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Procedural Programming- The Secret Behind Spore
imashoe writes "Ever wonder how Spore works under the hood? The game seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different creates created in the game? The answer is Procedural Programming."
I think you meant to say 'seemingly infinite' or 'infinite for all intents and purposes.'
I've tried to think of mental exercises to challenge people with a concept of something being infinite. For example, if you had an object of infinite mass with no gravity, would it be possible for us to exist alongside this infinite object?
Infinity has interesting properties and I challenge the use of 'infinite' in this summary. The article uses cautious words: Procedural programming essentially shrinks the technological world, allowing us to fit a lot more information in limited space, and allowing this information to interact in near infinite ways. The basic theory of how one would store infinite states of data instantly disqualifies any device I know of. Computers, game systems, etc. are ultimately storing data in a binary on/off form. You can story many bits of data and come up with many states very quickly. You cannot, however, store an infinite amount of states on a finite amount of bytes. There's just no way to do it. A very large amount of different states? Of course. But not an infinite amount.
For the purposes of speculation, what would be the best way to give a user a seemingly 'infinite' number of states? Well, the obvious choice (and what random number generators on computers seem to favor) is to use time. Time is infinitely divisible (although the representation of that depends on decimal precision) and it is (seemingly) never ending. So one would base the resulting states in the game off of when a user entered input. It is still very easy to show that this is a many-to-one mapping. You can divide time down to a small enough unit that they are technically different moments yet the hardware that captures the analog input cannot discern between them.
I think that this concept of 'infinite' states is desirable to gamers. And it's the states that you find yourself in in a game that were clearly not thought out by the developers that makes a game special. When you have a large freedom of configuration pitted against players with that same freedom, you have the core success behind real time strategy games where players would build cities and armies and pit them against each other.
I don't think this claim can ever be made when a digital machine is being used. I guess you could design a program that would adjust to the size of the machine and extrapolate the amount of precision it used to measure the moment at which the user clicked the remote button and then stamped this number on the create's forehead (or some other form of uniqueness). But, I do not know enough about how the CPU acquires the time stamp. If it's a quartz crystal, this is only accurate to the number of vibration the crystal makes per second with electricity pumped through it. I have good reason to believe you will always encounter some theoretical issue or barrier when trying to achieve truly infinite implementations. Best to leave that word where it belongs: in mathematicl proofs and scientific theories.
My work here is dung.
"The basics of sequential programming are all object oriented."
That pretty much captures how well the author understands programming.
It's not that they're wrong that Spore is innovative this way(assuming it's ever more than vaporware), but rather that they do an exceptionally poor job of describing the way it works...The distinction here isn't between gated logic trees and 'actions', it's between static and dynamic content.
That article is terrible. It reads like a 9 year old trying to explain something he doesn't understand.
Maybe not