Mechanical AI Made In LittleBigPlanet 65
Laurens writes "Despite slow sales of LittleBigPlanet in the USA, you might have heard of the calculator made within the game, but now that has been topped. I found a fully-functioning AI machine which plays Tic-Tac-Toe against the player. Considering that you can't actually program in LBP, this feat is impressive; it is a machine which has mechanical AND and OR ports made of pistons and proximity detectors, a physically moving Program Counter, and hundreds of wires. The level is called 'Tic Tac Toe' and is by author Cristel."
Another player created a similarly amazing level that is a recreation of John Conway's Game of Life.
Game hacking with Marathon (Score:3, Interesting)
This reminds me of things people did with Marathon 10 years ago, for example:
http://webwonks.org/Marathon/Forge/Harper/Clock.html [webwonks.org]
Fun news, but old news... Starcraft? (Score:1, Interesting)
All of this was done very extensively within concentrated groups of use-map-settings Starcraft map makers. There was one calc map capable of simple math and even algebra. There were also chess, custom user built skill sets and spells that were tagged to your controllable character. this was in no way part of the original game. There was one which my friend made that you could paint pictures, make animated minimap clips, stage firework displays, and even play short movies drawn with sprites and explosions set together pixle by pixle.
All these things were controlled by simple move, kill, spawn, and count triggers which were all linked to areas the player would position a controlable unit to start whatever programed trigger set was needed. we had hidden computation areas of the maps where creatures would spawn and die and move to work the trigger math out. we used a simple center view trigger to prevent these from being viewable(lagged like nuts with thousands of creatures spawning and being moved etc.
this is cool and all but its not really NEW news.
Re:Is anyone playing this game? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people like to produce, others, like yourself, just suck.
And still others, really enjoy seeing how complicated of a maze they can get out of, making a mod for Fallout, or GTA is fairly easy in comparison, and from another perspective its too infinite, a lot of people like a small, finite, "controlled experiments", where the results are in direct relation to the input, whereas Fallout/GTA/et al, generally have a point and click type design.
Same reason why some of use will fire up an IDE and program a utility we need, and others will just go Google for one they can download, sometimes the means is more enjoyable than the ends.
And no I didnt forget to check Post Anonymously.
Wire wrap, the headache. (Score:4, Interesting)
Brings back memories of wiring up 7400 series TTL gates with a wire-wrap gun. I wonder how they developed the thing. It would be amusing to write a back-end for a VHDL compiler or a logic simulator to generate logic in LittleBigMan devices. Probably easier than trying to debug the thing inside the game.
Danny Hillis once made a Tic-tac-toe machine out of Tinkertoys and string. I've seen the thing. I'm amazed that it worked. He once told me that it didn't work very well.
Re:They could take this a huge step further (Score:5, Interesting)
No. That involves gears. These mechanical computers don't use gears, and there's a good reason for that - the physics simulation doesn't quite work for gears.
The way it works is that when the game has decided that an object has been sufficiently crushed by another object, it just deletes it in a puff of smoke. (It's a kind of neat effect.) Creating gears, sadly, causes them to crush each other as the game tries to figure out how to make them spin. They have pre-crafted gears and I tried to make a simple set of three gears turned by giving power to one gear - and it worked for like three seconds before the game decided one of the gears had been crushed and deleted it.
For added nuisance, it's next to impossible to "anchor" the gears dead-center since you're using a PS3 controller. You can turn on a grid to try and help you, but it doesn't help that much.
Re:Wire wrap, the headache. (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, the idea of teaching matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe was in an article in Scientific American.
article describing how it's done [davincigames.it]