I would think making sure the score section of the net gets special emphasis might help with the harder games. Separate inputs even with the numbers of various things known to a human player (score, lives), rather than having the AI get that from a bitmap and separate/extract.

Also, I'm guessing they're not using all the tricks one can with neural nets. Like long short-term memory. That would seem to seriously help with this sort of thing. Basically I'm guessing their lack of success with the harder games is not due to inherent limitations like some of the above posters said, but due to limitations in their implementation.

I agree, and with the command line, you have to remember all the commands. :) It's nice having a windowed/menu interface for getting to something, and it's nice to have a GUI telling you hey, you're about to wipe your HD with that command or even limit your choices to stuff that won't hose your HD... thinking about installing linux and dual-boots and such before the tools had nice gnome equivalents. ... now, was it a 0 or a 1 that I put here?

If Netflix is so hot, so A-list, firing anyone mediocre, hiring only the best, how do they keep making such dumb mistakes? Sure, they're #1, but their instant streaming *blows* now. Their recommendation engine *blows*. It worked several years ago. I remember when they changed it over and it stopped making any sense and being of any use to me. So they're doing some things right, for sure, but now their performance makes more sense to me in light of the fact that they don't keep their talent around. I remember calling them up once and making a suggestion, which they implemented for everyone. I don't know if I was the only one or the last straw or what, but that was very impressive. But the whole qwikster thing and the total lack of anything good for their streaming service... I don't understand why they think they're such hot stuff. In my opinion, they're on their way down. Give it another couple years. Their self-produced stuff is pretty amazing, but I'm only going to activate my instant account for a month at a time to watch that stuff. I feel like a whole lot of their instant watching userbase is just there because they don't know how to get better instant streaming or because there is no better alternative for them at the moment. If they could turn around their streaming movie selection, that would be something, but I keep checking in and it just keeps getting worse.

I'm not sure if these are equipped with wireless transmitters, but "mesh network" sounds like it. I think that's a pretty bad idea. Wireless communication is one possible culprit for this thing. There's some evidence that these signals are disrupting a whole lot of plant life, for instance, and bees are pretty nuts with their quantum dance they do, the magnetic fields they sense and create. If you're going to put wireless transmission on these, maybe run a cable to a hundred feet away and use directional antennas. I suppose you could do controls without the wireless gear, but I would bet that the colonies with internet hubs broadcasting in their midst are not going to do so well. :) Seriously.

Oh, post right above me just pointed this out. Beat me to it. :)

Yeah, keep it safe, tell all our descendants, stretching longer than from now to the birth of our civilizations, our history, to deal with potentially ecosphere-killing crap, an exponentially growing pool of waste. Shit, if we don't have a storage system *right now*, like, IDK, 80 years into this show, however many generations later, and we're just storing stuff on top of the stupid reactors, ready to lay waste to a heavily populated island should some natural disaster hit (and news flash: over the span of 10k years, there's going to be quite a few natural disasters), what the hell? How is this safe? How is this a better alternative? OK, sure, it doesn't warm the climate. Way to go. It just generates shit that is so amazingly toxic to nearly every lifeform on this planet, and we still keep the damn stuff laying around, behind barbed wire, on top of a roof, with an infrastructure of people designed to handle it. Should that infrastructure ever fail, like say, IDK, civil war, humongous calamity/disaster, some other random shit we can't predict, it's death, just waiting, waiting.

It's so amazingly shortsighted to go nuclear. Yeah, hell yeah, there's probably ways to do it right, but we sure aren't using those methods. I talked to a grad student in nuclear physics who claimed we could just reprocess all of our spent fuel, use that to fuel reactors for ever. for ever. Great, great idea, glad it's possible, but let's do it then. And what we're talking about when we talk about nuke plants is more of this incredible waste generating BS.

Coal? Oh, fuck coal. Those mountains could have stayed there, for sure. Natural gas? Fracking, OMG, this is going to be seriously bad. Give it more decades, you'll see. So *cough* how about all that green shit we keep researching and talking about and, oh, say, europe keeps implementing? Let's do that. Wow, does that ever make sense. Nuclear? Gawd.

Yeah, WTF?! You need a bot to tell you what to say to people? Don't say anything. Shit, say hi. Hey, what's up? Oh yo, I can't talk now. Busy. Jesus, just use your brain and a couple fingers.

I saw this and straight away, lost any remaining respect I had for google.

I experimented with this several years ago, and I was surprised at how slow it was. Hopefully this has improved. It was written in asm, which should be fast, of course, but it seemed like they erased all of those gains with klunky system/gui stuff. Nevertheless, very exciting!

Yeah, and the sugar alcohols and fat taste-a-likes worked out so well. Seems like a great idea, but I would bet that it wouldn't be long before the users would discover some seriously damaging aspects that just weren't part of the model or rat-drinking-game studies. Better to just choose the right alcohol (whiskey! :)) and mix it wisely, take some B vitamins, eat some food before and after, etc.

That was my first thought. Hmm. Every time they take a picture of this thing, it's got a jet going in a different direction.... I mean say we took a picture of a UFO way out in space... what would it look like at lowish resolution? a lump of something with jets coming out of it? Maybe. I guess the true test for that is if it's orbit is changing unexpectedly.

Because seriously, even putting aside the possibility of already having taken video/shots of UFOs in space, on the planet, etc., what would our first encounter with one in space be like? A grainy photo of an anomalous object that we figure must be a comet, but boy is it acting strange...

I was wondering this too. They already knew it worked great ON MARS before they sent this. So uh, install it when it takes a second instead of a year? Seems like a no-brainer. So there must be something missing here because I'm pretty sure the folk at JPL have brains... big ones.

Except that the woman who spilled hot coffee on herself and sued, which everyone has loved to ridicule and hate, was being pretty reasonable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

Yeah. AMDs do more for cheaper, unless you really need the double precision. But you could get up to 10 boxes with 4 AMD cards a piece for that money. Although, are you saying that you need half a gig of RAM for a single thread? If so, GPUs are not the way to go.

I don't remember the source, it's been a while, but I read an online newspaper article about how prevalent NDM-1 is in India. This was hinted at in the article: people coming from India to Europe, bringing that with them. Basically, researchers have found gut flora with the NDM-1 gene in it. Which might actually be good for not killing off your intestinal flora with antibiotics (which I personally did and was f'd for years until I took probiotics). But more importantly, they've found strains of polio and all sorts of other nasty diseases that are mostly nonexistent nowadays (or at least not causing mass epidemics anymore) with the NDM-1 gene. Ie. there already are (or will be soon) strains of every nasty disease that can kill millions of people, all resistant to every antibiotic currently known to man, floating around in the Delhi sewers. I'd like to recommend everyone buy Maitake mushroom pills or grow them yourself. They're immune system boosters. For a couple years now, I've nipped in the bud about 95% of all sicknesses I've got, be it the flu or a cold, by just taking a few of these pills as soon as I feel the symptoms coming on. Fever, nausea, sore throat? Not a problem if I take these early on. They don't work as well if you're already well into the sickness.