I feel compelled to point out that having more female leads/characters doesn't change the array of game TYPES at all. An FPS with a female lead is still an FPS, NOT a different type of game. Carry on.

Unless it happens to be a PERSON where the death threat included home address information. Regardless of gender, THAT's the line that makes a threat credible.

Tangentially, the behavior you describe is the reason I don't play those games. It's also a behavior that doesn't need to be there. Why defend it as if its necessary for some reason?

This is not limited to gaming. Here's a breakdown of the statistics as they are known right now. Based on this: Wiki-link rape statistics 1/6 women have been raped in the US. Out of 150 million women in the US, that is around 25 million women estimated which have been raped. I think it takes millions of rapists (mostly men natch) to reach that number. So YES, millions of people (mostly men) ARE in fact out there raping people. No media bias needed, just knowing some real numbers.

Yes indeed, Go doesn't get enough love. Although it's only two player and isn't co-operative, as a two player game, it is outstanding.

Is that even really a game, by definition?

That's like two people roll a dice, higher roll wins. There's nothing to play, no input or decisions on the part of the player, and precious little interaction between players. I don't think that would be very fun at all.

'a' 'space' 'r'
'a' 'space' 'r'
'a' 'space' 'r'
'a' 'space' 'r'

Oh the memories. Not sure if that's what I call good, or simply nostalgic.

And Go.

Isn't that saying the same thing as the parent? "If people weren't people this system would work great!"

To be fair, the definition of "well" I intend isn't an arbitrary X/Y value. There's already very well defined numbers for the hardware which currently runs the algorithm. To transfer "Well" to custom hardware would be somewhere in the vicinity of: less than the original general purpose CPU by enough that it justifies the design effort involved and doesn't cost MORE to manufacture. All engineering decisions are trade-offs, and if the trade-off isn't worth the effort and resource cost you don't do it. For a transfer effort to go "Well" means at the end of the day you come out ahead somewhere.

If you have to spend 3 million dollars on custom hardware development just to get performance parity with a COTS general purpose CPU... you'd be hard pressed to call that "well" by any measure. This is what is implied by the setup of the original Ask Slashdot question, asking an engineering question about feasibility and cost.

Not really. The biggest conversion issues I deal with (when converting algorithms to hardware) are related to how software treats RAM vs how hardware treats RAM. They are fundamentally different methods of operation. In software RAM is cheap/free, so it is preferred over CPU cycles. In hardware, the processing is cheaper (in general) and RAM is more expensive.

Buffering and holding a megabyte of data between each stage of processing is natural and very easy for software. But in hardware this is a very inefficient way to do things. Converting from one method to the other can be quite difficult depending on the algorithm.

Nice point - For is used for iteration in software, and For Generate in hardware is used to generate new instantiations. The similarity in words/syntax is a dangerous trap. The closest thing in software is like putting malloc or new() in a loop. It's a great convention for when you need many similar bits of hardware. Completely wrong for iteration.

The original wording was "Some C algorithms may never transfer well into a hardware implementation." At least in my mind the transfer process is what might not go well... not how the final product may or may not run. Having some experience here I understood the transfer to be where the work/expense would be. And those are ultimately key factors you would use to base your decision about whether or not to go ahead and make the conversion.

I don't think we disagree on content, just on what might have been meant by Andy's post. Especially considering exactly what you said for the reasons you said, making claims of impossibility would indeed be silly.

Unless the algorithm requires all those special instructions and monster ram to run.... at which point your custom hardware looks very much like the CPU and system it is intended to replace, and definitely not cheaper unless you're selling a whole lot of them. Reliable hardware is expensive to build even when it's a simple design iterating on previously known good hardware. Starting from scratch on raw silicon takes millions of dollars, just for your first chip lot, not to mention all the man hours to get it there and subsequent revisions. There are lots of algorithms that don't make any sense (from a cost vs efficiency standpoint) to port to custom hardware. That's the whole reason the generic CPU exists in the first place.

I guess I'm disagreeing with your definition of better. If it's faster but costs too much for anyone to actually buy isn't better.

He didn't say "may not transfer at all", he said "may not transfer well". Also remember that an algorithm isn't just running on any old bit of hardware it's running on a modern CPU with lots of special instructions with a gigantic RAM attached to it and potentially some other peripherals for special functions. Hardware RNG, etc. It might very well not be reasonable to try to convert all this to a custom FPGA/ASIC for the cost involved.

Yep. Although sub-optimal is like the understatement of the year. I've seen not just inefficient but inefficient by an order of magnitude at times.