I got into Wheel of Time fairly young--maybe just after the third book came out--and kept with it despite the punishing slowness of the books after, say, Lord of Chaos. But it really was something different, I think. It was epic, not a standard journey to slay the bad guy after this first couple of books, like so much of fantasy after Tolkien it seems. And though slow and a little tedious at times, it never pissed me off like the last couple of books of Dark Tower, which it seems is the standard metric for WoT.
I work in Hamilton-Jacobi Theory and numerical optimization so I've done some work on similar equations, albeit where the equation was part of a system of coupled equations. I found orthogonal collocation seemed promising, though a bit cumbersome since you need lots of Legendre polynomials. A backsweeping approach might work, not sure since I've only seen it in the pseudo-static framework. I don't think FEM will work so hot, but that's just my experience and it could just have been the forcing terms I had to work with when I was working on my stuff. You might look at stuff by Shi Jin from Wisconsin, he's done some work on discontinuous Hamiltonian and Liouville Equations and for them the wave speed is variable, i.e. v=c(x)^2 taking the notation from your mathworld link. Cheers and good luck
I love GW. It's one of the only PC games I still find time to play. The lack of monthly fees got me into it, but I stayed for the sheer casual
aspect of the game. I don't have to grind all that much if I don't want to. Sometimes I can just get on for the Alliance battles. It has replaced
most of the shooters I used to play in that sense. Instead of getting on to frag for a while, I get on for some flag capping. And the PVE is still fun at the higher levels. Admittedly, I don't play the high-end PVP stuff, but I probably could and do pretty well.
With the new stuff with level caps, I worry that I won't have that anymore. To not build from scratch a PVP-only guy will mean I will have to grind and worry about farming and all that. I don't have time for all this extra work on keeping up with the Joneses. I dunno, it seems like this will drown out the casual players like me. That's the grief I hear from my friends who play WoW and EVE. And it's those complaints that made me ditch those two for GW. Hopefully they'll manage not to force out what I think is a big chunk fo those who play GW.
I always liked the degree of differences in the dialog trees in Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Your character's attributes really changed the way people would talk to you and interact with you, game quests and how to complete them. And playing the Nosferatu and moving about in the sewers all the time was like playing a totally different game. I easily played this game 5-6 times, which I never do just to see the different ways the game would react to different characters and scenarios. Sure the story was the same, but it still felt rather different each time.
Everyone assumes that the Halo movie would be terrible because all the recent movies based on video games have sucked. I can't fault the last part of that. But I must confess that before I saw The Fellowship of the Ring, I was 95% sure that it would suck because fantasy movies have sucked IMHO (maybe excepting Legend and the Dark Crystal--a strong maybe). Before Fellowship I would have said fantasy didn't translate well as a live-action medium. Now I recognize that there is great potential because of that trilogy along with the Harry Potter movies. They can be popular and well-produced. The effects are believable. So why assume that the guy who oversaw LOTR couldn't do the same for video games? He does have a decent track record.
I disagree with the above posters. I remember when the slashdot community got in a big huff each time Ebert questioned the status of videogames as art. Guess what art does? It gets critiqued. Literature, painting, theater, sculpture all do. Recently(the past few decades) have seen movies and, to a much lesser degree, television have become viable subjects of critique. So why not video games?
Not all games are purely entertainment to occupy your time. If they were, the majority of games would be the simply puzzle games like solitaire and their ilk, games that most people it seems on slashdot scoff at as "not real games." Games usually tell a narrative whether obvious or not. Myst wasn't just a set of puzzles disconnected from each other. It was a series of puzzles that both helped unlock parts of a story and were part of the story themselves. Another, perhaps less obvious example, is Contra. You're not just a "thing" with a gun shooting other "things." You're a commando fighting soldiers and aliens. Level progression tells you you're fighting in some overall picture. Even without narrative, you like certain games and not others, and I don't mean quality alone. I've liked some 9/10 games and not others. Why? Because of some aesthetic response that merits examining. When we examine games critically we can better understand, perhaps, the mechanics of enjoying a game. Then hopefully, we put that to use and make more enjoyable games. The article in the end I take as a first step towards this aim, though I don't necessarily like its analysis, though maybe because I've always been more of a historical/marxist/political reader when it came to my undergrad thesis.
I just dropped my myth box which I had struggled with for the last few months. Admittedly, I didn't know much about Linux beforehand, just the basics so I wanted to use myth as a learning tool. I didn't mind that struggle at all. Setting up in the end was easy and relatively painless once I understood some Perl basics etc. Myth's qualities are not overstated above. Authoring DVDs of recordings was a bit of a hassle, but it seems with those release notes it might have gotten better. I could even archive to DVD all my old VHS easily with the right tuner card! But there are two basic reasons I dropped Myth: 1) I was never happy with the media players available aside from watching archived videos, including DVDs (never got that to work). 2) the picture quality tended to be pretty poor (maybe that's the fault of ivtv? but still can't get myth without drivers). My friend tried two windows alternatives--gbpvr and media portal--and the picture quality for live and recorded TV is leaps and bounds better than anything I could find after hours and hours of tweaking my myth setup. I can't imagine how it would look on a nice TV. Blue lines on the top and bottom of the feed, terribly flat blacks, fuzziness on certain channels pervaded my myth experience and haven't occurred with media portal. I have other problems with media portal and wouldn't mind going back to myth, but it just seems the limitations of the drivers out there really kills the experience for me.
I think the greatness of the prize isn't the mercenary value people seem to think it holds. The money just shows importance. The prize's value comes from the dialogue and new paths of discovery that are opened up. Remember that in the end Fermat's last theorem (proof of which is what prompted this, at least in part) wasn't important in its result. It was important because the search for a proof resulted in huge new areas of research that are much more fruitful both in the purely abstract mathematical sense and in the practical sense. The fruits of that labor wouldn't have come out without placing such emphasis on the problem.
Hilbert's lecture at the beginning of the 20th century was similar. Here was (one of the best minds at the time propising a framework in which to work, goals to look towards. Not even close to all of them have been resolved, but they are smart problems that have led to all sorts of applications and results. It's a goal to work towards. The Clay prize does the same thing.
Is the Navier Stokes problem that important? Yes, that's why we have this great initiative for a derivation of classic and not weak solutions, or at least existence. The quest for the solution to the problems and those like it have created real progress. Without this kind of framework, we'd possibly not have the amazing work in PDEs and weak solutions that let us do great composite designs and image processing (to name two areas).
I took a year off after graduating with a double in English and Math. I went back for a PhD in math and after only a year off it was hard. Grad school is a rude enough shock at first that you don't need to add rustinesss. It's great, but it is a clear rammping up. If you're worried about not having experience in pure/applied/whatever math when you get out, that's what conferences and workshops are all about. You can get your name out pretty effectively that way, plus in math, alot of that is paid for. There's a real need for applied math people, especially if you're a US citizen. The government et al need lots of math people who can clear security.
I have to agree with the writer. The titular question is poor on its face. Video games form a medium. And just like paintings, movies, music, books, that medium is governed in part (if not overwhelmingly) by commercial forces. It isn't very useful to look at just video games as if similar things were not going in the aforementioned media as well. They have become highly derivative as well, and let's not forget the alienating properties that most post-modern artistic forms go for. Shooters (which is the standard apparently for these discussions) provide, for me, the same effect that most contemporary forms of "high art" do. So to ask if videogames are art, well, seems not futile but the wrong direction to take if you want to seriously consider the aesthetics of the videogames themselves.
maybe he'll fade away. Probably not, but it's better than hearing his self-aggrandizing crusade against all things not Jack Thompson. The problem is that some news media treat him a serious player in the world, when their only proof seems to be previous news media's treatment of him as a serious player.
Hopefully this will be better than that crap first game they did. I remember thinking, "Wow this'll be like Pirates on the Commodore with good graphics and stuff!" and afterwards thinking "Wow I wish Sid Meier would finish a new Pirates game with good graphics!" I think Bethesda did it? Not sure but I remember it was a developer I'd liked before.
On a side note, I noticed the cue they're taking from the overhaul with SW:G and right now promising interaction with the main characters right away.
Times are tight. Like Microsoft could afford to make a deal for these things. I mean, with the whole replacement fiasco(I love pulley systems to keep my $400 console alive--to buying failed game studios like Lionhead, do you really think Bill could have spent that kind of bank? He wouldn't have gotten a whiteboard for at least another week with that kind of dough.
Not to draw TOO many parallels, but remember when Galileo et al gave scientific findings that the governing powers didn't like? One of the causes, I feel from experiences with research, for the acceleration of scientific discovery is the change from a few centuries ago when science was done at the behest of the wealthy/powerful for status. As science was removed from the political, innovation and creativity flourished. This seems a bad sign of a growing politicization of scientific research, which is what kept things so slow for so long.
Maybe the G-man doesn't want his role revealed. I wouldn't doubt it'd be too hard for him to take out a few programmers everytime the release date nears.
Remember the good old days where we had unbiased gaming previews and reviews with none of those terrible corporate sponsorship problems? Wait, that's right I grew up on Nintendo Power. Their review of "The Wizard" was dead-on. That was the greatest film ever!
Let's not forget in the midst of all this next-gen marketing: Not everyone has HD. I don't care how much saturation of the market people expect hi-def to get in the next 5 years. Plenty of people still can't use this feature that Sony and Microsoft have as an "edge" over Nintendo. It's been said before, but if you're not a person salivating over the latest HDTV's to come out, you're probably not going to want drop $1000 for a new console and enough games to make it worthwile (and only 10 games or so for Xbox360, maybe half that with these rumors about PS3). I know that of all the consoles, Revolution is the only one reasonably in my price range (grad student!).
Even if in this generation I buy an HD set, I still won't buy either of the other two until then, when presumably the prices will have already dropped alot (meaning even worse losses for Sony and Microsoft). And my brother got a PS2 before I bought a DVD player. I waited 8 months or so, and for half the price of the PS2, I got a DVD player that didn't suck like the PS2. Why shouldn't I expect the same this time around? However Blu-ray/HDDVD falls, there will have to be players not half-assedly attached to a game console.
And even though Nintendo seems stuck in the same pattern as the other two when it comes to a glut of sequels, there is still plenty of innovation in their first party franchises. Zelda has always differed greatly between games both in style and gameplay. Hell, me and my roommate still play,frequently, MarioKart 64 over the Xbox games he has.
This gets at the heart of the problem I've always had for MMO's.
One of the central parts of the game is making money. If the process
is so little fun that people are willing to spend even more money to
not go through it, then isn't that a poor design for a central game
mechanic? Also, if you're paying for a game, subscription fees,
and now at the very least matching those prices bypassing a large
chunk of the game, how fun is that? It's like the satisfaction
of beating games with god mode on. Sure you won, but you also missed
70% (those FMVs are so awesome they are the other 30% ha ) of the game.
I always liked the pirates' booty problem (for those of you who giggled--oh grow up). There's a crew of 5, with a strict hiearchy from 1 down to 5. It's time to split the hoard of a 100 pieces up. The rules are:
The highest rank proposes how to divvy things up and there is a vote, if it's 50% or more against, you kill that highest rank and then the next highest gives a plan, etc.
Pirates will vote against unless there's a clear advantage to voting for (i.e. some pieces as opposed to strictly fewer).
Pirates may be dastardly, but are also logical;-)
So if you're the captain (numero uno) how do you dole the treasure out without getting killed?
Slashdot Mirror
I got into Wheel of Time fairly young--maybe just after the third book came out--and kept with it despite the punishing slowness of the books after, say, Lord of Chaos. But it really was something different, I think. It was epic, not a standard journey to slay the bad guy after this first couple of books, like so much of fantasy after Tolkien it seems. And though slow and a little tedious at times, it never pissed me off like the last couple of books of Dark Tower, which it seems is the standard metric for WoT.
I work in Hamilton-Jacobi Theory and numerical optimization so I've done some work on similar equations, albeit where the equation was part of a system of coupled equations. I found orthogonal collocation seemed promising, though a bit cumbersome since you need lots of Legendre polynomials. A backsweeping approach might work, not sure since I've only seen it in the pseudo-static framework. I don't think FEM will work so hot, but that's just my experience and it could just have been the forcing terms I had to work with when I was working on my stuff. You might look at stuff by Shi Jin from Wisconsin, he's done some work on discontinuous Hamiltonian and Liouville Equations and for them the wave speed is variable, i.e. v=c(x)^2 taking the notation from your mathworld link. Cheers and good luck
I love GW. It's one of the only PC games I still find time to play. The lack of monthly fees got me into it, but I stayed for the sheer casual aspect of the game. I don't have to grind all that much if I don't want to. Sometimes I can just get on for the Alliance battles. It has replaced most of the shooters I used to play in that sense. Instead of getting on to frag for a while, I get on for some flag capping. And the PVE is still fun at the higher levels. Admittedly, I don't play the high-end PVP stuff, but I probably could and do pretty well. With the new stuff with level caps, I worry that I won't have that anymore. To not build from scratch a PVP-only guy will mean I will have to grind and worry about farming and all that. I don't have time for all this extra work on keeping up with the Joneses. I dunno, it seems like this will drown out the casual players like me. That's the grief I hear from my friends who play WoW and EVE. And it's those complaints that made me ditch those two for GW. Hopefully they'll manage not to force out what I think is a big chunk fo those who play GW.
I always liked the degree of differences in the dialog trees in Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Your character's attributes really changed the way people would talk to you and interact with you, game quests and how to complete them. And playing the Nosferatu and moving about in the sewers all the time was like playing a totally different game. I easily played this game 5-6 times, which I never do just to see the different ways the game would react to different characters and scenarios. Sure the story was the same, but it still felt rather different each time.
Everyone assumes that the Halo movie would be terrible because all the recent movies based on video games have sucked. I can't fault the last part of that. But I must confess that before I saw The Fellowship of the Ring, I was 95% sure that it would suck because fantasy movies have sucked IMHO (maybe excepting Legend and the Dark Crystal--a strong maybe). Before Fellowship I would have said fantasy didn't translate well as a live-action medium. Now I recognize that there is great potential because of that trilogy along with the Harry Potter movies. They can be popular and well-produced. The effects are believable. So why assume that the guy who oversaw LOTR couldn't do the same for video games? He does have a decent track record.
I disagree with the above posters. I remember when the slashdot community got in a big huff each time Ebert questioned the status of videogames as art. Guess what art does? It gets critiqued. Literature, painting, theater, sculpture all do. Recently(the past few decades) have seen movies and, to a much lesser degree, television have become viable subjects of critique. So why not video games? Not all games are purely entertainment to occupy your time. If they were, the majority of games would be the simply puzzle games like solitaire and their ilk, games that most people it seems on slashdot scoff at as "not real games." Games usually tell a narrative whether obvious or not. Myst wasn't just a set of puzzles disconnected from each other. It was a series of puzzles that both helped unlock parts of a story and were part of the story themselves. Another, perhaps less obvious example, is Contra. You're not just a "thing" with a gun shooting other "things." You're a commando fighting soldiers and aliens. Level progression tells you you're fighting in some overall picture. Even without narrative, you like certain games and not others, and I don't mean quality alone. I've liked some 9/10 games and not others. Why? Because of some aesthetic response that merits examining. When we examine games critically we can better understand, perhaps, the mechanics of enjoying a game. Then hopefully, we put that to use and make more enjoyable games. The article in the end I take as a first step towards this aim, though I don't necessarily like its analysis, though maybe because I've always been more of a historical/marxist/political reader when it came to my undergrad thesis.
Right, I'm just saying that the drivers for the cards aren't great imho, and you can't use myth wihtout the drivers.
I just dropped my myth box which I had struggled with for the last few months. Admittedly, I didn't know much about Linux beforehand, just the basics so I wanted to use myth as a learning tool. I didn't mind that struggle at all. Setting up in the end was easy and relatively painless once I understood some Perl basics etc. Myth's qualities are not overstated above. Authoring DVDs of recordings was a bit of a hassle, but it seems with those release notes it might have gotten better. I could even archive to DVD all my old VHS easily with the right tuner card! But there are two basic reasons I dropped Myth: 1) I was never happy with the media players available aside from watching archived videos, including DVDs (never got that to work). 2) the picture quality tended to be pretty poor (maybe that's the fault of ivtv? but still can't get myth without drivers). My friend tried two windows alternatives--gbpvr and media portal--and the picture quality for live and recorded TV is leaps and bounds better than anything I could find after hours and hours of tweaking my myth setup. I can't imagine how it would look on a nice TV. Blue lines on the top and bottom of the feed, terribly flat blacks, fuzziness on certain channels pervaded my myth experience and haven't occurred with media portal. I have other problems with media portal and wouldn't mind going back to myth, but it just seems the limitations of the drivers out there really kills the experience for me.
I think the greatness of the prize isn't the mercenary value people seem to think it holds. The money just shows importance. The prize's value comes from the dialogue and new paths of discovery that are opened up. Remember that in the end Fermat's last theorem (proof of which is what prompted this, at least in part) wasn't important in its result. It was important because the search for a proof resulted in huge new areas of research that are much more fruitful both in the purely abstract mathematical sense and in the practical sense. The fruits of that labor wouldn't have come out without placing such emphasis on the problem. Hilbert's lecture at the beginning of the 20th century was similar. Here was (one of the best minds at the time propising a framework in which to work, goals to look towards. Not even close to all of them have been resolved, but they are smart problems that have led to all sorts of applications and results. It's a goal to work towards. The Clay prize does the same thing. Is the Navier Stokes problem that important? Yes, that's why we have this great initiative for a derivation of classic and not weak solutions, or at least existence. The quest for the solution to the problems and those like it have created real progress. Without this kind of framework, we'd possibly not have the amazing work in PDEs and weak solutions that let us do great composite designs and image processing (to name two areas).
I took a year off after graduating with a double in English and Math. I went back for a PhD in math and after only a year off it was hard. Grad school is a rude enough shock at first that you don't need to add rustinesss. It's great, but it is a clear rammping up. If you're worried about not having experience in pure/applied/whatever math when you get out, that's what conferences and workshops are all about. You can get your name out pretty effectively that way, plus in math, alot of that is paid for. There's a real need for applied math people, especially if you're a US citizen. The government et al need lots of math people who can clear security.
I have to agree with the writer. The titular question is poor on its face. Video games form a medium. And just like paintings, movies, music, books, that medium is governed in part (if not overwhelmingly) by commercial forces. It isn't very useful to look at just video games as if similar things were not going in the aforementioned media as well. They have become highly derivative as well, and let's not forget the alienating properties that most post-modern artistic forms go for. Shooters (which is the standard apparently for these discussions) provide, for me, the same effect that most contemporary forms of "high art" do. So to ask if videogames are art, well, seems not futile but the wrong direction to take if you want to seriously consider the aesthetics of the videogames themselves.
maybe he'll fade away. Probably not, but it's better than hearing his self-aggrandizing crusade against all things not Jack Thompson. The problem is that some news media treat him a serious player in the world, when their only proof seems to be previous news media's treatment of him as a serious player.
Hopefully this will be better than that crap first game they did. I remember thinking, "Wow this'll be like Pirates on the Commodore with good graphics and stuff!" and afterwards thinking "Wow I wish Sid Meier would finish a new Pirates game with good graphics!" I think Bethesda did it? Not sure but I remember it was a developer I'd liked before. On a side note, I noticed the cue they're taking from the overhaul with SW:G and right now promising interaction with the main characters right away.
Times are tight. Like Microsoft could afford to make a deal for these things. I mean, with the whole replacement fiasco(I love pulley systems to keep my $400 console alive--to buying failed game studios like Lionhead, do you really think Bill could have spent that kind of bank? He wouldn't have gotten a whiteboard for at least another week with that kind of dough.
Not to draw TOO many parallels, but remember when Galileo et al gave scientific findings that the governing powers didn't like? One of the causes, I feel from experiences with research, for the acceleration of scientific discovery is the change from a few centuries ago when science was done at the behest of the wealthy/powerful for status. As science was removed from the political, innovation and creativity flourished. This seems a bad sign of a growing politicization of scientific research, which is what kept things so slow for so long.
Maybe the G-man doesn't want his role revealed. I wouldn't doubt it'd be too hard for him to take out a few programmers everytime the release date nears.
Remember the good old days where we had unbiased gaming previews and reviews with none of those terrible corporate sponsorship problems? Wait, that's right I grew up on Nintendo Power. Their review of "The Wizard" was dead-on. That was the greatest film ever!
Let's not forget in the midst of all this next-gen marketing: Not everyone has HD. I don't care how much saturation of the market people expect hi-def to get in the next 5 years. Plenty of people still can't use this feature that Sony and Microsoft have as an "edge" over Nintendo. It's been said before, but if you're not a person salivating over the latest HDTV's to come out, you're probably not going to want drop $1000 for a new console and enough games to make it worthwile (and only 10 games or so for Xbox360, maybe half that with these rumors about PS3). I know that of all the consoles, Revolution is the only one reasonably in my price range (grad student!). Even if in this generation I buy an HD set, I still won't buy either of the other two until then, when presumably the prices will have already dropped alot (meaning even worse losses for Sony and Microsoft). And my brother got a PS2 before I bought a DVD player. I waited 8 months or so, and for half the price of the PS2, I got a DVD player that didn't suck like the PS2. Why shouldn't I expect the same this time around? However Blu-ray/HDDVD falls, there will have to be players not half-assedly attached to a game console. And even though Nintendo seems stuck in the same pattern as the other two when it comes to a glut of sequels, there is still plenty of innovation in their first party franchises. Zelda has always differed greatly between games both in style and gameplay. Hell, me and my roommate still play,frequently, MarioKart 64 over the Xbox games he has.
This gets at the heart of the problem I've always had for MMO's. One of the central parts of the game is making money. If the process is so little fun that people are willing to spend even more money to not go through it, then isn't that a poor design for a central game mechanic? Also, if you're paying for a game, subscription fees, and now at the very least matching those prices bypassing a large chunk of the game, how fun is that? It's like the satisfaction of beating games with god mode on. Sure you won, but you also missed 70% (those FMVs are so awesome they are the other 30% ha ) of the game.
I always liked the pirates' booty problem (for those of you who giggled--oh grow up). There's a crew of 5, with a strict hiearchy from 1 down to 5. It's time to split the hoard of a 100 pieces up. The rules are: The highest rank proposes how to divvy things up and there is a vote, if it's 50% or more against, you kill that highest rank and then the next highest gives a plan, etc. Pirates will vote against unless there's a clear advantage to voting for (i.e. some pieces as opposed to strictly fewer). Pirates may be dastardly, but are also logical ;-)
So if you're the captain (numero uno) how do you dole the treasure out without getting killed?