Comment by project_idea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by project_idea | Hacker News Reader

Here are some random ideas I thought of but not pursuing at the moment:

- a device for blind people that would give some description of the visual scene (using simple camera, for ex. read any text that is currently visible, or just describe somehow what is on the image so that it helps imagining it)

- a static site engine (cms): just generate the site as static pages in a compilation stage with a simple templating system

- an online two-player game based on Conway's game of life (two different colors, when a new cell is born, it takes the color of the majority of the neighbors, in each round the players can add a number of cells in a certain part of the board, goal is to wipe out other color)

- software for modelling paper airplane folding (improving designs, etc.)

- a wrapper around sqlite to make it work as client-server

- a zooming GUI that can be used on websites

- a framework for designing flexible layouts of webpages, so that they can be changed with a few parameters, which can afterwards be optimized automatically to have best conversion, etc.

- an art history game where player would see a small portion of a painting and would have to guess artist, age, technique, etc.

- a visualization for website visitors logs, where nodes are different pages, edges are the links between pages and a poster that shows the most frequent visit scenarios on the website

- a visual image search engine without textual queries, where one just starts by browsing a small set of images and picks in what direction to move on

- etc.

I like the 'life wars', that's a clever one.

I'll raise your glider one f-pentomino.

Set it up so that you only have to agree to the number of life cells you can both place, as soon as the last cell is placed the game fires and runs to completion.

Two sliders, starting at 50 cells or so, both players can lower the slider as long as the cells have not been all places. Each player sets a cell to their colour in turn.

Excellent little idea, it won't make you any money in the short run but it has a fair chance of going viral.

Core wars for life.

Really neat little idea.

edit: and now the Hacker News variation on this, set it up so there is an API where hackers can pit their skills against each other, a sort of face off arena for cellular automaton placement strategies.

There is your machine learning angle.

For extra points provide a schedule and a way for spectators to follow the action.

I'd help you build it / host it :)

Thanks, these are very nice ideas, especially the API for agents. I'd like to build this sometime, as it should be really fun to play... There are some issues in gameplay that I couldn't figure out yet, though. for example running until completion could be quite hard to detect, as there can be oscillators with a long period. Also, not sure if the board should be circular, to allow re-entry or not... I was thinking whether players can place their cells anywhere or just in their own restricted "corners" of the board. My main concern however is whether the whole thing would be predictable enough to allow some sort of strategy or it would just be too chaotic... I also sent you a private message if you'd like to discuss...

No cells live or die in x generations = end of game.

Anywhere, one after the other.

I meant one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillator_(CA)

So cells keep dying and being born forever, yet the game is stable.

Ah, good point! You'd have to keep quite a few digests of the 'state' to figure out that you're caught in a loop, the 'halting problem' in disguise.

You could work out the size of the cycle by checking the lower and upper limit of the populations though, if the lower and upper limits have not changed for a number of cycles it could also be end-of-game.

Store evey state, and if you ever get a state you've already stored you know you're in a loop. Should be possible to store it in very few bytes in "raw" form, and then compress it for good measure.

hash the state..

even then, if the period is very long it might be problematic

I built something similar to this in python once, which was kind of fun. Instead of 1 (alive) or 0 (dead), it was 1 (blue colony), 0 (dead), -1 (green colony), and things spawned as a summation of their neighbours. What this meant was the playing field cleared out quite suddenly, but man it could be a colourful explosion! I think with some good thought and a fun interface this could be a really amusing way to spend a weekend.

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