The first time a prisoner enters the room, he puts or leaves the chalice upside down.
Any time after that, he puts or leaves it right side up.
He also counts the number of times he's seen the chalice upside down.
When this number reaches n+k-1 (or n+k if the chalice can start upside down without the king touching it) for any prisoner, he can say "yes".
Of course, it only works if the number of time the king has to call a prisoner is bigger than the target.
If you really believe that, you owe it to yourself to read what some great sf writers have to say about it.
Start with two short stories: Ted Chiang's "Division by Zero" and Greg Egan's "Luminous". They both explore the idea of what is "true" in maths and they made my mind reel.
I've read NKS and I found it at the same time stimulating and lacking. The most interesting part is the demonstration of Turing completeness of rule 110. It's neat, it's smart, it's totally useless as is, requiering starting conditions for the CA that are at odds with everything else described in the first chapters (quasi-infinite strip, thousands of cells for one calculation). I wished that, with the kind of computing power that went into producing this book, Wolfram would have tried to EXTRACT higher order rules from simple CAs, a problem CA researchers have struggled with for ages, instead of building a perfect artificial setting where 110 computes. Maybe in volume II, in twenty years.
I'm the game design director of a european company and my job includes interviewing propective level designers. And here's the truth: good level designers are rare.
If you want to stand out, you must learn about the tools, the techniques and what makes a level fun. Today, levels are so big and complex that it is rare that level designers are given a whole level to design from start to finish, as it was still the case a few years ago.
So, you don't have to be an expert in every field but you MUST understand how everything fits together. IMO, the highest valued level designer is the one who can use limited resources and some scripting to produce interesting behaviors own his own.
Here are some skills that will come handy in this line of work:
- A basic understanding of architecture: what works and why.
- OOP: even if most scripting langages are not OO, scripts are often linked to types (or "classes") of objects. Knowledge of patterns is a plus.
- Resource memory management, reuse: doing a lot with few things.
Also, play a lot of games critically, old and new, read, watch movies.
The best new idea about data organization I've seen so far comes from Jeff Raskin's Humane Interface. The user zooms in or out on an infinite 2D plane where information is stored in groups, the more general the bigger, the more detailed the tinier.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind answering. :)
I've seen the errors of my way
The first time a prisoner enters the room, he puts or leaves the chalice upside down.
Any time after that, he puts or leaves it right side up.
He also counts the number of times he's seen the chalice upside down.
When this number reaches n+k-1 (or n+k if the chalice can start upside down without the king touching it) for any prisoner, he can say "yes".
Of course, it only works if the number of time the king has to call a prisoner is bigger than the target.
Stephane
If you really believe that, you owe it to yourself to read what some great sf writers have to say about it.
Start with two short stories: Ted Chiang's "Division by Zero" and Greg Egan's "Luminous".
They both explore the idea of what is "true" in maths and they made my mind reel.
I've read NKS and I found it at the same time stimulating and lacking.
The most interesting part is the demonstration of Turing completeness of rule 110. It's neat, it's smart, it's totally useless as is, requiering starting conditions for the CA that are at odds with everything else described in the first chapters (quasi-infinite strip, thousands of cells for one calculation).
I wished that, with the kind of computing power that went into producing this book, Wolfram would have tried to EXTRACT higher order rules from simple CAs, a problem CA researchers have struggled with for ages, instead of building a perfect artificial setting where 110 computes.
Maybe in volume II, in twenty years.
I'm the game design director of a european company and my job includes interviewing propective level designers. And here's the truth: good level designers are rare.
If you want to stand out, you must learn about the tools, the techniques and what makes a level fun. Today, levels are so big and complex that it is rare that level designers are given a whole level to design from start to finish, as it was still the case a few years ago.
So, you don't have to be an expert in every field but you MUST understand how everything fits together. IMO, the highest valued level designer is the one who can use limited resources and some scripting to produce interesting behaviors own his own.
Here are some skills that will come handy in this line of work:
- A basic understanding of architecture: what works and why.
- OOP: even if most scripting langages are not OO, scripts are often linked to types (or "classes") of objects. Knowledge of patterns is a plus.
- Resource memory management, reuse: doing a lot with few things.
Also, play a lot of games critically, old and new, read, watch movies.
Good luck.
Yep. It's from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"
It's not so amazing since most publishers who accepted Google's proposal had probably already been convinced by Amazon's "Search inside" program.
Here's a demo.