My first inclination was to do it in Python with the PyGame SDL libraries on Linux. Trouble is, nobody will ever see the game that way. So while talking with Kasul last night, I decided to reach deep into my past and write it as a Java applet.

Years and years ago, I worked for a company called Harcourt, a publisher of textbooks that at that time was looking into running an online university for distance learning. Since the courses were to be web-based, they had a vast need of interactive web applications. I wrote a couple dozen small applets to support the courses, and along the way, I wrote the beginnings of a Java game engine to help make things pretty. The below applet illustrates the dual-slit diffraction experiment that helped prove that photons could be considered both as waves and as particles.

The smooth operation of the controls, the double buffered graphics…. The package also included a graph paper canvas which I used for several applets, including this one illustrating the tangents to arbitrary curves….

So, I have my old game engine available, and examples of my older applets to start with, and I think I’ve just shown I can get sophisticated programs working in a browser. It’s a start! All those years ago, I bet my career on Java Applets instead of Flash. That was a bad bet. Maybe someday they’ll make a huge comeback.

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Monopoly board computer after calculating 2 * 2

Yesterday, Bear was caught in a bind because he didn’t have a computer to run the Champions Online beta. He didn’t know that he was standing on a computer — the Monopoly board itself.

Before World War II, computers weren’t machines, they were a profession. Rooms of people-computers, usually women, would perform calculation after calculation with mechanical calculators (that could only add and subtract) and paste the results in huge books, which would be shipped to military bases and used to calculate firing solutions for weapons of war.

In 1936, British mathematician Alan Turing described a theoretical primal computer, which could do only a couple of very simple operations. He imagined an infinitely long strip of tape split into cells, which could be either blank, or have some sort of mark. A read/write head could travel along the tape in either direction, one cell at a time, recognize a mark in a cell, write or erase a mark, and modify its internal state.

This extremely simplified computer came to be known as a Turing machine. Turing’s machine worked by the process of recursion, which means simply that a calculation is carried out by the process of repeated steps. Turing theorized that any computable function could be calculated by a Turing machine. Alonzo Church had previously theorized that any calculable mathematical function could be distilled into a series of recursive steps. The Church-Turing thesis proved that a Turing machine and Church’s thesis were logically identical, and therefore, a Turing machine could calculate any calculable function.

It follows, then, that any algorithm or device that can emulate a Turing machine, can calculate any calculable function, and further, that any two devices or algorithms that can emulate a Turing machine, are functionally identical (or Turing complete).

In our Monopoly board computer, the endless strip of tape is represented by the properties on the Monopoly board. Since 40 spaces is not infinite, the Monopoly board computer isn’t Turing complete, and thus can’t be proven to be able to run Champions Online. But it’s good enough for our purposes (technically, since no computer has an infinite amount of storage, no physical computer is Turing complete, which means that there exist problems that are solvable, that computers cannot solve).

Since it would be inconvenient to always be spinning the board, the read/write head is here represented by Bear, who can move freely backward and forward on the board, one square at a time. The state of the Monopoly computer is represented by cash on hand.

Every computer needs a program, the series of recursive steps that control Bear’s actions. This program takes 0, 1 or 2 houses on Mediterranean, 0, 1 or 2 houses on Boardwalk, and places a number of houses corresponding to their product in Go.

We start off with two houses on Mediterranean and two houses in Boardwalk, Bear on Go, and no cash.

Looking up the state of having no cash, and there being no houses on Bear’s square, the instructions state to “take $15 from the bank, build 4 houses and move forward”. After following a couple dozen steps, you’ll come to the state pictured above, with $8 on hand, four houses (the solution) in Go, and Bear building hotel after hotel backward around the board because this Turing machine has no HALT state.

Writing programs for the Monopoly board isn’t the simplest job. Since a Turing machine is a thought experiment, not a basis on which to construct a real computer, it doesn’t care how many steps it takes to perform even the simplest calculations. So since I didn’t feel like figuring out the algorithm myself, I wrote a genetic algorithm (GA) to do it for me.

Alan Turing’s machine works on the principal (s,a) -> (s1,a1,d) where ‘s’ is the initial state, ‘a’ represents a mark (or no mark) at the current position, ‘s1′ is the new state, ‘a1′ is the mark to write (or erase) at the current position, and ‘d’ is the direction to move the head — forward, backward, or stay put. My GA generates all possible (s,a) — states range from no money to $20, and marks from no houses to a hotel. It then makes a thousand random programs by filling in these (s,a) with a random (s1,a1,d). It then runs each of these programs, scores them on the basis of how many of {0,1,2} * {0,1,2} it gets correct, and replaces the least fit programs with a combination of programs created by combining the genetic material of two programs to make a new program, or (1/4 of the time) by an entirely new random program.

Then it repeats it over and over until it produces the perfect program.

Here’s the heart of the GA program that wrote the Monopoly board program (in Python):

gen = 0
while True:
      gen = gen + 1
      print "Gen",gen
      newChromo = []
      for i in range((2*maxchromos)/3):
         if random() < 0.25:
            c3 = makeChromosone()
         else:
            c1 = ranChromo()
            c2 = ranChromo()
            c3 = {}
            for k in c1:
               c3[k] = c1[k]
            for k in c2:
               c3[k] = c2[k]
         newChromo.append(c3)
      cfitness.sort()
      for i in range(len(newChromo)):
         c = newChromo[i]
         d = cfitness[i]
         f = score(c)
         chromos[d[1]] = c
         cfitness[i] = (f,d[1])


The complete set of instructions for running your own Monopoly board computer are found here -- it's a comma-separated value (CSV) file, and is best opened in a spreadsheet program. The Python program for writing Monopoly board programs can be found here. It's undocumented, but based on how you write the "score" function that determines fitness, should be able to write any number of simple programs for the Monopoly board.

Enjoy!

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This is the very first release of this, my very first plugin, and feedback is definitely encouraged.

To install:

1. Right click on this link and choose “Save Link As…” and name it ‘xfirestats.zip’.
2. Unzip this file to find ‘xfirestats.php’
3. Upload ‘xfirestats.php’ to the plugins folder of your WordPress installation — http://yourblog.com/wp-content/plugins/ might be the spot, but there will definitely be other plugins there. Automatic installation is coming.
4. Go to your WordPress dashboard. Choose Plugins, and activate XFire Stats.
5. In your dashboard, choose Appearance and then Widgets.
6. Drag the XFire Stats widget where you want it to go.
7. Edit it, and entire your XFire Id and, optionally, a title for the widget (otherwise the title will be XFire Weekly Stats).
8. Save changes.
9. See that it appears correctly in your blog.

Enjoy! Please send me an email at brendahol@gmail.com if you have any trouble, reactions, suggestions, untapped rage, etc.

The most recent version of this plugin will always be at the “XFire Plugin” page linked in the header to this blog.

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I’ve written a WordPress Widget that shows your gaming (via XFire) for the past week. It still has one or two bugs issues challenges before I can release it publicly, but if anyone has any ideas of what they would like to see in such a widget, like sorting, or yes for times/no times, or live information or whatever… let me know.

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Step 2: Spend 15 minutes writing a program in Python to solve it for you.

Step 3: Suddenly realize you missed the point of the puzzle in the first place :P

We had to do a version of this game as a programming assignment in Pascal back in college. It took a lot longer than 15 minutes back then. Python > Pascal. That’s all.

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I really like Nexus: Kingdom of the Wind before EQ came out. What games are like that NOW? Without having a complete knowledge of all MMOs available, you can’t know. Raph even points to a comment to a Keen and Graev post that does a decent job of “sequencing” the modern EQ-type MMO (this includes WoW and its descendants).

Coldheat and I talked a lot about this last night. I talked about how we can look at modern MMOs as continually adding complexity (and in some cases, removing complexity) from older games (like Rogue, Colossal Cave Adventures, Risk), and how each decision made by a game designer could be thought of as adding, deleting or rearranging “genes”. Successful genes — design decisions — would be passed on to new games. Unsuccessful ones would not be copied.

Weighting these genes appropriately (which is the hard part), you could tell how similar two games were, which ancestors they shared, and hopefully, how much you might like a game given games you already liked. Or even more fun, proposing a bunch of characteristics (like Guild Wars, but with mandatory grouping and permadeath…) and getting a list selected from all the hundreds of MMOs that meets your needs.

So this morning, as I was setting up Shifter, my Shapeshifter solver, which required setting up some Python stuff since I hadn’t run Shifter since I re-installed Linux on Baphomet, I was thinking about what a web-based front end to such a database might look like. And today I am browsing Wired.com and see an article about the Python-based web framework, Django.

I’d briefly used other Python web frameworks, like Turbogears, but that was too much like work. I’d thought about making some Ruby on Rails stuff when I was between jobs, but I had nothing in particular to make with it, so that died. At work we use Struts and Hibernate with Java, and that REALLY seems like too much work. But a really simple Python-based framework…

So it’s all coming together. Since I have Friday off, I might use that time to try and pull together a data entry page so I can start breaking down the very earliest RPGs and MUDs into their component features. I think this “sequencing” of games will likely take the longest — how do you enumerate every feature in WoW? There must be millions. But until I get to entering data, I won’t know what the important ones are, the ones that by their very inclusion, advanced the genre. And this page must be robust, because if it works out, I will be making it public to hopefully get other people to help analyze the games they play.

I did something similar with my old book collection using keyword fields in a Q&A 4.0 database 20 years ago. Plot elements — time travel, romance, horror, elves, etc — cover artists, everything. But I never did much with it (aside from looking up cover artists) because I was pretty familiar with the books I had already read. Here, though, I will be entering information for games I have never played. So we’ll see how that goes.

I have lots of projects I start and never finish, but I think there is a real need for a MMO database that goes beyond just name and genre, and tells you its features in a way that can be compared and contrasted to other MMOs. So maybe I’ll be able to make time for this.

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I spent hours last night running around Norrath on Test, killing stuff and doing quests, just so I could write about the Void Storms coming in EQ2′s Game Update 46. Is the next expansion The Void? Or is this just a red herring? Regardless, the appearance armor and weapons are kind of cool and there are a lot more benefits besides, and you can read all about it over on Massively. Fair warning: You will be doing a LOT of cleansing to earn the nicer rewards.

Last week, I had the honor of being taken to a quick tour of the new 80+ Runnyeye instance, “Runnyeye: The Gathering“. Insert “Magic: The Gathering” joke here :P I didn’t get a chance to really explore the instance, but even the little part I saw showed that the devs must have had a blast when they designed the adventure. R:tG is this year’s Nizara — awesome loot, but it’s not going to be a walk in the park. You can read all about it on Massively as well.

Time was also spent helping my son with his epic (good thing I hadn’t transferred my troub and inq to Najena; both were needed), and feeling crappy in the hot weather and falling asleep on the couch while Chime urged me to go to bed (in My Life as King for the Wii).

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The other writers warned me I wouldn’t be able to keep up a six night a week raiding schedule. I thought I could, but… well, I need to be awake when I write. I make stupid errors otherwise. So I’ll be talking to my guild leaders about cutting back my raiding obligation to two nights a week, or maybe it’s time to just go completely casual. I’ll never see my mythical epic, but the ordinary one is pretty sweet by itself… and there’s always pickup raiding.

Anyway, off to the dentist (yay).

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I wrote a piece yesterday about MissBimbo.com, a game that teaches young girls how dieting and boob jobs are the path to a successful and rewarding life… and on the way to work, what drives by but a truck full of Bimbos… or something :)

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The current game I’m writing (when time permits) doesn’t use sprites, but some tech demos I wrote do, and this looks like a pretty darn amazing package, able to do rotation and scaling and handle thousands of moving objects and collisions at incredible speed. My PyGame-based tech demos were struggling to get 60fps out of just forty or so sprites — and I wasn’t even testing collisions (well, they were supposed to be avoiding each other anyway). So I may have to revisit those demos and maybe there will be a game in there, after all.

I’ll leave the difficulty of distributing a Python-based game in this era of Flash-based browser games for another time.

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