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Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t (2011)

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Re: Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t (2011)

#11

Post by aqme28 »

sherm8n wrote: post #3
stormbrew wrote: post #2

I think it's interesting that people who make games often don't think of their players as basically a giant parallel computer. You're essentially sending a puzzle off to hundreds, thousands, or millions of 'cores' that will through a combination of brute force, intelligence, and a complicated but large network of communication, come to an optimal solution in a time span you as an individual probably can't even compre…

It's human nature. When your goal is to challenge or stump someone you think there's no way they can be smarter than you. You designed it so you should know it best.

Schneier's Law: "Any person can invent a security system so clever that he or she can't imagine a way of breaking it."

Re: Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t (2011)

#14

Post by daniel-levin »

"No, they had discovered a superior strategy."

I had a similar experience when I published an iOS game in 2011. I was still in high school, so publishing a game available on the App Store was quite a big deal to the other people at school. I became known by a bunch of people for making this game. One day, someone I'd never spoken to comes up to me and shows me 'a bug'. It turns out this guy had developed an optimal strategy that would win the game every single time, with an almost perfect score. I totally failed to anticipate this way of playing the game. In retrospect, it was quite naive to assume that players would play how I would. When I played my own game, I had the technical knowledge of how the game functioned - and it seems as if this context clouded my vision of more creative ways to play this game. Players didn't think about collision detection, trajectories, the scene graph, parallax scrolling and z-indexed sprites. Instead, they saw the game as world to interact with, and having zero knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes afforded them a lot of room for creative exploration (and exploitation)

Re: Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t (2011)

#17

Post by SagelyGuru »

"I thought there was a mistake because some users were solving puzzles faster than I was! Were they cheating?"

This made me chuckle. I think this says more about the MIT mindset than about the users. Also, the total surprise at the guessing strategy is characteristic of a mathematician.

Nevertheless a fun little article to read.

Re: Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t (2011)

#18

Post by kybernetikos »

tikhonj wrote: post #7

This reminds me a lot of the section on constraint-satisfaction problems from an AI class I took a while back. You can solve constraint satisfaction problems using backtracking, but this is very difficult--it takes exponential time. However, for certain problems (like the well-known n-queens problem), the optimal way to solve it is to start with a random configuration and jiggle it around. This is the same thing but…

I wanted to learn about constraint-satisfaction algorithms, so I implemented dancing links in javascript. If you're interested, you can see it at http://dancing-links.herokuapp.com/ and the source is on github https://github.com/kybernetikos/dancing-links

Re: Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t (2011)

#19

Post by just2n »

tantalor wrote: post #10

MIT didn't teach you about hill climbing algorithms?

And that's the difference at MIT between a math degree and a CS degree, methinks.

Though, I don't think a hill climbing algorithm is going to be too helpful when there's only 1 solution.

Re: Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t (2011)

#20

Post by neop »

It's funny how these things work. I'm the developer of an iOS snake game called Space Snake (http://www.shiftingmind.com/spacesnake/). When I launched the game I quickly got to the top of the high scores, since I had been playing it myself for quite some time during development. I was very happy when someone finally beat my high score. It meant there was someone out there who liked my game enough to beat me at it.
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