Research Effects

[YohanTM2]

ORIGINAL: Rummy

Check back with me in a couple months. Work keeps me pretty busy till the summer.

Um, DOH...

[YohanTM2]

ORIGINAL: Rummy

Good point, Neuromancer (what the heck does that mean, by the way?). I'm certainly not blaming game designers for shorting us on AI. I am just tired of having my expectations raised. My real problem is a lack of time to play with actual people (having two toddlers does restrict one's time).

Why is it though, that some of my favorite old games like Harpoon and the V For Victory series seemed more challenging? Even TOAW was tougher than Korsun's AI.

Or am I just getting better?

or drinking less [X(]

The playing less with real people is my key point, I need pbem.

[Rummy]

. . . which is why WAW is so exciting. It appears to be the perfect game for pbem. I've been looking forward for a long time to a game that allows players to explore all of the 'what-ifs' of WWII . . .. What if Japan goes defensive on the U.S. and invades Russia? What if the U.S. loses at Midway? What if Germany makes it to the Persian Gulf? What if the Allies attack through the Balkans instead of Italy? What if the Germans somehow pull off Sea Lion? What if Japan takes Hawaii? Fun stuff.

[neuromancer]

ORIGINAL: pasternakski

"Neuromancer" is the name of William Gibson's 1984 sci-fi novel that was embedded early on into the cyberpunk "culture." It was heavy on the cyberscience (you could get a computer motherboard interface stuck in your head and become sort of a walking CPU with plug-ins). I thought it rather silly.

Most people who read Neuromancer fixated on the technology aspects (either poisitively or negatively). This actually rather annoyed Gibson as the technology was window dressing for the story (and he never claimed that his technology was realistic). He also was rather annoyed that few paid any attention to the socio-political-economic aspects of the story.

What an unfortunate few ever realized is that most cyberpunk novels contained a metaphor of the current state of the world. Corporations getting bigger and more powerful. Crime getting more and more out of control as the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened. The information age becoming more and more important as computers become more and more important. Technology exploding out of control, growing faster than we know what to do wih it.

as I said, it wasn't really about the future, it was about the present - the 1980s and early 1990s (the Regan years). As for the future he was wrong about that. We've already started down a path that will make the worst future offered in cyberpunk look like a utopia in comparison.

The future we're going to get won't be like in Neuromancer. It will be much, much worse.


The irony is that the internet as we know it didn't exist when Gibson wrote about cyberspace. And while we don't have his VR cyberspace, and possibly never will, the basic notion that a huge amount of the worlds infomration will be on computer, and linked to each other is true. And that smart hackers can get in to this place and cause damage or make money.

I even read an article by a guy who argued that no one would ever put all their sensitive data on the internet where it could be accessed like is depicted in cyberpunk. That was said in (IIRC) 1989. Within the decade the article was proven completely wrong. And the basic concepts behind Gibsons cyberspace became real.

As for the ultra small computers. Already here. They're just too expensive to make for the public. Or still cannot deal with the heat problems (IBM made an entire working computer main board and so on that fit into an area smaller than your average microchip - the chip, not the plastic jacket - it ran for only a few seconds before suffering heat death).

More feasable - at this time - is the 4 GB hard drive that is the size of two or three quarters stacked together. In 1991. hard drives were as big as 3.5" floppy drives, and could hold maybe 120 MB of data on a good day. We know have personal computers that ae as powerful (or more powerful) as multi-million dollar supercomputers were back in the 80s.

In 2000 I was using an encryption scheme that would take months for a computer bigger than most people had access to, to crack. Now, a desktop PC can break that same encryption scheme in less than 48 hours, probably less than 24.


The only thing we don't seem any closer to, is actual Machine Intelligence.