Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 2.6 Based on the what I expect the conditions of the blades
to be after using them before, which blade might I select to use again?
N EEDING M ORE T HAN O BSERVATIONS
As we have laid out, to be able to craft our pretend worlds, we need to be able to ob-
serve and understand what is going on in our real worlds. Much can be discovered
simply by observing what happens around us. We can identify the relevant factors
and relationships—sometimes intuiting and inferring things that are not readily
apparent. Most importantly, we must think about this information in a manner that
allows for quantification. In some cases, this is simple. For example, my daughter
could certainly make the claim that making three election posters was better than
making only one. At other times, however, making direct comparisons is not pos-
sible. Could my daughter Kathy make the same claim that making three posters is
the same as making three stickers? What is the difference between three posters and
three stickers?
Even more difficult to ascertain is the relationships between items that cannot
be counted. How much is it worth to have one popular kid evangelizing about your
campaign for president of the fifth grade? How do we put a number on that? How
do you put a value on promising ice cream Fridays?
And yet, if we are to construct an algorithm to make decisions about such
things, we need to condense all this information into a form that can be digested
by those algorithms. We need to be able to put these very issues into the language
of mathematics and numbers. After all, when it comes to computers and the algo-
rithms they so happily process, the power is in the numbers. Without the algorithms,
we cannot make our decisions. Therefore, we need to somehow take these observa-
tions and comparisons about the behaviors we witness and turn them into numbers
and algorithms.
Conveniently, that's our next stop…
 
 
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