![]() Why is official competition seen as a game? Because there are rankings with clear winners and losers which implies some people are performing better than others and are judged as such.īut what about individual activities with no competition? For most people to consider something like that a game, they would still require external judgement about performance. Why? It's because official competition, even involving things not normally considered games, is seen as a game. But, if there were a contest set up where multiple artists competed to paint the best picture, many people would say that is a game. Most people would say that an artist painting a picture is not playing a game, even if they are having fun doing it. ![]() The question really comes down to whether or not pure creativity is a game. I'm sure it's because the natural feeling learning curve for gamers (not necessarily programmers) is building on really simple pieces, like "add 2 numbers, ok move things, now check out storage, ok now check out control directives" sounds a lot like assembly, no? I loved the ever loving shit out of Opus Magnum (especially after figuring out the undocumented keyboard shortcuts).Īlso as an aside, it feels like most if not all programming games feel more like assembly than high level languages. The cost/efficiency histograms in all of his games are brilliant for worming into programmer brains. I didn't have time to watch the video, so maybe you already mentioned them. OP I'm sure you're aware of them as they are some of the most popular programming games, but you really need to check out the Zachtronics games. I had a weird experience with TIS where the anti-optimization achievement for the first puzzle led me to spend several hours across a couple sessions getting it to run slower than the age of the universe, and then immediately lost interest in the game. But something about seeing other people jump so far outside the mental box that I had placed around what I thought was possible in programming has made it easier for me to jump outside the box in different ways myself. No, I'm not implementing TIS-100-derived parallelism in real code. I had half-expected to see some sort of cheesing or cheating, but nope, these people were just way more clever than I was.Īnd interestingly, that led to a big jump in my real programming skill. And in retrospect, it makes sense - the opcodes include certain instructions like "ANY" or "LAST" that hint at parallelism - but I never would have thought to go down that route on my own. my 1 simultaneous solution = a cubic difference. So then, it's obvious - 3 simultaneous solutions vs. These people were finding ways to compute solutions in parallel, sometimes three layers at a time, yet still managing to synchronize the output appropriately. The craziness came in something I never would have thought was possible. Sure, there were some non-obvious improvements that came from things like algebraic equivalences - clever ways to compute certain expressions more efficiently - but these I expected to see, and would have accounted for "constant factor" improvements over my solutions. So I looked up some of the top solutions and had my mind blown. Then I'd run the code and see just how many cycles away I was from the best - not only slower, but polynomially slower. So I got to the point where I would find a solution, then come back to it, tweak it a bit, improve the efficiency, and feel like, okay, this is probably pretty close to the ceiling - maybe not the best, but within a constant factor of the best, surely. I was approaching the game mostly to just get to a solution for each puzzle the architecture is different enough from what we use in the real world to make even finding a naive solution sometimes difficult for me.īut eventually the little "scoreboards" they give you after each solution tripped my efficiency fuse. (Minor puzzle-solving spoilers for TIS ahead.)
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