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Long time no speak.... just finished playing the new Stranglehold demo from Xbox Live. In a word, fantastic. Just so cinematic and fun. Did you work on that? If so i'd like to congratulate you on whatever you did... Smiley200 17:53, 9 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sadly, no - I can't take credit for any of that. The game I'm working on won't be out for more than a year yet - although it shares a lot of software with Stranglehold. The team did an amazing job of capturing the feel of the movie - the collaboration with John Woo really shows clearly. Have you seen 'HardBoiled' (the movie of which the game is the sequel)? SteveBaker 19:04, 9 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I've seen it, and I would agree about capturing the feel of the film. I especially think that about the spin attack where it shows the enemies being hit. Where the doves came from though I have no clue... In fact, I think that the only problem with the game is the crappy cover system... You almost always have something sticking out, which makes the game impossible on "Hard Boiled" difficulty... Smiley200 09:01, 10 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Do you think, placing the {{Notaforum}} template on this talk, page and archiving the inactive discussion sections will be useful ? I would like to see the talk page used for its intended purpose - i.e. discussion of the article rather than the theories and conspiracies behind water fuel cell, HHO, the latest perpetual motion machines - but won't do so if editors such as you Rubins, Dmacks and you who help maintain sanity on the page, have any objections. Cheers. Abecedare 17:47, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think people pay any attention whatever to the piles of templates that accumulate at the top of talk pages. I have no objection to you sticking it up there - I just have zero confidence that it'll have an effect. Archiving inactive topics is a useful thing though - it helps to keep the conversations tracking one thread. That article is a serious problem though. I'd like to simply delete it per the guidelines in Wikipedia:Fringe theories - but that's not going to happen. SteveBaker 18:19, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have no expectations that people will stop commenting on the issue because of some template, but I at least hope that being able to point to it will help short-circuit some off-topic discussions.

Frankly, I don't understand why people who really believe in this stuff don't try to publish it in a scientific journal and waltz away with their Nobel prize, or start a company and rake in, say a trillion dollars (roughly speaking). Of course, there are all those oil-companies/US government conspiracies to consider but ... oh well. Abecedare 18:26, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

After seen your contributions to the RD and realizing you still don't have a barnstar for them, I've thought you deserved this :). Place it wherever it should be in your User page, I'm too clumsy to make it fit well. --Taraborn 17:22, 17 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wow! Thank you so much - it's always good to be appreciated! I'll carry it very carefully over to my User: page and place it in a shiney new {{award2|template}}! SteveBaker 17:33, 17 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not to get in a long discussion about this (I'm on a business trip and shouldn't be distracting myself with WP at all), but two points:

1. Have you read Brad Patrick's (older) statement on the function of the existing medical advice disclaimers, and on whose problem it's likely to be if anyone were ever to act on bad advice and complain?
2. No one is going to take you seriously on your calls for 24 hour punishments if you keep calling them "bans". The correct term for a short-term block is a block. —Steve Summit (talk) 17:31, 20 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly: Yes - I have read Brad Patrick's advice. There are really three issues at stake here:

1. Wikimedia Foundation's potential for legal liability. OK - Brad says it's no problem and he's a lawyer and I'm not. However, I worry that if we make no effort to enforce these rules then WMF may still get in trouble. Afterall, the original Napster said you weren't allowed to download illegal content - and they still got sued into oblivion. However, IANAL - so we'll let that one slide.
2. The potential for some well meaning respondant to get into legal liability. This isn't a negligable matter - you can argue that we should all know better - but clearly not everyone does or they wouldn't do it.
3. The potential to do actual harm to someone who asks for advice on our reference desk. Even if we aren't liable and we do warn them, we STILL don't want someone being hurt or worse because of crappy advice or some kind of joke that gets taken too literally.

I don't know where the legalities fall here - and in the end I guess it doesn't matter. Giving medical advice is stupid - we have a rule that says "don't do that" - but we fail miserably to enforce it. Brad says the rule is there for a solidly legal reason - so it only makes sense to enforce it.

Secondly: Ban/Block - they know what I mean. I'll be sure to use the correct word in future though - thanks for the correction. SteveBaker 18:56, 20 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I couldn’t help thinking further about what it might be like to be a victim (beneficiary) of Quantum Immortality, as described by SteveBaker. And then I had a dream:

It has been over 30 million years since I became the oldest man of my species. I grieved over my friends who had died before me. Then, it seemed but a few days passed and I was the last one of my species, and now, I now longer know what I am. Here, in a dark drain I must appear as a stunted albino toad encased in a translucent gelatine, no more than 6 inches long. Those darker buds you see appearing like moles in the gelatine are the embryos of my next brood, for I give breed parthogenetically. They are genetically programmed to serve me, workers tending the fat grub of their queen - to gather food for me, to maintain my shelter, and to defend me, little white worms with corkscrew teeth. For in my immortality, I have become an evolutionary genus of my own. I can no longer see or hear, but my teeming progeny crawl over my jelly like skin, and I feel the sensations of their movements. In this way they tell me a little about their foraging and the night sky. You can see within the gelatine of my flesh, past the appendices of my eyes, a slightly darker area, like a shadow, wrapped in a caul of veins. This is my brain, what remains of it, with the vestiges of those organs necessary to maintain it. Then in what I imagine is a croak, like the softest purr – just a tremulous vibration really – I give forth with the song of what has constituted my consciousness for immeasurable epochs: “I breathe…I breathe…I breathe….”

Well, perhaps the notion of evolutionary change in a single entity like this is unsound, but then again, perhaps it is not… Myles325a 00:28, 22 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wow! A nice piece of writing. But indeed - there are imaginable horrors and unimaginable ones. When you consider the insane coincidences it would require to keep you alive through loss of body parts - through the worst of wars and horrors humanity could offer - then to live through the final death of the sun - and yet still, every single moment of every single day, you're on the brink of death when one after another, crazy random things force you to survive. You can't end it all - because every effort at suicide fails for the same crazy reasons that you survive every other death. Truly this is the worst imaginable fate. A hell far worse than religion has imagined. SteveBaker 00:52, 22 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The reason I asked about this is that his suggestion of a game built on relativity or quantum mechanics to help improve understanding is something that I would certainly have interest in at least designing a prototype for. I'm having trouble of thinking up any game mechanics that would be particularly fun though. Any ideas? :) Capuchin 07:51, 22 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, thinking about the relativistic game: Certainly a two-player game would be impossible because you can't get time dilation to work in the real world. So as one player starts moving fast, you can't simulate the relative time dilations of the two players because they exist in the real world and we can't slow the perceptions of one player relative to the other. The worst part (if it's going to be realistic) is that people have to travel VAST distances if they are moving close to 'c'. If we're moving around at speeds where time dilation actually has an effect (let's say AT LEAST 0.1c) then one second of motion will move you 19,000 miles. So the gaming 'world' has to be at least millions of miles across and the player and AI characters will be crossing it so fast you'll never see them. Graphics showing what's going on are going to be boring in the extreme - just a blank screen most of the time! But I guess one could cheat and make the speed of light (say) 100mph. At walking speeds, relativity would be hardly noticable - but when you got into a car or something, you'd easily get up to relativistic speeds. One would need to add red-shift effects and allow for the delay in light transmission times and the effects of distance dilation - which would certainly be challenging - but not necessarily impossible. As for making it 'fun', it's generally possible to do that just by giving players a gun each and telling them to go kill each other - providing there is some other thing to make the game interesting...which in this case would obviously be the relativity thing. If the player is moving REALLY fast compared to the game world, then the AI players will be aging very rapidly - this would mean that they could get an awful lot done while you are zipping away from them at 99.99mph. That might pose some software contraints on a realistic game. If it has to simulate 1000 years of AI 'life' in one second of elapsed 'real world' time - then we have to have AI characters who don't do a whole lot with their lives! If you decided to drive off at 99.99mph turn around and shoot at them - then ten generations of your enemy have lived and died in the meantime, which means that they'd almost certainly have figured out how to make a nice powerful death ray from scratch and shot you in the back long before you could slow down enough to turn around! Perhaps then it would be wiser to think in terms of a puzzle game in a world full of inanimate objects. Perhaps you could design puzzles that have a timing element to them that can only be solved by moving the pieces of the puzzle at relativistic speeds...using effects like the ladder paradox.

A quantum mechanical game would be a lot tougher...and again, I wonder whether it's even possible.

SteveBaker 14:30, 22 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes, I love the ladder paradox, that's certainly something that would make an interesting mechanic. I'm not sure how original puzzles would be thought up. Maybe Richard has thought about this a little and it might be worth contacting him. I'll be sure to broach the subject with a few of my professors when I get back to uni. I know a few who would see the value in such a game. I'll let you know, it's certainly something to ponder about if there's a lull in the day. A few videos of simulations with lightspeed at 100mph or so are very interesting, an interactive version would be the first logical step, I think. Capuchin 14:42, 22 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think that if I were to work on this, the first step would be to create a virtual world in which the speed of light was adjustable and all of the more obvious effects worked correctly - and where you could just slide blocks around by dragging them with the mouse or something. We would need to use that software to train ourselves to think relativistically - in precisely the way that Dawkins says we need to, (ie To get our middle-world brains thinking in game-world physics). Once we got the software working to the point that we could place objects - move them at various speeds and generally play with that virtual world, it might be a lot easier to start thinking up puzzles. I'm thinking that we have a lot of separate little puzzles that you'd have to solve consecutively - ranking them in some kind of order of difficulty and perhaps arranging them so that each one relies on a different relativistic weirdness (eg Some depend on time dilation - others on distance change, others on red/blue shifted light, others on mass variations...that kind of thing). This would allow the player to become comfortable with the effects somewhat separately. It would also be nice to be able to replay each puzzle from a different frame of reference. So when you've learned that you can get the ladder though the barn by moving it fast enough, you could replay the puzzle from the point of view of the ladder and watch the barn getting bigger and the time between the doors opening and shutting changing. So in terms of an implementation plan:

• A library of classes for representing positions, speeds, rest-masses, etc for a bunch of simple objects (cuboids would be a good start) - plus the player's frame of reference.
• A simple rigid body physics package that could handle collisions, objects bouncing off of each other, etc.
• A graphical renderer that could cope with redshift, length distortions, time-of-travel for light from objects, etc.
• A user interface that would let you impart velocities to objects (probably using some kind of logarithmic speed control so you could accurately choose between 99.99% of c and 99.999% - yet which doesn't put you through the grief of accurately specifiying 0.01% of c or 0.001%) - also some means to switch your personal frame of reference at will. We'd probably need some means to artificially disable redshift effects in order that we could see what's going on. SteveBaker 15:12, 22 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Some kind of a scripting language for setting up the initial conditions of each puzzle, describing it to the user and measuring when it has been successfully completed.
• A means to record/replay puzzles so you can watch them in different frames of reference.
• All of the usual scoring, timing, high score table junk.

Some of these things might be insanely difficult - one major problem is that if objects can rotate they no longer have straight edges (I believe) because one end of the object could be moving a substantial fraction of 'c' and thus be distorted to hell compared to the part of the object that's at the center of the rotation - and that would make all aspects of the game very tough to implement. We might want to start off with a world in which objects can translate - but not rotate!

SteveBaker 15:12, 22 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not certain why it upsets you so much that I drive the speed limit - so much that you relate my retelling of my experience to some sort of radical religion. I am not a terrorist. I am not holding people hostage or threatening to blow up buildings because others drive over the speed limit. I simply stated my experience. You stated yours. I don't see why your opinion is to be taken as the absolute truth while anyone who disagrees is some sort of religious wacko. Perhaps you edit the way you drive - hot-headed and lead-footed. -- Kainaw^(what?) 13:34, 23 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not at all - you simply claimed something that cannot possibly be true (ie that driving at the speed limit with gentle accelleration/braking) gets you there just as fast as "leadfooted driving". That's not true. It's obviously not true - and the smug way you say it is evidence of pure wishful thinking. So I replied with a correction...that's what scientists do on the science desk where wishful thinking is not encouraged and clear, logical thought is what is required. Now I'm not saying you should drive lead-footedly - or that it isn't good to stick to the speed limit and drive gently - I'm merely saying that you can't possibly be correct in claiming that driving that way gets you there just as fast. I said nothing about terrorism or hostages. SteveBaker 16:38, 23 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Partly because I spend a lot of time programming a nearly-stackless 8051 microcontroller, I tend not to use recursion very much.

So what do you think of this:

• User:Atlant/String symmetry.c

Atlant 16:56, 28 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In my job interview, I wrote (in C++ as it happens - hence the overloaded function) something like:

   bool isSymmetrical ( const char *s, int len )  /* WARNING! Recursive! */
   {
     return ( len < 2 ) ? true : (s[0] == s[len-1] && isSymmetrical(s+1, len-2)) ;  
   }

   bool isSymmetrical ( const char *s )
   {
     return isSymmetrical ( s, strlen ( s ) ) ;
   }

...which certainly devours stack at a rate of (at worst) one stack frame per two characters in the string.

Your approach is certainly the way I'd really do it in production code. It's clearly faster, more compact, less runtime storage, much, much more understandable! I only did it the recursive way in the interview because I wanted to talk about interesting graphics programming matters and not spend the next 10 minutes of the interview worrying about whether I'd gotten some kind of stoopid off-by-one error. The recursive approach makes it very clear that you've thought carefully about the termination condition. It didn't work though - I still ended up discussing the code for 10 minutes.

I'd have written your version a little more compactly:

   bool isSymmetrical ( const char *s )
   {
     for ( const char *i = s, *j = &s[strlen(s)-1] ; i < j ; i++, j-- )
       if ( *i != *j ) return false ;
     return true ;
   }

...it saves a variable (although the compiler would probably have optimised that out) - but mainly it saves doing indexing operations inside the loop.

But it's dangerous to get into dueling code fragments. There are always issues of memory usage versus speed versus understandability - you might be smart enough to write it - but how smart will the next programmer who looks at the code be?

SteveBaker 18:05, 28 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I generally figure that modern compilers (with register coloring and all the other cool tricks that they play) will manage to produce good machine code regardless of whether I use (say) one variable or three. And occasionally (especially with my highly-powerful, cough, choke, 11 MHz 8051), I look at the produced machine code and check ;-).

Atlant 19:09, 28 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's amazing how long the 8051 has survived - I'm trying to think back to when I first used one - jeez it must have been 20 years ago! But it's a great little work-horse machine, I used about a half dozen of them in the 'Commander' project I worked on back then. We used 8051's to drive safety systems, door mechanism, audio subsystems, hydraulic motion control, coin and banknote readers, our simple serial-port based multiplayer networking...you name it! (The game itself ran on a 386 PC and used four ARM chips for doing the graphics on a card I designed and programmed). It's curious though how the great cycle of complexity turns. These days I spend a lot of time programming the GPU's on nVidia graphics cards, the Xbox and the Playstation - and we're back to having a microscopic processor with hardly any code or data space and having to carefully consider every instruction. The compilers are amazingly efficient though - that at least is a huge improvement. What sorts of applications are you using them for? SteveBaker 19:58, 28 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Here at Teradyne, our high-end chip testers use a highly-distributed network of these little buggers to control and monitor the power and cooling systems of the testers. Together with a '586-class central node, they handle power sequencing, voltage, current, temperature, and humidy monitoring, and handle the automatic shutdown of the tester if any of hundreds of parameters goes "out of limits". Our central node is programmed in C++ running on VxWorks, but all the identical distributed nodes each contain an 8051 programmed in C and assembler running directly "on the iron" (well, it's an 8051 so maybe "on the tin foil"). The nodes intercommunicate using an odd implementation of LonWorks.

Atlant 11:22, 29 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. On many keyboards, the tilde is entered by holding the Shift key, and pressing the key with the tilde pictured. You may also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot 00:33, 31 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I was away from Wikipedia for a number of hours, so I missed the huge lecture on my tongue-in-cheek "Yes" answer to the "this or this" question on a band tour. The Ref Desk's habitués frequently take one another to task for facetiousness, and quite rightly. I don't think I have ever seen so many words or such anger over one word, however, especially when I wasn't there to further fuel the debate, which is the usual reason it goes on and on. The initial answer was a lapse in judgement on my part, and for that I apologise and will also apologise in the applicable place on the Ref Desk. It was not, however, a crime of such enormity that it deserved the pile-on venom that it received. I have always enjoyed your answers and have appreciated your expertise and your concern about helping the OPs. Perhaps, if I goof another time, a short note on my User page, extending the same courtesies and requesting a re-think, would not only save you a lot of time, but also get a quicker correction, if that was the intent. Bielle