So there's this game I like... called Space Engineers. I'm not great at making cool looking space ships, but what I really like is making machines and using event controllers and timers to automate stuff. These things, as if a visual makes any difference :
Shut up, I'm a nerd, you're not my mom... Lol. But the tricky thing about programming these blocks is, there's no way to count things. You can say, "if this happens, then execute these instructions," but you can't say, "if it happens x times, then output y." That makes sense, because if you can save states then you could get overflows and exceptions if you make something recursive.
So I have to trick the game. And it makes me giggle a little bit when I do. Its easy, but it also highlights a problem. What I do is make a thingy turn on a light, then another thingy check to see if all the lights are turned on, and that becomes the counter and it executes a thingy if the counter key matches the keyhole, so to speak. Then I can have branching "code" to handle exceptions, only there's no code, its just blinky blocks. Like, a hundred blocks, and I get lost trying to remember what does what. The problem that I mentioned before is that, even though you can trick it into having a memory, the size of the memory is the only thing that counts. You just create a binary - is it full, or isn't it - and nothing can exceed the "physical" limitation of the capacity you build in.
This is completely pointless, but I enjoy it. It makes me wonder about stuff in computer science - stuff which I'm sure a lot of y'all could explain, though I doubt I could write the right prompt. And another cool thing in Space Engineers is, you can save your design and then paste it in again later. So most of my designs are not complete working thingies, but pieces that I can use over and over. Anyways. Just thought I'd share that.
Shut up, I'm a nerd, you're not my mom... Lol. But the tricky thing about programming these blocks is, there's no way to count things. You can say, "if this happens, then execute these instructions," but you can't say, "if it happens x times, then output y." That makes sense, because if you can save states then you could get overflows and exceptions if you make something recursive.
So I have to trick the game. And it makes me giggle a little bit when I do. Its easy, but it also highlights a problem. What I do is make a thingy turn on a light, then another thingy check to see if all the lights are turned on, and that becomes the counter and it executes a thingy if the counter key matches the keyhole, so to speak. Then I can have branching "code" to handle exceptions, only there's no code, its just blinky blocks. Like, a hundred blocks, and I get lost trying to remember what does what. The problem that I mentioned before is that, even though you can trick it into having a memory, the size of the memory is the only thing that counts. You just create a binary - is it full, or isn't it - and nothing can exceed the "physical" limitation of the capacity you build in.
This is completely pointless, but I enjoy it. It makes me wonder about stuff in computer science - stuff which I'm sure a lot of y'all could explain, though I doubt I could write the right prompt. And another cool thing in Space Engineers is, you can save your design and then paste it in again later. So most of my designs are not complete working thingies, but pieces that I can use over and over. Anyways. Just thought I'd share that. 