I would argue that this wheel isn't made out of odd matter, it's made out of motors and springs (rubber bands) the same way all actuators are. It behaves in a way that is analogous with odd matter, which the article defines as:
> The odd wheel grew out of Coulais and Vitelli’s past work on the physics of “active matter” — an umbrella term for systems whose constituent parts consume energy from the environment, such as swarms of bacteria, flocks of birds and certain artificial materials. The energy supply engenders rich behavior, but it also leads to instabilities that make active matter difficult to control.
I'm a little confused by the idea of this being spontaneous as well, especially since it's repeatable. Emergent, maybe? On the whole it just seems like a type of open loop locomotion control that doesn't rely on limit cycles. Which is interesting but not "spontaneous".
Almost more interesting than this announcement by itself is that Canonical is now providing a PREEMPT_RT patched kernel for Ubuntu in general. That's super cool.
Big confusion time on the algorithm name, like many other I was also coming in expecting this to be some sort of visualization of the concept of wave function collapse from quantum physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse
Oh, thanks. I clicked on that and saw a patch of grass and some water and was wondering what the heck that had to do with wave function collapse (in the quantum physics sense). Kind of waited to see if there was some animation, maybe some particles would hit the grass or water or something... but it was static.
For the fundamentals, Gaffer on Games has a series referred to as "Networked Physics" that goes over deterministic lockstep simulation in a networked (aka Multiplayer) environment, and input handling[1]. There are also other articles/series on stuff like Reliable UDP instead of TCP which is important for keeping latency low, writing a game loop with variable timestep, and other gamedev fundamentals. Gaffer on Games is a terrific resource.
The series doesn't really get in to doing things like rollback and the like, which would be "beyond fundamentals", as noted by the fact that a lot of AAA games don't even have good rollback net code.
Blizzard folks gave a GDC talk on the Overwatch architecture and their rollback implementation that is good for a conceptual discussion[2]
Here's a Gist w/ some rollback net code pseudocode that got posted in a gamedev subreddit once that I bookmarked but didn't read myself[3]
EDIT: Here's the lower-level game networking series from Gaffer as well, "Building a Game Network Protocol"[4]
These are great links, gafferongames demystified so much for me. I will also add in a link to Fabien's look at the quake 3 netcode, with the added bonus that the source code is available.
This is somewhat notable because Florida is one of several state with laws that present roadblocks for municipal broadband efforts in the US.
From [1]:
> Florida state laws impose “ad valorem” taxes on municipal broadband networks, but does not impose such taxes on other public utilities or services sold to the public. The state laws generally subject municipalities to restrictions on capital-intensive initiatives that make broadband projects difficult to begin. The statutes require municipalities to hold at least two public hearings, during which local officials must offer a roadmap to profitability within four years — making nearly any citywide municipal broadband proposal unfeasible.
I'm wondering if the fact that they're leveraging the co-op's power grid to do the build-out helps them get around this.
This is amazing. 2Gbit service for 99 a month is a great deal in the US. If it's reliable and fast ... * I almost considered thinking twice about moving down to Florida...*
EPB of Chattanooga is always the model system for muni internet. They also said that their goal is not to dominate (which is their current position now), but to make sure that at least competing companies will match up their offerings (which commercial consumer ISPs tried until EPB rolled out multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds).
It's a prototyping tool, I don't believe it has any codegen facilities. It used to be a Quartz Composer framework and then it evolved in to a standalone app.
The phrase originated w/ Jim Cramer, it refers to the 5 best performing tech stocks(or what were the best performing at the time). Nothing to do with their impact on the field from a technical perspective, just a business perspective.
