Another design contest sort of idea - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / projects

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2014, 10:15:20 pm
content: Background:There are a number of old games that are played bingo style to keep them interesting. This is a timed race between multiple players, where all receive the same randomly generated bingo card, where to mark off a square, a player must complete some sort of objective. Based upon their knowledge of the game, players pick the optimal row, column or diagonal to complete (and thus achieve a bingo). Choices may be obvious (a row containing both "obtain item at X" and "defeat boss of X") or non-obvious (abusing glitches to break intended sequences, insert items into inventory, reach locations otherwise unreachable, etc.).For games, I think the latter is a required part, to have an exciting bingo -- just playing the game as intended, until you've gotten the earliest items on your card, would be very boring. So there is a certain space of games which are entertaining and well written, but not quite coded well enough that they are unbreakable; but not coded so poorly that they constantly crash and are frustrating to play. I only know of a few games like this, offhand.But back to electronics. There are no glitches, a circuit is simply whatever it does. Well, that's not entirely true: one can abuse the expected or undocumented properties of ICs to various ends. As has been discussed before (like that IOCCC thread). But how would it be done? I think it could be done two ways. And perhaps should be done two ways.One way: the goals (contents of each bingo square) are, for example, using a given function block in your circuit at least once, or with restrictions (no more than x?), or with prohibitions (cannot use Y). The overall form of your circuit can be diverse, but should have some coherent purpose to it, and all function blocks are used (or avoided as the case may be).Another way: the circuit requirements are built up from small individual requirements. For example, "runs from 12V supply"; "receive AM radio 500-700kHz"; "nanosecond pulse generator output"; etc. Any given row/col/diag will contain some incoherent smattering of requirements, but one will likely flow better than the rest and actually involve connected signal paths. Alternately, choices could be ranked so that, rather than picking them fully at random, a Markov chain picks related entries; so you are more likely to get, e.g., intersecting rows and columns that suggest a radio with different bandwidth or supply voltage.Judging could be in a number of methods. One big downside is, most would require experts to judge them on correctness, and rank by completion, functionality, time to design and build, etc.It would take a very long time to set up. Experts would have to create objectives, then rank them on feasibility and (if Markov weighting is used) fill in the weighting matrix. At least it's somewhat expandable (you can always add more objectives, though the weighting matrix needs O(N) new elements for each additional objective), and the probabilities can always be adjusted for balance (and will need to).Whaddya think?Tim