Ross Smith

Comment Threads

• Jocelyn Ireson-Paine commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  "Palimpsest" reads as if it was heavily influenced by The End of Eternity. I suppose Honorable Scholar Yarrow is an allusion to Asimov's Educator Yarrow: Educator Yarrow was at a desk talking to them. Harlan could remember Yarrow well: a small, intense man, with ruddy hair in disarray, freckled forearms, and a look of loss in his eyes. (It wasn't uncommon, this look of loss in the eyes of an Eternal — the loss of home and roots, the unadmitted and unadmittable longing for the one Century he could never see.)...
• Jocelyn Ireson-Paine commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  That [the idea that a computer is limited by its programming] is a very naive view of software. I urge you to take a look at the field of machine learning; you might be in for some surprises. Because everyone knows about evolution's power to generate novelty, those computational learning methods called "genetic algorithms" that are based on evolution are a good starting point. Look at the wonderful creatures that Karl Sims evolved under a simulated physics. Papers explaining how he did this are linked at the bottom of the same page....
• Greg. Tingey commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  brucecohenpdx @ 150 As Zelazny described a temporal fugue battle in "Creatures of Light and Darkness" I've read that SO many times & I'm still having problems - it's a little-kmown masterpiece! Err.. the allocation & abrogation/acquisition/annullment (I'm on an alliteration jag!) of time-slots, whether 1 or 14-millisecond, reminds me of something that just popped up on a subsequent thread: The Josephus problem - of finding the survivior from a multiple-start & all the others get "eliminated", one way or another. Is this perhaps relevant?...
• Juliana Rew commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Enjoyed reading this history of Singularity Sky. I've been reading your books in a sort of backward order, so just finished SSky. Here's my short review before I discovered the crib sheet: thewell-roundedgeek.blogspot.com....
• rhialto [falu.nl] commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Interesting... Vance uses the word chronoplex exactly once, in Rhialto the Marvellous: Ildefonse spoke in scathing tones: "Behold these two creatures! They can roam the chronoplex as easily as you or I can walk around the table; yet neither has the wit to announce his presence upon arrival. I found Osherl asleep in his fulgurite and Sarsem perched in the rafters." (source: Totality)...