"In times where compilers are smart enough to basically rewrite and change code for
performance reasons it is completely inexcusable that the order of source arguments to
process is still that relevant."
After reading the comments on C and the difficulties the author had in the compilation process.... All I can say is Garbage in garbage out. I have worked in the HPC enviornment for a number of years using both Fortrash and C. The errors the author encountered would have been avoided by someone with any experience developing large softwares. I learned these things after working on my first project and now they barely, if at all, factor into my development time. Make sure you build and keep a dependency graph while you are developing and this becomes a non issue.
I don't disagree. Fortran is brilliant at what it does.... but I find many of its object oriented features to be very obtuse compared to C and C++. The way it uses pointers drives me insane. Building certain datastructures in fortran just takes too much time.
I kind of wish I could find a good way to make Fortran and C play nicely together. (There are some compiler dependent peculiarities that I have encountered that make it difficult.)
Fortran's intrisics and file handling capabilities make it indispensable in the work I do.... So it is really a love hate relationship.
I find the requirement for an active Github account to be questionable. 99% of the code I write is owned my someone else. I do after all work for a living. I wonder how true this is of many other people too. If I am writing code at home then I am probably not spending much time to make it look nice. I don't have time to write it at home much less make it look good to a recruiter.
After reading the solution presented, what strikes me is that there is very little new math in it. Before you jump down my throat let me explain as this is quite an impressive effort.
Equation 7 bears a striking resemblance to what you would get if you started with a Liouville vonNeumann equation and tried to solve it in time. Infact all of the equations seem to follow this path.
See for example the books:
1) Charge and energy transfer dynamics in Molecular systems by Volkhard May and Oliver Kuhn (chapter 2)
2) Chemical Dynamics in Condensed Phases by Abraham NItzan.
I find it a bit surprising to not see these in the reference material. Everything in this paper screams Liouville von-Neuman equation.
Honestly I feel like this is an even bigger problem in the natural sciences. In my experience journals want strong and interesting positive results. They rarely want negative results unless it is debunking a previous result that seemed interesting and positive. I have worked on projects before, that while interesting and on a solid theoretical base as far as approximations go, were ultimately incorrect for what ever reason. I should be able to publish and report on this so no one else wastes their time on it or can find a glaring flaw in it and build upon it. While the initial idea may be a good one the implementation of that idea is not always a good one. It can be useful to other scientists to know these things.
I am not entirely sure what is new here. I knowpeople that have been doing this for years. The Channel GREENPOWERSCIENCE
has done many videos on exactly this.
It is interesting to hear them talk about the game getting complex. I think in the latest version they hit that wall with the world government. It is probably one of the most unfun and distracting features that Civ games have gotten.
I do think they can add more complexity in other areas hough.
I would extend that to say that Diplomacy is still probably one of the weakest features of Civ.
It has been a joke since the original that dealing with the computer is like trying to barter with a schizophrenic, and sadly newer versions have only gotten a little better. AI's will still go from "I love you and want research agreements and luxury trades" to "I denounce you" and verge on war in the space of a turn.
Notably, the addition of the City-States was a big improvement, as they mostly respond logically, and their trend over time is to stabilize back to zero. They also provide you clearer guides on their emotional state and what actions will +/- it. If the main AI players were closer in the information they provided, and the options you had for interacting with them (ie, you could do things like destroy barbarians near them or gift them back their workers to increase your friendship) then the main AI might actually be reasonable to play with diplomatically.
"It is probably one of the most unfun and distracting features that Civ games have gotten."
It's controversial, but not without its benefits. Really depends on the type of gameplay you're going for, IMO. I enjoy a very diplomatic game of Civ4, for instance, and I try to squeeze every ounce of quasi-emergent diplomacy and even policy gameplay from what little I feel is there. But I realize I'm in the minority on this. Most Civ gamers seem to prefer a purely military game. In fairness to them, that's the clearest objective of the game. But I like that Civ allows you, albeit with a great deal of against-the-tide effort, to play a different type of game.
I never made the leap to Civ5, due to what I perceived as oversimplification, and a trend away from precisely those features I liked (but which everyone else seems to hate). So I can't really comment there.
I have very strong opinions on Civ 4 vs 5. Civ 4 is the kind of game that I'll install, then uninstall a week later after too many 3am or 4am nights. Civ 5 has the same 'just one turn'-ism, but it's not fun, which is weird. Any one city site is much the same as another - that feeling of finding an awsome site in Civ 4 is gone. I also miss the feeling of moving borders from 4 - the first owner of a hex has it permanently. You can have a massive city, but if a tiny village got the hex first... culture means nothing.
It was weird when it came out, that people were lauding a hex map as perfect. In reality it adds very little (given diagonals, it's less freedom of movement). But the strangest thing was... why go for a cell structure at all? In an age where you can calculate real distances, it's a massive throwback. Civ games are about resource management - cell-based maps are not fundamental to this.
Not to mention that they really gouge for the most minor DLC. But llike you, I perceive myself in a minority - Civ 5 is one of the most-played games on Steam.
> why go for a cell structure at all? In an age where you can calculate real distances, it's a massive throwback.
Would a game of chess be any better if it featured pixel-sized cells and real distances? Some games, especially turn-based, are more fun with a limited number of acceptable actions, because they require you to think in a certain way in order to win. In a game, you may end up weighing complex pros and cons of placing a city between two adjacent cells; that gameplay element would be a lot more hand-wavy with pixel-sized cells.
That said, Rise of Nations might be for you, if that is what you are looking for.
Well, I already mentioned that the placement of cities is largely meaningless in Civ 5 anyway. Unless you're putting them right next to barren land, they're all pretty similar.
Keep in mind also that chess is an extremely abstract version of combat, whereas Civ is trying to emulate civilisations. Likewise, chess has six different kinds of pieces, all of which play very differently. Civ effectively has three: 'ranged unit', 'melee unit', and 'air unit', without much difference between ranged and melee. There simply isn't the scope for clever arrangement or movement of pieces like in chess - civ combat is more simplistic like checkers... a game which very few people enthuse about.
> In a game, you may end up weighing complex pros and cons of placing a city between two adjacent cells; that gameplay element would be a lot more hand-wavy with pixel-sized cells.
When we recognize patterns, like, when we throw a ball at a moving target, we don't consciously analyze things, but that doesn't make it "hand-wavy". With a more complex map, it might take longer to develop an "intuition" for it, but that doesn't mean there are not a lot of complex and somewhat precise "calculations" going on, it's just that we're not that aware of all of them.
I agree with you in as far as it makes a great multiplayer element. In the vs the computer game it is a bit of a crapshoot though. Working with different world leaders is not something that is possible. You can't sit there and strategize over several votes. Futhermore the later in the game you are the more frequently they meet. By the information era they are meeting every 10 turns.
Agreed. Against my better judgment, though, I still try to hammer out "diplomacy," or some moderate semblance thereof, in my games against the AI. Mods are almost necessary in doing so, as the vanilla AI and rule set are optimized towards conquest. (Some AI personalities are more treacherous or aggressive than others, but virtually all of them will pursue military expansion over real diplomacy, provided the risk/reward calculations favor their odds.)
Again, I'll have to take your word for the annoyance of this element in Civ5. In Civ4, the UN is the closest equivalent. I found it to be somewhat enjoyable, if inconsistent in its decision making. It can throw a real spoilerish element into the gameplay that I like in my games. For instance, if I'm over-relying on my nuclear arsenal as a source of military power, and the UN suddenly bans nukes, the playing field is leveled toward factions with bigger conventional forces and fewer nukes. I have to adjust accordingly, or else pray that the issue comes up again in another UN session and is reversed. I dig that.
Unfortunately there are several stories floating around where the law abiding gun owner was at the far end of the house and had enough time to get a gun out and fire through the door at the calamity coming forth. Which has frequently lead to the death and/or life time conviction of said law abiding gun owner. This might be ok if it weren't for the frequency with which these law abiding gun owners had their homes mistakenly raided.
So, a bunch of armed men breaching a door and rushing into a house is less likely to provoke such a response? No knock entry is dangerous, period. It should only be used where threat of violent opposition is well established. Once you're going in no-knock, the notion that flashbangs is the safest way sounds plausible.
You are probably one of the few. But I wouldn't buy too much into the argument that their rates have to go up. Internet speeds are higher and congestion are lower in many other countries where their rates are cheaper. I think there is one reason and one reason alone for this. That reason is localized monopolies. Take a quick gander into the deals the ISPs cut with local government. Prepare to be disturbed.
I think there is one reason and one reason alone for this.
If there's "one reason," it's because the US is spread out. Of the countries with faster consumer Internet speeds than the US, the biggest in area is France, which is less than a tenth the size of the lower 48.
That said, local governments often suck. A few months ago Google just gave up on putting Google Fiber into San Francisco.
Take a quick gander into the deals the ISPs cut with local government. Prepare to be disturbed.
The limiting factor is not land area, but the marginal cost to serve an additional subscriber. It isn't the size of your graph, but the total cost of your spanning tree. The numbers involved are linear distances and number of nodes, not areas.
In most areas of the US, pre-existing infrastructure, such as improved roads and utility easements, makes serving additional customers relatively low cost. But monopolies and commodity suppliers operate at different supply points. A monopoly will intentionally reduce output below the point where marginal cost equals marginal revenue, to achieve higher prices and economic profits.
Leaving aside the concept of natural monopoly, that's the one reason. Most telecom markets are a local monopoly. Service sucks because the company providing it makes more money that way.
Land area and population density are red herrings. You need to measure the size of existing networks, such as roads, electric power, potable water and sewers, and divide those by the number of people served.
To use a car analogy, think about the Autobahn-style Interstate highway system. Before and after it was constructed, places remain the same absolute distance apart. But afterward, traveling between those places could take more or less time. Places that were previously adjacent might now require a detour via an overpass, whereas places previously distant might both have convenient on and off ramps. Travel times by car are thus determined by the roads network topology and not purely geographical distribution.
No, when trying to wire up a population, population density really really matters. The #1 and #2 countries for Internet speed are Singapore and Hong Kong.
Only in the sense that high population density makes minimal spanning trees very small indeed. The area simply is not relevant for wired coverage. Wireless links are another story, obviously, where antennas define a coverage area, but as long as the bits go through linear fibers, it simply does not matter how large someone's back yard is, or how far it extends from the front door. That area is irrelevant to the provision of service (unless someone lives on the other side of it).
The fastest data networks are wired, and even the wireless networks have linear backhaul.
By topology, a high-rise apartment building where everyone is within 100m of the utility closet on their floor is not all that different from a small town where most houses are within 100m of Main Street. The apartments have smaller area because people are stacked on top of each other. The total length of the cables and the equipment at the distribution nodes are still what matters.
You are removing a step in the causality chain. High population density causes efficient networks because all high-density areas incorporate their vertical space, by necessity. High-rise apartment and office buildings make it relatively easy to wire up a lot of people all at once.
But low population density does not necessarily imply a costly, inefficient network. The correlation between the two is stronger at the dense end of the scale. In the case where information about network topology is not available, population density may be used as a less accurate substitute, but your conclusions will likewise be less accurate, especially at the lower end of the scale.
Probably a closer approximation could be reached by looking at aerial photos of the places under comparison, adding up the total length of visible streets, and dividing population totals by that number, to get people per street-meter rather than people per square-meter.
> If there's "one reason," it's because the US is spread out.
Stop trotting this meme out. It's false.
South Korea invested 1.08 billion over about six years, from 1999 to 2005. They also deregulated, primarily around competition - direct competition is allowed between ISPs there (it is not here, usually due to locally determined monopoly status).
South Korea has a landmass of approximately 100,000 square kilometers. Which calculates out to about 10,000 invested per square kilometer.
From the mid 90s to the mid 00s, internet service providers received a sum of over 200 billion USD (some say as high as 300 billion USD) in direct and tax subsidies, with the understanding that they would build out fiber to the home. It never happened, for various reasons. But the point is we already tried subsidies to get it, and it didn't work.
According to the 2010 census, there are 486 urbanized areas and 3087 urban clusters. UAs are 50,000 or more people, UCs are at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 people. Pretty much covers everything from small towns in the middle of nowhere to large metropolitan areas like NYC but excludes Yosemite, most of Alaska, etc -- you know, the places where almost no one lives and probably don't even have cell reception. UAs and UCs combined, according to US Census data from 2010, cover 1,565,052.983 km^2. If we pretend that ISPs weren't planning on wiring up rural areas with fiber anyways, that means we spent $127,791 per square kilometer and got nothing for it. (For the record, the average population density of UAs and UCs together is 978.54/km^2). This would cover 80.7% of the total US population.
Per square kilometer of populated area, we spent over twelve times what South Korea did to get fiber to the home and got, basically, nothing for it.
Not only do the things that you mention do that, but also things like salads :(. Trying to lose weight with IBS can be a PITA