So there's already a Doom interface to killing UNIX processes: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ .

What i'm thinking of is an abstracted set of library calls that will take a complex "work problem," generate a corresponding "game problem" (like the next block shape in Tetris), and use the solution the player provides to solve the "work problem." The crux that i haven't solved is this: are there formulae that can produce a net savings of work by mapping the work-actions to game-actions (and back), over just solving the original work problem?

If not, maybe we could just collect entropy from Internet-connected gamers to improve rand().

ps. I did read _Ender's Game_. It reminded me of Netrek.
-- johan, Mar 03 2000

Sokoban http://www.cs.ualbe.../Sokoban/paper.html
"Sokoban is PSPACE-complete" [johan, Mar 03 2000, last modified Oct 21 2004]

SOKOBAN http://www.math.tau...dorit/sokoban.ps.gz
SOKOBAN and other motion planing problems [johan, Mar 03 2000, last modified Oct 21 2004]

Minesweeper http://digitalmass....01/minesweeper.html
The "minesweeper consistency problem" is NP-complete. [egnor, Mar 03 2000, last modified Oct 21 2004]

What do you think you're doing when you play Solitaire on a Windows machine, merely wasting time? Certainly not. A mapping has been made between the intricacies of Klondike and various well-understood software engineering practices.

Once the process has been bootstrapped, you need never employ costly software engineers and testers again. The users generate the next Rev.
-- jimfl, Mar 03 2000


There's some mathematical work on the computational complexity of various games. Some have been shown to be P-, NP- and even PSPACE- complete. (IIRC, Shokoban is PSPACE-complete.) Not only _could_ we map any problem in those complexity classes into those games, at least in some cases the mapping is already published.
-- cosma, Mar 04 2000


That's a good point. I like my work (UNIX sysadmining) but i like playing games, and i know a lot of people who would rather be playing games than doing anything else. This would be a way all that crainiating that goes forth into computer gaming could be doing "real" work, and perhaps someone could make a living playing games, just like all those sports stars..
-- johan, May 04 2000



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