I wonder if a statistics-based cheating detection system could work in more of the esports style games? Chess.com seems to have a pretty good method to detect cheaters based on analysis of post-game data: https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-com-fair-play-and-c...
Even in something like an FPS, if player movements or action patterns could be compared to normal patterns, it would be incredibly obvious who is cheating regardless of HOW the player managed to cheat.
Even something as elaborate as a full AI-powered robot that physically hit the keys could be detected when it made a move that was not within the patterns of human players.
Of course, the cat and mouse game then becomes more about the cheat algorithms learning to act more human to avoid detection, but they have a long way to go. Plus, each time they have to adjust and become more human, the less and less of an advantage the cheater has!
I just recently watched an old episode of The Screensavers from 2002 where Kevin Rose talked about potential spam abuse of computers connected to the internet with the service enabled.
Thanks for mentioning mermaid.js. I am bookmarking this and excited to try it.
I’ve always loved https://sequencediagram.org for creating sequence diagrams with text (highly recommend btw), but have also wanted to create other diagram types in a similar manner. Mermaid.js looks super intriguing.
Yes, I was thinking the same. I am super curious about what functionality in this could be used for sound generation.
It even looks like a full synthesizer. When I first saw the pictures, I thought it was some weird version of an EMS VCS 3 synth — which coincidentally is also from 1969!
Super intriguing. I don't really know much about FPGAs, but the idea of using them to essentially clone old gaming system CPUs is flat out awesome. I assume that theoretically this would be identical to original hardware, unlike emulating it in software?
This Pocket device looks like a well made product. I wish all the best to this endeavor -- if nothing else just for helping preserve gaming history and letting people (more accurately) play older games.
The idea of creating computers out of virtual objects has always fascinated me since I first saw someone do it in Minecraft.
It really brings up some interesting scenarios that I like to day dream about sometimes.
For instance, in a real world simulation, you could build a processor with a gazillion transistors because you don’t have to worry about the same physical limitations like size or heat. Could it take an input and compute an output faster than something in the real world?
Would you be bound by the speed of light in the virtual world? You control the physics in your virtual world, so technically nothing prevents it right? Information can travel faster than the speed of light relative to your virtual objects. Say you model the earth at 1:1 scale in the simulation and have avatars on complete opposite sides of earth. They could exchange messages faster than they could in the real world since the information wouldn’t have to physically travel across physical space. (e.g. send message directly to memory address X instead of sending light through fiber optic physics simulator).
Essentially, in a simulation of the physical world that has tweaked physics, could information be processed faster than the processor running the simulation?
Is there some sort of conservation of energy law, but for information?
Great article that brought back some fond memories of the Sega Channel. As a young teenager when we got it, I was in awe of the technology and wondered how it worked and why something like it didn’t exist for the computer. Not having to tie up a phone line AND it was even faster! Loading it up for the first time really felt like it was magic and world-changing.
Interestingly enough, later on when cable modems came out in my city, you still had to use a phone line for the up channel. The Sega Channel still seemed superior to what PCs had and always wondered how they pulled it off. So, it’s neat today learning how it worked!
The Sega Channel was definitely too late though. The Genesis was old and I swear it seemed like the PlayStation came out a short few weeks after we got it. Of course, that was its own type of magic that felt world-changing when powering it on the first time. ;)
I worked at a software company that went through a "lean transformation" where management effectively idolized Toyota's production philosophy and wanted it used in each and every department.
While it helped our customer service department quite a bit as-is. The Toyota Way is definitely not something you can directly copy/paste and use in software development. Building a Camry 5000 times is not the same as shipping 5000 different software projects, so a lot of the analogies and examples you find in text don't always apply. I always found it amusing that you never see or hear examples used from the R&D and engineering of the actual automobiles -- just once all that hard stuff has been figured out and the manufacturing starts, all the principles are magically, easily applied.
To be honest, a lot of it is just "common sense" or things that just naturally transpire if you have a good team (especially if Agile dev and ideas like continuous delivery are used anyway.)
With the negatives aside, the problem-solving culture part of it is something that can really change things for the better and is worth researching. If nothing else, I found just being able to have a framework for solving problems as they come up is huge -- surely regardless of what a company does. For instance, integrating a standard to collectively write out the "Five Why's" and clearly define the problem statement when a team is gathered to discuss solutions to a problem can save so much time. How many times have you been dragged into a meeting, go through a huge discussion, design a solution, only to realize later that it wasn't really solving what needed to be solved?
Outside the culture aspects, it mostly just felt forced, frustrating devs, and really made things feel almost like a cargo cult waiting for the goodies to drop from the sky.
Even in something like an FPS, if player movements or action patterns could be compared to normal patterns, it would be incredibly obvious who is cheating regardless of HOW the player managed to cheat.
Even something as elaborate as a full AI-powered robot that physically hit the keys could be detected when it made a move that was not within the patterns of human players.
Of course, the cat and mouse game then becomes more about the cheat algorithms learning to act more human to avoid detection, but they have a long way to go. Plus, each time they have to adjust and become more human, the less and less of an advantage the cheater has!