At university I had an introductory C course where one assignment was to write a program that searched a 4x4 array of booleans for groups of cells set to true. Groups had to be rectangles, powers of 2 in width and height, and could wrap (i.e. they could go off the right edge and back on the left edge). We had to submit our programs by e-mail and printed form one week later. The prof. marked the paper versions and the TA ran and tested the digital. One slight problem, if you used the university owned printers, they charged for print outs. A few pence per page to cover costs and stop people abusing the rather nice high quality printers the computer faculty had.
I’d always enjoyed programming and whilst C was new to me, using another language wasn’t a big problem. As I worked on it I realised the problem wasn’t as straightforward as I first thought, but I spent a few hours on it that evening and had a solution I was happy with.
Penny was a student on the course whose approach to academia was memorization. She didn’t consume, process, and apply concepts. She just remembered them. Her favourite subject was maths. While the rest of us were struggling to derive some formula, she’d have just committed the process to memory.
Penny was complaining a lot on this programming assignment. She didn’t understand why the assignment was so hard for an introductory class. I didn’t judge. I know some people find programming hard, but I didn’t feel I could help her much without jeopardising my own mark. There’s only so much uniqueness in a small program and if she just copied my solution we’d both get penalised for plagiarism. I did mention to her the cases I’d found tricky to get right was when two groups overlapped. If one group completely covered a smaller one you’d only report the bigger one, but if not you’d report both groups.
I heard, through her boyfriend, that that week had involved many long evenings working on this assignment, but she turned up at the next class solution in hand. Obviously stressed, she carried a pile of paper of several hundred pages. She had written a program that consisted of an if-statement for every possible group size and location. About a hundred different possible groups. Each condition written with constant value indices into the array. To cope with the overlapping groups problem, checks for smaller groups also checked that no larger group also covered this area. No loops. No search algorithm. Just a linear program of if-statements.
Apparently debugging this has been a nightmare. Cut and paste errors everywhere, but when I’d told her about overlapping groups aspect it had blown her mind. There always seemed to be a combination she hadn’t accounted for. Multiple times she thought she was done, only to find a corner case she’d missed. And just to kick her when she was down, she’d paid for multiple printouts, each one costing about £10 only to find a problem afterwards.
This consistent A grade student who sailed through everything by relying on her memory had been broken by being asked to create an algorithm rather than remember one. She got credit for submitting a solution that compiled and solved some cases, but I doubt the professor got past the first page of that huge printout.
Penny had worked really hard for that D.
Lol why does this entire text sound like a setup for that last sentence
I’m familiar with issues like this. Lots of copy/pasting with little edits here and there all the way down.
This reminds me of one of my very first programs, a tic-tac-toe game I wrote in high school. It displayed hardcoded grids of Xs and Os and blanks very similar to what’s shown here. This approach worked because of the much more limited move possibilities. The program could always win if it made the first move, and always win or tie if the human moved first, depending on if the human made mistakes. I wish I still had the code.
Did the program cheat? Tic tac toe is a tie if opponents play correctly.
This is very inefficient, they should be using a switch case.
Programming chess as a single lookup table is wild
Right?
pretty sure there are more possible chess positions than atoms in the earth (universe?), so even if every atom of our planet were converted to transistors there’d be no way to fully represent all possibilities.
This was a fun one to look up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number
It looks like the number of valid chess positions is in the neighborhood of 10^40 to 10^44, and the number of atoms in the Earth is around 10^50. Yeah the latter is bigger, but the former is still absolutely huge.
Let’s assume we have a magically amazing diamond-based solid state storage system that can represent the state of a chess square by storing it in a single carbon atom. The entire board is stored in a lattice of just 64 atoms. To estimate, let’s say the total number of carbon atoms to store everything is 10^42.
Using Avogadro’s number, we know that 6.022x10^23 atoms of carbon will weigh about 12 grams. For round numbers again, let’s say it’s just 10^24 atoms gives you 10 grams.
That gives 10^42 / 10^24 = 10^18 quantities of 10 grams. So 10^19 grams or 10^16 kg. That is like the mass of 100 Mount Everests just in the storage medium that can store multiple bits per atom! That SSD would be the size of a
smalllarge moon!
i think you did the weight approximation in the wrong order, 1024 is a lot bigger than 6×1023. so you can probably double the final weight.
Assuming your math is correct (and I have no reason to doubt that it is) a mass of 10^16 kg would actually be a pretty small moon or moderately sized asteroid. That’s actually roughly the mass of Mars’ moon Phobos (which is the 75th largest planetary moon in the Solar System).
Out of curiosity, why did you say planetary moon? Is there any other kind?
Dwarf planets sometimes have moons (e.g. Pluto)
valid chess positions is in the neighborhood of 1040 to 1044
Lol, big board you’re playing with…
A position is the arrangement of all the pieces on the board.
I would have probably done it in my high school programming class to be funny and also fuck with my teacher, because they were an asshole.
Are they trying to code every possible chess position??
The implication is that the person in the meme is
Honestly back when I was a kid this is how I thought games were made, every possible image of a game was already saved and according to your input it just loaded the next image.
I stopped thinking that with 3d games
Those shitty old tiger hand holds kind of worked like that.
It does work like that a little bit, like with sprites they’ve often hard-coded the frames of animation, so when you push a button it loads the correct image, like Mario’s jumping frame with his hand in the air. But there are such things as tilesets, and sprite positions, and all that good stuff.
I thought that they were managing that stuff on a per-pixel basis, no engine, assets, or other abstractions, just raw-dogging pixel colors.
And before I even played video games at all I was watching somebody play some assassin’s creed game I think and I thought the player had to control every single limb qwop-style.
Apparently ai is learning to do that first thing you said about pure pixel management. It’s crazy that it works at all
In the first few Assassin’s Creed games, they did use the idea of a Puppeteer system for the control scheme, although it wasn’t physics-based or anywhere near as hard as QWOP. Each of the controllers face buttons performed actions associated with each limb, and the right trigger would swap between low profile actions and high profile actions.
In the top right of the screen, there was always a UI element showing what the buttons did at that moment in that context, which might’ve been why you thought it was a QWOP style system. It’s not exactly what you were thinking of at the time, but you were closer than you realise.
Even with 2D games that’s basically impossible. Only time it could work is with turn based games and then…you end up with this post lol.
I see you’ve never played “Dragon’s Lair”, where every scene was cell animated and the player “chose” the path that the animation would take.
That one ran on a laserdisc, right? Like a CAV disc so it could very quickly move the laser to one of a couple of places for basically a win/lose decision, overlaying some graphics over top for the game UI?
Space Ace!
LOL, I’ve actually heard of it, but I have not played it. Ofc that game never even crossed my mind when writing my comment haha. I suppose choose your own adventure style books also fall into this category.
I remember having a thought one day as a young kid while interacting with a DVD main menu (the kind that had clips from the movie playing in the background, and would play a specific clip depending on what menu you went in to).
“This is basically how video games work, there’s a bunch of options you can choose from and depending on what you do it shows you something. Videogames are just DVD menus with way more options.”
I grew up to not be a programmer.
The game Myst actually worked kind of like a DVD menu with more options.
Instead you are a choose-your-own-adventure author
Close, I DM’ed a short-lived DnD campaign a year ago.
Its not terribly far off from pre rendered or FMV games like Myst are doing it.
I remember speculating as a (small) kid that the AI soldiers in Battlefront II’s local multiplayer might be real people employed by the developer. Not the brightest child was I.
I remember as a kid seeing my older brother talk to people on a mic and thought he was talking to the characters in the game
I grew up mostly with the PS2 and above and I thought the same thing 😅. I did think there had to be a better way though
This is where you’d normally go “there must be a better way…”
Not some people.
This is a great advertisment for what real developers do. You shouldn’t just crank out the first idea that works. You should be doing something that is smarter and sensible.
As a middle schooler I used Power Point to make FMV games for my friends and classmates, and it was basically this. Just, like, SO MANY slides
AI has probably finished this game by now.
And still lost.
Laughable for chess, but essentially how Steve Mould played tic tac toe using synthesized DNA.
if that is python then makes sense
