Team Snarkpit

Agent Smith said:
Does anyone have a server?

kampy will... someday :heee:

Hooo, I vote cs...

Dudes I want to get this list of players now. :biggrin:

Send a fe-mail to ding@bs-army.com with:

Name: ding (i.e.)
Timezone: GMT +1 (i.e.)

Thats it!

Done.

I take it there was no game today, as no one ever posted a location? I was outside putting in fence posts all day.

If there was a game, I was up way too early on a Sunday :biggrin: .

Oh, and also done.

I would be interested in a tfc squad or an ns squad, although im already in an sc one...

done

waiting for broadband O_o

Hey Ding, do you have a server in mind? I was thinking, due to the fact that we are spread across three major zones, thats really going to affect ping for some people, depending on where the server is. Now I don't know if you'll all agree, but maybe we could rotate the server between the zones, choosing a Europe server one time, then a US server, then an Australia server, so that everyone gets a chance to play with low lag at some point. I have no problem playing on UK/US servers, as I regularly do with 350+ ping, but this ought to even it up a bit.

I don't see why the atlantic adds so much to the ping times. Surely going a quater way round the world at the speed of light down a fibre optic cable only adds like... quick calculation ...32 miliseconds? So I should be able to play on a newyork server with a ping of about 80 max if I normally get a ping of 35 here?

scary_jeff said:
I don't see why the atlantic adds so much to the ping times. Surely going a quater way round the world at the speed of light down a fibre optic cable only adds like... quick calculation ...32 miliseconds? So I should be able to play on a newyork server with a ping of about 80 max if I normally get a ping of 35 here?

whispers

both ways jeff

/runs

That still doesn't allow for the ping you actually get; 350+ ? :sad:

scary_jeff said:
That still doesn't allow for the ping you actually get; 350+ ? :sad:

yeah, it does, when you consider that the only confirmed fiber optics is in the water.. the rest is apt to be good old copper.. the bottlenecks at both ends may be enough to shoot the pings through the roof..

i am not sure, but at least around here, fiber optics is more rare than copper..

The signal travels at the same speed through copper. I guess the main carriers are optimised for bandwidth and not latency... damned lazy carriers!

scary_jeff said:
The signal travels at the same speed through copper. I guess the main carriers are optimised for bandwidth and not latency... damned lazy carriers!

/me supposes you are right, if copper was as good as optics, why would they be spending millions to replace all the old wires.. its got to be capacity, not speeds thats driving the idea.

my fields of experience, do not encompass fiber optics, so i am only guessing.

Yep, you get higher bandwidth with fiber-optics. Plus I bet another reason for the switch is that there is less possibility of interference with the signal. Probably takes less energy to run too.

http://www.rccfiber.com/publications/design%20guide/design.htm

Some information on copper vs fiber optics.

you get around 10gb/s on fibre optics, yet they rip you off on the prices due to the fact you need an exact length and you cant re-wire the plugs on the ends, plus if you cut it, it can go right through your skin without any pain.

I read about some information connection the ARMY was working on and it supposedly transferred information instantaneously, or so it appeared. They used vibrating atoms and pulled the electron far away from the nucleus, and then they vibrated the nucleus and that made the electrons vibrate simultaneously however far away. Now, keep in mind I read this. I even asked my physics instructor and he was like "What are you talking about??", but if I talk to instructors savvy on string theory they say "Sure, why not?". So, I'm really asking, what the s**t? It makes sense to me if the ideas of quantum physics work in this setting, but they could bulls**tting everyone.

Oh and, I'd love to have a Fiber Optic connection ... oh man, go light.

What you are describing sounds like a special case of entanglement. Two particles can be "entangled" so that their spin states (and every other property I think) are always identical. If you change one, then you instantaneously change the other however far away they are from each other. Unfortunately no information can be conveyed. You cannot know what the state of either particle is unless you make an observation, and any observation changes the state of the particle. For example, imagine that you and I each had one of an entangled pair of particles. I could change the state of mine however I want, and yours would change to match, but you would have no way of measuring the change. Whenever you make a measurement you cause the superposition of states to collapse into one, but you can't know what the state was before you made your observation. hence you cannot detect a change in state and no information can be conveyed. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>

In short, it is impossible to send information faster-than-light according to relativity and quantum mechanics (unless you have wormhole). If anyone ever figures out a way to do so, it won't simply be a cool technology, it will mean the utter collapse of 100 years of physical theory.

I thought that's half of the theory for quantum computing? Using entanglement to transfer information instantaneously? In addition, I thought you can only have two types of spin, so if you measure it, and measuring it changes it, you know it's now the other one? I don't see how they could have already done this if there is no way to make a measurement that would tell you it had happened?

They rip you off because they put in a huge fibre infrastructure, at great cost, and the system is at nowhere near the designed capacity. Good for the future, bad for the telcos that put the fibre in.

I don't know anything about quantum computing, that said however, you are misunderstanding me because I didn't explain it adequately.

Even if you are talking about something like spin, which is either up or down, it still doesn't work. There is infinite uncertainty in the state of the particle before you make a measurement, and you cannot conclude that what you observed is different form it's previous state. Although your observation does cause the superposition to collapse, there is no way to predict which state it will collapse into. if you could do that the uncertainty would be meaningless. The history of the particle has no effect on the future outcome. It's like flipping a coin. While it is spinning in the air there is a great deal of uncertainty which side is up. as soon as you catch it to find out, this "superposition" collapses into one of two states, but just because it was tails last time does not imply that it will be heads this time. Over a long series of measurements you'd be right: it lands tails just as often as it lands heads, but that has no bearing on the outcome of an individual toss.

I think you are right that quantum computing relies on entanglement in some way, but I think the difference is that somehow the observation step is removed. I would also venture to guess that there is some quirk of the process that limits everything to light-speed.

Ah that makes much more sense. You should come and replace some of my university lecturers :smile:

From what one of my lecturers said, the main part of quantum computing is (very basically, I couldn't explain it properly) splitting processing into a number of tasks that can be sent off to an unlimited number of parallel 'dimensions', where the tasks are processed, and the results sent back. It sounds made up but there is a lot of money going into it from what my lecturer said. And he is one of the non-crap lecturers who actually knows his stuff.

I only wish I could explain it as well as you can explain the entanglement thing!

*as the topic just advanced beyond most of the pit memberbase*

well, another good example is one with a cat in a box. you put a cat in a box with a vial of cyanide. the box is locked and sealed, and nothing can be measured of it. also the cat can breathe so you can flaw this. also the cat will stay alive for an infinite amount of time if it doesnt stand on the vial of cyanide.

Once we seal the box, we dont know whether the cat is alive or dead. So we say it has two superpositions. one where the cat is alive, and one where the cat is dead. It is both alive and dead.

When we open the box with the cat in, we see if the cat is alive or dead. So the Superposition collapses.

blue, you are not endearing yourself upon me by rubbing my nose in my lack of comprehension :biggrin:

This is also explained excellently in the final chapter of "the code book" by Simon Singh (I hope i spelled his name right, also thats reffereing to quantum computing.)

G.Ballblue said:
It's a joke man :razz:

ok then, but.. you have alienated a large percentage of this community, you cannot blame me when i misunderstand a joke.. i have learned the hard way that a smiley can be used as a weapon, its not always a sigh of joking..

sorry then, my bad.

Jef - I'm glad I could explain it clearly. :smile: I'm not always that sucessfull.

Dred_furst said:
well, another good example is one with a cat in a box. you put a cat in a box with a vial of cyanide. the box is locked and sealed, and nothing can be measured of it. also the cat can breathe so you can flaw this. also the cat will stay alive for an infinite amount of time if it doesnt stand on the vial of cyanide.

Once we seal the box, we dont know whether the cat is alive or dead. So we say it has two superpositions. one where the cat is alive, and one where the cat is dead. It is both alive and dead.

When we open the box with the cat in, we see if the cat is alive or dead. So the Superposition collapses.

Yes, good old Schordinger...The quantum physics book that was used at my university has a living cat on the cover and a dead cat on the back. Brilliant cover art, but I've never felt that that was a thought experiment very conducive to comprehension. It seems more designed to confuse than to clarify.

? posted by G.Ballblue

It's a joke man

ok then, but.. you have alienated a large percentage of this community, you cannot blame me when i misunderstand a joke.. i have learned the hard way that a smiley can be used as a weapon, its not always a sigh of joking..

sorry then, my bad.

ITS NOT BLUE :o

isn't this along the same lines of "if someone farts in the woods and no one is there to smell it, did it have an odor?" or was it trees i can never get that one right..

Sort of. The difference is that Schrodinger's Cat and the coin toss examples are linked to totaly random events. The whole "if a tree falls in a forest..." train of though doesn't count because nowhere is there random chance involved. You have stated that the tree falls, the direct physical outcome is a sound, and there is no way around it. The example doesn't hold up. There is no "superposition". Then again, I don't know much about the physics of farts... maybe that one works :biggrin:

Schrodinger's cat is more linked into the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is about how it's meant to be our consciousness which determines reality, and how it has to be us (as observers) which decide if the cat if dead or not. It's sort of the same as that analogy, in that they're both saying that a person has to be there for there for either to exist... though I think Schrodinger's cat is large enough for spontaneous quantum reduction to occur, i.e. it doesn't actually happen in real life :razz:

Schrodinger's cat is more linked into the Copenhagen
interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is about how it's meant to
be our consciousness which determines reality, and how it has to be us
(as observers) which decide if the cat if dead or not. It's sort of the
same as that analogy, in that they're both saying that a person has to
be there for there for either to exist... though I think Schrodinger's
cat is large enough for spontaneous quantum reduction to occur, i.e. it
doesn't actually happen in real life :razz:

What he said.

Gwil said:
What he said.

.

Leperous said:
though I think Schrodinger's cat is large enough for spontaneous quantum reduction to occur, i.e. it doesn't actually happen in real life :razz:

Obveously.

lol, we're sure offtopic now ^_^. But these bizarre things are kinda interesting, even though I dont understand a thing :biggrin:

http://www.phobe.com/s_cat/s_cat.html

tries to find a cat smiley

a monkey'll do

contrary to what i may lead you to believe, the cat lives/dies theory is not unheard of to me.. i just found it only vaguely interesting when i heard it as a boy, and even less now.. i would be far more inclined to discuss the "if a tree fell" theory, or even the "do bears s**t in the woods" one.

even as a child, it disturbed me deeply to contemplate any theory where something had to die to prove it out.. it reminded me of a discussion we had in high school.. the topic was, "if you knew someone was going to commit suicide, what would you do to prevent it?" sadly i came to the conclusion that, those who want to.. succeed, those who don't succeed, only wanted attention.. IMO, if you could convince someone just how long dead lasts, that would be deterrent enough to save any worth saving..

as i said, i hated theories that involved killing something :sad:

The cat living or dying has nothing to do with the theory. It's just one example of it. Thats like saying you hate the theory of gravity because if someone jumped off a building they would accelerate downwards to their death.

mazemaster said:
The cat living or dying has nothing to do with the theory. It's just one example of it. Thats like saying you hate the theory of gravity because if someone jumped off a building they would accelerate downwards to their death.

people have jumped without dying maze..

if i misinterpreted the concept, its only because it has no interest for me to do otherwise..

wouldn't be the first time, sadly i feel it won't be the last.

i apologize to anyone who understands the theory and me ruining it for them :/

Orpheus said:

mazemaster said:
The cat living or dying has nothing to do with the theory. It's just one example of it. Thats like saying you hate the theory of gravity because if someone jumped off a building they would accelerate downwards to their death.

people have jumped without dying maze..

That's what they want you to believe. They being the pro-business bulldogs of the evil corporate American empire, of course. I mean, who else would it be, the... anti-antacid cohorts of wholesome female booty?!?! Of course not! So let's be serious.

And that just about sums up this thread to my mind, most likely because I am a... erm... intellectual inferiorite.

i think, one of us needs a lobotomy hugh :biggrin:

you make me laugh so hard sometimes

let's get back on topic ... anybody in for a training/war this weekend ? My trigger finger is getting itchy !

Sounds fun to me.

Ok then, we'll do the same times/days as I worked out before, its now just a matter of picking a server. G.Ballblue had a good idea of picking an empty server, if someone could suggest one, as I don't have a clue when it comes to Europe/US servers.

We'll just find one when we've gathered up in the snarkpit channel. What day and time (GMT) would suit you guys best ?

It's already done. Of course if this doesn't suit a lot of people, we can work something else out.

Agent Smith said:
Ok, I've done some rough calculations, and assuming we're going to play on the weekend, that being friday night/saturday/sunday, If the people in the US start playing at around 3pm on saturday (GMT -8.00), the people in Europe play at around 11pm on saturday (GMT), and the people in Australia play at around 9am on sunday (GMT +10.00), we should all be on at the same time. :biggrin:

I'm willing to get up at 9am on sunday to try this out. I don't know how this works for everyone else.

It might benefit more people to push the time onward an hour or so. I
can't remember exactly but I think its just me and Gwil from the UK at
the last list, and I think we would probably prefer something like 1am
to 11pm on a saturday night. It would also be good for the Australian's
having a bit of a lie in, and 3pm or 5pm makes little difference I'd
think to the US folks.

Who else is going to be playing CS:S from tonight though?

Thats fine me with Reno, I wasn't sure how late you or Gwil be willing to do this. It suits me fine.

I'd love to be playing CS: Source tonight, but unfortanetly my copy of CS: CZ is about 8 months late, courtesy of Vivendi.

I'd also love to be playing CS:S tonight, but my old old PC just wouldn't have it. Haven't played a new game for years :biggrin:

But yeah, I can do 11pm right up to about 3am (finish at that time, not
start!). Whatever floats other peoples boat, just gotta wait for ding
to sort it now :smile:

i wouldnt worry about it ballblue, you are only a wee nipper. theres
nothing cool about staying up til the small hours, yknow :smile: they have
your best interests at heart! and all that cliched rubbish :razz: