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Author Topic: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)  (Read 31365 times)

Draco18s

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #120 on: May 25, 2012, 09:13:52 am »

I believe that what probably kept people from developing effective steam engines before the 1700's or whatever was a slow rate of communication, sharing of ideas and designs, exacerbated by lack of literacy, social mobility, and a whole host of other factors...

Steam engines were known for thousands of years.  Ah la aeolipiles, but no one could figure out how to harness the motion generated.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #121 on: May 25, 2012, 09:23:40 am »

Actually, in my history of technology class I took, there was a pretty funny/sad and probably apocryphal story I was told about the first steam engines:

The first steam engines put to actual practical use were put into use in coal mines in England.  You see, they needed fuel for their steel industry, and they used to use charcoal for steel, but England had basically been cutting down all its trees because of increased steel production as it was expanding its empire, and needed more and more fuel for its steel.  So they went to mining coal as a last resort. 

All the easiest-to-reach coal was already burned, though, so they had to get the hard-to-reach stuff, instead.  And the hard-to-reach stuff was in flooded mines.

So they found a way to turn steam pressure into pnuematic pressure, where a fire was lit, steam built up pressure, and then a lever was pulled to have that pressure released, and push a piston that sucked water out of the mine.  This meant that they could start using coal to fire a machine that would help them mine more coal... However, the problem was that someone had to manually stand there pulling the lever only when the pressure was high enough, as measured by a pressure guage.

Because this was a ridiculously easy job, and it took no effort, and was boring as crap, they of course turned to that classic Industrial Revolution staple: Child labor!

So a boy was standing there all day watching a guage hit maximum before pulling the lever when he got an idea: He simply devised a system to tie the gauge by a string to the lever, so that when the gauge hit the pressure levels it took before he could pull the lever, the gauge would pull the lever for him.  Then he ran off and played. 

When the boss came back and realized that his child worker had just devised a labor-saving technique that eliminated the need for a human being to do stupid, repetitive labor, and vastly improved efficiency and safety, he did the only rational thing, and rewarded the child by firing him, because his position had now been eliminated.

And thus the modern age of industry was born.
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Draco18s

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #122 on: May 25, 2012, 09:55:11 am »

So a boy was standing there all day watching a guage hit maximum before pulling the lever when he got an idea: He simply devised a system to tie the gauge by a string to the lever, so that when the gauge hit the pressure levels it took before he could pull the lever, the gauge would pull the lever for him.  Then he ran off and played.

If you want something done efficiently, ask a lazy person to do it.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #123 on: May 25, 2012, 10:19:41 am »

So a boy was standing there all day watching a guage hit maximum before pulling the lever when he got an idea: He simply devised a system to tie the gauge by a string to the lever, so that when the gauge hit the pressure levels it took before he could pull the lever, the gauge would pull the lever for him.  Then he ran off and played.

If you want something done efficiently, ask a lazy person to do it.

For that same class, I had to do research on the earliest times of computing (around the 1960s), and how people were reacting to it, and what their new expectations for computers were shaping up to be.

One guy, who I can't remember off the top of my head, said something that stuck with me, that went something like: "We all have these visions of a Jetsons future where man is so lazy that he will find a way for machines to do all his work for him until it reduces the work we do down to just pushing a single button.  These people have limited imaginations, for they don't understand that as soon as man has reduced all his work down to pushing a single button, the only thought that fills his head is how to make the machine press the button for him, too."

But really, that's how technology works: We have these crazy ideas of technological innovation coming from some single individual inventor like Alexander Bell inventing the telephone, but that's a total exception to the rule - Tesla and Bell and Edison all came at a time when a totally new basis upon which technology could be built was already developed.  True advancement doesn't come until long after the research is over, and the development is in play.  We had notions of electricity for centuries before that, but only when we started having the Industrial Revolution and machine tools to mass produce the means of transmitting electricity over long distances, and the machines to create the power that could create the electricity did that ever mean anything.  It's only when you had power plants that anyone could invent a lightbulb or telephone or electric motor. 

Real technological advancement comes from the kids you stick in the factory who have to push a button all day with nothing left to think about but how to find a way to make the machine push the stupid button for them, because there's no reason a human actually needs to be there to do something as boring and routine as button-pushing.  When you get the machine to push the button for you, you can run the whole factory with one guy who only has to walk by every now and again to make sure the whole thing isn't on fire, and the machine is still doing its job. 

That's how productivity per capita soars, and productivity per capita is how humanity advances.
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Draco18s

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #124 on: May 25, 2012, 10:47:03 am »

When you get the machine to push the button for you, you can run the whole factory with one guy who only has to walk by every now and again to make sure the whole thing isn't on fire, and the machine is still doing its job.

And even that you can outsource to a machine.

There's a 365T on this topic somewhere, but I can't remember enough detail to know what to search for.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #125 on: May 25, 2012, 12:12:28 pm »

When you get the machine to push the button for you, you can run the whole factory with one guy who only has to walk by every now and again to make sure the whole thing isn't on fire, and the machine is still doing its job.

And even that you can outsource to a machine.

There's a 365T on this topic somewhere, but I can't remember enough detail to know what to search for.

Well, it's sort of the whole point of the arch of the history of technological progress.

I remember one argument I had about tech trees where I had a lot of trouble drilling this home to people, but it goes like this:

In the time before written histories, the typical peasant lived pretty much the same life they lived all the way up to the 17th century.  That is, one peasant worked a field of 5 acres.  Granted, earlier on, they only worked about 3 acres, until they could get slightly better tools that made working the farm easier, around the time of the ancient Egyptians, but basically, throughout all of history, around 90% of the population was doing just that: working 5 acres of farm.  (Exceptions of course to shepherd cultures, but those were even less changing with time than the farming cultures.) 

They could have improved agricultural yield with metal tools like steel plows, but steel was too expensive and rare to supply to most of the populace, so instead, they used wooden plows and oxes to plow the soil, and they could only work 5 acres.  This is because giving those average humans a greater share of the products of work was impossible - they just couldn't find a way to produce those metal goods for everyone unless they got everyone to do it themselves.  On the grand macroeconomic scale, it didn't matter if you were caveman, roman, dark ages peasant, middle ages peasant, Native American, or citizen of some great European empire during the age of exploration - the amount of goods in your life was always the same - what you and your family could produce for yourselves by hand, or maybe trade for from a little side business.

If you look at a graph of human productivity, it's basically a flat line all the way to the 18th century.  Why?  Because human productivity was directly tied to the number of humans and their animals alive to do work.  Both took food.  Food took arable land and people working that land - 90% of the people working that land.  Therefore, the amount of human productivity could never exceed the amount of arable land under the plow times the productive yield of that land. 

Therefore, human productivity could go up very, very slightly through techniques like the printing press where humans found a way to make their tools slightly better, but they still, fundamentally, were based upon human power.  And as long as it was based upon human power, it could never exceed human population. 

This only EVER[/b] changed with the introduction of steam power.  Now, you have the ability to make the machine do the work for the lazy human.  The lazy human can make the machine do the work for them, while they just pull the lever.  Then, they can make the machine pull the lever for them, and they just have to watch the machine.  Then, they can make another machine watch that machine, and you just have to have a human watch the machines watching the hundreds of other machines.  Now, one human is doing the work that once took tens of thousands of humans to do.

Now, you can produce ten thousand times as much product from ten thousand times as much work from a single human being. 

Now, on the grand macroeconomic scale, we have the actual capacity to produce far, far, more than we ever could per human, and that means we have the capacity to distribute to those humans not just enough food to ensure they aren't going to go hungry, but all sorts of wastefully unnecessary goods.  In fact, we produce so much we have to invent a culture of excess just to buy all the goods and then throw them away just to justify having all the productivity we do. 

We now have - for the ONLY time in human history - the utter fluke of a perspective that technology always inherently advances, and that is a good thing, instead of the classical fear of technology and knowledge.  This is because our economic model is based upon eternal growth of demand.  Therefore, we have to constantly innovate new ways to supply that demand and new ways to make people demand more things they don't really need. 

Now, we are approaching The Singularity.  The point where we have not just made the machine do the work for us, but the machine thinks for us, too.  The Singularity is the point where we make self-evolving AIs, which is to say, we make the machines so advanced that we make the machines make the machines better at pushing the button for us. 

It's called The Singularity because it is the point beyond which we cannot predict anything.  Once we have outsourced the job of finding better ways to be lazy to the machines, as well, it inherently means we are no longer going to understand the ways in which the machines are going to be becoming more advanced, and how they are figuring out faster ways to make other machines that make other machines that make other machines that watch the machines that press the buttons that make the machines do the work for the few redundant humans whose only job left remaining is trying to find a way to justify why they built all that crap in the first place. 

So I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
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Draco18s

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #126 on: May 25, 2012, 12:25:19 pm »

So I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

I don't, per say, but I will enjoy what comes with them.  Probably.  It depends on if we get a benevolent AI or not.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #127 on: May 25, 2012, 12:43:06 pm »

So I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

I don't, per say, but I will enjoy what comes with them.  Probably.  It depends on if we get a benevolent AI or not.

Well, the only thing to really know about human history was that it was all just a lot of spinning of wheels, just waiting for a jump that took less than three centuries to complete.  That's only about 9 or 10 generations.  All the generations before that were just wasting their time.

Depending on whether or not the AI overlords are benevolent or not, our grandkids or great-grandkids may be the last humans to live.  Beyond that, one way or another, life extension and the fact that humans are totally unecessary for production may make reproduction functionally obsolete. 

In that timeframe, as well, we will be slamming into the Carrying Capacity of the Earth, where humanity will have to destroy itself over the finite resources no longer being able to be stretched further, no matter how much more productivity we may have. 

It will be the end of our current consumerist society, one way or another. 

So smoke 'em if you got 'em, because we're hurtling headlong into the Singularity.
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

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Draco18s

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #128 on: May 25, 2012, 12:46:13 pm »

In that timeframe, as well, we will be slamming into the Carrying Capacity of the Earth, where humanity will have to destroy itself over the finite resources no longer being able to be stretched further, no matter how much more productivity we may have. 

Aye-yup.  Azimov knew about that limit well and wrote several short stories on it.

Even worked out how many people would make the equasion "mass of all humans = mass of all animals."  Turns out you get a population density of Manhattan...over the entire surface area of the planet, including the oceans.
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Itsdavyjones

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #129 on: May 25, 2012, 03:11:17 pm »


In that timeframe, as well, we will be slamming into the Carrying Capacity of the Earth, where humanity will have to destroy itself over the finite resources no longer being able to be stretched further, no matter how much more productivity we may have. 


http://www.space.com/15395-asteroid-mining-planetary-resources.html

This is a company that has just recently been formed that has plans on harvesting asteroids, so there may be a finite amount of material on Earth, but you can't forget the space based resources.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #130 on: May 25, 2012, 03:25:24 pm »


In that timeframe, as well, we will be slamming into the Carrying Capacity of the Earth, where humanity will have to destroy itself over the finite resources no longer being able to be stretched further, no matter how much more productivity we may have. 


http://www.space.com/15395-asteroid-mining-planetary-resources.html

This is a company that has just recently been formed that has plans on harvesting asteroids, so there may be a finite amount of material on Earth, but you can't forget the space based resources.

You don't mine for food.

The carrying capacity of the Earth is the amount of people we can feed if we convert every arable patch of land solely to the production of more food.

It is the functional wall into which our world will have to start killing each other over the scarcity of food as portions of humanity start to starve to death and tax our natural resources to the point where we will cause severe environmental degradation that will make our planet less capable of feeding even the few remaining humans.

This will only be averted by either severely limiting human population growth, invention of "superfoods" that take far less arable land to grow, or interplanetary colonization on a scale that allows us to just export excess humans into space. 

Bottom line, the next world war is probably going to be fought over water. 
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

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Heedicalking

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #131 on: May 25, 2012, 05:58:29 pm »

I hope re-stacking bolts comes soon.
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Tierre

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #132 on: May 28, 2012, 07:11:17 am »

I hope re-stacking bolts comes soon.


LOL you tried to derail back derailed thread:) Yeah stacking is good but i doubt it will come soon - Toady likes all the info which is not important too much:) So he cannot stack different things together (very different - like 1 bolt is a bit more muddy than another... :( ).

To Kohaku - wow i saw you derail your own thread for the first time:)
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #133 on: May 28, 2012, 10:28:42 am »

Enh, I could rerail it whenever it was important to do so.  Derails are no big deal, in spite of what everyone says. 

Anyway, part of the first page was specifically on how this information could be maintained in a stack.  It's entirely possible to maintain information on everything worth keeping track of in a stack of items.

Further, there is certainly room for making the tracking of information more abstract, anyway.  If a stack of 25 bolts made from one metalsmith is stacked with a stack of bolts from another metalsmith, you can just say 25 of the bolts was from the first metalsmith, and randomly choose which smith's bolts are being taken from the stack as they are removed.  You don't need to keep track of any specific bolt's creator, and realistically, you wouldn't.
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

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Tierre

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Re: Stacking and Hauling Improvements (optimization)
« Reply #134 on: May 30, 2012, 06:52:39 am »

Well it's Toady's decision anyway:) I think a lot of info is unimportant to store but i am not a developer of dwarf fortress:)
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