625 karma · joined January 7, 2014
Does the USPTO have any route for third parties to proactively invalidate patents or somehow trigger their reinspection other than during actual litigation? (Maybe an open group to prioritise patents and pursue this could get crowdfunding?)
90s me would be absolutely floored by a text editor needing 438MB RAM.
Wait, what am I saying? 2018 me is pretty flabbergasted by it, but perhaps less surprised (and more cynical) than 90s me.
If vertex clustering is used as the simplification algorithm, there's no need for the geomorphing buffer and seamless LOD morphs can be done entirely in-shader.
Video showing LOD-morphing here: https://youtu.be/akOk2wAb0yo
A number of commercial game engines use similar techniques.
The advantage of using geomorph buffers is that higher quality simplification algorithms can be used for greater quality and efficiency. A pure vertex clustering approach is simpler and allows for smaller data, which may be better for streaming i/o.
Contrary to intuition, the presence of random noise can actually make detectable a signal that is otherwise below the minimum detection threshold. See, e.g. stochastic resonance. (Essentially, the noise occasionally interefers constructively to 'bump' the signal up beyond the threshold to make it detectable.) If you are able to introduce and control your own noise, you may also be able to take advantage of coherence resonance.
Randomness itself can be a very useful tool in many signal detection and processing systems, e.g. sparse random sampling in Compressive Sensing techniques can reconstruct some kinds of signals at frequencies beyond the Shannon-Nyquist limit of a much higher-density fixed-frequency sampling -- something thought impossible until relatively recently.
I would not be at all confident that such 'system' noise could not be filtered out statistically; it might even be used to an attacker's advantage.
I'm talking about GPU support here for accelerated graphics and physics, not CPU. Obviously, CPUs have had native double support for a long time.
Doubles have been hardware accelerated for some time for both graphics and physics, BUT: until recently you paid a heavy price for doing double calculations on the GPU (20x slower or more typically), especially on lower-end hardware and obviously increased memory requirements. Most game engines have until relatively recently used 32-bit floats for pretty much everything, although often selectively using 64-bits or multiple scaled reference frames for positioning over larger scales.
From what I understand, Star Citizen converted their game engine to use 64-bit floating point for worldspace positioning in both their graphics and physics pipelines, so they can have a single coordinate system for positioning at the scale of an entire solar system, without having to worry about precision issues. My understanding is that Star Citizen uses the GPU heavily for graphics, physics, procedural generation, and simulation using graphics shaders (vertex/fragment, etc) and compute shaders.
You're right of course that graphics and physics can be implemented independently, but they have to share coordinates and data at some level, and if you have to convert between multiple precisions, coordinates systems, and frames of reference, you are potentially making things more difficult and negatively affecting performance.
From the Star Citizen interviews I've seen, my understanding is that the conversion to 64-bit worldspace simplified their development (all their components can share worldspace data) at only a small cost to performance on modern hardware, and they obviously felt it was worth the trade-off. However, technical detail in many of the videos I've watched has been rather lacking, and some articles have clearly misinterpreted what they've done. I doubt their entire engine has been converted to use 64-bit for everything, which is probably wasteful, and would severely limit the hardware capable of running it.
He didn't seek professional advice about his central life-altering pain because he thought it would be as poor as the help he'd had for other things (by what sound like crappy doctors). He was probably wrong about that.
People under enough emotional strain and pain sufficient to drive them to suicide are rarely thinking clearly when considering how to deal with that pain alone, no matter how intelligent and logical and reasonable they might otherwise be. Such a huge mental burden clouds your judgement. It's hard to think clearly about how to climb out of the swamp when you feel yourself drowning in it.
Of course, that's not a small assumption...
If you think something may benefit from a shared memory data store, lmdb may be worth considering as a fast, reliable, high concurrency alternative to reinventing wheels with raw mmap + manual sync.
In mathematics and computer science that is indeed the proper definition.
And HackerNews is definitely a mathsy/computersciencey sort of a place, so it might be nice to use the word correctly here.
Out of interest (or is it flippancy?), where do you use the word algorithm, when not talking about mathematics or computing?
Do you consider a discussion about heuristics vs algorithms (which is what this thread is above), on a site like Hacker News, to be 'general language'...? Or would you consider that this might indeed be a suitable context to comment on their proper formal definitions?
To be considered an algorithm, a method must be:
1. Finite. It must terminate after a finite number of steps. (The program, i.e. the expression of the method must also be finite.)
2. Definite. Each step must be precisely defined, requiring no 'interpretation' or ingenuity on behalf of the executor of the algorithm.
3. It must take zero or more inputs, and these inputs must be well-defined.
4. It must produce one or more well-defined outputs.
5. It must be an "effective method", which (in addition): 5a. Must always produce a result 5b. The result must always be a correct result 5c. It must always arrive at a result after a finite number of steps 5d. It must work for all defined categories of inputs
This is (almost) literally page 1, chapter 1, book 1 of Knuth. Most probably one of the first things you'll ever be taught on any respectable computer science course.
Of course, the term is used more vaguely and everyone still knows what we all mean, but the above is the widely-accepted formal definition.
The level of inefficiency here is mind-boggling. Surely this must be one of the least efficient, least environmentally-friendly computing ventures ever?
[1] https://www.disneyresearch.com/project/3d-touch-surfaces/
Wrong tense. This has already happened. What 'will come' is more of it.