sinner6 - Slashdot User

Review: Spore 605

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 09, 2008 @01:15PM from the evolution-of-games-and-vice-versa dept.

The hype leading up to Spore was excessive. But then, so is the scope of the game; following the growth of a species from the cellular level to galactic domination was an ambitious goal, to say the least. Bringing evolution into the realm of entertainment was something Will Wright hoped and gambled he could do after the success of the Sim franchise. But rather than evolution, Spore became more about creation — creation that allows a single-player game to include the community, as well. It ties the various parts of the game together to make Spore very entertaining as a whole. Read on for my thoughts.

Submission + - Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers

Submitted by Vicissidude on Thursday June 21, 2007 @01:50PM

Vicissidude writes: As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season. The robotic work has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, and pushed forward by the uncertainty surrounding the migrant labor force. Farmers are "very, very nervous about the availability and cost of labor in the near future," says Vision Robotics CEO Derek Morikawa.

Submission + - The Six Dimensional Space-Time Theory

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Tuesday April 17, 2007 @12:16PM

eldavojohn writes: "PhysOrg is covering an interesting year old paper that proposes an alternative space-time relationship theory. His resulting proposition, based on Einstein's general relativity and Elie Cartan's triality concept, is a Twister Space (which I've only read of in Roger Penrose's latest work). The basic gist of his theory is that space-time is not modeled by four dimensions but instead six. He's hoping that tests from the Large Hadron Collider will help prove his theory. The extra two dimensions are time like or related to time and are the designated twisters in his equations. He's coining this as a "Xi transform" and cites the rationale of these extra dimensions to be providing symmetry — the product of a wave operator and a Xi transform, taken in any order, is zero. The three dimensional space model is s2 = x2 + y2 + z2. The traditional four dimensional space-time model has a critical minus sign, s2 = x2 + y2 + z2 — t2. Sparling is proposing a model that resembles s2 = x2 + y2 + z2 — t2 — u2 — v2, where u and v represent the new time variables. The implied connotations the new theory holds are massive would rock the very concepts of future versus the past, the paper is heavy but the PhysOrg article summarizes it nicely."

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