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Comment Re:Wow. Just... WOW! (Score -1, Troll) 122

First off, don't answer any questions, not even when the police show up. Their only job is to build a case against you. Then get a lawyer, and hope you get a light sentace for statitory rape. Also, don't forget you will now be registered as a sex offender.

Secondly, Diddy Kong Racing was trash for a racing game, no wonder she is crying. And N64 is 2 generations ago. Give her your DS with Mario Kart and Nintendogs. That should make her happy, maybe she will drop charges.
Math

First Self-Replicating Creature Spawned In Conway's Game of Life 241

Calopteryx writes "New Scientist has a story on a self-replicating entity which inhabits the mathematical universe known as the Game of Life. 'Dubbed Gemini, [Andrew Wade's] creature is made of two sets of identical structures, which sit at either end of the instruction tape. Each is a fraction of the size of the tape's length but, made up of two constructor arms and one "destructor," play a key role. Gemini's initial state contains three of these structures, plus a fourth that is incomplete. As the simulation progresses the incomplete structure begins to grow, while the structure at the start of the tape is demolished. The original Gemini continues to disassemble as the new one emerges, until after nearly 34 million generations, new life is born.'"

Comment Queueing Systems (Score 3, Interesting) 71

Get your Astrology and Fortune telling jokes out of the way, but it's not really hard to use predictive analysis and come out to be very accurate (within 3%). You are not always going to hit it on the head, but it's very easy to get close. There are patterns in everything people do and while there will always be outliers for the most part behavior follows basic patterns or cycles, although these may change over time.

It's important to be predictive in anything that involves a queuing system, such as a sales website or where a lot of the theory got its start in telephone calls. Really it applies to anything where people try to do the same thing at once that requires resources for the company to allocate. It can be the difference between success (Blizzcon ticket queue never crashed out) and failure (iPhone 4G). Especially with more people trying to access the same thing at once on the internet, this sort of analysis of how many resources to allocate efficiently is going to be more important. You don't want to allocate too much due to costs, but you can't do too little otherwise your customers suffer.

Yeah, it’s a lot like statistics, but it's going from 'What Happened?' to 'How and why did it happen?' and from 'What is happening now?' to 'What's the next best action?'.

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I'd rather just believe that it's done by little elves running around.

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