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What every robot wants
Programming agents that have a large number of potential actions ( Read more... ) -
The corpse of a ghost
For over ten years, I have been surviving on fantasy. I motivated myself on the basis of an imagined career, imagined relationships, imagined sex. The sacrifices I have made have been for the benefit of people who don't know I made them; my greatest accomplishments have been in aid of projects that only I am fully aware of ( Read more... ) -
Class, Status and Slime
I have literally spent years trying to reconcile the benevolent yet disorganized sentiments of socialism with the organized yet exploitative greed of capitalism, all because of a simple mistake made in the 18th Century.
In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they ( Read more... ) -
Stone Soup
By many accounts, we are the most individualist generation ever to inhabit the Earth. And I am an individualist even among my generation. This is not to say that I am revolutionary, but only to say that I value self-sufficiency and personal responsibility above all else. The most painful aspect of my existence is that I see all love as ( Read more... ) -
Night Owl
I have just noticed that LiveJournal tags each post with the time from my browser, rather than using a centralized time. Since my time settings are all wrong on my home computer, this leaves the impression that I make many of my posts in the middle of the night. This is highly misleading. -
Advanced Lemmings
The lush world of my simulation will exist to support a population of human-like agents. Each agent is nothing more than a collection of numbers, some descriptive information, and a collection of objects they carry. These agents differ from agents in a typical video/computer game in two particular ways:- Agents do not have "hit points" or any ( Read more... )
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Locked in a cell
Simulating a natural environment so that human-like agents can frolic in it seems like a great idea, until you're hit by...
The Hangover
Modeling the natural environment is hard. There are two approaches that I am aware of. The first approach is often used when specific predictions are required, often for engineering purposes. You represent the ( Read more... ) -
Competitive smiling
Recently during the Olympics, I reflected briefly on the fact that I didn't watch any figure skating. Now I realize that it is "typical" for guys to consider figure skating unmanly and "not a sport". But I really don't like figure skating. Or more precisely, I don't like competitive figure skating. I actually do like figure skating, as an art ( Read more... ) -
The garden of Eden
In research, there are two ways of looking at a project: the hype, and the hangover. Some researchers are really good at hype, and fuel the development of science fiction. Some researchers are really good at giving others hangovers by pointing out obvious flaws. Both approaches are needed, but I find that the former really annoys me. ( Read more... ) -
The Power of Personal History
For a number of years, I tried to be vegetarian, but ultimately backed down from it. The reason was simple: my food sucked. It was almost good enough to live off, but not quite. It certainly wasn't good enough to share with friends. I needed to learn to cook... and I just didn't have the background and support to learn to cook vegetarian. Add ( Read more... )