Martin C.

Martin Inspiring Lunatics, Tainting Meats

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Calculating Pi in “Carnage Heart” Search

That’s totally freakin’ awesome by the way About Me

— Ben Johnson, September 11, 2006 I’m a Software Architect at Infinio, a
startup I joined in March 2012. I
have also worked at Endeca on the
  core algorithms for their search en-
gine, been the Artificial Intelligence
Lead at Rockstar Games New Eng-
                For those who don’t know, Carnage Heart is a video game for the original Sony
land, and worked at Panjiva, ITA
Playstation. It’s a war/strategy game, where your troops are Mechs. You spend your Software and Icosystem. Before that I
money buying new technologies, then assemble them into a design, and finally spend more was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT,
first at the Artificial Intelligence Lab,
money producing them in a factory and sending them off to capture enemy bases.
then at the Media Lab. And before
that I was a graduate student at
The interesting thing is that in battle, you don’t control them directly; instead you write Carnegie Mellon University’s
Robotics Institute.
programs to control them. The programming language is rather primitive, but it contains
things to detect friendly or enemy Mechs, detect incomming missles, move in various I was part of The Centre for Metahu-
directions, fire weapons in various directions, etc. man Exploration

I founded and led Esc, a virtual 3D

So yesterday (Feb 4, 1998) there was too much hail and ice to ride my motorcycle to nightclub
school, so I walked in. On the way home, I got to thinking. That’s the problem with
The Journal of my road trip across
walking: you’re left alone with your thoughts. Anyways, I was thinking about the Carnage
America
Heart video game (that’s the one that lets you program Mechs for battle). I was thinking You’ll need Acrobat Reader

about it’s computation engine, and whether you could do some traditional programming
I co-founded Grey Thumb, an artifi-
tasks on it, like computing Pi. After all, it’s Turing complete. So I started thinking about
cial life interest group
how I would do it. You have registers, which hold (I later found out) 3 decimal digits, and a
sign. But, the only operations you have are add a constant, subtract a constant, multiply by How to communicate with an alien
race
a constant, divide by a constant, assign from a constant, and compare to a constant. The
constants must be in the range 1 to 100 (inclusive), and there are no operations that I (might have) met Roger Waters
involve two registers.
I was a programmer on Star Trek:
Armada
Now, there’s a really simple formula for Pi:
Calculating Pi in a video game

Pi/4 = 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + …

My fake thesis proposal

                A couple things crossed my mind. First, I only had 5 registers, so I could only I sang in the band “Booty Resonant
Frequency.”
compute a few digits of Pi. But wait! I have 3 mechs! And they can communicate! There
are 5 different channels (1-5), each of which can send or recieve 5 messages (named after 5 email: martin at martincmartin dot
colours). It wouldn’t be hard to use a single channel and transmit a number in base 5. So, com

that’s 15 registers at my disposal.

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But a bigger problem is that there’s no (direct) way to take a reciprical. There isn’t even a Beeper Codes
Sodarace
direct way to add two registers. But this is where my theory of computing classes come in.
Calculating Pi in "Carnage Heart"
If you want to add register B to register A, you can do (assuming B > 0): Writing To A Binary Stream In
C/C++: Harder Than It Should Be
Meeting (a man who claimed to
be) Roger Waters
foo: A = A + 1
B = B - 1 Categories
if B > 0 then goto foo Adaptive Behavior – Tidbits
Adaptive Behaviour
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Programming Languages
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Of course, this destroys B, but you can make a copy of it before hand:
Meta
Register
Log in
[Copy B to C and D, destroying B] Entries feed
C = 0 Comments feed
D = 0 WordPress.com

bar: C = C + 1
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D = D + 1
B = B - 1
if B > 0 then goto bar

Now that you can add (or subtract) two numbers, you can compare them by subtracting
the two and seeing if the result is positive, negative or zero. Or, equivalently, you can
subtract 1 from each, and whichever gets to zero first is the smallest.

Then, you can do division by repeated subtraction:

[Calculate A / B, quotient in C, remainder in A]

C = 0
baz: if A < B then end [in practice, goto the first statement of the next step]
A = A - B
C = C + 1
goto baz

If you expand everything out, you can combine many steps. For example, the copy and
subtract can be combined like this:

[A = A - B; C = B; B = 0]
C = 0
phat: A = A - 1
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B = B - 1
C = C + 1
if B > 0 then goto phat

There are some other speedups you can do too. Instead of subtracting 1 all the time, you
can do:

[A = A - B; B = 0]
phat1: if B < 100 then goto phat2
A = A - 100
B = B - 100
goto phat1
phat2: if B < 10 then goto phat3
A = A - 10
B = B - 10
goto phat2
phat3: if B < 1 then end
A = A - 1
B = B - 1
goto phat3

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The ultimate in this vain would be a binary thing: compare to 512, 256, 128, 64, …, 1. You
don’t even need the loop, since you only need to subtract each number at most once.
(Actually, it’s hard to compare to numbers bigger than 100, since it can’t be done directly.
Probably best to have a loop to get it under 100, then do the binary thing.)

Also, for division, you could do "if A > 10*B then A = A - 10*B, C = C + 10".
Multiplying by 10 is built in, and you need to make a copy of B anyways.

Well, I wrote the program out on paper. It’s only for a single mech, and while I combined
as many steps as I could, it doesn’t have any of the other optimizations. It should compute
the first 2 or 3 decimal places of Pi (that is, 3.141 or pretty close). Who would have thought
those theory of computation constructions could actually be used?? I haven’t implemented
it yet, I’m waiting until I get the “best” CPU (fastest and largest program storage). Then I’ll
try it. I’ll be curious to see how far it gets in the 150 second time limit. (Too bad I can’t let
it run all night!) That series converges really slowly, especially if your variables only ever
go up or down by 1 at each timestep!

I’m such a nerd.

Martin.

P.S. I eventually did implement it, and it didn’t even get a single digit, because the time for
the match ran out.

P.P.S. The next step would be a multi precision, parallel communicating version. The
above formula converges so slow, so it would have to be based on the Taylor series for
arctan…

Created Thursday February 5, 1998

Martin C. Martin   Email: martin at metahuman.org

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