DDR (Stepmania) changed my life.
About a decade ago I decided I didn’t want to be obese anymore. I’m 6’3" and I weighed around 300 lbs. DDR was an exercise that I could tolerate doing after delivering mail all day long. After six months I had reached my initial goal of getting under 250. Over time I added more exercises to my regimen and grew more disciplined in my diet. Today my weight is hovering around 190.
Without DDR I might be struggling with severe health issues today. Bemani has my gratitude for creating this wonderful game.
An ai, or just a traditional bot? Either way, possibly interesting. It also should be easy to code a simple version of the game with a way to add in bots?
It doesn’t matter. Software that plays QE well is a very interesting problem to solve. Even just being able to prove whether the problem space of QE is P or NP, let alone producing a solution, would get a paper published in a journal for sure.
I don’t think QE could be formulated as a decision problem. Distilled to its simplest form, it’s poison cup game, right? It’s not solvable, so P/NP wouldn’t apply.
You could definitely make a robot that kicks (some) human ass though.
My thought was this. I could maybe code up some sort of frame(should be easy maybe, the game is pretty simple), share out the interface to match and restrictions(maybe have some runtime restrictions?), and then I could run the bots we write(regular hand written bots, or crazy neural nets may apply here), and I could then post scores of how well the bots are doing against each other. Would you be interested?
That sounds very similar to a bot-coding challenge some of the forum participated in a long time ago: http://ants.aichallenge.org/
Recreating that for QE (or any game) would be a tremendous amount of effort. Running untrusted code on your server is asking for a mountain of trouble. But if it was say, an open source framework, you could write bots for it, run them on your own machine, etc.
Making it would be firmly in shit talk territory for me, but I would definitely be interested in using it. I wonder if QE would be the best game to build around though.
Yeah, I’ve never liked the model where you run people’s code on your own servers for the contest. It’s much better to create an API and people have to run their own code with their own resources. Makes a bit of an unbalanced field if one competitor has a huge supercomputer and a whole team of engineers, and someone else interacts with the API by hand, but hey.
Ah right. I only know QE as Quantitative Easing, and a quick google didn’t bring up anything else. Considering that it’s a game about bailing out companies means I had the right acronym.