Short of them having some complete breakthrough of where the server can do some massive massive pre-computation to alleviate client side computations, I don't see this happening.
Between the computation / communication tradeoff, this would have to be a huge breakthrough for rendering.
As a Chinese American guy with great grades, I believe your friend is full of BS (unless she's "Chinese" in that she actually lives in China). In HS / College, I've never seen good grades = popularity.
Are people still making money from facebook apps these days? I thought it was over a while back (and thus why the mass exodus to develop on the iPhone although apple's approval process sucks.)
With 'normal' code, if it's broken, something doesn't work, and you know to fix it. With crypto, if it's 'broken', all the valid requests still work, and you don't know that anything's wrong.
In fact, as far as I know, the only way to know if your crypto code is 'working', is to prove it ... in the form of, if you can somehow break my crypto, you will also be able to break problem X, where X is a problem the crypto community has generally accepted to be hard to solve.
I am. Order not crossed up at all; this is just divide & conquer approach; figure out what end goal is, then divide it into smaller problems, and solve each of those. :-)
I didn't say the bots had to play well ... if at the end of every competition, everyone rises up to the level of the winner, then I think the bots would also improve drastically :-)
Can we have a poker bot competition? I'm not a great poker player myself (in fact, I don't really even know the rules) -- but I think it'd be another cool way to socialize; especially if people are required to release the source later, and we can all chat about what worked / didn't work, etc ...
I would argue that the hard problem is not "reasoning" (taking absolute truths and deriving other truths); but rather dealing with noise.
The former problem -- logic -- ended up giving us the AI winter, and it's the later (with machine learning) that is driving Google and modern robotics.
If this is just Mathematica + Prolog + A giant hand tuned database, I think it'll be a disappointment. (Look at the Cyc project -- led by a former Stanford professor, lots of funding, supposed to revolutionize human knowledge -- where is it now?)
"Let's only write performance intense parts in C++", and have the rest in an interpreted scripting language, where things like this (and more) come much cheaper?
I found this book far more insightful than a bag of tricks.
Clearly, anyone who practices these rules religiously will end up living a very lonely, paranoid life.
However, as a nerd that doesn't understand social dynamics very well, I've found this book to be of immense defensive value -- I started seeing how people utilized these rules (either consciously or subconsciously) around me, and have been able to avoid being influenced / controlled by them.
Between the computation / communication tradeoff, this would have to be a huge breakthrough for rendering.