Speaking as a non-Web-developer: It seems like using these new fancy tools isn't all that helpful, if using them creates lots of integration work (as in the angry post above), with the main benefit being flashy effects. I've seen sites that advertise a game or something, that rely on an elaborate animated Flash menu that would've offered the information just fine as plain HTML. Why demand Flash and cookies and Java and.NET when all I want is to view some text and pictures?
"presentation can enhance functionality, but cannot replace it."
That's the key part. The game advertised in the article seems like it rejected that advice on the theory, "Oldschool games focused more on gameplay, so let's go out of our way to make it look primitive instead of getting some halfway-decent graphics and sound." Ie., decent graphics and solid gameplay aren't mutually exclusive.
I nominate Cave Story (freeware) as an example of classic Metroid/Castlevania-style gameplay done right in the modern era. The graphics are roughly 16-bit-era, the music is memorable without the use of the Japan Symphony Orchestra, and there's simple, fun gameplay with an interesting story (and even a hidden extended storyline).
Facing down Random Homicidal Forest Critter #168 isn't as scary in an RPG as "UnReal World"'s experience. You try to act like a standard adventurer, and soon find you're too cold to sleep, too exhausted to build a shelter, then to stand up... Yeah, it'd be easy to go overboard in exactly what's simulated, but a little realism would go a long way towards making RPGs more interesting. I think the key is that *difficult* and *dangerous* tasks other than monster-slaying should get modeled. So, finding food yes, finding a toilet no; convincing the city guard you have valid travel papers, yes; filling out tax forms, no.
On "UnReal World" specifically: that game highlights the need for a good interface when you're introducing an unusually large amount of complexity to a game. URW does it in a hard-to-use way, and would've benefited greatly from a Zelda-like system with easy, context-sensitive actions. Not separate multi-key commands for "Cut down tree", "cut fallen log into blocks", and "cut block into firewood".
The builder's skill, effort, tools, raw materials, and workplace are his capital. Those who denounce capitalism deny that he should be able to own any of those; they're the property of the State to redistribute. Note that that list includes the builder's mind and body.
As much as I respect him, I kind of blame Carl Sagan for the ISS. He argued that we should use a space station for international brotherhood, and it seems like that goal detracted from the goal of actually accomplishing something tangible.
It's nice that NASA has been able to do some science experiments in space. It's also nice that their robotic probes have gathered information about the planets and the rest of the universe.
Ultimately, though, I don't care about the raw science. This research does little to get us closer to actually bringing life to other planets. A few weeks back, NASA released a report saying that they can't keep running the ISS, the Shuttle, and their other experiments while also gearing up for a return to the Moon or a mission to Mars. If I could drop the ISS into the ocean next year and use the money for a Moon/Mars venture, I'd definitely do it.
An easy way to taste this fact is to compare apples or strawberries of different sizes. (But presumably not comparing apples to strawberries.) Same total amount of sugar per fruit, usually, so the big ones are less sweet.
The President of the United States has no business deciding how long the school year should be. None.
Then again, he also has no legal authority to order me to buy health care.
So... it's not a tax and not government-controlled, but your only options are to pay it or not watch television? I guess there's no vehicle tax either, since you could always walk everywhere. Or is there some way to shut off whatever part of the TV is devoted to picking up broadcast signals, so that you can legally have a TV without paying this "optional" fee?
Federal income taxes are optional here in the US too -- you have the option of not making any income. This option is chosen by the very poor and very rich alike!
Yes, but it has the benefit of being a clearly defined project with some specific sub-tasks, like finding ways to manufacture nanotubes in massive amounts. Also, it has multiple possible uses, so it's useful regardless of whether our ultimate goal proves to be "On to Mars!" or "Let's send robot probes and sulk on Earth forever about how immoral we are!"
We're explorers and pioneers. Unless we expand, we stagnate and die. Hoping for anything like a perfection of human nature first is a recipe for suicide.
I disagree that the US has "one of the more oppressive regimes amongst the technically advanced nations." It's more accurate to say that we're working hard to throw away everything that made us unique. We could do quite a lot, yet, if we returned to the Constitution (which was killed by both parties over a century or more) and either found a legitimate way to fund NASA or got the government well out of the way of private space companies.
If we tried to eliminate the profit motive from education, colleges would have less incentive to do as good a job as they do in educating students. Today, we complain about high tuition and look for alternatives such as the article's online-college idea -- and as the headline notes, the colleges are scared by this kind of competition. If education were truly not for profit -- if getting donations and tuition were not a concern -- colleges wouldn't much need to struggle to remain relevant and worthwhile.
I replied because the "shouldn't be for profit" line reminds me of the health care debate. Sure, we could force doctors to be poor government employees who become indentured servants to the government to pay off their "free" tuition. We'd get only doctors who really love their jobs and don't care about the money. Wouldn't that be wonderful? No, not really. I'd like my doctor to know that I'm helping to fund his kids' exorbitant college tuition.
Now, if he were in Tennessee or Montana, he could claim exemption under the states' Firearms Freedom Acts from federal gun laws! Well, except that it's a little too big...
Why not build him a working fusion reactor in that case? Some people have actually done that! Sure, it loses energy overall -- just like the multi-billion-dollar kind!
...Because, of course, secession was evil and illegal when the South did it, but good and legal when the West Virginians did it.
Not Really a Robot
on
Robotic Mold
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The article explains what's meant by saying that the "robot" will compute: "Most people's idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence. It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm. The plasmodium is capable of solving complex computational tasks, such as the shortest path between points and other logical calculations. Through previous experiments we have already demonstrated the ability of this mould to transport objects. By feeding it oat flakes, it grows tubes which oscillate and make it move in a certain direction carrying objects with it. We can also use light or chemical stimuli to make it grow in a certain direction."
That's like saying that the bamboo plant on my desk is a robot. It, too, transports substances in a direction determined by light input, and computes the optimal direction for approaching a light source. I could even claim that I'm adding "logic gates" to it by covering or pruning certain leaves.
Says the article, the mold robot has "the number crunching power of super computers" because it carries out computing tasks. That claim is also pretty silly. The A* algorithm can find the shortest distance between paths, and it doesn't require anything that could be called a supercomputer today.
So, this thing is a "robot" in the sense that pointing at random objects and calling yourself a master of "found art" is art.
You're welcome to have your own government protect you from having to make your own judgments. Ours has no authority to give us that "protection"; what a shame.
And both the one-axis and "political compass" charts confuse the issue by making the position "keep the government out of our economic lives" get lumped together with "give big subsidies to corporations". With the implication that the only option besides communism and corporatism is a compromise that combines the worst elements of both -- rather than an actual free market.
The "Political Compass" is a better description of politics than "left and right", but it's still badly flawed. It seems to pick an arbitrary scale and center, such that that Web site can't identify one politician who has ever occupied the "true center". If the range is supposed to represent the theoretical limits of political positions, "The timeless universal centre." Logically, wouldn't that mean something like totally enslaving 50% of the population, or enslaving all of the people for half their time? Instead the chart picks some weird, apparently arbitrary center point that makes Obama a "rightist", and declares that that is the One True Center.
The current Republican Party officials, maybe. Conservatives or libertarians, no. Under a free government, politicians have few favors to sell to any bidder.
You might be interested in the AI work of Douglas Hofstadter, as described in "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies". In that he describes projects that are meant to build creatve programs, that lead toward AI that can react to new situations without a human pointing it in exactly the right direction. In the last 10 years or so his research group seems to have stalled, but the program "Metacat" is available online if you have the patience to get it working. The theme of that work, creativity, is a key part of intelligence because even a routine task like recognizing objects involves fuzzy analogies to past situations that never perfectly match.
The idea about "AI that makes the same mistakes as us" is part of a split among AI researchers. Some seem to want to understand the brain so they can build better AI, while others want to build AIs so they can understand the brain. If the goal is to understand human brains, then simulating human stupidity means you're hopefully following the same processes that the brain uses. So artificial stupidity is useful, for that purpose. I'm more interested in seeing better AI, regardless of whether it ends up working like a living brain.
I'm not sure whether to think of this development as a good thing. The obvious benefit for gamers is that they won't need to buy a whole new console so often. But the gaming industry seems to be hitting a technological wall, in that graphics are about as good as they need to be to look shiny and realistic. Same for gameplay complexity. There's a bigger difference between an Atari 2600 level of technology (as in "Adventure") and NES-level ("The Legend of Zelda"), than there is between NES-level and oh, PS1 level. That is, once you get to a halfway-decent tech level you can get recognizable graphics and gameplay that's not all that different from modern games'. "Final Fantasy X" could've been made for the NES if it'd had more raw storage space.
I've been thinking about whether AI could be a breakthrough technology that revolutionizes gaming, but after reading about game-specific AI I'm kind of shell-shocked. The kind of AI that people want for games tends to be remarkably stupid, mostly meant to dispense quests and die entertainingly. From what I understand of that impressive-looking recent demo about the AI-driven kid, 90% of that was fake, and didn't need to be real AI to impress an audience.
So, unless developers find new gameplay styles that really push the hardware, there's little point in advancing the hardware any farther. I don't much care whether my enemies splatter with true Newtonian realism when I frag them with a plasma rifle.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a non-Web-developer: It seems like using these new fancy tools isn't all that helpful, if using them creates lots of integration work (as in the angry post above), with the main benefit being flashy effects. I've seen sites that advertise a game or something, that rely on an elaborate animated Flash menu that would've offered the information just fine as plain HTML. Why demand Flash and cookies and Java and .NET when all I want is to view some text and pictures?
"presentation can enhance functionality, but cannot replace it."
That's the key part. The game advertised in the article seems like it rejected that advice on the theory, "Oldschool games focused more on gameplay, so let's go out of our way to make it look primitive instead of getting some halfway-decent graphics and sound." Ie., decent graphics and solid gameplay aren't mutually exclusive.
I nominate Cave Story (freeware) as an example of classic Metroid/Castlevania-style gameplay done right in the modern era. The graphics are roughly 16-bit-era, the music is memorable without the use of the Japan Symphony Orchestra, and there's simple, fun gameplay with an interesting story (and even a hidden extended storyline).
Facing down Random Homicidal Forest Critter #168 isn't as scary in an RPG as "UnReal World"'s experience. You try to act like a standard adventurer, and soon find you're too cold to sleep, too exhausted to build a shelter, then to stand up... Yeah, it'd be easy to go overboard in exactly what's simulated, but a little realism would go a long way towards making RPGs more interesting. I think the key is that *difficult* and *dangerous* tasks other than monster-slaying should get modeled. So, finding food yes, finding a toilet no; convincing the city guard you have valid travel papers, yes; filling out tax forms, no.
On "UnReal World" specifically: that game highlights the need for a good interface when you're introducing an unusually large amount of complexity to a game. URW does it in a hard-to-use way, and would've benefited greatly from a Zelda-like system with easy, context-sensitive actions. Not separate multi-key commands for "Cut down tree", "cut fallen log into blocks", and "cut block into firewood".
The builder's skill, effort, tools, raw materials, and workplace are his capital. Those who denounce capitalism deny that he should be able to own any of those; they're the property of the State to redistribute. Note that that list includes the builder's mind and body.
As much as I respect him, I kind of blame Carl Sagan for the ISS. He argued that we should use a space station for international brotherhood, and it seems like that goal detracted from the goal of actually accomplishing something tangible.
It's nice that NASA has been able to do some science experiments in space. It's also nice that their robotic probes have gathered information about the planets and the rest of the universe.
Ultimately, though, I don't care about the raw science. This research does little to get us closer to actually bringing life to other planets. A few weeks back, NASA released a report saying that they can't keep running the ISS, the Shuttle, and their other experiments while also gearing up for a return to the Moon or a mission to Mars. If I could drop the ISS into the ocean next year and use the money for a Moon/Mars venture, I'd definitely do it.
An easy way to taste this fact is to compare apples or strawberries of different sizes. (But presumably not comparing apples to strawberries.) Same total amount of sugar per fruit, usually, so the big ones are less sweet.
The President of the United States has no business deciding how long the school year should be. None. Then again, he also has no legal authority to order me to buy health care.
Do you claim to have a moral right to take my stuff because society can use it effectively to develop new tech?
So... it's not a tax and not government-controlled, but your only options are to pay it or not watch television? I guess there's no vehicle tax either, since you could always walk everywhere. Or is there some way to shut off whatever part of the TV is devoted to picking up broadcast signals, so that you can legally have a TV without paying this "optional" fee?
Federal income taxes are optional here in the US too -- you have the option of not making any income. This option is chosen by the very poor and very rich alike!
Yes, but it has the benefit of being a clearly defined project with some specific sub-tasks, like finding ways to manufacture nanotubes in massive amounts. Also, it has multiple possible uses, so it's useful regardless of whether our ultimate goal proves to be "On to Mars!" or "Let's send robot probes and sulk on Earth forever about how immoral we are!"
We're explorers and pioneers. Unless we expand, we stagnate and die. Hoping for anything like a perfection of human nature first is a recipe for suicide.
I disagree that the US has "one of the more oppressive regimes amongst the technically advanced nations." It's more accurate to say that we're working hard to throw away everything that made us unique. We could do quite a lot, yet, if we returned to the Constitution (which was killed by both parties over a century or more) and either found a legitimate way to fund NASA or got the government well out of the way of private space companies.
If we tried to eliminate the profit motive from education, colleges would have less incentive to do as good a job as they do in educating students. Today, we complain about high tuition and look for alternatives such as the article's online-college idea -- and as the headline notes, the colleges are scared by this kind of competition. If education were truly not for profit -- if getting donations and tuition were not a concern -- colleges wouldn't much need to struggle to remain relevant and worthwhile.
I replied because the "shouldn't be for profit" line reminds me of the health care debate. Sure, we could force doctors to be poor government employees who become indentured servants to the government to pay off their "free" tuition. We'd get only doctors who really love their jobs and don't care about the money. Wouldn't that be wonderful? No, not really. I'd like my doctor to know that I'm helping to fund his kids' exorbitant college tuition.
Now, if he were in Tennessee or Montana, he could claim exemption under the states' Firearms Freedom Acts from federal gun laws! Well, except that it's a little too big...
Why not build him a working fusion reactor in that case? Some people have actually done that! Sure, it loses energy overall -- just like the multi-billion-dollar kind!
...Because, of course, secession was evil and illegal when the South did it, but good and legal when the West Virginians did it.
The article explains what's meant by saying that the "robot" will compute: "Most people's idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence. It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm. The plasmodium is capable of solving complex computational tasks, such as the shortest path between points and other logical calculations. Through previous experiments we have already demonstrated the ability of this mould to transport objects. By feeding it oat flakes, it grows tubes which oscillate and make it move in a certain direction carrying objects with it. We can also use light or chemical stimuli to make it grow in a certain direction."
That's like saying that the bamboo plant on my desk is a robot. It, too, transports substances in a direction determined by light input, and computes the optimal direction for approaching a light source. I could even claim that I'm adding "logic gates" to it by covering or pruning certain leaves.
Says the article, the mold robot has "the number crunching power of super computers" because it carries out computing tasks. That claim is also pretty silly. The A* algorithm can find the shortest distance between paths, and it doesn't require anything that could be called a supercomputer today.
So, this thing is a "robot" in the sense that pointing at random objects and calling yourself a master of "found art" is art.
Oh, and isn't Australia's government also working on installing mandatory Internet filtering, to further protect you?
You're welcome to have your own government protect you from having to make your own judgments. Ours has no authority to give us that "protection"; what a shame.
And both the one-axis and "political compass" charts confuse the issue by making the position "keep the government out of our economic lives" get lumped together with "give big subsidies to corporations". With the implication that the only option besides communism and corporatism is a compromise that combines the worst elements of both -- rather than an actual free market.
The "Political Compass" is a better description of politics than "left and right", but it's still badly flawed. It seems to pick an arbitrary scale and center, such that that Web site can't identify one politician who has ever occupied the "true center". If the range is supposed to represent the theoretical limits of political positions, "The timeless universal centre." Logically, wouldn't that mean something like totally enslaving 50% of the population, or enslaving all of the people for half their time? Instead the chart picks some weird, apparently arbitrary center point that makes Obama a "rightist", and declares that that is the One True Center.
The current Republican Party officials, maybe. Conservatives or libertarians, no. Under a free government, politicians have few favors to sell to any bidder.
You might be interested in the AI work of Douglas Hofstadter, as described in "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies". In that he describes projects that are meant to build creatve programs, that lead toward AI that can react to new situations without a human pointing it in exactly the right direction. In the last 10 years or so his research group seems to have stalled, but the program "Metacat" is available online if you have the patience to get it working. The theme of that work, creativity, is a key part of intelligence because even a routine task like recognizing objects involves fuzzy analogies to past situations that never perfectly match.
The idea about "AI that makes the same mistakes as us" is part of a split among AI researchers. Some seem to want to understand the brain so they can build better AI, while others want to build AIs so they can understand the brain. If the goal is to understand human brains, then simulating human stupidity means you're hopefully following the same processes that the brain uses. So artificial stupidity is useful, for that purpose. I'm more interested in seeing better AI, regardless of whether it ends up working like a living brain.
I'm not sure whether to think of this development as a good thing. The obvious benefit for gamers is that they won't need to buy a whole new console so often. But the gaming industry seems to be hitting a technological wall, in that graphics are about as good as they need to be to look shiny and realistic. Same for gameplay complexity. There's a bigger difference between an Atari 2600 level of technology (as in "Adventure") and NES-level ("The Legend of Zelda"), than there is between NES-level and oh, PS1 level. That is, once you get to a halfway-decent tech level you can get recognizable graphics and gameplay that's not all that different from modern games'. "Final Fantasy X" could've been made for the NES if it'd had more raw storage space.
I've been thinking about whether AI could be a breakthrough technology that revolutionizes gaming, but after reading about game-specific AI I'm kind of shell-shocked. The kind of AI that people want for games tends to be remarkably stupid, mostly meant to dispense quests and die entertainingly. From what I understand of that impressive-looking recent demo about the AI-driven kid, 90% of that was fake, and didn't need to be real AI to impress an audience.
So, unless developers find new gameplay styles that really push the hardware, there's little point in advancing the hardware any farther. I don't much care whether my enemies splatter with true Newtonian realism when I frag them with a plasma rifle.