Absurd, Strange, and Highly Improbable Life Goal: Will You Help?

256w ago - So I recently came up with something I can do that would let me die accomplished: I want to play a game that was never programmed.

I've been thinking about it for about a week now, but haven't done much research on it but I came to these few conclusion so far:

• The game will essentially be "randomly" created
• The simplest "terminal" for the project would be NES
• The generated file should be between 5KB and 25KB, and follow the rules for zip compression. (This is the part that makes everything improbable -there are 7.4583407 E1125 possible files that could be produced (expanded example below) (25000^256))
• The production of the file will have a initial seed, and ideally keep a log of tested values
• Ideally a check on the NES ROM should also be performed.
• With the number of possibilities, the likelyhood of a game being produced is just as probable as a picture Pam Anderson loading up or even the first few lines of a Shakespeare play, or Beethoven's Symphony.
• A user in control of the produced random value can copy/paste, a known value, and easily load a game such TETRIS...(I can't quite understand if this would be violation of Copyright Law (I compare it to throwing a tomato on the ground and it coming out being just like Mario))

I know its' absurd, crazy, and all around unlikely but the probability of random can never be determined, and only increases with the number of individuals involved. Anyone, and everyone, please comment with you concerns and cares, and helping words and knowledge you may have.

O and spread the word!



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kakarotoks's Avatar
#3 - kakarotoks - 256w ago
hehe, hacked, quite an interesting theory, I was also thinking about this a few years ago, but the time it would take to generate random bytes that actually form a correct sequence of instructions is incredibly high...

There's also the problem of how many bytes exactly do you need to generate? would you need to randomly (cryptographically random of course) generate a new seed ? since you know that there is no true randomness, there's only pseudo random number generators that are actually just some very complex algorithms... I'm not sure it's possible that with a single seed you could have such an algorithm generate a correct sequence (since it's not real randomness)... so the PRNG's output n and n+1 are probably never going to be valid by themselves....

How long would it take to try as much possibilities AND to test their validity ? Considering that cryptographic randomness would most probably require some form of user input or other kind of environmental/unpredictable input, the amount of random bytes you can generate at any given time are probably quite low, which will make this an impossible task...
I like the idea though!

p.s: the application that calls rand() then write() would be the author of the game, so technically, it was "programmed" since you programmed the generator...

hacked2123's Avatar
#2 - hacked2123 - 256w ago
I'm thinking more and more that it's just never gonna happen. The probability of so much is possible that the few random things that do come up, will be unusable from the start...

PS3 News's Avatar
#1 - PS3 News - 256w ago
I did my little part to help ya die 'accomplished' hacked2123... I approved this submission.

By the way, your 'expanded example below' isn't below as it was too long for the Portal... however, you can type it here in the Forums if you wish and I can add it to your post above.
