Game Engineering (was Re: To Digex and ALL Galaxy GMs!)

From: bampton@cs.utk.edu (Howard the Energizer)

Date: Thu, 08 May 1997 00:00:00 +0000

In article <6WQ-vDF4WtB@zardoz.ping.de> hz@zardoz.ping.de (Harry Zimmermann) writes:
>
>I manage a PBEM game which is comparable to Galaxy and I can
>remember an incidence which nearly caused me to give up the game totally.
>I made the mistake to make a demo version of the turn processor available
>to all players to practice and learn the rules. Some people with an
>attitude similar to yours spent quite a long time to disassemble the
>program to find out the algorithm which produces the starmap and the
>deployment of all players on it. This knowledge, which normally is not
>available to the players, was used to kick other players out of the game.

This brings up an interesting question.

Suppose we are playing Galaxy (or another source code available game)
which randomizes locations of things. Let us further suppose that the
random number generator is "good" and has a reasonable seeding
mechanism [Stock galaxy 3.52 does not, 3.55 probably doesn't. Current
versions of GalaxyNG have this problem fixed. I fixed this problem in
the Blind code more than 4 years ago.]

Is it cheating if a player downloads the source code, and creates
games to get a feel for how the program creates games? If it is, how
does this differ from someone who has played 30 or 40 games?

Note that I am assuming that they don't do an exhaustive search to
determine the game setup you've actually generated. That I claim is
cheating.

Howard
--
$1000 plus $1 per byte fee for proofing commercial mail sent to me.
Howard Bampton   bampton@cs.utk.edu     http://www.cs.utk.edu/~bampton/
System Administrator, Stibo Datagraphics

References

To Digex and ALL Galaxy GMs!
Eric Bales <alai@ix.netcom.com>
Mon, 05 May 1997 00:00:00 +0000
Re: To Digex and ALL Galaxy GMs!
jdc@access4.digex.net (John Cochran)
Tue, 06 May 1997 00:00:00 +0000
Re: To Digex and ALL Galaxy GMs!
hz@zardoz.ping.de (Harry Zimmermann)
Wed, 07 May 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Referenced By

To Digex and ALL Galaxy GMs!
Eric Bales <alai@ix.netcom.com>
Mon, 05 May 1997 00:00:00 +0000
Re: To Digex and ALL Galaxy GMs!
jdc@access4.digex.net (John Cochran)
Tue, 06 May 1997 00:00:00 +0000
Re: To Digex and ALL Galaxy GMs!
hz@zardoz.ping.de (Harry Zimmermann)
Wed, 07 May 1997 00:00:00 +0000