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The 2018 Spring Games are underway, freshman are getting involved and learning new systems. Teams have fully moved on from the past season are focused on this upcoming season. We still have 4 months before opening day, but it will fly by, so to keep any potential discussion going, I'm creating the 2018 thread early.
There is still much to discuss!
Watch any spring games? What are your thoughts? What's your hopes for this year?
We've been working on recursive sequences in python in classes lately, and I was a little surprised at how much math actually makes a difference in your ability to optimize code. I wrote a little demonstration for one of my assignments.
The fibonacci sequence makes no sense to me, but essentially, it goes like this.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...
Each digit is the sum of the two previous digits. Pretty simple. We could definitely extrapolate this as far as we wanted to and get an infinitely large number of digits, but I won't go there. Apparently this is some sort of important sequence in computer science and I don't know why, but you should be able to see the pattern easily enough.
Say we wanted to know what, say, the 20th digit in the sequence was? It turns out that the method for finding this is a little bit more complicated than you'd think. It's rather tedious to go and actually add up all of the numbers. And particularly if you're going to use a recursive sequence, as fast as we think computers are these days, trying to go past about the 40th term or so in the sequence will crash my macbook because literally going through and generating this sequence is that tedious for a computer. Maybe yours might get a tad bit higher but I'd be willing to bet you won't get past 50 in Python.
Okay, but why in the world is this so freaking slow?
It's because it's recursive. If it wants to find the 5th number in the sequence, it first must find the 4th and the 3rd, and add those up. But because it doesn't know what the 4th and the 3rd are, in order to find the 4th, it must find the 3rd and the 2nd. And in order to find the 3rd, it must find the 2nd and the first. And it has to go through all of these steps before it can give a simple answer. Although this is easy for small numbers, as you can probably imagine, this starts to grow exponentially once you start finding, say, the 20th, or the 30th, or the 35th number in a sequence. The next thing you know, your computer can't even find the 40th term in a simple sequence without crashing, where you could probably do it by hand in a matter of a few minutes.
There are two ways to speed this up. Instead of calling the same function over and over again and creating a gigantic tree of function calls to recalculate the same data over and over and over again, you can either save what each digit is as you go, and only calculate if you haven't saved that particular digit yet, or you can use something called an exact solution (a simple formula you make out of the recursive sequence using some sort of voodoo magic) to do the trick. By saving these numbers, it prevents the results from growing exponentially because it never has to recalculate values it's gone over before. You can easily calculate, say, the 4000th term with this method.
I demonstrated all three methods with the following code. It calculates the 35th number in the sequence. Enough to take a few seconds on the recursive calculation, but not enough to crash my Macbook. Hopefully it won't crash yours.
Code:
import sys
sys.setrecursionlimit(2000000000)
print ("Will evaluate three methods of calculating the fibonacci sequence at 35.\n")
#define a simple recursive fibonacci sequence.
def recursive_f(n):
"""Slow recursive function. n = the number to evaluate. """
if n == 0:
return 0 #base case
elif n == 1:
return 1 #another base case
else:
return recursive_f(n-1)+recursive_f(n-2)
#same as the previous function, but store previous values.
#this keeps the function from re-evaluating the same values.
def mem_f(n, mem=dict()):
"""Memoization recursive method. n = num to eval. Don't pass mem. """
if (n in mem):
return mem[n] #welp we already saved a value. Don't re-evaluate.
if n == 0:
return 0 #base case
elif n == 1:
return 1 #base case
else:
value = mem_f(n-1, mem)+ mem_f(n-2, mem)
mem[n] = value #store value
return value
#This solution is a little different. This is a formula that is not recursive.
#In theory python shouldn't crash, but large numbers are beyond python's range.
def fib_exact(n):
"""Calculated exact solution from second order sequence. n = num to eval."""
result = (value1 - value2) // value3
return int(result)
#recursive with slow method. will take forever.
print ("Slow recursive method: ", end="")
print (str(recursive_f(35)) + "\n")
#recursive with fast method. Much faster.
print ("Fast recursive method: ", end="")
print(str(mem_f(35)) + "\n")
#Exact solution. The fastest of them all.
print ("Exact non-recursive method: ", end="")
print (str(fib_exact(35)))
This will run in Python 3 if you want to save it into a .py file and run it. And I attached a file with this post too.
This page (yes that's a link) pretty much describes what we spent an hour or two doing in class to optimize this. It's my very first semester in this new program, I haven't even taken Calculus yet, and I already feel like my head is hurting.
Needless to say, you can teach yourself to program, but it's hard to teach yourself everything. I feel that, even solving simple problems, I have learned a lot.
I played these games quite a bit growing up. Simcity always ran alright on integrated graphics for its time. I never really had too much of an issue, although on bigger cities I definitely did notice that the frame rate got pretty bad. But the game more than made up for it. Simcity 4 was always the best to me.
But even on my 2012 Macbook Pro (2.5 ghz dual core i5, 3rd generation) makes playing Cities Skylines almost unbearably slow. We're talking in the ballpark of 2-3 FPS at best. I can deal with 10 FPS. But 2-3 is absolutely awful.
But this is a fairly, ish I suppose, old computer nevertheless. Even 4th generation i5's were better on graphics, and I'm sure the current 7th and 8th generations have far outdone even the Haswells. AMD supposedly has good integrated graphics too.
Anyone play these games today on integrated graphics? Have any advice on what works and what doesn't? I wouldn't mind playing skylines again if I had a computer that could handle it.
So a community that was near and dear, and beloved by several of us here, has now (apparently, as I'm told) been put to rest. Not all of us are members of this community, and neither are we at MS, an offshoot in any capacity. But many of the members that were the most invested in MS were invested here because they supported what we did, and a couple of us were active members over at Simmania. Other communities that people have come from that have made the MS community include the general MyBB community (including Icyboards), as well as a few other websites, and collectively, they have made us what we are. (I have faith. We'll make it further! )
But Simmania (http://simmania.net) was something special of its own. Founded in 2010, it has brought over eight years of tight-knit community that has stayed true to its values. I write this as a former admin of the community from years back, as it started off with a core group of about four or five people, most of which aren't around today, until around 2013ish, where members such as pupper_donut and brian come from. The community was a small Simcity fansite with a very active chat community that slowly spread out
It was never a huge forum. It had about 35K posts about ~300 members, many of whom had posted, by the time it had disappeared. So this thread shall serve as a tribute to one of our biggest inspirations as a community. And because some of the same members that supported Simmania now are here supporting MS, and because MS shares much of the same tight-knit atmosphere that defined Simmania, Makestation now says profoundly, thank you.
May a tribute to Simmania be held here in this thread.
Farwells, beloved community.
This is mainly for Darth-Apple but I'll leave it open for discussion as well... I'm also not much of a car guy so I'm not really sure how all this works.
Ever since I bought my 2012 Kia Rio 5 the thing has had minor issues with a slight engine rattle and losing power in low RPM ranges, but I learned to live with it and it was never bothersome. However, over the past few months or so the problem has been steadily getting worse, now it has reached the point of an incessant and loud spark knocking on acceleration and under load. My mileage has also seemed to drop significantly.
After doing some reading around I found out that many others also have the same problems, and after taking it to the dealer have been told there is no issue. Some people have said that using premium gas has helped (but I really couldn't be bothered to spend the extra money). I'm beginning to think it's just a problem I'll have to live with as it seems that these particular engines do this a lot (even though there's nothing mechanically wrong with them).
Either way, I just wanted to get a little bit of input and maybe advice/suggestions. Given this and other experiences with this car I've already decided not to bother with another Kia anytime soon
I figure I will eventually get around to making videos for them. Was considering making some more. These are minor, but I was wanting a massive overhaul.
