eytanz
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halyavin wrote:
If the fact that some peoples use solver would be minor irritation for most of members

Yes, it would be.

and the fact that 50% of peoples use solver would be minor irritation for most of members

No, that would be a bigger problem. In my current count, though, less than 1% of players use solvers.

But some peoples seems not like the fact that highscores can transform to a programming contest. Or this will be a minor irritation for them anyway?

The fact that the highscores *can* transform into a programming contest is a minor irritation. If it *will* transform into one, that's a different issue, but there are plenty of ways to deal with that (for example, shutting the highscores down completely).

I simply don't see any reason to believe any of the scenarios you are describing will actually happen unless someone starts an organized effort to make it the case that they happen. Few of the current DROD players would be interested in participating. So, in order to get 50% of people using solvers, it would be necessary to recruit about as many people as there are currently on the highscores, and get them all to buy DROD and Caravelnet accounts. If that happens, Caravel will have so much money from all the new subscriptions they could afford to take the time to deal with this in an organized manner. So lets worry about it when it happens, ok?

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larrymurk
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Ok, I'll add my 2 cents also.

What's the point of using a drod solver if there were one? I don't think anyone would be impressed that someone has a bunch of high scores gained by cheating. I happen to love the card game bridge. Now one could fairly easily cheat (especially at online bridge where you could collude with your partner). But why cheat? The joy of the game is to share in the fun of the mental challenge.

I'd also say that if one started a thread in the development board about creating a drod solver I think it would garner a lot of interest. The idea of working on and creating a drod solver is a commendable one. Using a solver to generate high scores which are compared against those not using one is not acceptable.

igusarov
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Sorry, I don't quite follow...

Constructing a Robot capable of eating dinners is fun - just like any creative invention is. But having this Robot eat your dinners for you day after day is not fun.

Why would anyone want to play DROD with a help of a solver program? Like any logic game, the most entertaining part is excersising your brain on solving the puzzles yourself.
1. Well, this is a biased opinion - I'm a casual player, never find myself interested in hardcore room optimization.
2. As usual, there are exceptions. Perhaps, orb solver is one of them.

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[Last edited by igusarov at 01-10-2007 02:42 PM]

Briareos
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igusarov wrote:
Why would anyone want to play DROD with a help of a solver program?

Well, I for one could use a solver program in some rooms now and then when I'm totally stuck.

But when that urge is over, I just make use of this instead - I don't need a solver program, I need a program that gives me enough subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) hints that I can figure it out on my own...

np: Autechre Live via XLTronic 28.12.2006

____________________________
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halyavin
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larrymurk wrote:
I'd also say that if one started a thread in the development board about creating a drod solver I think it would garner a lot of interest. The idea of working on and creating a drod solver is a commendable one. Using a solver to generate high scores which are compared against those not using one is not acceptable.

If this program will be published, all peoples who care about highscores will have a temptation to use it. I can't estimate how much peoples will fall into actually using it, so I see a danger here. May be someone knows psychology of forum members better?

eytanz
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As mentioned above, by several people, over and over, no-one but you here seems to consider that a risk worth caring about.

Discussing how to build a solver is interesting.

Worrying about who will use the solver is not particularly interesting.

____________________________
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[Last edited by eytanz at 01-10-2007 04:31 PM]

Jason
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The point of DROD is to have fun, using your brain. A solver is, well, useless. At least to me.

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NiroZ
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larrymurk wrote:
What's the point of using a drod solver if there were one? I don't think anyone would be impressed that someone has a bunch of high scores gained by cheating. I happen to love the card game bridge. Now one could fairly easily cheat (especially at online bridge where you could collude with your partner). But why cheat? The joy of the game is to share in the fun of the mental challenge.

I can't understand either why people want to cheat, but I guess that the temptation to beat other people, and the resulting ego trips must be too much for them.

Oh, and Halyavin, I would advise you to change style under which you conduct your self, I have never seen someone lose such a large percentage of their rank points in such a small period of time, despite having some things that are worthy of a discussion.

As for submitting this program on the development board, I would advise against it, as not only is it a temptation for people to use(although that could be somewhat circumvented by preventing it from creating demo's or flagging demo's made with the program as made by a bot), but it also encourages people to act like Halyavin is doing, becoming paranoid about others using it, which could be even worse.

I would agree with people that this is not actually that big of an issue. Unless lots of people suddenly start using their own homemade bot programs to cheat the highscores, (as compared to 1 or 2, which would be easily spotted) then there is not much to be worried of, and considering the type of community that DROD has spawned, I would not be worried at all.

eytanz
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Meh. Nothing good comes out of trying to hide this sort of information. Sure, I don't think anyone should just post a solver binary, but source code for a solver is another matter. And I think making the solver public will decrease paranoia - paranoia is increased by the sort of random rumor-mongering that halyavin is doing, insisting that there is a solver that only a select few have.

Not to mention that if the solver is publicly available, Caravel would be better poised to figure out how to counter its effects (true, not as much as if the solver was made available only to Mike and Matt, but I doubt that's going to happen).

____________________________
I got my avatar back! Yay!

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[Last edited by eytanz at 01-10-2007 06:05 PM]

Maurog
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File: roachy.jpeg (130.7 KB)
Downloaded 206 times.
License: Public Domain

Okay, I admit it, I use a DROD-solving plugin too.

But it's not what you think!


____________________________
Slay the living! Raise the dead!
Paint the sky in crimson red!

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[Last edited by Maurog at 02-08-2009 09:34 AM]

NiroZ
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Maurog wrote:
Okay, I admit it, I use a DROD-solving plugin too.

But it's not what you think!

Click here to view the secret text

×Seriously, it's not what you think at all!

Click here to view the secret text

×
I'm such a horrible person.

Bonus points for the mangled paperclip.

Briareos
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NiroZ wrote:
Bonus points for the mangled paperclip.

Hey! That's still "Roachy the Room Rescuer"!!1!elf

np: Autechre Live via XLTronic 28.12.2006

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

igusarov
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Briareos wrote:
Well, I for one could use a solver program in some rooms now and then when I'm totally stuck.

Oh, don't tell me that you'd agree to exchange a warm and friendly H&S forum for a cold-brained program :-)

halyavin wrote:
If this program will be published, all peoples who care about highscores will have a temptation to use it.

Not a problem. Should such solver become available to the public, it would be very easy to tell solver-generated demos: either they would be exactly the same, or they would share certain style. Anyway, I'd prefer not to fight the windmills. When there will be evidence of widely used solver problems, then Caravel'd have to think about it. Now it's all just speculations.

halyavin
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So we have opposite points of view:

Niroz wrote:
As for submitting this program on the development board, I would advise against it, as not only is it a temptation for people to use(although that could be somewhat circumvented by preventing it from creating demo's or flagging demo's made with the program as made by a bot), but it also encourages people to act like Halyavin is doing, becoming paranoid about others using it, which could be even worse.

and

eytanz wrote:
Nothing good comes out of trying to hide this sort of information. Sure, I don't think anyone should just post a solver binary, but source code for a solver is another matter. And I think making the solver public will decrease paranoia - paranoia is increased by the sort of random rumor-mongering that halyavin is doing, insisting that there is a solver that only a select few have.

And both arguments are reasonable. I yield to NiroZ way of thinking.
PS I afraid to start a new poll...

Stefan
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halyavin wrote:
Can you send me link to your DROD solver?

No. That program will never leave my hard-drive(s). Well, it might end up on a backup CD or two, but I have no intention of ever releasing it. Period.

May be it works good on real puzzles too. Have you checked this?

No, but I know for a fact that if the solution requires more than about 15 moves, it becomes useless.

____________________________
0.099³

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[Last edited by Stefan at 01-10-2007 06:40 PM : screwed tags]

AtkinsSJ
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At the risk of continuing this discussion, why is it still going on? We've essentially decided that drod solvers:
1) Are cheating!
2) Are generally pretty useless.
3) Take the whole point out of drod.
4) Are interesting to try to create.
5) Cause ridiculously long, repetitive, paranoia-infused discussions.

AlefBet
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eytanz wrote:
What you seem to not understand is that everyone here accepts that there could be a DROD solver out there. But no one really cares all that much - if there is one, it's a minor irritation, not a huge problem.

<cs-theory>I've heard some discussion that indicates that DROD is PSpace-complete. If that is true, then a general arbitrary DROD solver that solved even smallish puzzles in a reasonable amount of time would be such a marvel of information theory engineering that whoever made it would have much better things to do than solving DROD rooms with it (such as breaking all the public key encryption systems in use today and otherwise generally being hailed as the next Plato, Newton, Einstein, and P.T. Barnum all rolled in one). What is more reasonable to anticipate is computer-assisted solutions, of course, where the computer solves some aspects of a puzzle and relies on human interaction and decisions to direct the rest. These would still be impressive, but much more plausible.</cs-theory>

larrymurk wrote:
What's the point of using a drod solver if there were one? I don't think anyone would be impressed that someone has a bunch of high scores gained by cheating.

I think that's generally true of the DROD community as it currently stands. However, if you look at the FPS community, they have a lot of people heavily vested in cheating and cheat-detection. I never understood it myself, but I guess people get their ego vested in some publicly viewable number and don't have remorse at gaming it. It's not reasonable to think that this couldn't happen to the DROD community some day once really useful computer assisted solvers start to appear.

Even so, if you look at the FPS community, they have cheat-bots and cheat-bot detectors and they go back and forth in a cat-and-mouse game. I think in some ways their methods of automatic cheat detection have worked against them, because if cheating is defined algorithmically, then the cheaters can use that algorithmic definition to fall outside the scope. As a result, not only does more effort end up going into writing cheat detectors, but also the cheating itself ends up looking more and more ambiguous. Cheaters always leave clues as to what they are doing, and if it's always humans looking at those clues (once suspicion arises), it's much harder to determine what they will and won't catch.

So I think it's both ridiculous and counterproductive to try to put a bunch of technological measures into the game systems to try to thwart cheating, much of which doesn't even exist yet. Have we learned nothing from DRM and the music industry?

____________________________
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++Adam H. Peterson

TripleM
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Just as a side note; from a person who doesn't really care much about high scores, they seem to have caused quite a large number of heated arguments on this forum. Perhaps they shouldn't be taken so seriously..

silver
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AlefBet wrote:

eytanz wrote:
What you seem to not understand is that everyone here accepts that there could be a DROD solver out there.

<cs-theory>I've heard some discussion that indicates that DROD is PSpace-complete. If that is true, then a general arbitrary DROD solver that solved even smallish puzzles in a reasonable amount of time would be such a marvel of information theory engineering that whoever made it would have much better things to do than solving DROD rooms with it (such as breaking all the public key encryption systems in use today and otherwise generally being hailed as the next Plato, Newton, Einstein, and P.T. Barnum all rolled in one). What is more reasonable to anticipate is computer-assisted solutions, of course, where the computer solves some aspects of a puzzle and relies on human interaction and decisions to direct the rest. These would still be impressive, but much more plausible.</cs-theory>

like I flippantly said before, "if I had a drod solver, I'd be getting my PhD with it..." but, in actuality, it's possible that this is a false dichotomy.

agreed: we already have an existence proof for mechanisms that can solve drod rooms in a reasonable period of time. but it happens to be the case that all those mechanisms are also "generally intelligent" so if I could make another one by artifice, it would still be a laudable achievement.

agreed: we can readily construct a proof that brute forcing drod is impossible (literally).

but those two extremes are not necessarily all possibilities:

it might be the case that drod can be solved by a sufficiently clever set of heuristics that might be of little interest outside of the drod community. which is to say, the "intelligence" needed to solve a majority of room puzzles may be a sufficiently small subset of general intelligence that one could conceive of implementing it (probably big chunks of it would look like prolog code).

OR, it might be the case that one could make and train a neural net that knew how to solve drod rooms but was otherwise pretty boring to people on the cutting head of AI research.

I'm just saying, it's a big spectrum, we can't assume everything's on one end or the other, and no one has disproved any middle ground here.

____________________________

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[Last edited by silver at 01-10-2007 09:06 PM]

Tim
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Can we stop fuelling this forum troll by not replying on this thread any more?

Thank you.

Anti Troll FAQ
How to Troll
A thread about trolling

-- Tim

silver
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but... but... I'm bored. waiting for new release to spur all kinds of discussion. and it's not like I'm replying to the actual topic of the thread.(*)

(which probably explains most of the traffic in this thread)


(*) come to think of it, total thread derailment may be the best way to kill the original nasty junk from it. we should use this thread to talk about ponies.


____________________________

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[Last edited by silver at 01-10-2007 09:14 PM]

Elfstone
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I have followed this thread with a combination of interest, surprise, amusement and, at times, something approaching dismay.

Halyavin, some of the very clever people in this site have given articulate and patient responses to your concern with regard to mechanical cheating; they are speaking from the background of both a considerable degree of computer knowledge and long experience of this game and this community. Their opinions should therefore command respect.

May I give you a different slant on the issue? I’m speaking as someone for whom technology is still a bit of an adventure, something which does not come naturally to me and has to be struggled with at times. This is the only computer game I play and I love it, as much as at times I hate it, as much as it drives me to distraction, as much as it calms and relaxes me. In spite of being seriously hooked on this game I have not a single highscore; I can be fairly confident in saying that I will never have a highscore. Does that matter? - not a whit!

There are a number of people here - I’m honestly not sure how many , but not a big number I think - who care about highscores and for them I assume that is part of the pleasure of the game. For a great many members of this site however highscores are not an issue. Would I use computer software, if it was available, to get my name on the Highscore-board? - no; never; there is no point in doing that. That is not what the game is to me - it is, at the risk of sounding cliched, the journey rather than the destination which matters.

Then there is this site. In the months that I have been a member, I have frequently been inspired, touched, amused, moved by the contributions of other members and what has struck me over and over and again is the integrity of this community; the sheer goodness and kindness of people here. I have been around in this world a great deal longer than most of the other members and I am only too aware that anything ‘Good’ that humans can dream up or create or invent or discover, they can also corrupt, defile and abuse. I have seen too much good in this world turn to bad and it saddens me. I would be desperately disappointed if this site were to start taking ‘anti-mechanical cheating measures’ and if it was felt necessary to have statements of policy against potential cheating. I think that the membership here can be trusted to maintain the standards of sportsmanship that they have displayed thus far. I think the site can and will police itself. I think that enough people here care about this site - not just use the site, but care about its well-being - that they will protect and nurture it.

In a world where these qualities are, it seems, becoming scarcer, it is a joy to find a community where honour and honesty and helpfulness and well mannered behaviour and genuine decency are the norm. I suspect you are not taking that into account in your thinking on this subject.


____________________________
Winner of: Novice Architect Excellence 2006.
FAPCA - Technical Design Excellence in Layout and Aesthetics

Syntax
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Amen

Tahnan
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Does it bother anyone that Elfstone's writing is as beautiful as her holds are? It doesn't seem fair for her to have all that talent to herself...

trick
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Nah. I'm just happy to have her with us

~ Gerry

schep
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[Edit: I might not have posted this if I saw there was a whole page I hadn't read yet. But it goes in a slightly different direction from previous discussion, so I'll leave it up. Also, ditto on the sentiment that cheat software wouldn't be used much, and I wouldn't be extremely upset if a few nasties did try it.]

I have to disagree with the opinion I keep hearing that it's not feasible to program useful DROD-solving software. The two big points behind that opinion are that (a) it would be too much trouble to input rooms to the software and solutions to DROD (not if the software handles all that) and (b) writing an algorithm capable of solving a typical DROD room is extremely difficult (probably true).

If I were to write DROD-solving power software, it would be able to load *.hold files, and the user would be able to switch between user playing and enabling algorithms. Maybe once you get to a certain point and smite the first roach in a large brained horde, you select a target spot on the screen near an orb or roach queen or whatever to start up the roach horde optimizer. When it reaches that spot, you can review what it did like a demo and continue from the end or any point before. In some parallel universe where I was out to break the Spirit of the Law and get my online high scores deleted, I would also give it the capability of outputting *.player files or submitting demos to CaravelNet. I am certain I could write something myself with just a few basic optimization strategies that would clearly be both Useful and a violation of the above Spirit of the Law.

So: evil optimizing tools are quite possible, I believe. But I'm quite happy with Erik's subjective Spirit of the Law answer. It's not the Caravel Team's responsibility to watch for violators. It's quite reasonable for anyone to watch for suspicious scores/demos if they want (but "invite players to watch for cheaters" would be a better wording than "ask players to watch for cheaters"). (And if anyone's method of watching involves automated demo downloading, it might be good to mention it to Schik first.)

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[Last edited by schep at 01-11-2007 02:33 AM]

coppro
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schep wrote:
... submitting demos to CaravelNet....

Nitpick: You'd have to reverse engineer that. Why not just export the demo under the same player (imported on both programs) and import it under a Caravel version, thus making it consider it yours, and do a batch upload?

Now, back to your regularly scheduled argument.

UrAvgAzn
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Now, halyavin. I know you are trying to get somewhere with all of this, but what is it? You're making such a big deal out of all of this, and have lost nearly half your rank points. Now I'm not saying that's bad, but it certainly isn't good. If the community could please stop modding him down until he actually gets to express what he's at? Then feel free to bombard him with mods. I myself am slightly confused with this whole thread, and certainly want a huge explanation from halyavin.

Also remember that without this site, we wouldn't even be communicating and we'd be stuck with KDD and no usermade levels. Of course, a loving DROD fan could make their own site about it, but that takes a lot of dedication. We should be grateful with all the work Caravel has put into this site. With just mainly Schik fixing up this site for our convenience, we can't expect a perfect forum (although he really is an awesome monkey ). So learn to respect the site, and the feature of uploading that makes DROD as close to multiplayer as it can get. Of course, I'd also love to enjoy battling for number ones, I'm nowhere near that good (and I don't have CaravelNet, but thats beside the point), and I'd probably cause michthro to lose sleep over a lost highscore . And if this highscore thing gets in the way, just remember all the work that Caravel put into it, and drive your thoughts away from cheating. Because:
Highscores = fun, but cheaters definitely would kill that fun.

Just my comments, feel free to ignore them.

Keep posting,

P.S. We love you, Elfstone!

____________________________
"The leaf, still green, must someday fall.
Such grief, such joy, to live at all."
- T.A. Barron, The Lost Years of Merlin

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[Last edited by UrAvgAzn at 01-11-2007 02:39 AM : added a few comments]

schep
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coppro wrote:
Nitpick: You'd have to reverse engineer that.

(confusion)... (follow-up questions)... (maybe a brief source dive)...
Nah, not gonna discuss the most evil part of a rhetorical hypothetical project.

Now, if anyone wants to talk about the interesting / challenging parts of DROD algorithm programming, maybe we can go start a Development thread.

TripleM
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Tahnan wrote:
Does it bother anyone that Elfstone's writing is as beautiful as her holds are? It doesn't seem fair for her to have all that talent to herself...

I think shez cheating, and using a l33t-to-DRODforumtext computer program. She typez in random phras3s using l33t, and posts l1ke the above come out. I know its imp0ssible that such programs can exist, but in any case this is very unfair, and something should be done about 1t.
Of course, 1 w0uld nev3r use such a program mys3lf.

Sorry.