Slashback: Bots, Time Travel, Turing

More on the Battlebots trademark dispute, proof that some of your are listening to Dr. Who on the Beeb, and a memorial -- finally -- for Alan Turing, in tonight's round of updates, corrections, and further info.

That eerie, eerie theme music will get in your head all day. sideshow-voxx writes: "The BBC has announced that there will be more installments of the Audio Adventure Dr Who - Death Comes to Time available on the web in the New Year."

This is cool news (the accompanying art is a nice touch with this Dr. Who presentation), but it would be nice if they would put the episodes into more audio formats as well.

Things always seem to get more complicated. Eric Molitor, ("Linux hacker and Builder of Violator - Linux powered BattleBot that competed in May") wrote about the BattleBots vs. Battlebots story of the other day, saying:

"As a BattleBot competitor I was horrified when I noticed your article but here are some corrections... BattleBots INC != BattleBots the show.

BattleBots INC is suing and not the TV show. (Comedy Central tapes the tournaments and airs portions of the finals on a TV show. But thats just like showing NFL games mostly. The TV company just pays a licensing fee to broadcast the event.)

Do a little research and the guy registered his domain at least a year after the first BattleBots competition in Long Beach. (Early 1998) In fact the battlebots.org domain was registered after BattleBots.com, and after BattleBots applied for their TM.

So this kid (running a script kiddie hosting service no less) registers a domain after somebody applies for the TM and then asks for $5K to give it up. Sounds like cyber-squatting to me. Also take a look at the dates on the website for the replies, etc. Things don't look right ....

Still BattleBots is dumb not to have registered the .org domain.

For a little history on BattleBots and the law suits, etc. that RobotWars got into that nearly destroyed this sport take a look at http://www.robotcombat.com/history.html.

Greg and Tray gave up a lot and everybody got together to dodge RobotWars/Profile records lawsuits to prevent the sport from happening. I'd hate to see them unfairly get a bad name."

Thanks, Eric.

Something to see in England. slathering wrote with news that the Alan Turing memorial written about in this Slashdot story has finally materialized. He writes: "I read about this in this months IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (who doesn't have a website). But I found the website for the memorial itself. Apparently funding was found for the Alan Turing Memorial since it was unveiled June 23, 2001 in Manchester, England. It was funded without any donations from the computing industry."

Re: Dr. Who?

[Bodero]

Is it like the rock band the Who or like Mr McGoo?

Doctor Who was a popular television show that ran in Belgium between 1972-1974. In it's day it was one of the most popular shows in Belgium and it starred Larry Lamb and John Craven (who went on to star in Hollywood movies such as Terminator and Total Recall).
No episodes exist of this classic TV show, but we can relive the episodes thanks to Steve Roberts who has reconstructed them from Crayon drawings and dialogue from episodes of Eldorado. The show was axed in 1974 after allegations that it was just a big hoax designed to extract money from the Belgium TV service. These allegations were denied by the production company, Grabitandrun.

There is another Doctor Who series as well, but by all accounts it was some obscure rubbish that is long since dead.

Wanted: an NT powered battlebot...

[Robber Baron]

Linux hacker and Builder of Violator - Linux powered BattleBot that competed in May

Somebody needs to build an NT powered battlebot, then we can have a serious NT vs Linux battle. (Of course the bastard will probably bluescreen as soon as the competition heats up...)

a real turing test...

[psych031337]

The real proof that computers have reached human levels of "intelligence" would be a machine that will blame a mistake onto another, hierarchically lower machine.

Re:Sport?

[mgblst]

yeah, i hate formula one too.

Re:Germans were beaten after Moscow 1941

[James_G]

I think it would be incorrect to attribute the victory of the Allies to any one single event. There were many, many technical innovations and associated events that helped. To name but a few:

• The invention of radar.
• The counter-acting of German radar (Basically an early version of chaff, shredded tinfoil dropped in huge bales from the bombers).
• Along the same vein, the use by the Allies of the German's own radar system to pinpoint targets along the coast of mainland Europe.
• The discovery by polish soldiers of a crashed V2 rocket, of which they took lots of details and sent them to the Allies.
• The cracking of Enigma, which was enourmous, and ultimately led to misinformation being sent back and fooling Hitler into believing the invading force was coming ashore in the wrong place.
• Etc. etc. etc..

There are far, far, far too many things to list here, I've mentioned just a scant few. No one single event is directly responsible.

If you want to read a good book about the technical innovations behind WWII, I'd recommend "Secret Weapons of World War II" [amazon.com]. An excellent read, with a great deal of detail on the hundreds of small independant events (Maybe even coincidences) that shifted the balance ever so slightly in favour of the allies.