Role playing games and robotic simulants -- the future of games and the evolution of mind

Fantasy Economics - Why economists are obsessed with online role-playing games. By Robert Shapiro

I was discussing this topic with a colleague today. He mentioned how one company used "sweatshop" low wage Mexican game players to outsource the tedious work of building initial assets in many role playing games.

That led me to the next logical step -- robotic players. I was inspired by an old science fiction satire about a world in which the costs of production had fallen so far that consumption became a duty rather than a privilege. Only the rich could afford to live without constantly consuming goods. The protagonist breaks the viscious cycle by building robots to consume things. Ok, so it's not the same thing at all -- but that's how my brain works.

I don't mean simulated players within the game -- the game wouldn't allow that. No, simulated players outside the game. They don't have to strike keys, but they need to generate keystroke and mouse motion signals. They don't have to read the screen, but they need to be able to "interpret" the digital stream representing onscreen objects.

Observed within a game the avatar for such a simulated player might seem clumsy ... even a bit "mindless'. Or they might seem oddly smooth but "stupid". They would, however, react with lightning speed to certain stimuli. They could kill game-rabits and the like very well. They'd never advance far in the game, but they could earn a lot of low level script.

And there could be a lot of them. Thousands. Millions.

Just like robots in the real world. Or just like frogs.

Of course the game masters might come up with tricks to detect robots. mini-Turing tests that would a robot would fail. So the robots would get smarter. One human might manage a hundred robots, constantly on call to solve Turing tests the robots could identify but not resolve. The robots might be supplemented by rats responding to a rat-VR version of the game. Eventually rat tissue plated out in growth chambers would play a role.

And so it goes.

Eventually the robots/simulants become a part of the game. Other simulants compete with them. Some get their own tv shows.

And do it goes.

President Cheney: Reason enough to vote for Kerrey

The Washington Monthly....Cheney was a wee bit unhappy with their conclusions:

The CTC concluded that Saddam Hussein had not materially supported Zarqawi before the U.S.-led invasion and that Zarqawi's infrastructure in Iraq before the war was confined to the northern no-fly zones of Kurdistan, beyond Baghdad's reach. Cheney reacted with fury, screaming at the briefer that CIA was trying to get John Kerry elected by contradicting the president's stance that Saddam had supported terrorism and therefore needed to be overthrown. The hapless briefer was shaken by the vice president's outburst, and the incident was reported back to [newly appointed CIA director Porter] Goss, who indicated that he was reluctant to confront the vice president's staff regarding it.

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Cheney is a raving lunatic. One heartbeat from the presidency. No wonder The Onion's Cheney parody was so persuasive -- it's easy to see him terrorising the nation.

myBallot.net: online ballot representation from Minnesota e-democracy

voter info from MyBallot.net

Very impressive! Creates a simulated ballot based on address information. Candidates with web sites get a link to the site. This year it's very simple -- except for the mysterious soil and water commissioners. These seats are contested and I know nothing about them. These should not be elected positions. (Neither should the judges for that matter.)

TIME.com: The Hunt for Osama bin Laden - November 2001

TIME.com: The Hunt for Osama bin Laden

I came across this reference in some old email of mine. Interesting to read it in light of what we know now. Rumsfeld's "trap" was not so well set as the journalist then imagined. I don't think they expected bin Laden to last past December 2001. (BTW, I'm inclined to think he's now dead, or, rather less likely, captured. Unfortunately, Zawahiri is likely neither.)

GOP Dirty Tricks in Ohio and Florida

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | New Florida vote scandal feared

Very dirty tricks. Tricks developed over generations of american apartheid. Now in the service of George Bush.

In this case the email went awry because it was sent to a .org rather than .com address. The .com address is the Bush campaign address, the .org is a democratic activist's domain.

Iraq is a festering pile of advanced explosive devices

Salon.com News | Tip of the iceberg

As I would later learn, the 120th had, for all intents and purposes, become the caretaker of Saddam Hussein's grotesque legacy in western Iraq: a vast, murky labyrinth of bunkers, tunnels and sandpits that contain a staggering menagerie of exotic bombs, bullets, shells, mines, missiles and torpedoes. All told, there are 103 known sites in the 120th's sector, encompassing approximately 100,000 of the estimated 600,000 tons of high-density explosives strewn across Iraq.

...To visit a captured weapons site the likes of which I saw at Taqaddum is to witness the byproducts of unfathomable delusion and malfeasance and to parse the chilling dreams of a lost regime with an unquenchable desire for ever-larger and more grandiose weaponry and death-dealing machinery. Surveying the kaleidoscope of munitions at Taqaddum, I could discern no real rhyme or reason to it at all. There were scores of 6,000-pound anti-ship bombs of Chinese manufacture, for which the Iraqis never possessed aircraft capable of lifting. Strewn throughout the maze of bunkers and sandpits were hundreds of bombs of South African, Chilean, Soviet, West German, Yugoslav, Czech and U.S. origin, almost all of them sitting on wooden pallets, left to the mercy of the elements and the wild dogs that haunt the place.

Much of this ammunition was decades old. Many of the bullets and bombs found at Taqaddum corresponded to weapon systems that have been obsolete for decades. It was as if someone had given their crazy uncle $10 billion and said, "Buy whatever you want, so long as it explodes." The tour guide for this potpourri of death, Capt. Bruner, mentioned that the Russians had probably been dumping untold amounts of obsolete ordnance on the Iraqis for years, exploiting Saddam's compulsive desire for power to obtain cold, hard cash.

...Regarding the general situation of unaccounted-for explosives, physicist and weapons expert Ivan Oelrich, a former consultant for the U.S. Army and now with the Federation of American Scientists, put it this way: "I'll bet if you took all the car bombs that have gone off in Iraq in the past six months and tallied them, [they] would add up to a couple of tons of high explosives. So if they're doing what they're doing with two or three tons, what difference does it make if they have 380 more?"

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The Bush administration has a tragi-comic problem with the recent story of ungarded explosives. The real response to the accusations of negligence is to put it in perspective -- it's only a small part of an overall problem that's far worse. Not the answer Rove likes to give.

The editorial endorsements -- enough to shift the tide?

Shrillblog: The Kennebec Journal of Augusta, Maine Is Shrill And Unbalanced

The intensity and distribution of newspaper endorsement of John Kerry has surprised me. I was not expecting this level of ferocity. Even the Financial Times has spoken out (The Economist appears to be cowering in the corner -- terrified of losing 1/2 their readership and 3/4 of their UK staff).

Might this be enough to offset neo-fascist GOP motions in Ohio?

The GOP is not the Nazi party ...

Shrillblog: Wow. Diana Moon Is Actually Too Shrill

... As potentially unpleasant as this Ohio business is, it is a democratic paradise in comparison to 1930's Germany - and to 1930's America, for that matter. And despite some rather facile analogies of manner one could make - totalitarian tendencies here and there; an upsetting predisposition to blind hero-worship of Bush in certain circles; and the fact that, were it not for unfortunate historical echoes, a decent 4-word slogan for the Bush re-election campaign would be "triumph of the will" - there is no reasonable analogy of scale between the modern-day Republican Party and the Nazis. The modern Republican Party leadership is much, much, much better than the Nazis, probably better than Vladimir Putin, and not too much worse than the Republican Party of Nixon and McCarthy 50 years ago. It is important to remember that in 2 short weeks these people are going to voted out of office, soon to be but a memory, and it will be much easier for everyone moving forward if we don't have intemperate charges of Nazism on our consciences.

But this is not the real problem; the real problem is this: shrilly comparing republicans to Nazis is not only too shrill - it is also, paradoxically, not shrill enough. It is, in fact, but a pale shadow of true shrillness, which can only come from contemplation of the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence and simple disconnection from reality of the Bush administration. Looking for Nazi parallels blinds us to the fact that the Bush administration is made up of dishonest, incapable, easily-duped buffoonish ideologues, and takes up free time that could be more usefully spent ululating mindlessly to the dead, uncaring stars...

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The good news is we've only slipped back towards the darker parts of American history, not German history. The bad news is that the dangers ahead may exceed those of 1939 -- if only because modern weapons of mass mayhem dwarf those of 70 years past.

Ralph Nader supports vote swapping - a way out?

VotePair News: Ralph Nader Points Swing State Supporters to VP

Ralph Nader on a C-Span mentioned that swing state supporters should check out VotePair.org. The following documents where during the broadcast VotePair is mentioned...

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Has Nader identified a way out of the conundrum? With the election perched on the finest edge of a razor, and minor details like human civilization at risk, has he taken -- at the last moment -- the higher road? If I were a Texas democrat, I'd trade my presidential vote to a Nader supporter.

Should Rove be scared?

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

Anna Greenberg of pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research told the BBC, or example, that only three percent of Americans use their mobile phones as a sole communication device, but the FCC said two years ago that five percent of U.S. homes have only mobile phone service and that 15 percent of university students have only mobile phone service. And with 77 million U.S. mobile phones owned by people age 18-24, many of those supposedly counted are probably still associated with a parent's hard-wired telephone number but are really mobile. So the numbers of unpolled votes could be huge.

And though pollsters (who after all are generally in business to do this work) deny it, the switch from fixed to mobile communication is already having an impact on the outcome of elections.

In the last presidential election, one might have expected the final tracking polls to pretty closely reflect the actual outcome of the election only a few hours later. But no. Gore was generally two to three points down in most tracking polls conducted on November 6, 2000, but won the popular vote on November 7 by about half a million voters, or half of one percent. True, this is within the statistical range of most polls, but if the deviation from the actual vote count was truly random noise, then half of the tracking polls would have counted high and half counted low. But that's not the way it happened, and the reason isn't noise, but a consistent sampling error.

More recently in the 2003, Philadelphia mayoral election the final tracking polls gave incumbent mayor John Street a slight statistical lead over challenger Sam Katz, yet the actual vote went 59 to 41 for Street. How could those Philadelphia tracking polls be so far off? They missed the extensive effort to register student voters in that city, with its several major universities.

Now how about Diddy and all the others urging young people to register and vote in the upcoming Presidential election? Their stated goal is 20 million new voters (out of a total of perhaps 110-120 million voters) and given the fervent message and extensive advertising on MTV, VH1 and elsewhere, that goal just might be reached, presumably with most of those kids voting for Kerry, the Democratic challenger. If the polls are skewed, then Kerry is actually doing much better and can probably expect a comfortable win.

But if that's the case, why aren't we hearing about it?

The likely answer is simply because Democratic strategists fear any sign of cockiness will result in many of those newly registered young voters not bothering to vote at all, leading to a Bush victory. So nobody says anything, holding their breath and hoping for a particular outcome.

And Diddy, I hear he's planning to sublet the Lincoln bedroom.

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I'll be out there November 2nd, on the phones and in the car. As for Rove, he's going to do something desperate.

Escape from Tora Bora: how bin Laden got away

How bin Laden got away | csmonitor.com

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Not quite the story Bush wants us to believe. Fascinating details!

Bush charity? Maybe. Or was it mandated community service?

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

President Bush often has cited his work in 1973 with a now-defunct inner-city program for troubled teens as the source for his belief in 'compassionate conservatism.' 'I realized then that a society can change and must change one person at a time ...' Bush said in a video shown at the 2000 Republican National Convention about his tenure at P.U.L.L.... 'I was working full time for an inner-city poverty program known as Project P.U.L.L.,' Bush said in his 1999 autobiography, 'A Charge to Keep.' 'My friend John White ... asked me to come help him run the program. ... I was intrigued by John's offer. ... Now I had a chance to help people.

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The program may have inspired Bush, but it appears he was not there voluntarily. It appears to have been some sort of mandated community service. Given his admitted alcoholism it was probably related to a DWI charge -- a drug charge is also a possibility.

The secret government

The New York Times > International > International Special > After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law

In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.

Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II.

The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress.

White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. 'We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve,' said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.

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The "kind of treatment". Yes. An eye for an eye.

So Cheney wrote this. I wonder if Bush even understood what it was. No doubt Feith was involved, and Cheney's dark inner circle. I wonder if this was why Karen Hughes left.

Powell and Rice were not informed.

Why does Powell not resign?

WolfpacksforTruth.org: The Real Story on George Bush's "Wolves" Commercial

WolfpacksforTruth.org: The Real Story on George Bush's "Wolves" Commercial

The wolves speak up. They were conned. They support Kerry.

Sometimes humor is the only possible response.

Shrillblog: Conservative Daniel Drezner Is Shrill

Shrillblog: Conservative Daniel Drezner Is Shrill

A quite funny (in a dark and dire way) before and after blog posting. in 2002 Drezner mocks Al Gore's speech on Iraq, in 2004 Drezner is a raving lunatic anti-Bushie who makes 2002 Gore look like a friend of the Bush administration.