Utopia by Lincoln Child

Yeah, I'm sure a few of you saw this coming with a couple of my posts recently.

Has anyone else read the book 'Utopia' by Lincoln Child? (NOT the classic that's required in many english/literature classes)

It's about the "perfect" amusement park, built inside a HUGE dome in Utah. They use a lot of futuristic holographic and robotic technology, including this Artificial Intelligence network. I'll stop so as not to give anything away. It's a very interesting book, and is closely integrated with the amusement park, including a park map in the inside cover.

Any thoughts?

http://coasterbuzz.com/forum.aspx?mode=topics&ForumID=11

http://coasterbuzz.com/forum.aspx?mode=thread&TopicID=36388

Why did that not come up when I did a search for 'Utopia'?

Because the search script bytes.

Did you search on the bar on the right or did you go into the forums and Search | Recent | Notification | Favoritesclicked on search? *** Edited 12/31/2004 5:36:51 AM UTC by WILLDOG***

I'm inclined to agree with John. I'm usually okay about finding stuff more by date than with the search function.

the one at the top.. I've found stuff before and refrained from double-posting.

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Michael Darling said:
Because the search script bytes.

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There are no scripts on this site, son, but there are bytes. Besides, it's actually the built-in full-text indexing system that comes with SQL Server, which is not well suited to forums. Funny you should mention it though...

And I don't think he searched either, because I searched and see three obvious matches.

Searching here and over at GTTP/Pointbuzz has always been an art that few have mastered.

So if I'm understanding your blog entry correctly, Jeff, the new method for searching that you tried is actually grabbing words from posts and sticking each non-junk (meaningful) word into a row in the SQL DB? I shudder at the thought of how big that table will get and how quickly...

That's a really nifty way to build a search function, though. I'm interested to see what you make of it.

*** Edited 12/31/2004 8:39:16 AM UTC by Michael Darling***

Unfortunately Michael I am not one of those few. I do keep trying though. :)

Since no one else feels like giving a straight answer, I thought that the book was great. If you are looking for a action/mystery/sci-fi/rollercoaster related book, this is the book for you. I randomly picked it up at an airport book store on my way to Orlando once and couldn't put it down.

I thought that some parts of the book were very detailed about aspects of the amusement park. I think that the author really did his research. But for every correct aspect about amusement parks, there was at least one or more completely off the wall ideas. I imagined this park to fit in well with the disney chain. I thought that the only downside of the book was that it wasn't longer. *** Edited 12/31/2004 6:42:35 PM UTC by CoasterMatt***

The "mastering" is just searching by rank. That's my "secret."

The problem with it is that it just blindly indexes without regards to anything but the frequency of a word. No weight is given to whether or not it appears in the topic title or first post, the number of replies, etc., all of which make the word more relevant.

With two-thirds of the CB forums indexed (about 4 million words), searching happens in less than a half-second.

I've still got some threading and lost HttpContext issues to work out though, so realistically it won't see CoasterBuzz in production for a few months.