Category Archives: Science

SiN Episodes: Emergence

I’ve played through the first episode of SiN Episodes entitled Emergence, dowloaded via steam, and have a few things to say. One of the draws of the game is this

Face off against ruthless enemies, like jetpack soldiers and mutants that evolve as you fight them. Witness enemies that adapt to your actions and truly work as a team, as they cover each other and help fallen comrades to get back on their feet.

Semiotically, Sin EM shares the typical environmentals, from Pac-Man to Kya to HL2: crates, spans, and sounds as a means of negotiating the space. But I like to engage the so called intelligent parameters of shooters and adventure games and have to say that the above description is and isn’t true as a means of addressing the ambiguity of programmed “intelligence.” I never saw the enemy evolve, in other words. Because there isn’t much to evolve.

As far as I could tell, the enemies in Sin resemble the Combine in that they’re as dumb as you’d expect. They can’t hear and don’t seem to care much about their own lives. I remember rushing into rooms and soldiers in HL2 would face windows rather than my avatar. Shoot and move on. Similarly in Sin. In one case, I entered a storage room and waited for the soldiers to enter or toss in a grenade. They didn’t. I crept to the door, peered out, and two of my enemy stood facing a wall. I tossed out a gas canister. Nothing. shoot it. Boom. Move on.

High difficulty has nothing to do with intelligence but with enemy numbers. The higher you play, the more you’re shot up or flanked. Fine. Accuracy is another question. These guys don’t miss, even when you’re hiding behind walls. That’s not intelligence. That’s programmed targeting. Both HL2 and Sin suffer from this relentless “programmed-ness” that diminished the sense of in-game intensity and decision making against an enemy that wants you and has its own wants as well.

Sin is a typical penetration metaphor. You must get in and do your business. In/out. But it lacks the grit of HL2, whose world-story is enticing as an image of apocalypse, at least in my mind. But in both worlds, the internals don’t feel intelligent. Why not a game where the intelligence is palpable and isn’t always about calculating proximity, as in hitTest() or either ors, but as a thing that has an intent beyond the avatar’s activity or mission: an agency that builds on its own ends or problems. An enemy that hunts you down and alters its plans and is often confused is a mod I’d like to see in an Half Life or Sin of the future. Anatonistic agency must have a feel of a mind of its own. Sin feels as if it’s waiting for you to walk into it. The trigger is its cognitive metaphor. But I’d suggest that more needs conceiving, an antagonist you can feel working outside your influence.

Hyperspace

Richard Blaubb writes

I’m new to the whole hyperspace thing, but how can I weigh it down with a monkey wrench or other bodge that can remind me I got stuff to do? I hear the Benedictine monks keep a skull on their tables for the same kinda reason.

This post on books generated some interesting comment and RB finishes the comments with the above. I’m sure that sometime Professor of Mathematics Sandoval would love to give Richard a few lessons on the mathematics of hypercubes, which, again, would involve matrices.

Narrative and Science

I’m reading yet another history of twentieth century science and will be moving on to Krauss in the next phase. While there’s a little more on real collaboration, such as that between Einstein and the mathematician Marcel Grossman, and clearer linkages between Einstein and later developments in physics and detector technology, the narrative seems common. We begin with relativity, move through background radiation, and end with string theory, which over the past couple of years I’ve come to find a little tiresome. General audience writing about string theory tends to be repetative, regardless of its merits or competition as a unifier for gravity and quantum theory: quantum gravity.

I’m interested in the collaborative element to all this and how hard people work in the pursuit of verification. It’s intriguing that lots of people, Kip Thorne, for example, took a Sagan quandary and went to work on it, and it promoted more interesting questions about blackholes, which relied on questions asked, at another point in the hypertext, by Hawking.

So, what comes next? I’m not interested in time travel or what will happen if we’re struck by an asteroid or even in other life in the universe. It has to do with pick-ups. Joey picks up a rock and finds a scorpion resting under it. He stands up, feeling that cold zero in the bone of Emily Dickinson fame (even though he’s never read her). He looks up and sees the approaching asteroid cross before the sun, perhaps a minute away from impact. He kneels and carefully fits the stone back into its dimple, as if it had never been disturbed.

Animals and the Constitution

The Eagle Forum’s Constitution Watch (I believe written by Virginia Armstrong Ph.D) writes this as a Fact vs. Fiction clarification for us dummies

Fact v. Fiction #2: Evolutionists claim that their battle against creation-science is primarily a “scientific” issue, not a constitutional question. But our treasured U. S. Constitution is written by persons and for persons. If man is an animal, the Constitution was written by animals and for animals. This preposterous conclusion destroys the Constitution. The Aguillard Humanists leave us with no Constitution and no constitutional rights of any kind if they allow us to teach only that man is an animal.

Well, garsh. Now that this has been cleared up, I can die.

Kansas and Science Standards

Standard 3 under Life Science of the new Kansas science standards goes like the following block. Those familiar with the writing of institutional academic standards will recognize the outcomes language. Read it this way:

The student:

understands biological evolution, descent with modification, is a scientific explanation for the history of the diversification of organisms from common ancestors.

The specified standards that accompany this go

1. a Biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process that has no discernable direction or goal.

and

f. The view that living things in all the major kingdoms are modified
descendants of a common ancestor (described in the pattern of a branching tree) has been challenged in recent years by:

i. Discrepancies in the molecular evidence (e.g., differences in relatedness inferred from sequence studies of different proteins) previously thought to support that view.

ii. A fossil record that shows sudden bursts of increased complexity the Cambrian Explosion), long periods of stasis and the absence of abundant transitional forms rather than steady gradual increases in complexity, and

iii. Studies that show animals follow different rather than identical early stages of embryological development.

Standards writing is a delicate process. One of the hardest things to do is to adhere to a standard for standard writing because the standards reflect a host of institutional values, expectations, and the realities of a given area of study. I believe that outcomes should reflect a respect for students. What I read in the above is an almost unbelieveable cynicism, ignorance, and disrespect for real debate.

Biological evo postulates unguided:

challenged in recent years

previously thought

Huh?

Taking stands

I’m with the ones who have a sense of humor

In conclusion, thank you for taking the time to hear our views and beliefs. I hope I was able to convey the importance of teaching this theory to your students. We will of course be able to train the teachers in this alternate theory. I am eagerly awaiting your response, and hope dearly that no legal action will need to be taken. I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

From Bobby Henderson via Bad Astronomy.