and flesh colored pixels. Brooks marvels at how a few simple rules can produce a machine that is remarkably life-like. If you're not sure, they have video tapes of lab visitors holding conversations with the machine, who apparently takes part in the conversation with the patient interest of a well-bred host.
I listened to Brooks present the semi-academic version of his talk at Duke. The really fascinating thing about this robot/experiment is that making the robot react to simple cues from the human makes the robot act much more intelligent than it actually is. It may be easier to make a robot that behaves intelligently around humans than it is to make one that intelligently explores mars.
By giving the robot the ability to recognize eyes and where the human is looking, it can pick up cues as to what aspects of the environment are important. By making it maintain a proper conversational distance from the human, it prevents collisions and makes talking to it much more comfortable.
Because the robot responds to its environment, the environment shapes the robot's behavior. If that enviroment is alive and intelligent, the robot's behavior becomes more intelligent than it would normally be. We give off hundreds of little cues that allow us to respond intelligently to each other, and Brooks' work has opened the door to letting robots bootstrap themselves to a higher level of interaction.
His tone reminds me of the folks who advocated closing the US Patent office prior to the turn of the century, arguing that everything that could be discovered had been discovered. He's probably equally wrong.
Did anyone else notice that Brunner completely undercut his entire theme by his choice of the primary industry of Precipice? His ideal town is made possible by providing a unique service. Because it's unique, it's not possible to model other towns on precipice, thus making them useless as a model for the world. The solution he offers is not generalizable.
IMNHO, Brunner's overrated. This book is definately a must-read, but most of his other work is eminently skippable. Read "Children of the Thunder" and you'll understand why his work went out of print.
Neal Stephenson's other book with his uncle, The Cobweb, is a mystery/thriller set during the Gulf War. The main characters are a CIA analyst with a theory about Saddam's real bio-weapons strategy and a small town deputy in the midwest who becomes involved in the plot.
It's a decent novel, but just amazingly bitter about the functioning of the government buracracy. Where _Interface_ was funny and cynical about the political process, _Cobweb_ is simply viscious and pessimistic. He may be right and things in Washington may be as abyssmal as he says, but it does not make for enjoyable reading.
It doesn't really have any of the techno-candy his other novels do. For a rating, I'd give it about 1/5 of a _Snow Crash_, maybe 1/2 an _Interface_.
I taught a class on genetic algorithms last year and actually assigned this book as the main reading. It's very readable and well organized. To answer mwood's question, she does include a section on when Genetic Algorithms are useful, what sort of problems they're good at or have trouble with.
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As a 6 year veteran of the games industry, my best advice for someone who wants to be a game designer is simple: make games. Make games every day. Make board games, make flash games, invent physical games played with sports equipment, whatever. The medium is less important than just spending time designing fun games and then watching real people play them in front of you. Make a mod for an existing game or engine, make your own twist on a classic game like Tetris or even chess. Just make games.
If making games isn't something you'd do every day for fun anyway, then it's not the career for you.
I listened to Brooks present the semi-academic version of his talk at Duke. The really fascinating thing about this robot/experiment is that making the robot react to simple cues from the human makes the robot act much more intelligent than it actually is. It may be easier to make a robot that behaves intelligently around humans than it is to make one that intelligently explores mars.
By giving the robot the ability to recognize eyes and where the human is looking, it can pick up cues as to what aspects of the environment are important. By making it maintain a proper conversational distance from the human, it prevents collisions and makes talking to it much more comfortable.
Because the robot responds to its environment, the environment shapes the robot's behavior. If that enviroment is alive and intelligent, the robot's behavior becomes more intelligent than it would normally be. We give off hundreds of little cues that allow us to respond intelligently to each other, and Brooks' work has opened the door to letting robots bootstrap themselves to a higher level of interaction.
His tone reminds me of the folks who advocated closing the US Patent office prior to the turn of the century, arguing that everything that could be discovered had been discovered. He's probably equally wrong.
Did anyone else notice that Brunner completely undercut his entire theme by his choice of the primary industry of Precipice? His ideal town is made possible by providing a unique service. Because it's unique, it's not possible to model other towns on precipice, thus making them useless as a model for the world. The solution he offers is not generalizable.
IMNHO, Brunner's overrated. This book is definately a must-read, but most of his other work is eminently skippable. Read "Children of the Thunder" and you'll understand why his work went out of print.
Neal Stephenson's other book with his uncle, The Cobweb, is a mystery/thriller set during the Gulf War. The main characters are a CIA analyst with a theory about Saddam's real bio-weapons strategy and a small town deputy in the midwest who becomes involved in the plot.
It's a decent novel, but just amazingly bitter about the functioning of the government buracracy. Where _Interface_ was funny and cynical about the political process, _Cobweb_ is simply viscious and pessimistic. He may be right and things in Washington may be as abyssmal as he says, but it does not make for enjoyable reading.
It doesn't really have any of the techno-candy his other novels do. For a rating, I'd give it about 1/5 of a _Snow Crash_, maybe 1/2 an _Interface_.
I taught a class on genetic algorithms last year and actually assigned this book as the main reading. It's very readable and well organized. To answer mwood's question, she does include a section on when Genetic Algorithms are useful, what sort of problems they're good at or have trouble with.