I am personally a fan of another of his games not mentioned here, Yomi. It definitely puts focus in a 1-on-1, competitive aspect where you're not playing time trial and every action you make involves picking the counter to the action your opponent is going to make.
It's a lot of standing on the shoulders of giants. People take a new framework or library that abstracts things at such a high level like making a chart just by doing chart ((0.1, 0.2, 0.3), (1, 2, 3)). This work has been done by someone else awhile ago, and they can fit them together like LEGO to create something cool in a relatively short period of time
And that's much of how API hackathons work. You have all these really fleshed out LEGO blocks. You just need people to come up with interesting ideas. So you give the people API access. And see what they come up with in 24 hours. And a lot of the stuff is just proof-of-concept. It's not like, let me polish this hack and unittest the hell out of it before I release. It's all make and break and testing the waters to see if other people are interested in it too.
I would guess they pull from the wiki commons and then use typical JPG or PNG algorithm libraries to stretch or compress the image. There's probably some AI to retrieve images that don't need to be stretched much so that it looks natural.
> The provided images are for layout purposes and each image we use for this project is released under the creative commons license (CC BY-SA). For more information visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
So, if you want to use the images for more than just layouts, you have to double check the license and ask the author. For this we will link to each photographer's flickr page. Furthermore, we assume no liability.
I'm interested in knowing how many of you on here are going to read this in one sitting. Not that it would be sufficient to analyze it for bugs, but because you're that interested.
If I had the mathematical background necessary to understand it, I certainly would.
... and I really wish I did have the mathematical background. Anyone have any recommendations on how to go from a standard CS undergrad math background to being able to understand proofs like these?
Sipser is great. Highly recommended. Working that book really accelerated my understanding. You can go from practically nothing to something with it, though it helps to have some discrete math.
As a compiler guy, I found that reading a lot of type theory papers helped me really get into the CS theoretical mindset, which made reading mathematics papers a lot easier. Writing a lot of Haskell code didn’t hurt. Oleg Kiselyov has some fairly approachable papers, as do Simon Peyton-Jones and Daan Leijen. Try searching for things on Lambda the Ultimate[1] if you’re interested.
Read it and google as you go. Math is one of the best covered topics online. For a potential millenium prize proof, it seems very approachable. That said, that's not saying much.
I find math in some cases to be really hard to Google. Particularly with expressions that I don't know the names of; I never know what to use as search terms.
I'm certainly missing some background but if I had the time I'd work my way through it just for the hell of it. The problem he attempts solving here is extremely important so I welcome any attempts made at it.
Why is this game so godlike? I think people might have missed it because they are too used to thinking about what could happen on a real board, where arms would get tangled and whatnot. The strategies in place, like leaving your king wide open to get taken, but dodging at the last second to bait a power piece in are awesome!
I think it's pretty standard that if you issue a move command, units will not attack and will go around. Players have come to expect this since Starcraft I. The whole idea of tower defence that was made popular stands a testament to the fact that we can place walls and change terrain and units WILL change their path on the fly. If you have played a tower defence in Warcraft III, you know that units can be lured into taking the A* optimal path, and you can block it off just before they get there, forcing them to recalculate a new path (which may be a long way away from where they currently are). Then, you can destroy the new tower you just placed and block off the path they had just changed to, forcing them down the old path again. You can repeat this as long as you have resources to build your cheapest tower (this was an exploit that made certain user-created maps really easy). Tower Defence designers now know about this and most of the well-made maps prevent you from building during level.
TL;DR: Path recalculation has been around since Starcraft I.
EDIT: And probably before that
You're missing the point of his post - he was saying that while path recalculation exists, it's hard to make an AI that makes proper choices when it comes to following the current path and creating a new path - especially when it's opponent can also modify the available paths in the future.
I'm saying that players have come to expect that issuing "move" will make AI take the shortest path without destruction, and we know that if there is a faster way, we have to tell the AI to attack through the wall if we want to break it. I guess the TL;DR didn't cover that though.
They also said that the participant won half the trials. How could the experimenters fool the subjects about the game if they didn't get any harsh sounds back?
The actual study seems to be behind a paywall. The article claims that "participants were told they won about half the trials", which I assume would be by blasting them with noise ("fingernails on a chalk board, dentist drills, and sirens"). Why would they need to explain which noise was used if they never used it (the player had no opponent)?
And then we have artists like DJ Kariu (http://www.youtube.com/user/Kariu) who have been producing content for years, have ~30k views on their big songs, produce consistently, and are still surviving with a separate shift job because they didn't get picked up. Even if you're noticed, it's still these labels that are creating a majority of the jobs.
Enough with the ad homenim attacks. I never once claimed that all good artists will be huge stars. I simply stated it's easier to gain recognition, not guaranteed recognition. I also never said the middle man shouldn't exist, most just aren't willing to adapt to modern distribution channels. How many years did it take to get the Beatles on iTunes? AC/DC's stuff was held off for a long time too.
>Even if you're noticed, it's still these labels that are creating a majority of the jobs.
Really? It's the record labels? You don't think it's concert venue's employees or employees of the companies that create the software to distribute the music and videos?
I think you're looking for "straw man" as I didn't attack you personally but you think that I'm attacking a point you didn't make. I brought up one counter-example, but I have seen many more out there.
I'll go back to the top again.
>Justin Bieber was a nobody until he put his videos on Youtube. Kendrick Lamar was discovered this way too. It's easier to gain recognition now than ever. If the world enjoys what you produce you don't have to worry as much about a distribution channel like you did 10+ years ago.
Yes, they get more recognition, but for what? They can convert this Youtube recognition into a small portion of money through Youtube ad monetization (a brand and a distribution channel, though I guess not a label). These examples ended up with a major distribution channel (a major record label) that will bring in enough revenue to survive on or to become a star (something Youtube ad monetization can only do for a very small few). Youtube was just the equivalent of that buddy you have in the industry that can pass on your sample tape with a kind word to get them to look at you. That one buddy probably means more to people in the labels than 100k views.
To continue with your direct response, music labels were promoting artists before iTunes. "[E]mployees of the companies that create the software to distribute the music and videos" most likely include employees of the label itself or contracted companies to write the software. Promoters have been around since the town crier, and their value has kept the job existing (and now unfortunately they take the lion's share of the revenue).
I make no comment on the middle man's ability to adapt to modern distribution channels. I don't think it's relevant to them picking up artists.
Concert venues and software contractors do create jobs, but they very rarely spawn into the giant companies we see represented by the RIAA. If they did, why would this power imbalance exist?
