To anyone who has *programmed* a game, this might be entertaining:
Recently I had some compression questions and I started to participate in comp.compression. I discovered that there is usually one or two people every few months who crop up claiming to have come up with an algorithm to losslessly compress *any* data by at least one bit. (Of course this completely violates the Counting Argument and is impossible, because otherwise you could use such an algorithm recursively to compress terabytes into one bit, which is obviously silly.)
There was one such person recently who honestly thought his algorithm worked, and was ignorant to explanations on how it could not possibly function. All of his posts reminded me of the period in my life when I could have sworn I could perceive patterns in all random data. Honestly trying to help him, I posted the following:
---begin--- When I was young and experimenting with graphics programming, I created a simple program that plotted random dots on the screen. I noticed that they formed on the screen in a "grid" that moved in a counter-clockwise pattern, listing slowly downward and to the left. I then thought the random-number generator was broken, so I tried it in a completely different language on a completely different computer -- same thing. Tried a third language -- same thing. I chalked it up to an effect of trying to produce analog systems on computers and forgot about it. Later, when I was about 14, I was sitting in the front seat of a parked car and it started to rain. To my utter amazement, the drops started falling on the windshield in the same grid-like counter-clockwise pattern! For almost 7 years, if you asked me, I would have sworn on heaven and earth that I could see a pattern in all random things. It wasn't until I was 21 and starting to experiment with digital video, specifically informal research into the human visual system, that I realized how foolish I'd been. The grid-like arrangement and slowly-drifting counter-clockwise motion that I had perceived was simply my brain attempting to make sense of random data, as human brains are prone to do. Today, whenever I witness random data forming, I still "recognize" the "pattern" and chuckle to myself, but I no longer believe that there is a pattern in randomness, or that random data lacks entropy. ----end----
So, for anyone who has coded "plot random pixels all over the screen" as their first graphics program, you now know what kind of madness it can lead to ;-) The moral of the story: "When one is postulating correlations or causations extent in reality, one should always remember that the human brain is mainly a pattern recognition engine. And it is such a persistent pattern recognition engine that it often perceives patterns where none exist." -- Jeff Walther, Usenet, 1999
Jukka Eronen wrote:
John Romero wrote:
Um, I thought maybe at the end you would have found an old Akalabeth or
copy of Stuart Smith's >"Fracas" in the cabin...
SOMETHING collection-related! J
Well, we've had off-topic conversations before :) (but put OT on title now)
Ok, how's this for a real life adventure?-) (or arcade in this case). http://www.pacmanhattan.com/about.php
Quite the coincidence I actually just had thought were there actually any games brought to life (like the topic at hand could also be interpreted) and just happened to see that link (without searching). Any similar links? Well role-playing and such are are a bit similar too, but any other based on games?
- Jukka
-- http://koti.mbnet.fi/psychic/eng_index.html - Synchronic Web: Sierra/Lucas/Tolkien/Ultima/AD&D/SSI collecting and beyond!
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-- Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/
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