• Space/Time tradeoff (was: Re: Video games are a waste of life)

    From vallor@21:1/5 to wichitajayhawks@msn.com on Mon Jul 21 06:54:39 2025
    XPost: talk.bizarre

    On Sun, 20 Jul 2025 20:21:17 -0500, "Lane \"Stonehowler\" Waldby" <wichitajayhawks@msn.com> wrote in <me5j0dFmse5U2@mid.individual.net>:

    vallor wrote:
    On Tue, 20 Jun 2023 18:35:04 -0700 (PDT), entwickeln14 wrote:

    On Saturday, June 17, 2023 at 8:07:31 PM UTC-4, nikolai kingsley
    wrote:
    "a while ago" being around 1988.

    Hello.
    What's new?

    e

    hi

    In 8th grade, I wrote a game on the Commodore PET. You would maneuver
    your avatar (an asterisk) through a landscape of constantly-changing
    random blocks appearing and disappearing.

    Kind of a funky maze game. Would have been around 1981.

    Lies. You never did that. You can't even count to 1981.

    Not only did I write it, I optimized the movement keys by using the
    numeric keypad numbers as indices for two arrays that held +/-1 values
    for x and y.

    Was a lot faster than the "if then" chain I was using previously.

    (This was in PET BASIC, of course.)

    Recently I asked ChatGPT about the principle I'd used, and it
    called it "time for space trade off". Posted about it in
    comp.theory in passing.

    Message-ID: <101bvbm$58on$2@dont-email.me>

    It's pretty obvious that pre-computing values can speed
    things up. Orthogonally-related, I once made a lookup
    table for IPv4 unicast addresses whose decimal representation
    was an md5 hash.

    -rw-rw-r-- 1 xxx xxx 75161927360 May 6 2016 md5_ipv4_rainbow.b

    (Turns out, back in the days of Usenet yore, certain NSP's didn't
    salt their posting-host hashes. Used it to figure out who was
    posting as certain socks in a.u.k.)

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