Skylancer64
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 62
Registered: 10-25-2003
IP: Logged
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Re: Hypothetical question (+2)
The real problem is that if you use critters to pack information, it becomes very hard to control. The state is prone to shift on you in ways you don't want because of monster movement rules, and unless Beethro himself is nearby to kill the roach, the number of roaches will stay constant, severely limiting your options for counting. Moreover, you also need spawners to add roaches back in. And there is the problem with wubbas that you can never add more, or delete them except with bombs, which end up taking more space, etc.
Consider the simple case of a room with roaches and gel babies (which have wubba-like movement) and their appropriate spawners. There are hugely many combinatoric possiblities, up to 3^N (since roaches and gel behave differently), but you'd be hard pressed to systematically cycle through them all, since all the critters will all beeline towards Beethro, collapsing your stored information downward to a few simple packed-against-the-wall states. And moreover, crafting positions where the movement difference matters is hard and takes up space. I hardly believe you can achieve even an exponential amount of info stored, at least without taking a large amount of space with walls and force arrows and spawners. But then, you are already far worse than a binary bit per 3 sqaures.
Using objects like guards to store information isn't much better, since their swords take up space, and unless constrained (invisiblity potion, decoy...), they will always rotate to face Beethro. And again, you'd like to be able to force Beethro to finely toggle the states of the guards one by one, forcing him to recursively cycle through most combinatoric possiblities, but how well can that be done with the relatively massive influence ranges of the invisiblity potion and the decoy? And how can you make guard sword orientation matter so that the player has no choice but to cycle through all those possiblities? Bringing the player near the guard at all already destroys the information since the guard will re-orient towards the player.
With all the variety of critters and objects, you can speculate about any variety of base (each square could be door open, door closed, with a roach, or a wubba, or a rock golem, or a rock golem pile, or a wraithwing, or tar, or...), but I don't see a feasable way of exploiting it. And remember, even if you somehow achieve an 8^N, if it takes you more than 9 (3*3) squares to do it, you are already worse than plates and doors. The power of doors is that they are hard information storage, non-disrupted by player presence or position, and finely programmable with careful plate-orb settings, and they can togglably block player movement, forcing the cycling through all combinatoric possiblities necesary to achieve exponential time.
I suspect you could find ways to combine critters and doors, but the 3-square-per-bit configuration I found doesn't allow for much in the way of this, and every inefficiency you introduce to allow critter storage is a loss. If you find a 4-square-per-bit door configuration that somehow allows for additional critter information, it still seems doubtful that you can make up the roughly 100 powers of 2 that you lost in the process. As far as I can see, the optimal room would be very similar to the ones we already have, except perhaps with a brain and spawners so Beethro has to fight as he counts, and bombs on the walls so sword orientation is restricted, and some other doodads here and there to add an impressively large constant multiplier. Builders might have some potential as well, although that starts to reach into scriping. But generally, I don't see any way to achieve any real improvement on 2^397, order-of-magnitude-wise.
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Complexity is the source of Life.
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I suspect that although you could get say... 3^X or more, you wouldn't be able to get a higher number ofmoves because you could pack less of them into w room.
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