Dr. Dobb's Journal November 2002
On the heels of nVidia's release of the Cg graphics language specification (see "The Cg Programming Language," by John Ratcliff, DDJ, October 2002), graphics vendor ATI has released RenderMonkey, a suite of development tools and IDE for creating real-time shader effects. RenderMonkey is based on a plug-in architecture and provides an open framework for integration of shader tool components. Data is saved in an Open XML Shader Database. The IDE is modeled on Visual Studio GUI. The current release, which supports Windows 98/ME/XP/2000 and DirectX 8.1 (or higher), can be downloaded at http://www.ati.com/developer/sdk/radeonSDK/ html/Tools/RenderMonkey.html.
Patience is a virtue, except when it comes to booting up computers. Luckily, researchers at the Sandia and Pacific Northwest National Labs have developed a means of helping computers boot up instantly, making entire memories immediately available for use. The technique is based on magnetic tunnel junctions used in Magneto-Resistive Random Access memory (MRAM), which let computers store information in nonvolatile fashion. For details, see http://www.sandia .gov/news-center/news-releases/2002/gen-science/atomicanchor.html.
Arm-chair football coach and University of California at Berkeley economist David Romer put to work a variety of mathematical, statistical, and economic tools to tackle the critical question of whether it's better to kick a punt or go for a first down (or touchdown) in football games. To answer the question, Romer reviewed nearly 20,000 first-quarter plays in 732 regular season games in 1998, 1999, and 2000 downloaded from the National Football League web site. He then published his results in a paper entitled "It's Fourth Down and What Does the Bellman Equation Say?" (http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/dromer/), which he presented to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
According to Romer, teams would often do better if they went for a first down or touchdown on fourth down. Central to Romer's argument is the Bellman equation, an economic tool that thinks ahead about what happens next, and what happens after that, and after that.
Edward K. Ream, who gained fame in the 1980s for RED (a text editor for MS-DOS), CPP (an ANSI-Standard C preprocessor), and Sherlock (a debugger), has stepped off in the world of literate programming with Leo, an open-source programmer's editor distributed under the Python license. As a literate programming tool, Leo is compatible with noweb and CWEB. A single Leo outline can generate complex data spanning many different files. Leo, which is written in 100-percent pure Python, is fully scriptable and saves files in XML format. It runs on any platform supporting Python and Tk/tcl, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. For more information, see http://personalpages.tds.net/~edream/front.html.
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has announced the formation of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Interface Standards Committee. The idea is that, with industry standards in place for basic AI interfaces, developers can better create believable and interesting nonplayer characters that learn and have emotions, as well as exhibit complex reasoning and interaction skills. Further, programmers can create advanced AI technologies like automated storytelling systems that adapt to a player's interests. The Committee will develop interface standards in such areas as pathfinding, steering, decision trees, finite state machines, rule-based systems, goal-oriented action planning, and world interfacing. For more information, see http://www.igda.org/Committees/ai.htm.
Sony has given the boot to its Betamax video tape recorder after 27 years. If nothing else, Betamax again underscored that better technology and first-to-market can be outdone by better marketing. Rival VHS video is still around, at least for the time being.
But in an example of not learning from the past, DVD standards continue to fragment with Toshiba and NEC announcing an alternative to the DVD format supported by Sony, Panasonic, and others. The new format promises to significantly increase storage capacity. The Toshiba/NEC proposal is cheaper, but is incompatible with the Sony-backed Blu-Ray Standard (see http://www.blu-ray.org/).