From: thunk <gmkoller@...>
Date: 2010-03-31T16:55:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Playing Games with "Ruids"


ummm, i taught my heathkit to play tic-tac-toe on its octal keyboard.
yup, then charged into checkers and couldn't beat it but like tic-tac-
toe it would not make a mistake so games ended in ties all the time.
charged into chess and got totally humiliated :) but then that's how i
learned something in 1978 or so. i backed off of chess in a hurry
though because i took on real work for my little friend doing "quality
audits" that the boys feeding cobol to the big iron corporate couldn't
do.  yup.

the key to my "confidence" in the game thing is that the "HelperClass"
methods can do anything - they could be hooked up to a monitors and
have real humans making the counter move, they could have schirnoff vs
kalalschnikoff memorized, they could, use other software - so in this
context all the little Ruids would have to do is coordinate.

and that's rather a revelation because i didn't think of it that way
until i woke up thinking about this instead of what i was supposed to/
expecting to.

somebody i chatted with talked about distributed and that's generally
beyond my pay grade or likely actual experience (although we collected
stuff all over factories and such...).  but if one system were to not
be able to keep up playing against so many players the whole thing
could spawn itself and divide the games going but then the whiteboards
would need to get copied and it gets nuts.  much better would be to
kick things off with fixed rules and a daemon per game - then when the
nth + 1 player arrives it could just cause a sistered thread to kick
off.

so when i think about that it sure sounds like heroku would be the
right kind of hardware.

but i'm not really thinking about games, or shouldn't be...