Internet

We will open today's program with an outline of Alexander Kostinsky about the victorious procession of the Internet on the planet.

Kostinsky

If the twentieth century began as a century of electricity, then the 21st century starts under the sign of digital technologies and the Internet ... You will not surprise anyone with such a phrase, and yet, the most exciting reading is a column of news of the world of high technology.

Almost all far -sighted politicians are rebuilding their countries on digital rails. No wonder recent studies show a sharp growth of Internet users not only in the United States, but also in many other countries of the world.

Moreover, it occurs even faster than predicted last year. In accordance with the US -USIC Internet Council (USIC), more than three hundred million people used the Internet in March 2000, while the majority live outside North America. Seven years ago, there were less than 90 thousand users of the World Wide Web around the world. In 1999, there were already 171 million of them. According to the latest estimates, the coveted billion will be reached by two thousand fifth year, and only 300 million of them will be inhabitants of North America. For the Internet is a new reality. No wonder the report of the US website emphasizes: “Over the past decade, the overwhelming number of Internet users were US citizens and the overwhelming amount of information on the Internet was presented in English. These factors defined the Internet as an American environment. Now, more and more users from Europe and Asia are going to cyberspace, the Internet becomes a multi-cultural, multi-language and multi-pole environment.” (End of the quote).

The authors of the report suggest that English will lose its dominant position in the World Wide Web. A large number of Internet nodes in national languages will appear. Today, for 50 percent of users, English is considered native. So far, English -language resources continue to lead on the network: they make up 78 percent of all sites and 96 percent of sites devoted to e -commerce. In addition, 70 percent of all Internet pages are stored on American servers, and most of them are in English.

But already now the leadership of the United States in some Internet sectors are successfully disputed by other countries. The Ministry of Information and Communications of South Korea published in September data on the number of citizens of the country with high -speed Internet access. The report shows that since May of this year, the number of connections to the network on high -speed lines jumped 2 times and amounted to 2 as many as 2 tenths of a million people. More than a million Koreans go into fast networks via ADSL line, 740 thousand through the lines of cable television and 420 thousand connected through local networks. At the same time, in the United States, on February this year, there were approximately 2 million users with high -speed access to the network. In total, about sixteen million Koreans now have constant Internet access. In the USA it is 100 million people. The main reason for such a rapid growth in the high -speed access market in Korea is high competition in the market of fast lines providers, which led to a significant reduction in prices for such connections in the country.

Thanks to the Internet and digital technologies, Japan, which was persistently advancing on the heels, was thrown back in the economic competition far back. Of course, the Japanese do not intend to put up with such a position. The Japanese government has adopted a new five -year plan for the development of information technology in the country with the intention of "catching up and overtaking America." The main task of the new strategy for Japan will be to achieve leadership in the development of Internet economics and information technologies. For this, a special government council was created (It Strategy Council), which was headed by the president of Sony Nobayuki, the President of the Sony Corporation. According to the president of Sony, it is the Internet - the main highway on which the Japanese economy will enter "into the new era of ultra -fast development and economic expansion." Japanese politicians and businessmen, as well as Korean ones, consider “massive investments in the infrastructure of high-speed access to the network” the key to the rapid development of Internet economies. They also advocate the speedy adoption of laws that ensure the accelerated development of e -commerce in the country. If the schedule of the shock five -year plan is not torn off and the introduction of a new strategy will be successful, then the Japanese government hopes in five years to overtake the United States in the field of information technology and electronic commerce. Not all experts believe in such an outcome of the case. According to experts from Siliconvalley.com, this is an almost impossible task. So far, only 11 percent of families in Japan have Internet access, compared with 37 percent in the United States. And ordinary telephone services, due to timely payment, cost the Japanese much more than the Americans. But, Japan hopes for mobile technology, for the development of which it is ahead of the United States and Europe.

The leaders of the industrialized regions of China are no less decisively determined, which, it should be noted, is strikingly different from the poor agricultural areas, due to which largely flourish. The municipal government of Shanghai wants to turn the city into one of the most developed world centers of information technology and telecommunications in 10 years. Shanghai hopes, though for two five-year planes, to become along with New York, Tokyo, London and Paris. By the end of 2002, it is planned to connect more than half of Shanghai's city quarters to the Internet. Until the end of 2003, all the main spheres of the city’s life, including business, education, and healthcare should receive access to the World Wide Web. Shanghai government hopes that in the near future the growth of information technology will be 20% per year.

But not everything is so cloudless in the Niva of the digital industry. The new Internet companies growing as mushrooms and fabulously rich in a matter of days, often after a successful start they find the low quality of ordinary daily management, which was not slow to affect business results.

According to the International Herald Tribune, American Internet companies only fired about five thousand employees in September. The main reason for staff reduction was that commercial sites, counting on constant growth, accepted many new employees, trying to reduce production costs, providing customers at the same time various types of services. This often led to the low quality of service and the outflow of customers. It turned out that even overheated expectations of investors do not get rid of the need to professionally conduct business. Employees of provider firms, Internet trading companies and sites were subjected to main reductions, which provide information about the health and sports field.

But not everyone suffers losses. In general, the "branch of digital technologies is still looking into the future with optimism." According to Andersen Consulting, it is the rapidly developing Internet economics that becomes the most important source of new jobs in developed countries. So those who have fired from computer companies will quickly find a new place of work. Andersen Consulting analyzed the situation in labor markets in the USA, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and concluded that 10 million new jobs will appear in them as a result of the development of the Internet by 2002. In the United States, 5 million 800 thousand jobs will be created by network companies, 3 million in Europe. The remaining million two hundred thousand vacancies will arise according to the forecasts of Andersen Consulting in traditional companies, which in any case will be forced to transfer a significant part of the business processes to the Internet.

In pursuit of the United States, European countries began. At the end of 1998, 2 million 100 thousand people were employed in the network economy of America, while only 517 thousand in the leading European countries. The separation is four times. Andersen Consulting believes that by 2002 Europe has a chance to reduce the lag by almost 2 times.

If the governments of developed countries compete - who will previously set mass cheap broadband networks and reduce to zero the cost of access to their citizens for zero - then Russian officials can still write into their asset the introduction of the time -based payment for telephone conversations, because of which they are just behind the United States of Japan and Europe, persistent advancement into the mass of the system of operational -search events and the smaller communication networks and the lesser The same strange concept of information security. But they - better than early than it is too late - will have to solve the problems that politicians of other countries are puzzling over. It is precisely on their solutions that the country will take in the first place in the new millennium in the International Table of Ranks.

Radio "Freedom", the program "Seventh Continent". In the conclusion of the program, Vladimir Voronko will talk about the so -called "Games with Drunk Intellect." The text is read by Alexander Kostinsky and Vadim Alekseev.

Voronko

Probably, many listeners of our program at least once in their lives played strategic games. Some, perhaps, did not play against the computer, but on the network against several players - people. At first, this fun carries almost everyone.

It is very interesting, being in the role of a commander, to look at what is happening from above and manage dozens of military formations crawling among the hills of a distant planet. To experience your own tactical genius, encountering troops subject to you with enemy troops.

In most of these games, events take place in a real time (Real-Time), and very quickly everyone who plays understand that they do not have enough eyes or hands to normal control over the situation. While the player in one place is ambushed, his own reconnaissance group falls into the enemy’s ambush, and although a couple of seconds are spent to switch the card to the new place of events, this is enough to lose several connections, whose own intelligence does not exceed an ant.

Lovers of such games believe that it is necessary to correctly build a strategy, and then tactical misses will be unimportant. Those who do not like Real -Time - strategies, say that they usually win the one who moves the mouse faster, and in this sense they are not very different from shooters.

These strategists have a way out - they play a campaign, as in chess - a move by the course. In this mode, when the opponents act in turn and can think of everything in a hurry, control over the situation is much more accurate, and strategic plans are much more sophisticated. The campaign is very popular, but only in the case of playing with a computer that makes its move in a few seconds. When several people play with each other, each of them is forced to expect for a long time when other participants make move, and the whole strategy turns into a boring expectation.

What to do to a person who does not like a single popular strategy, but who is uncontrollably drawn to planning events and managing something aggressive? Perhaps he will like one of the most elitist games, the full name of which sounds like: "Games with a loaded intelligence."

The first such game appeared at the dawn of the computer era, when the sizes of computing machines were such that a person could hide inside them and for some time live secretly from the service staff.

As a memory in these machines at one time, inductance coils with ferrite cores were used, and the first game, without hesitation, was called the "heart war". It was a competition of programs fighting each other in the memory of a computer, i.e. On his ferrite cores. Programs were written by people and were, in fact, the first computer viruses that, in contractions with each other, tried to capture the entire machine memory, and to erase the rivals from it. Of course, the most tenacious and aggressive won, so that this game can be considered the progenitor of the current viruses, the epidemics of which periodically shake the Internet.

More than one decade has passed since then, but this game, in English - "Corewars", is still not forgotten and there is an international federation of its lovers, an officially approved set of rules and even its own ideology. On the Internet on special servers, championships between new and old viruses are constantly held, there are archives of previously famous programs and instructions for beginners.

Unfortunately, Corewars was created by programmers for his own entertainment and honing skill, so it is quite difficult for a person who is poorly versed in programming. You need to know the language of programming assembler. In addition, Corewars, perhaps, is the most abstract of all games with loaded intelligence.

Fortunately, for people who have yet learned how to program only alarm clocks and video recorders, in 92, the Moscow company Gamos wrote a unique game called "Battle of Snake" (Snake Battle). This is a full -fledged game with the loaded intelligence, and it still remains the most famous and successful development of our programmers in this genre.

Listeners can imagine the 25-N-25 game field, for which two, three or four snakes in nine cells are produced. After the start of the battle, the snakes begin to frantically crawl across the field, trying to bite off the tails of the opponents on a piece, saving, while their own bite. Each bitten piece increases the length of the bitten snake by one cage, and the long one that has been bitten is reduced. Snakes cannot crawl back and ahead, through themselves or other snakes, and the duel continues until one snake is eaten by everyone else, or snakes are confused in the wriggling of their own bodies.

The task of a person in this game is obvious - you need to train your snake in such a way that she can survive in battle with the pupils of other players. Despite the apparent complexity of this task, and we are talking about creating a real little artificial intelligence, the authors of the game managed to make the processing process of snakes very simple and visual.

The player training his snake must draw for her peculiar plans of the area, where with conventional icons it is necessary to indicate what will surround the snake during the battle. These plans, or rather patterns of behavior, have the size of 7-on-7 cells, and the snake can remember nine of these templates. On each of them, usually in the center, the head of the snake and, at the discretion of the player, the bodies of other snakes, their heads and tails, obstacles, and so on, in the combination that will seem the tutor of the snake most likely and necessary.

During the battle, before the start of each course, the snake glance looks around the playing field around its head and compares it alternately with each template laid in it. If the position on the field coincides with any template, then on the next move the snake crawls in the direction that was indicated in this template, otherwise the move will be made in a random direction.

Despite the apparent primitiveness of such programming and its limitations to only nine templates, quite complex lines of behavior can be created in the "Battle of Snakes". The fact is that the situation on the game field does not necessarily completely coincide with what is indicated in the template. The game allows you to program snakes at three levels of complexity, and two of them provide, when comparing templates, an indication of the simplest logical operations.

A trained snake can be transmitted to someone else's hands in the form of a file for battles on the side. By the way, access to the snake templates closes with a password, and, sending your creation on tour, you can not worry that competitors will examine your decisions and copy them to themselves.

As a matter of fact, the main meaning of the "Battle of the Snake" is in the sending of their pets to various tournaments. It is such an absentee competition with other people that can justify the time spent and bring a certain satisfaction if your snake wins someone.

Currently, relatively constant competitions between combat reptiles on the Internet are held at www.chat.ru/~almanzor . From there, you can download the game itself, the rules for holding the championship and copies of the best snakes for battles at home.

Perhaps those who are familiar with normal programming languages, compilation of game templates may seem too simple and uninteresting. Then, instead of the game "Snake Battle" they can try the game "Battle of Robot" "Robot Battle". The participants in the battles in it are virtual tanks, and a measure of success is the energy accumulated by them. These tanks, or rather, the simplest robots, travel along the cells of the virtual field of the battle, shoot with rockets, go around mines and collect batteries. The person’s task includes writing a program that could successfully control such a robot and ensure its survival.

The programming language in Robot Battle is quite simple and resembles Visual Basic. Those who at least a little wrote programs for Windows will immediately notice that it uses the same principle of programming events. This approach allows you to realize almost any strategies for your robot behavior in the program and make it as sophisticated as you need.

Так же как и в других играх этого жанра, файл с программой для робота может свободно переходить из рук в руки и запускаться на так называемом визуализаторе - программе, в которой происходят бои и которая позволяет эти бои наблюдать. Разумеется, роботов можно пересылать по Интернету, и организовывать между ними большие чемпионаты. Главным веб-сайтом поклонников "Robot Battle" является www.robotbattle.com. Там можно найти саму игру, ознакомиться со всеми её правилами и примерами уже готовых программ.

Стоит заметить, что у "Robot Battle" есть аналог российской разработки. Это игра "Robot Warfare", отличающаяся упрощенным языком программирования и более разнообразным полем боя. У неё есть собственная почтовая рассылка, а сайт поддержки находится по адресу robots.vr9.com .

Рассказывая об играх с подгружаемым интеллектом нельзя пройти мимо одной из их самых популярных разновидностей, которая изначально принадлежала к совсем другому жанру. Речь идёт о так называемых "стрелялках от первого лица", играх типа Doom, Quake и их десятков аналогов. Поначалу это были обычные аркады с задачей убить всё, что движется, но, начиная с Doom-a, в них появилась возможность боёв по сети, и все игроки смогли охотиться не только на глупых монстров, но и друг на друга. А это - качественно новый уровень, и поединки между людьми быстро стали очень популярными, а поскольку найти партнёра для такого поединка удаётся не всегда, то понадобились виртуальные роботы, которые бы внутри игры имитировали поведение игроков-людей.

В самых популярных стрелялках (том же Quake-e), эти роботы могут, по определённым правилам, программироваться всеми желающими, а затем подключаться к игре так же, как к ней подключаются новые уровни, звуки или монстры. В этом смысле Quake (и его аналоги) ничем не отличаются от ранее упомянутых битв змей, роботов и даже "CoreWars", о которых говорилось в самом начале.

С этой точки зрения, Quake является типичной игрой с подгружаемым интеллектом, и, по очевидным причинам, самой зрелищной из всех таких игр. Наиболее полную коллекцию Quake-роботов можно найти по адресу www.boteрidemic.com , а правила их создания на сайте www.inside3d.com .

В заключение можно сказать, что игры с подгружаемым интеллектом не очень популярны среди широкой публики. Это элитарные игры в самом точном и лучшем смысле этого слова. Это игры не столько самих игроков, сколько их создателей, или, говоря высоким стилем - игры творцов.

Передвигать на мониторе забавные фигурки могут даже обезьяны, и они это не раз делали, показывая чудеса реакции и глазомера, но только люди могут из строчек компьютерного кода создать саму игру, и только некоторым людям под силу создавать придуманных игроков, которые могут самостоятельно играть в придуманные игры.

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