garethace
Forum Replies Created
- Posts
For this reason the real decisions are made by chief/head traders who have the courage to stand by their investment strategies.
I can now see the reasons why they would have wanted to transfer decision makiing onto computers. Because it must be such a very stressful business trying to base decisions on a human hunch.
I guess those tall buildings would come in handy for jumping off of though! I you made a bad decision. Do a search on Google for games like Total Annihilation and Medieval: Total War. It is interesting to notice just how often the AI behaves stupidly, as in your Russian example. Anyone who would be used to playing Real Time Strategy gaming or Turn based Strategy gaming, as in chess, would know how lightly a bad computer AI glitch is to occur. Even the most beloved RTS games have bad issues!
But then again, most of the games like:
S T A L K E R
an RPG, are made by Eastern European small startups! They like their turn based strategy, those guys!
http://www.gamespot.com has a very intriguing interview/diary with the makers.
I personally have wondered a lot what it would be like to play something like Shogun – I love the wide open spaces displayed in the game.
he already is using a copy of J.D. Edwards e-Gov accounting software, which is the Daddy of them all! 😉
I am just going to cross reference back here to the other thread:
What bugs the hell out of me though, is how more and more of these important financial decisions are being made nowadays be complex AI programs used to track these distinctive patterns in human behaviour, human spending etc, on a time frame.
That is what my post here;
is sort of alluding to. The decision making capabilities AI in computer games. This is one book I have always wanted to sit down and read.
Just a glance over at the Dell specs for home gaming units these days, a thing I haven’t done in a long time I must admit – there is no way the average Joe might consider upgrading his pathetic Geforce FX 5200 to a new Radeon 9800XT with 256MB of dual channel 256bit Direct X 9.0 card with 8 fully functional 32-bit rendering pipelines. (Each cycle can render 8 pixels)
I bit much to imagine the average person actually knowing that – but then again, the average person possibly wouldn’t know the difference. Or that an Audigy 2 sound card not only renders sounds in the game, but can also process those sounds bouncing off of objects and your hearing them indirectly!
Naw, that just purely for the geeks! 😉
TOD and TED.
Anyhow, it would appear that many products in the PC industry are in the process of diverging at the moment – i.e. to keep the R&D going on various components, the average user will not need the sophistication of the highest end parts. That means, that only a small community of dedicated followers will actually spend more money to get the high end.
So in a way, the market for ‘The enthuasiast desktop’ (TED) could be like all PCs were in the beginning – something that only a few will afford. While the technology contained in ‘The office Desktop’ (TOD) will be much more crippled and divergent from the higher end.
It will be interesting to see how things pan out anyhow. I would expect to see TED running much faster that TOD in future, or TOD just politely bowing out and becoming the sealed platric box, that Microsoft/XBOX wants everyone to have, rather than the open Architecture made available presently.
It looks as if consoles will become very sophisticated too
But consoles do not have to be backwardly compatible, which means they can throw out everything and the kitchen sink, every few years and start with a clean slate. Unlike the Desktop, which has to remain backwardly compatible to x86 and its gigantic installed software base – circa early 1990s.
While the demand for high end pcs for games will just fuel a very small but elite sort of demand
AI is an interesting study – the best way to think about a game, is just like a very complicated database.
yeah, I can’t argue with that – travelling around teachs you a thing or three, or four, no doubts.
I tend to learn most of what I know about economics around the world through snipets about the IT industry – in the last few years, it has been interesting to observe the swings and the round-abouts.
Ever think of investing? I believe that is where many United States ordinary citizens put some of their cash – even younger generations, hoping to make a quick buck.
Not to mention all of the new products which are always held back until after the xmas rush. Nothing older would ever sell before xmas.
technology revolves in 4 year cycles – then everyone needs to upgrade at once.
2000 was an artificial w2k scandal and should never have been used to boost sales and upgrades artificially – the obvious realit of a slump after such dangerous over-buying happened.
You could pick up big-iron SUN gear on the black market for a fraction of its original cost around 2001.
some of the tech curious readers here, might do well to keep this article in their favs,
A lot of standards and specs are going to all change at once, meaning that those who have bought this year, really have bought at the wrong time.
Another reality I did become aware of over the xmas in particular, was the futility of using TAXIs as transport now in Dublin.
€12.00 to go 1 or 2 miles in traffic!
While the LUAS cost a billion quid, it still is costing the average shopper that to move about?
Some fundamental questions, and realities need to be faced.
Learn all about things like RTE, no not the Montrose variety, but the one all corporation will spend billions on during the upcoming next .DOT COM boom.
I am thinking more of the modern high tech equivalent of an elephant roaring down the narrow streets of our capital at 60mph! 🙂
LUAS, cars, buses…
Let us not forget about the ‘Leon Krier’ touch, going back to classical rome etc. What Dublin really needs is an army.
http://www.pcgameworld.com/screenshot.php/game/1535/page/1/Rome:_Total_War/
The MATRIX just borrowed everything it could from text book AI thinking in the computer communities. Just like LOTRs has packaged up the Tolkein book for people who do not want to read.
This is a good discussion about AI and the MATRIX movie
That Steven Spielberg movie called AI, is a good example of the ideas I am talking about too. Some great acting in that movie too, set design, concepts etc.
If you rent it on DVD, it is very interesting to listen to Spielberg speak about his ideas behind that movie.
Bear in mind, that in terms of the entire history of human development, we have only had our unique brain power for a small part of our history. That is to say, that the golden age of human development and excellence is just a brief interlude.
For many millions of years, the human species could only hunt and savenge as best it could. At nightime, early humans just had to stay in the dark and cold in caves like animals. But at some critical point, following their ability to control fire – suddenly their brain began to evolve at more than linear rates.
So, for millenia, humans brain capacity stayed pretty much at a constant value, as witnessed by their use of the same tools over the course of millions of years. Then suddenly and without much warning this all changes, as the nightimes suddenly become lighted with fire and peoples’ reality switches from external factors, to things inside their heads.
Sean O’Laoire described a very similar switch from the traditional cottage for both animals and people, which prevails across most of Western Europe. When houses with large fireplaces came about, and animals were housed elsewhere, suddenly man become aware of romantic impulses he never knew he had.
The fact remains, that machines are currently accelerating in development at a rate much greater than the human species at the moment. At the moment, machines may be going through their early phases of development, but that does not mean that they will never develop the ability to control fire.
I was hoping that Archiseek, could provide more or less the same opportunity for architects to sit around a fire and think for a change! 🙂
As regards to NASA, you should know that over there, in order to keep getting their generous government funding they simply have to ‘spend’ their budget each and every year. Otherwise they get less next year.
In the times of Apollo, NASA managed to do very productive work. But nowadays, they just fall into the same catagory as any other government funded institution.
Coming towards the end of the year, they always check the accounts to see if there is any more money left. Then if there is a few million left, they have to pull out the catalogues and frantically started ordering ‘stuff’ to make up the difference.
Whole buildings full of computers are filled doing this – only to be switched on doing absolutelly nothing, except perhaps to walk the odd site-seeing tour through.
In regards to a couple of things here, I am going to put on my favourite right brain and start being a scientist.
The one environment, which resembles the sexual numerical possiblity, law of chance situation to create actual human beings, does not exist in CMOS transistor technology. Intel etc are leading the world in that.
They have to build an entire new factory line every year and we are now talking about 1 billion transistors on something the size of 4mm x 4mm, getting smaller and more dense all of the time.
Moore’s law predicted back in the 1960s, by an intel engineer, has never been broken – that transistor count will double every 1.5 years.
Like I said no two chips are exactly alike. We simply do not know what to do with all the processing power we have anymore. It is going mostly unused. Same with digital storage, same with embedded memory etc.
More and more functions are therefore able to integrate onto a single piece of silicon, and at some stage the machine will actually start to use this vast reserve of computational power to do something like in the first human brains, which only difference is that it was biological and chemical as oposed to silicon.
All mathematical possibility theory currently points to the fact, that we are creating a rain forest of cross pollenation on microchips, somewhere in some industrial looking, nonedescript factory shed, that critical leap with finally happen – that initial spark.
As to the Moore’s Law thing, and time travel, at some stage in the future – the human species will have created so much digital storage capacity, memory and processing power, that it will be able to devote some part of it to just recording a point in time in exact realistic detail – that will allow supercomputers to spawn billions of alternative scenarios and billions of copies of you and me.
That means, mathematically speaking, if you think you are you – i.e. the one special ‘real’ Brian in the billions of other virtual copies, then the odds are stacked against you by a billion to one!
In other words the whole reality that science has set out to discover, and these great people like Einstein wanted to make clear – has in some strange way, become inverted on itself.
In the future – most people will actually exist in virtual space – that is the critical cross-junction between the human species and the machine.
And also that point at which we as a species will effectively cease to be useful anymore. No walt disney endings, just re-created virtual time and space.
Some stuff here about concepts in robotics.
I am a great fan of Helmer Stenros and Seppo Aura’a book about this – it does mention Chinesse gardens a lot, and how the whole perception of space and time is becoming more ‘eastern’ in modern architecture.
However, Stenros failed to even mention Brown. I like the notion that the garden gives you surprises and depends upon the fact that the observer moves.
Do a search on robotics and that will lead you in the correct direction.
Remember, it will not be humans who do this exploration – it will be robots who have mastered the art of movement in both human-scale designed and non-human scale designed environments.
These robots will also have the ability to reproduce just like any other species.
I have talked a lot with the people working in computers, and most of them believe that at some critical point in the future, that a ‘leap’ will be made – because no too microchips are exactly alike – to when machines can actuallly think.
Did anyone see the BBC documentary on time travel yesterday evening?
To be honest, the AAI do not care what profession you come from. It is completely motivated by ‘just having an interest’ in design.
In fact, it would be true to say, that architects perhaps like going to the AAI to get away from their profession a bit, to get a wider view on things. To dip their toes into something a bit different.
I mean, in the question times at the end, or in forum debates I have gone to, it was the multiplicity of views and opinions that was so refreshing.
