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Mathematics for Game Designers
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- Week 4: topics... Sat, 2011-02-19 17:32
- week 3: postings in the forum to check out Tue, 2011-02-15 04:08
- Games for Math designers Sat, 2011-02-12 22:49
- week 3: check-in and resources Wed, 2011-02-09 23:19
- week 2: examples Tue, 2011-02-08 02:13
week 2: what's up
Hi all:
Those who showed up to the synchronous meeting said they were mainly interested in writing code, so I think what we need to do is create some discipline around this: in other words, we need to see the code. If you're writing code, or thinking about writing code, please start a thread describing the project you have in mind and any results! (The forums are here btw: http://p2pu.org/math-future/node/14535/forums!).
Second, I continue to think it would be a good idea for people to post solved exercises in the forum I set up for that purpose (http://metameso.org/vanilla/index.php) but since no one really did this during the first week, I'm beginning to have some doubts. If this is a practice that isn't going to work for you, I'd like to know more about why. I've been wondering if the fact that I'm not dictating a step-by-step process for people to follow has created a sense of too much arbitrariness.
In any case, not to be a downer, but this course isn't going to work without participation. If you can, pease reply to this thread and let me (and others) know what's on your mind regarding the course. I'm perfectly happy to accomodate a "slow start", but things do need to get moving or nothing is going to happen. Critical remarks would be much more useful than silence!!
Oh, and speaking of motion - that is the rough theme I had in mind for the course (for week 2). The example of a "melting snowman" in the course description was kindly coded up by Daniel Chiquito, and can be found here: https://github.com/holtzermann17/mathgame -- for those of you interested in writing code, extending this example would be a very useful exercise. Essentially the idea here is to create a simple "game physics". I'll post a couple of related examples about "difference equations" in the math forum and would like to see follow-up on this topic from others there as well.
This book is a helpful resource: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Schaums-Calculus-Differences-Difference-Equations/dp/0070602182 - let's keep our eyes out for related resources that might exist free on the web.
Joe
Well, I am here to learn Math first, coding is secondary . I am going through Graph theory in order to understand what it is and how to apply it. Which exercises do you have us to do as per Math?
Hi Emeka: regarding exercises in graph theory: please pick the ones that you find most suitable, or ask a question if you get stuck. I listed a few online resources here - http://p2pu.org/math-future/node/14535/forums/25329 - the last one, on Google Code, looks particularly promising and seems to have a mixture of problems at different levels. Regarding this week's topic of discrete movement - some of the resources listed at the bottom of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrence_relation could be helpful -- that's the first google hit for "difference equations". The second hit is http://math.furman.edu/~dcs/book/c1pdf/sec14.pdf and I see some nice looking exercises there after about 5 pages.
The idea of combining these topics (getting flows on graphs) does seem to be something that would be very suitable for a coding exercise, once the basics of the theory are done. Coding can be a good way to learn math :) -- just keep us posted about what you're looking at or working on :).
As a first contribution, I decided to transcribe Daniels snowman example into ruby (my preferred language :) )
I've gisted the code here: https://gist.github.com/810965
(for small chunks of code, I find gists much easier to deal with than a full github repository, but you could add it to the github repo if you wanted :) )
I'm planning on reading up on graph theory later today and tomorrow, and I may try to visualize some of the graphs with ruby.
Sweet! You should definitely take a look at snowman2d.py and see about translating that. And someone might want to make a version with ASCII art. Daniel and I had discussed mining code and ideas from "pacman for console" - http://sites.google.com/site/doctormike/pacman.html for layouting and interaction (currently this is Linux/POSIX only).
Regarding graphs: we have yet to fully investigate the "extra credit" tools from Week 1. But if at any point in the course you can get code running that moves different objects around on a graph ("monsters"?) then I think we can count that as a major success ;)
Thanks for posting!
Joe