demagogue

On the other hand, I was in the capital in 1997 when some bat-shit loon ran in with two hand guns and just started shooting at random, running towards the Maj Whip's office and hitting/killing a number of security persons. People complained why the gov't didn't take the "signs" he'd been consistently given off seriously. My friend was in the same hallway when it happened. So maybe the gov't needs to do a better job distinguishing 14-year-old "peace loving" teenagers from the batshit loons that finally crack and run into the capital shooting ... A problem is that they both make "cartoonish", retarded-looking threats. WILLIAM OF ORANGE sent my Congressman a scary letter about every 3 days, written in orange ink, all capitals, on lined paper, with little drawings on the side, you'd think he was 11 but actually in his 50s. I think this girl was just freaked and wants to come out looking like the victim ... I'm sure these agents probably just did their job and forgot about it.

Yeah, Alice is depressingly simple ... pattern-matching at its most primitive, a 6 year old could set it up. It's depressing because it won the Loebner prize in like 2004. The winner wasn't even a programmer, just a magazine article writer that learned a little code just for the contest! I think after he won the judges changed their methods to make sure it'd never win again. But I wouldn't go so far as say that a computer won't be able to "comprehend" human speech conversationally in the near future. I've been studying this for a while, and have seen some pretty sophisticated stuff. It's just, my opinion, the classical approach to formal linguistics has been ass-backwards -- it's most important to give a computer something to say first and then worry about how to say it correctly ... and now that we're into cognitive linguistics and game theory approaches things are scooting along. MIT has put out some pretty impressive Natural Language Generators recently; they've got robots (as well as AI in-game) that are able to look around them and report on what they see; they can imagine things that aren't there and report on their "visions", walk around, pick up what they want, take a rest when they get tired. The Nigel Grammar is being computized a bit at a time; painstakingly slowly but surely. I think things are happening either so fast or behind the scenes that it's not getting publicized, and when something *really* impressive comes out it will take the public by storm ... but researchers have learned not to hype things up and keep things in their techy articles. The whole "strong AI" debate doesn't impress me; it's like any theoretical limit or restriction on an empirical question; it doesn't help anything except distract people from a potential way forward.

I used to love Tony Shalub's previous series Stark Raving Mad -- an odd couple set up with Neil Patrick Harris -- but apparently it got cancelled really fast ... too bad! I thought it was smarter and funnier than Monk, and more about a relationship than one guy so it had more to work with, but Monk is pretty good too, or was before its quirkiness started getting repetitive.

I think the idea is ... it's not just that the rays run out of momentum at that distance (after being continually slowed by solar gravity). It's that they all run out of momentum all together, at about the same distance. So there will be interference effects; the rays won't just slow down, but will start getting bounced around by other slowing rays, and the faster ones will get bunched up by the slower rays holding them in and bouncing them back, where they'll hit incoming rays and things get bounced around further. So, the point is, you get a little sluggish, semi-turbulent pool of rays bouncing around in this zone, the wind gets *thickened*... rather than the rays just slowing down and dissapating and the wind getting *thinned*, which would happen if there were much fewer of them. It's the "pooling" of the rays that's the important point, it seems, not just the fact that they slow down after a while.

It's more about the pure logic underlying math than math itself. It has one of the best explanations of Turing Machines and Godel's Theorem because it's hands-on ... you are solving them right along with him, but in a fun way. That must be why computer science people like it so much. If you like this book, I'd also recommend The Mind's I edited by the same author (Hofstadter), which uses lots of little stories, essays, dialogues on naturalism ... that the "soul" is the brain ... and the "spiritual" implications of that, fun enough that you can forget that it's also pretty deep. They don't make many books like this any more ... full of little thought-games adding up to a big punchline. Minsky's Society of Mind, maybe. Penrose's Emporer's New Mind tried, and was great as long as he was talking about physics but was just awful on the "mind" part. Hofstadter wrote another book along these lines called Le Ton Beau de Marot on language creation, esp poetry, by brains and computers, but it's much more personal, even sentimental. If I ever become accomplished in some field, I think I want to try to write a book like one of these ... because nothing is more fun than when the author isn't just lecturing the reader but inviting him into thinking through something very interesting together.

There's a great dialogue in the book Godel, Escher, Bach (what's been called a bible for the cyberage) in which 2 characters get trapped in a series of Escher drawings and things like gravity suddenly changing on them occur as they walk across* -- sounds similar to the talking here. Awesome read (the whole book, really) if you can find it. * The whole thing is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for going in and out of nested levels of representation -- as you can do in a computer program -- and then tangling the hierarchy so things get loopy. The sort of thing Godel, Escher, and Bach were masters at doing.

I personally think '80s movies rock; they're always so stupid ... like the one about the journalism girl that dresses like a guy for a story and another girl gets a crush on her and she gets a crush on a guy; the guy that sells his telescope for one freaking date with the popular girl (Can't Buy me Love?); the Last Starfighter ... man, they are all pretty dumb like your post, but in a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 way you can laugh at. And D&D we had good times with, because it was one game that was all about personal interaction, uh, sort of anyway. Where it goes overboard is those people in Society for Creative Anachronism, which literally dress up in chainmail, get nurf-swords, meet on a field and different factions go to war with each other. By the way, I did something like renaissance faires as an actor in college; we put on an annual dinner theatre and I was always the dashing young prince - never the villian (not that I didn't try; I was just so type-cast with my blonde hair and baby blue eyes.) So I sort of have the whole D&D mindset in my blood.

I have to ask myself: is my life is really any better off knowing that this thing even exists? And the answer to that is question is "Yes. Yes, it is."

The good news is, at least we know that uncadonego is actually an uncle now. I'd be a little skeptical if he decided to call himself unca Don just for the hell of it.

Anyway, you can go to thiefmissions.com and search by "author" to answer your question yourself. You'll get this: So it looks like the answer is no, at least not enough to get credited. A Thief Nonetheless was a Komag contest mission, though.

As long as we're on this ghastly topic... A similar thing (as the above quote, from a while back) happened to me as a kid, except: - instead of a big brown spider it was a scorpian - instead of a hand-towel it was a bath towel as I was getting out of a bath - the scorpian actually did bite me - very high on the right thigh, near the joint. Totally oblivious I wrapped the towel around myself and felt a sharp prick, and almost dreamlike I let the towel fall down and saw the scorpian scurry out. And it literally took me a few seconds to comprehend the connection until my leg started burning. And I cried out, not from the pain but because I had no idea what a bite like that could do to me. My parents called poison control and we had to make a paste to cover the swelling bite ... and the whole time I was just in a daze. It was pretty surreal. That right there beats my second story where, on a trampoline, a cruising wasp got annoyed at our bouncing and bit me square between the eyes so that my eyes got swollen and I literally couldn't open them for about 4 hours. Now that I think about it, I guess I grew up in a pretty dangerous place -- out in the countryside in Texas, where most everything seems big and onery.

So you can't have D3 AI in DarkMod at all? Not that I'm dying to have mindless demons in DM or whatever, but I was under the impression that it was like a oneway street, all D3 assets could basically be thrown into DM but not vice versa. But I gather it's a lot more nuanced than that.

Yes, I was just thinking how it's just like a dev to be dying to play his own game: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...ost&p=85370

There's a video of a demo play from X06 released. I already linked to it in the Bioshock thread, but because it also has Assassin's Creed I thought I'd crosslink just to keep things tidy: ms.groovygecko.net/groovyg/clients/xbox/xbox_hb.wmv?wmcache=0 The AC part starts a little before the 32 minute mark. It should probably also be added that it looks pretty f'ing fun.

They've released another trailer for Bioshock and it's looking very good: ms.groovygecko.net/groovyg/clients/xbox/xbox_hb.wmv?wmcache=0 It's about 37 minutes in (right after the also very good looking Assassin's Creed demo, which is entirely in-game). for the ttlg thread on this: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?...447#post1506447 The Bioshock movie is prerendered, so you know; I'm not sure how much of it will make it in-game. But it's awesome nonetheless.

Not for the PC, it wouldn't. There are so many variables of trouble to try to pick it up mid-fight -- all the problems of self-dropping a sword multiplied by 10. And it would effectively render bad-guy AI into (temporary?) civilians, which could raise all sorts of hairy problems. One major set of problems would be trying to script or foresee every possible place a weapon could fall to ... like if you're on a bridge and it falls into the water. Now the PC loses his sword for the entire game without consent, and the AI would be thrown into M.O.-limbo. I could think of *other* types of games where it might fit, like a fencing simulator or something, but not this one IMO.

I got the impression it was something in between. It's not the absolute latest build because, e.g., Ken's already said the HUD's been somewhat tweaked from what we see here. But I think the article can be at least right in saying that it's not *exactly* the E3 build, either. It's a later build that was rigged up (and deemed good enough) probably specifically for public release. But they've done work since then, which probably improves things but maybe isn't as "clean" to release publicly.

Awesome timing, Komag. You (inadvertently) gave me the best present for my birthday! Thanks.

@Spar, If you noticed, there is a big difference between the time put into a full FM and a contest mission. A contest mission can be churned out in 2-4 weeks. A full FM, if you're working at it diligently, I mean look at the production times for the three Calendra's Legacy FMs, each one took about 3 months, and from what I gathered it was on a pretty diligent schedule. That's probably the fastest ... so any time longer than that is I think due to taking lots of breaks on building and really filling things out. By the way, you guys should consider running a contest for TDM assets if you really want people to contribute. The funny thing is that, given how much better output we seem to get from the community from contests, this is only half-joking.

You think NW was being a little harsh with the baton? I mean, are we just not supposed to talk about Komag there in any but a shallow sense? And if not in that thread (understandable), then where are we allowed to talk about it? Anyway, I don't worry about it ... rules is rules, and I don't really want to dredge anything up here. It does make me wonder how well she'll keep things under taps during the contest, though. I mean the entire FM forum is going to be flooded with Komag contest threads! (Can't exactly not let people put up threads on them.) I can predict shock and surprise every third post and she'll have to put up a sticky: "First rule of Komag contest; nobody talks about Komag." Oy, what a week it will be. Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what you want to do with this poll ... since of course the future of K's contests are up to him, and most people's opinion there I think are going to be pretty predictable. My guess is he'll -- or probably better worded, if it were me -- I'd switch over to TDM when it's ready, but that's still such a ways off it's hard to think about it now. And until then I'd maybe play with the idea of thematic contests in the meantime. Aside from his actual opinion, a poll is just going to be a somewhat gratuitous if maybe nice chance to know what TTLGers think along the way. But I guess it doesn't hurt.

To save you the trouble of looking for it, the link to the full text of Abelard's memoir is here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/abelard-histcal.html Aside from being helpful, I just enjoy the surreal aspect of linking to a 12-century tract as a way to "contribute" to a thread on the evolution of the eye. Gotta love these forums.

A lot I could say, but for now, I'll take care of these: Ok, here are two good introductory papers to get you going: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty.../papers/ecs.pdf http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ Some standard (recent) books are: Dennett's Consciousness Explained (defending a kind of functionalism) Chalmer's The Conscious Mind (defending property dualism) A more popular book which is incredibly fun and accessible to read is: Dennett & Hofstadter: The Mind's Eye (dealing with the "spiritual" implications of physicalism/ functionalism) For more of the older classics, a list here (look at the comments below as well for others): http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html A very extensive on-line collection of phil of mind papers on just about every topic there is, is here. (This is Chalmers' database. It seriously has *everything* you'd want to read about.) As a few classic papers (which should all be on that page), - Nagel's What's it like to be a bat - Jackson's Knowledge Argument (and replies) - Block Problems with Functionalism - Searle's Minds, Brains, Programs (Chinese Room Argument against strong AI) For now, I personally like Peter Carruthers's approach (although a few things I disagree), which is very much connected to cognitive science and emperical approaches to the brain and evolution, etc (and you can see his papers on Chalmer's page). I think functionalism is basically the way to go. No shit ... that's a crazy coincidence because just last night for kicks and giggles I read Abelard's Memoirs on Calamities , which among other things recounts the love story between Abelard and Heloise -- for no good reason except I had no good idea who the hell Abelard was. He's a terrifically engaging writer, wasn't he? What amazes me was that he was writing in like 1100. I always had this impression that the *entire* 1000 years of the Dark Ages were just that, dark, but reading Abelard he really brings that period in France alive ... and you feel the spark and energy of intellectual creativity and new thinking spreading around. I loved it how the religious authorities couldn't really touch him because he put so much work in making his arguments logically airtight (for the time); he knew his arguments were better than everyone else's - he was so delightfully self-sure - and his students all loved him. I loved reading it!

I guess it's time for more philosophy-types to swoop in. OrbWeaver - On consciousness (cns), from the way I studied it in phil of mind, your reply to Max. is missing something if you don't distinguish (1) and (2) below. I don't know if you actually did or didn't, but at least your post can be read as confusing on this point. So anyway, we're all supposed to distinguish: (1) THE SUPERVENIENCE THESIS. Cns supervenes on NCCs (NCC=Neural Correlate of Consciousness, the minimal unique neural activity that gives rise to a specific cns experience). This just means that cns experience is entirely dependent on the physical substrate manifesting it, so an experience cannot exist unless there is an NCC there to physical support it. There is an emerical necessary, one-way connection from physical -> cns. In the lingo they say the experience "supervenes" on the NCC, as if it were conceptually hovering over it every time it comes into existence. FROM (2) THE ENTAILMENT THESIS. *This* NCC activity logically entail *this* experience. All it means for there to be an experience is that there is this NCC activity. While most people (not otherwise predisposed against science) I think are on board with (1), (2) is actually a much harder case to sell. There are two big challenges: (A) THE KNOWLEDGE ARGUMENT: If you know everything about an NCC, you don't necessarly know everything about the cns experience. Imagine a great neuroscientist living her whole life in a black and white room. When she "understands" how the *blue* part of the color vision works in her brain, she still has no idea what "blueness" is like because she hasn't experienced it (a bad argument because it conflates "knowledge of" and "knowledge that", but the intuition is harder to shake off that this info doesn't entail these properties of experience, first person, no gaps, holistic) (B ) THE CONCEIVABILITY ARGUMENT. You can imagine, or at least there is no logical inconsistency in imagining having the *same* NCC activity giving rise to *different* experience (red<->green), or even no experience; zombies. And what about silicon brains functionally equivalent to human brains; the behavior would be the same, but is the experience? You can imagine it as different. What if the nation of China manifests the same functional relationships as a small NCC (which ostensibly are smaller than 1 billion synapses) by 1 billion people waving red flags to one another (so the pattern of flag signalling is identical to neuron signaling by CL- charges firing adjacent neurons). Such signalling might run an FPS if correctly timed (very slowly!), but is it cns? If so, where? We can at least imagine it isn't. Both of these argue that there is no *logical* necessary connection. There is only an emperical connection that logically could have been otherwise. It gives a foothold for some non-physical hangers-on in the universe, such as property dualism; the entities may be physical, but they have non-physical properties. So most people now-a-days are on board with (1). But rejecting (2) is very hard to do at the same time. The problem is that a functional network of neurons (whatever makes up an NCC) doesn't have the same properties as experience, holistic, no gaps, a "feel" that is very modal (smells vs. colors vs. tastes. vs. pains, etc...), how does all the modality get in there? Where is the "orange" part, can you point to it, much less the "subjective" part of it, the part where the orange stops and the blue starts, and the part where blue stops and "smell" starts. I mean, let's be very concrete. When you pull a single hair on your arm, a neural column of almost exactly 1000 neurons goes active, the minimal unique signal for the little "pain" of it. It's a very specific feeling, but it's very hard to get your head around the fact that it's *these* 1000 neurons firing in a pattern together that's giving rise to *this* pain. I mean, you can literally count them: 1000, and watch them firing in a Hebbian pattern, chug, chug, chug. At what nanosecond do we get "pain"? So the point is, your (obweaver's) reply to Maximus is ok if all you're saying that cns cannot exist without the NCC. But when Maximus said that the NCC can't fully "explain" cns, that's a little different question that's much harder. Just because we know NCC->cns doesn't mean that we are sure the physical info of the NCC explains everything there is to know about the experience, its first person nature, its "likeness", etc. Ok, all that said, my opinion is actually that there is a 'logical' connection between NCC and experience and that the knowledge and conceivability arguments are wrong. But I recognize that there's an "explanation gap" and I have to give reasons why the physical info gives rise to *this* experience. I have some ideas, and I know books that have some ideas, but I don't personally think this question has been fully answered yet and we can't make much any headway until at least they get something like a non-invasive realtime map of NCC dynamics at the synaptic level, something at that level of specificity to start modeling and theorizing over. Good luck in that happening any time soon. Then again, maybe it'll just be another 100 years and our grandkids will find an answer to it. It's just my intuition that there really is an answer; I just don't have illusions how tough the problem really is.

HUD? We don't need no stinking HUD.

Careful or your definition will cover Tom Arnold. (at least circa 1990s; pudgy, Rosanne, "The Tom Show")