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The Father of Civilization: Profile of Sid Meier
An anonymous reader writes with a link to Kotaku's recent profile of Civilization creator Sid Meier, and includes this snippet: "One year, as [coworker John] Stealey recalls, the two men went to an electronics trade conference. On the second night of the show, they stumbled upon a bunch of arcade games in a basement. One by one, Meier beat Stealey at each of them. Then they found Atari's Red Baron, a squiggly flight game in which you'd steer a biplane through abstract outlines of terrain and obstacles. Stealey, the Air Force man, knew he could win at this one. He sat down at the machine and shot his way to 75,000 points, ranking number three on the arcade's leaderboard. Not bad. Then Meier went up. He scored 150,000 points. 'I was really torqued,' Stealey says today. This guy outflew an Air Force pilot? He turned to the programmer. 'Sid, how did you do that?' 'Well,' Meier said. 'While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.'"
'While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.' The ACTUAL ALGORITHMS! Not the patterns resulting from them like a mortal man would.
I see three possibilities here:
1. Sid Meier, super genius.
2. Sid Meier, not knowing as much about computers as we though.
3. The person that say that he said 'While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.' is an idiot.
Which one do you subscribe to?
the algorithm results in the pattern. if it's simple then yeah, he observed how the algorithms work. if you memorize how koopa troopers walk and by what rules, then you know where they will walk and then you know the algorithm(that the actual game might have more complex code than is actually necessary to complete the algorithms in the way they manifest to gameplay is of no issue to this).
if you just memorize how every enemy on the screen acts on the screen you're none the wiser in a new level. once you can guess how the pattern will go for a new level then yes, you have deduced the algorithm. this is when a game loses it's magic.
if it never deviates from it, then the quickly observed pattern is the algorithm.. look, it's not rocket science. if you notice that everytime you're in the direction D from the enemy sprite a thing X happens. they you know the algorithm.
many games even nowadays have algorithms you can guess (accurately, mind you) what they are for enemy "ai"(which is a fucking joke still). even in games like WOW - that's what instancing, pulling and all that depends on. you even have "street names" for the internal variables like aggro.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
4. The person whining about this on a Sunday morning is a virgin
In 1980, a 'pattern' was something your wallpaper had. The word had no computer connotations. You're judging the man on how well he used 21st century lingo back in the 1980's.
This is what Red Baron looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06vBHL51LBg
I don't think being a Air Force pilot would help a lot. The reason Sid won was because he was better (or more used to) playing computer games, including seeing patterns how the enemies arrives (from left or right etc).
No that's not what he's saying at all.
Perfect AI would be able to learn your behavior and adapt to it.
That way there would be no fixed behavior for you to learn, and you'd have to adapt constantly.
Saying that you can't plan if you don't know exactly how your enemy will react is kind of sad.
It's sort of like admitting that you can only follow a fixed formula yourself and that you are incapable of adapting to your opponent.
How do you deal with playing against another person? Are you unable to plan for them because they might react in unexpected ways?
Or do your friends all play according to some fixed recipe?
do you kickban people who do unpredictable things when playing against you?
the variations into the algorithm are the salt. totally random behavior is predictable, because the you know there is no logic and can play accordingly as the ai will never be able to attain any goal. it could never win a game of doom, but if it always runs the same paths between places then again it's never going to win that way either. the point with real intelligence is that you can't troll them repeatably, or rather you can't know if you can, because of free will.
look, a game where you already know what the enemy is going to do with certainty is a game ALREADY PLAYED. what's the point, except maybe to demonstrate to someone else how the game works? which is what sid was doing in the story in the article.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Railroad Tycoon
Still has never been outdone in the genre. Transport Tycoon, additional editions of RRT, not even the latest Rails, which I believe Sid lent his name to without really being involved.... none of them can hold a candle to the original Railroad Tycoon.
Which one do you subscribe to?
4. Sid Meyer said 'While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.' for brevity since he counted on his coworker's ability to deduct that he meant "the patterns resulting from the algorithms" Smart people speaking to smart people don't need many words to say a lot. With precision.
It's sort of like admitting that you can only follow a fixed formula yourself and that you are incapable of adapting to your opponent.
How do you deal with playing against another person? Are you unable to plan for them because they might react in unexpected ways?
Or do your friends all play according to some fixed recipe?
Other people follow a rational process when acting. If you understand their process, you can predict their actions, and beat them - that's the vast majority of what tactics is. Sure, you might not get it right 100% of the time, and yeah, they might act unpredictably - but an unpredictable action is usually one that is tactically inferior (or you've made a failure in not identifying it as a tactical possibility). So yes, play against a human a bunch of times, and you will begin to understand their "algorithm", they'll begin to understand yours, and that's where the fun really starts.
AIs don't have the faculty to develop their own rational processes, so they're given algorithms that mimic them. A decent AI should generally make rational, tactical actions, and they should be somewhat predictable, based on what makes tactical sense given the physics of the gameworld, the current state of play, etc.
If your opponent intentionally tries to be unpredictable, the game is no fun. Try playing chess with someone who isn't making tactical moves, but just acting unpredictably - you might lose a few games due to over-thinking, but overall, you'll probably win, and get no satisfaction out of it because chess is a highly tactical game, and an unpredictable player removes a large part of the tactical element, making the game not fun.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
All my friends and myself still listen to 3 decades old music, not to mention all the blues and jazz classics that are far older.
Books don't become boring because they are old. Look at the so many movies that come out as remakes from 100 year old books.
E.g the three Musketeers (albeit the latest remake was just shit)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The word pattern has had the meaning the GP used for a very long time. It's not new lingo.
The meaning has changed, at least with the way it's used in software today. A GoF pattern includes the solution to apply - the algorithm, you might say - when the pattern is encountered. Sid Meier memorised solution techniques, a.k.a. algorithms. If he had used the word 'pattern', it would have said nothing about how he solved the situations he recognised by a pattern.
Most literature no older than 100 years looks now dated and plain boring (yes, even golden classics). Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore
No. You have it backwards. Most recent literature is crap. Then again, most of the stuff that's ever been written is also crap. The difference between the works in the canon and the stuff that's getting published today is that over time it tends to be only the worthwhile material that endures. Mainly for this reason, if you pick up a book that's still in print after a long time then it's likely to be a lot better than a random contemporary book.
The idea that nobody listens to music over twenty years old is about a dumb as it's possible to get in a syntactically valid sentence.
Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore
That is not true. Most people continue to listen to the music they heard and loved during their teens, twenty something years. People trained in classical music listened to them before they turned 25. Very few people like the music they hear first time in their fifties and sixties. Looks like we start losing the ability to like fresh music starting from age 25-35 and by the time we reach 60s and 70s we totally lose it.
I wonder if the music executives pick the music that made superhits some 30 or 40 years ago, dress it up using modern arrangements, and disguise it well, but use the same foundation melody, scale and rhythm and try to create new hits.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
He's still right, though. You and your friends listen to 3 decades old music because you've stagnated, but even you won't listen to just any 30 years old record. I mean, even though it was a #1 hit close to 30 years ago, "Never Gonna Give You Up" is mostly remembered due to Rickrolling. Most music, most literature, most films and most art has always been shit; contemporary shit is just more acceptable due to being part of the zeitgeist. Old crap is forgotten, and people forget that they forget, and thus you get the popular delusion that there used to be some golden age.
I wonder if the music executives pick the music that made superhits some 30 or 40 years ago, dress it up using modern arrangements, and disguise it well
Its all the same 4 chords.
"His name was James Damore."
Now Alpha Centauri was a really good game. I wish I would see innovations like in AC instead the x remake of the same game.
AC had:
* real 3D map
* real atmosphere and a good story
* innovated combat system
* innovated diplomacy
* and in my opinion way better game then Civ III and the remakes (Civ IV, etc).
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
By the way it was worded, it could, to some people, sound like a case of using a technical term in order to impress the less knowledgeable.
A: Hey Sid, how did you catch that curve ball?
B1: I memorized the physical forces acting on this particular spinning sphere traveling through the gaseous medium.
B2: I saw that the ball tended to veer up and right, so I positioned my hand close to there as a way to prepare.
Yeah, it's kind of an extreme example, but would anyone even consider response B1 over B2?
Now, I don't know Sid, I do love his games, and I guess you can stretch the interpretation of "algorithm" just enough to cover all the possible meanings that he could have meant, so I'm more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in this anecdote. But if someone threw out response B1 to my question A, I would be dubious, to say the least.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I wonder if the music executives pick the music that made superhits some 30 or 40 years ago, dress it up using modern arrangements, and disguise it well, but use the same foundation melody, scale and rhythm and try to create new hits.
I'd argue that today the execs pick the gimmick first before anything else. The quality of the music's far down the list. Pop music's always been a little bit about style over substance but acts like Lady GagMe epitomize it. Back to Sid Meier.... I haven't played the original Civ for more than a decade but I sure did when it first came out. Folks who weren't around yet or are too young to remember don't realize what an impact it had.
I'm forced to listen to a narrow selection of that music every time somebody at work decides to have the 'Classic Rawck' station playing on the radio on his workbench.
I bought 5 Pink Floyd CDs yesterday morning at a garage sale.
The 'old stuff' isn't a be-all and end-all. My favorite album right now is David Bowie's new album that he released this spring.
My father's favorite music is the stuff that was popular a few years before he started listening to music: the big band stuff like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. I like that music, too. But it's not a be-all and end-all.
What Phillip Glass and John Cage and those folks are doing actually eclipses all the popular crap. I'd certain rather listen to a recording of an orchestra playing a Charles Ives work than any of the pop musick.
Or Terry Riley's The Harp of New Albion which I can barely listen to at the moment, because my Klipsch speakers aren't hooked up, and so many of the subharmonics of the detuned piano are missing when it's played on low quality equipment.
Check out Phillip Glass' 'Dracula' in the Piano arrangement. There's a CD release.
Very few people like the music they hear first time in their fifties and sixties.
That's usually because people in their 50s and 60s have been listening almost exclusively to the same music for 30-40 years. How many people who continue to listen to new music on a regular basis end up hating it?
In my experience, most people who continue to listen to contemporary music on a regular basis find about as much new music to like each year as they did when they were in their 20s.
From the childish notion that immense intellect would manifest as gaming skill to the baffling assumption that being a real-life fighter pilot would have any bearing whatsoever on playing a 2d side scroller. Sounds like the perfect kind of imbecile to be impressed with Sid Meier hype.
i could live a little longer in this prison
It's (1), Sid Meier, super genius. I've spoken to the man twice, the tech side of Baltimore where we both live is pretty small. Sid is exactly the sort of guy who will stare at a game, note the patterns, and then figure out what algorithms must be driving them, all while a regular person is just playing. There is not a hint of boasting from the guy in person, he's just that good at what he does.
Vast hordes of young people who believe, like we did at that age, that history didn't begin until they were born.
Billie Holiday died in 1959, The Cure had their studio début in 1979. Your sixties are longer than mine.
Well, really my only Sid Meier encounter, if you don't count sitting in an audience.
So, I'm at . . . COMDEX? CES? One of those big-ass electronics trade shows. Might have been Chicago, might have been Las Vegas.
I got away from my booth for an hour, and I head for the area where computer games are being shown. I'm totally jazzed to see a dummy box and demo of Colonization. I look over the material about it, and to another totally jazzed gamer next to me say something like "Cool, it's like someone did a decent remake of Seven Cities of Gold!"
A voice at my shoulder says "Good, that's what I had in mind."
SQUEEE!
Let me add that I come by my music snobbery honestly. I worked in radio for 17 years and observed pop music rotting away a little more each year. Before you say I'm just an old fart who hates anything new, there *is* good stuff being made today but the record companies aren't signing them. They toil away in small venues night after night busting their asses for next to nothing. They write their owns songs & play their own instruments, and don't need or want Autotune.
I *like* "Never Gonna Give You Up". Good song.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
No, I despise Madonna too. Competitive with Let It Be? Competitive with Dark Side Of The Moon? Competitive with Born In The USA? Goodbye Yellow Brick Road? Elton John had the same gimmick-- dress outrageously, but he makes good music. Lady HaHa is nothing BUT an image. The music is only incidental, and it's all Autotuned.
OOOH I want to join the condescending display of knowledge. When did Pink Floyd ever write a modal melody that blossomed into florid counterpoint, or discovered a way to make the D triad follow the C# triad, through a harmonic intensification of a melodic element? (see Beethoven op 18 no 3, for example, first movement). Or when do you see anything even remotely close to the technique of taking a tune or theme and successively chipping it away to motivic nothings? Even a minor composer from 18th century Bohemia, Zdenek Fibich, showed more harmonic creativity than Bruce Springsteen. I mean, have you actually listened to "Born in the USA?" The monotonous repetitions are so tiring.
What's really tiring is people who are condescending about music, especially when the stuff they prefer is just as much trash. Lady Gaga is fun to listen to, that's why people listen to her.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's not like current game AI is really any more complex with some rare expections. Graphics are prettier, and levels are usually at least semi-3D, but the enemies are still dumb and your own allies dumber automatons.
And that's the way it's going to stay, too, since the gameplay balance depends on it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
See also, survivor bias.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I think a lot of it depends on your definition of "dated". Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare are dated in that the language and some of the situations are anachronistic, and yet either because they're ripping good stories (like many of Doyle's Holmes stories are) or deal with universal themes (as Shakespeare's greatest plays do), the anachronisms almost fade away.
At the same time, it's true that there are no lack of out and out dated works. I watched some old Spitting Image episodes from the 1980s, and while I had a good laugh at Margaret Thatcher and Jeffrey Archer being brutally mocked, I realized that my 20 year old daughter wouldn't find it very funny at all. The humor was firmly planted in that period, so that even 25 years later, at best it's funny in a manic and nostalgic way.
There is a lot of unreadable Victorian pulp, to be sure. It was the first great age of mass market consumer publishing, when literacy levels in Europe and the Americas reached the level that one could make a living publishing trash. At the same time, once I get over the jarring hump of 19th century idiosyncrasies, I can still enjoy Austen or Dickens, and even see in their marvelous and often excruciating characters people I know today. Thus they transcend the period in which they are written and set, and become universal works.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The Iliad is still a riveting tale. "Dated" has no meaning whatsoever on art. Grow up.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
The Iliad is pretty bad - very little actually happens, and the gods intervene in most of the fights.
The Odyssey, OTOH, is still a good adventure story, if you don't find it too trite that most of the encounters (and the overall story) are metaphors for Ulysses's need to conquer his sexual promiscuity enough to settle down with his wife.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, I actually read a scholar's edition, which aimed at keeping the exact verse pace and style. Sure, if you Hollywoodize it, it would sound much better.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
That's still true today. The essence of being a skilled reader is to drop the crap within the first few pages, and move on. Try Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. More recently (but not that recent), try the Skylark series by E.E. "doc" Smith. Try Journey to the Center of the Earth. There's plenty of great stuff out there of various flavors: per Sturgeon's law, as quoted above, your job as a reader is to find the 10%. If you can't do that, it's not the material. it's you.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Proctologist's law: EVERYTHING is crap.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Pearl Jam's album "Ten" was amazing. Pretty much everything after that was shit, though, and unfortunately they had so much inertia it ended up getting airplay.
Lulwat? I've played that board game. It is completely unrelated to any of the Civ computer games in anything other than "both are about ancient civilizations in competition with each other". That's not really something you can "steal". Ok, so the article on the first Civ's page mentions he took some inspiration from the board game - I actually didn't know Civ the board game was the first game to have come up with the idea of tech trees, as it's been used in hundreds of board and video games since. But seriously - what game *hasn't* taken some inspiration from other games? Ok, so maybe he could've come up with a different name, to reduce confusion, but they aren't particularly similar games. (Though it is sort of amusing that there's now a board-game-ization of the computer game, to further increase the confusion.)
Well yeah, other than playing civilizations colonizing ancient earth, turning population points into additional cities, trading resources like iron and bronze between other players, starvation killing off population, the tech tree... and the bulk of the actual EFFECTS from the tech tree like astronomy letting you get across oceans, yeah, you know, totally unrelated.
In any case it was close enough that MicroProse bought the rights to it. Which means that Sid isn't a cheating scumbag, as the original game designer made a buck. And Sid and co. certainly made improvements that meshed well with the medium. And Sid was a brilliant guy that worked on a lot of early games that were damned good. But he gets a lot of credit for something that he, you know, stole.
Here's a citation. If that'll help:
One of the most repeated and touted inspirations for Sid Meier's Civilization is the earlier Avalon Hill board game of the same name, designed by Francis Tresham for Hartland Trefoil in Britain. While Meier had no doubt heard of the game prior to 1990 through his connections with Bruce Shelley, he insists that the influence is not as strong as some claim. "I had not played that before I did Civilization," says Meier. "I played it later. I remember there were some cards and trading. It was more ancient; it didn't really come into any sort of modern or medieval times."
But connections, however thin, were there: Bruce Shelley had not only worked for Avalon Hill, the American publisher of Tresham's Civilization, but he created the American localization of Tresham's 1929 railroad game, a game which served as an admitted inspiration for Meier's earlier Railroad Tycoon. It should come as no surprise, then, that Shelley was intimately familiar with Tresham's Civilization. "I had played it many times," recalls Shelley. "I believe Sid had a copy of the game and looked at the components. I owned the original board game, but don't recall if I brought it into the office."