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"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 s…
> "It turns out to be easier and faster to iterate from an existing but wrong solution, than to deduce a correct solution from scratch. " It is if you have no additional cost in building/destroying something, as in this game. If you had a pot of money and every piece you placed/destroyed cost you money (or even more than a fraction of a second in time) - as is often the case in real life - then the picture could well…
That's true if you are building something tangible. You can't simply start building something (like a bridge) and fix the mistakes you make while you are making them. But for programming ? You don't have those kind of costs.
In product (prototype) development, there's a maxim that's followed by a lot of people "Plan to throw the first one away" or something to that effect. Sure, it may not work for every case. But, for lots of projects, it's useful to accept the notion that you will learn enough building the first one to get more value out of throwing it away than by keeping it. There are just too many things that can't be seen without a (probably) unattainable level of diligence.
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.
I think this illustrates one of the biggest reasons many of the most popular mobile games have variable solutions and some sort of "star" rating for the solution. A lot of these games work on the idea that people ripping through it achieve the 1 star solution and go to puzzle 2. It has a "secondary" or "advanced" mode built right in for the person who wants to get 3 stars on each. Common things to grade with stars: S…
I think this illustrates one of the biggest reasons many of the most popular mobile games have variable solutions and some sort of "star" rating for the solution. A lot of these games work on the idea that people ripping through it achieve the 1 star solution and go to puzzle 2. It has a "secondary" or "advanced" mode built right in for the person who wants to get 3 stars on each. Common things to grade with stars: S…
> "It turns out to be easier and faster to iterate from an existing but wrong solution, than to deduce a correct solution from scratch. " It is if you have no additional cost in building/destroying something, as in this game. If you had a pot of money and every piece you placed/destroyed cost you money (or even more than a fraction of a second in time) - as is often the case in real life - then the picture could well…
That's true if you are building something tangible. You can't simply start building something (like a bridge) and fix the mistakes you make while you are making them. But for programming ? You don't have those kind of costs.
At the simplest level, 5 days of coding something that you realise doesn't do what you want is 5 days you'll never get back.
At places like mine, where you've got multiple third parties that you're interfacing with, sending them off to develop something before being 100% certain that they are doing the right thing could - and reasonably frequently does - have many thousands of pounds of cost implications, and many months of delay, when you realise that a particular call needs to real time instead of batch for example.
I'm pretty sure MIT teaches some sort of AI 101.* CSP, local search (and genetic algorithms) is what you're looking for. Also make sure to check out the paper by Wolpert and Macready on "no free lunch in search and optimization" for a perspective on "best way" *I also think it's a non-trivial connection to make that these types of problems are covered in AI or at least that's the feedback I get from students. "Oh did…