I used to play Traveler and D&D. Also a really obscure game called "SPACE QUEST". BTW, this is not the "Space Quest" everyone sees today.
This was similar to Traveler, however, the game was far more complex in the ship design & operation, the physics of spaceflight, and it even went so far as to include Spectral and Luminosity Classes, orbital mechanics, civilization levels and types, planetary atmospheres, flora and fauna, etc. Took days to set up a ship, crew, and the nearby stars. Prob why it never took off. I wonder how many people have this RPG book on a shelf somewhere. Not many I would bet. They only printed it once and it was a limited run at the time.
Also, computer gaming was getting its legs at the same time. My first computer game was a game called Adventure, we would play late at night on the IBM-360 mainframes. Then Zork came out for the Commodore and Atari and all bets were off.
BOOM! Computer gaming became huge. Eventually overtaking paper RPGs.
Now with the ease of the Internet, graphics, and the speed of personal computers, RPGs have come into their own on the PC. (Everquest is but one early example).
Also the face of the chat room is changing. These are virtual worlds with physics, textures, walls, lawns, forests, bushes, libraries, rooms, (whole towns), etc. that you can walk thru using the avatar of choice and seeing out of your avatar’s eyes other avatars walking thru this same virtual word and being able to congregate and chat. BTW, brick looks like brick; add marble, cement, flora and fauna, wood, lakes, waterfalls, pools, metal, etc. These look real. >[? There are whole websites devoted to nothing but textures to build a world/community to add to the existing ones out there already. I know of one, I have access too, that would take you months to explore all the different places. There are Castles, gardens, forests, towns, homes, etc. Even one person made a New York street complete with cabs, noise, and high-rises you could get into (Including riding the elevators). You could take cruise on a cruise ship, swim, ride wave riders, etc. Snow would fall, there was night and day, the moon phases would change. I even walked by a lake where I could see the stars reflected in the water. How cool is that.
I remember being in one of these “worlds” where we were just a bunch of avatars standing around in front of a bar and grill on a cobblestone street. It was like really being there. However, the folks I was casually chatting with were from all over the world. Mostly from the USA, Canada, Britain, France, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain. A few were from South America, Asia, Eastern Europe and the like, but that was not often. It was kind of strange walking down a realistic looking street with a group of folks chatting away, knowing in the back of your head, these were people sitting at computers from all over the world.
Add VR headsets, and you could almost forget you were in a virtual world as apposed to the physical one.
Some people took this to the extreme as well. I saw marriages, fights, cliques, families, occupations, virtual money, property bought and sold, all in this "cyberspace".
This is not just a fad either. It is growing FAST. Even the US Army has gotten involved. They are using the VR software from one of these online communities to set up virtual combat simulations for training.
The "Matrix" is not as far off as you may think. BTW, I am not talking a war with machines, but the virtual logging into a world that looks and acts like the "real" one.
Just my two cents.
-and another- (sheesh RADES! you gonna post all your old stuff?)
There is not enough information in this article to make any kind of assessment of the research being done. I do know they have found a gene that is partly responsible. See:
http://www.physicspost.com/articles.php?articleId=166
However, there is another revolution going on that many have not extrapolated to its logical conclusion. A scientist by the name of Dr. Gordon Moore made a postulation in a paper to the April 19th 1965 edition of Electronics magazine (titled, “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits”) that industry would be able to double the number of circuits onto an electronic chip while reducing the cost by one half every year. Quoting from that paper:
“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will remain nearly constant for at least 10 years." (Moore 1965)
This was postulated by Moore as a simple log-linear relationship between complexity and cost. In 1975 (ten years later), Dr. Moore delivered a paper to the 1975 IEEE International Electron Device Meeting where he showed a plot of semiconductor devices that remarkably followed his prediction very nicely. There were some minor revisions to the curve, most notably his prediction for doubling jumped to about every 18 months as apposed to one year. This curve became to be known as Moore’s Law and even got its own equation:
In a physics class I took, I heard a professor remark “if airplanes had progressed with the same rapidity and complexity of the microprocessor, we would have landed on the Moon ten years after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk”. This may have been a bit over dramatic, however, it pushes the point of just how complex and capable these “tiny brains” called microprocessors are becoming.
Dr. Federico Faggin designed the first microprocessor, called the 4004, in 1971. Interesting anecdote: Dr. Faggin was in his lab all alone late one evening in January of 1971. He received his first 4004 CPU wafer late that day and wanted to test it. He worked late into the night and I can imagine the whoop as he realized it worked! His wife, Elivia, was the first person other than Dr. Faggin to share his triumph. If you ever peel the cover off of a 4004 CPU and look at it under a microscope, (I would not recommend it, they are becoming collector pieces) you will notice etched along with the circuit the initials FF for Federico Faggin.
http://www.intel4004.com/sign.htm
Note: a central processor unit (CPU) wafer is a round slice of silicon with a group of chips etched onto the surface, which are then cut up and packaged into individual chips we see in our computers. See:
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=619
Let us leap into the future 34 years. January 2005 (next month). Sticking to Intel (yes I know there is AMD, IBM, and a host of others out there) the current production run processor for the home computer is called the Prescott. The original 4004 contained 2300 transistors, ran at a clock speed of 108 kHz, PMOS process with 10um line widths, and had a 4-bit architecture. Just 34 years later, The Prescott is a 90nm process (.09um), strained silicon substrate, 125 million transistors and runs at external clock speeds up to 3.8GHz.
http://www.pctechguide.com/02procs_Prescott.htm
You may be wondering where I am going with this. :-)
IMHO, it will not be biological systems that ensure longevity, but silicon instead. There are leaps and bounds I read about every day in this technology. Multiple core CPUs, massive parallel processing, faster bandwidth, lower latency, etc. I am neither a chip designer nor an information theorist; however, I know a few who are. There is some thought in the industry that we may in fact be able to directly link a human brain to a silicon one, effectively expanding the biological into the machine.
Pure layman conjecture here: Would this then ultimately allow for our consciousness to leave this biological construct called the human brain and reside wholly in silicon?
Just an interesting thought.