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SimCity Player Spends 3 years on optimal city design
- wazoox 16y agoFucking loving Jeezus christ. This guy could have solved wolrd hunger with his skills, instead he maxed out Simcity 3000.
- ugh 16y agoNah, to max out SimCity he probably only has to know about a few dozen variables and how they interact, to solve world hunger he probably has to know how thousands of variables interact with each other. Maxing out SimCity is one of the easier problems out there :)
- dirtbox 16y agoI'm surprised he could find the time with all the sex he must have been having.
- dirtbox 16y agoBurried in record time! God I love how pompous this site is.
- mixmax 16y agoThough it might seem like it that isn't the case - people here are generally helpful and down to earth. The problem is that there's an ingrained fear here that the site will turn into reddit[1] with all of the oneliners, memes and silliness that defines it nowadays. HN is the last resort for intelligent discourse for many users. And they don't want to lose it. As a result of this fear anything that resembles a comment that might have been made on Reddit will get downvoted. [1] I have nothing against Reddit, on the contrary I personally write loads of silly comments there and enjoy the oneliners.
- icey 16y agoFunny jokes seem to get upvoted (see the first comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277622 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277622)
- dirtbox 16y agoGiven the subject matter, I wouldn't pop this in the intelligent discourse pigeon hole, however your point is well taken.
- joshfinnie 16y ago
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- a-priori 16y agoI'd be interested in seeing more of the analysis that went into designing this.
- nooneelse 16y agoI'd be interested in seeing the maker give a lecture on that. Well that and getting a copy of the city and removing all the firehouses.
- lotharbot 16y agoThe best part of the vid is from 5:35 onward, where it shows pretty decent detail of the city. It's interesting to see the way "perfectionist" players approach their games. The details of the optimization are often surprising. Even the specific choice of factors to optimize for are interesting. In SimCity, one player shoots for maximum population; another might go for the quickest time to reach a particular population level; yet another might seek to maximize industrial production. I like seeing how they work within the rules to reach those different goals.
- eru 16y agoYes. SimCity is not really a `game', but more of a sandbox, where you set your own goals. Of course you can set your own goals in more traditional games as well, but they tend to come with a pre-defined one.
- rradu 16y agoAs someone who's played SimCity for many years, I'm super impressed by this. Although he didn't use cheats, SC3000 was the best cuz it had a cheat where you could place a specific building and have it be there permanently--without any worry of abandonment. SimCity 4 is much harder because there are a lot more variables to deal with, including the fact that you can run multiple cities in a region.
- potatolicious 16y agoHuge SimCity nerd back in the day here - his city design is impossible in SimCity 4; the new game requires all lots be connected to some kind of road. The secret to his success is that there are no roads, every single tile is connected to a subway station that's impeccably designed. There's no traffic congestion of any sort. Personally, I think SC4 teaches people a bad lesson - that cars are an absolute necessity to urban planning.
- ars 16y agoCars might not be, but roads certainly are. How do you expect to even build the place without a road? Much less deliver furniture and other things?
- blhack 16y agoHaven't you ever seen an apartment building?
- ars 16y agoYes. If you have a point you should just write it, because I don't understand it from that question.
- blhack 16y agoAn apartment building is effectively a large grouping of houses that are not directly connected to a road. People carry couches, or TVs. Maybe apartments are not like this where you live? Where I am, there will be a couple of square blocks of buildings that are all considered one complex...inside of that complex is a parking lot, and you walk to your building, then your apartment. It wasn't meant to be snarky.
- Seiwynn 16y agoI'm a little disturbed at his population distribution in the final city. Scary how his optimal city has no one over age 60.
- anamax 16y ago> Scary how his optimal city has no one over age 60. Logan's Run or Soylent Green?
- listic 16y agoWell, that last city was optimized for population count, not longevity.
- grinich 16y agoor culture.
- cstuder 16y agoor life quality.
- _delirium 16y agobunch of commies in this thread!
- IgorPartola 16y agoor homogeneity of political views.
- johnyzee 16y agoI wonder how many of the theories could be applied to actual urban planning.
- hugh3 16y agoA grid of subway stations with a stop at every block? Sounds rather expensive. Besides, all attempts to build "perfect" cities in real life have resulted in dull and lifeless places. A certain amount of chaos is necessary to keep cities liveable.
- dantheman 16y agoAgreed, simcity uses a static model. So the rules can be deduced. In reality we don't actually know what the rules are and they are much more dynamic -- i.e. the introduction of the internet, the car, the cell phone, etc. These have impacts on cities, and what people expect from them.
- brianobush 16y agowhat if the subways weren't subways we know of today, but rather conveyor belt like roads. might be feasible if in a more automated future.
- hugh3 16y agoHeck, it's feasible now, but the power consumption and maintenance costs would be fairly insane compared to the plain old cars-and-roads solution. (How often do you see an escalator broken down? Pretty damn often.)
- petercooper 16y agoAs an aside, and because SimCity doesn't get mentioned much here, if you're on OS X and want to play Simcity 4, I spent a lot of time getting it to work "just so." The trick is.. Windows XP + Parallels 5 (I'm a big VMware Fusion fan but Parallels 5 boosts SC4 performance wise somehow) + software rendering (hardware rendering is a FAIL/unstable on both Parallels and VMware with SC4).. and I can run everything on high no probs on my iMac. Works a treat.
- elblanco 16y agoI play SC4 myself on my netbook. It's a great time killer on a long plane ride.
- ka2 16y agoI'm using Ubuntu but this should still apply to OS X. SimCity 4 works nearly perfectly (both software & hardware rendering) under Wine. There used to be a problem with the installer but based on test results on the Wine AppDB that works now too. Also you can set a custom resolution using "-CustomResolution:enabled" and using eg. "-r1440x900x32" which helps make the game more playable on widescreen monitors. I used to run SimCity under VirtualBox but with larger populations it's much faster under wine.
- swombat 16y agoWhat a waste of time! I'm a bit ashamed that we (me included) are all so impressed by this. We should be weeping for the tragic waste of human ingenuity and productivity. Three years of work for nothing.
- techiferous 16y agoI've actually found play to be indispensable at being the best you can be at work. Because the end result really doesn't matter, play lets you experiment more than you would otherwise. This experimentation allows you to discover possibilities that you otherwise would have been too risky. Normally this applies to playing around in the same domain as your work (I make stupid/playful websites to practice my web programming skills, for example.) This is just a video game, but there are still a lot of transferable skills that are practiced: concentration, planning, forethought, logical thinking, multi-variable problem solving, persistence, etc. These habits would serve him well on a programming job, for instance.
- rsheridan6 16y agoIt's no worse than the three years of TV that millions of people have spent their time on for the last 3 years.
- gtt 16y agofrom commets to TFA: To everyone belittling his 'waste' of 5 years of his life on a pointless endeavour, remember that in life, everything is essentially pointless, you are born, you live, you die. And thats that. You may in life build the perfect Simcity city, or refurbished a muscle car, or discover electricity. But at the end of the day you end up dead, and its all irrelevant.
- redcap 16y agoI'm sure that people like Martin Luther King Jr and others who have made a difference would beg to differ. Your life doesn't have to be pointless.
- 16y ago
- pgbovine 16y agoi wonder if there's a scriptable game like simcity (maybe freeciv? i dunno) ... that could make for a good testbed for certain optimization algorithms
- ax0n 16y agoI'm not sure, but you just made me miss the day of scripting BBS Door games such as Trade Wars 2002.
- CoachRufus87 16y agoimpressive, fascinating, yet a tad bit disturbing... kudos none-the-less
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI do not understand why such a large piece of a person's life would be spent doing this. Even model railroads have some tangible significance -- it is possible to share them with others in such a way that the others enjoy them and you bring happiness into somebody else's life. Perhaps this is because I find value in helping others. Some may find value in simply being pre-occupied as they wait for death. To each his own. I do not understand a lot of things. What I found totally amazing wasn't spending years trying to optimize solutions to random problems others have created, but how this guy made a super-awesome video explaining how he did it. Very impressive. Loved the music and the camera movements. This guy should start charging to do demo videos for software products.
- eru 16y ago> I do not understand why such a large piece of a person's life would be spent doing this. You can share your digital artefacts with people all over the world. Isn't that much better by your metric than a model railroad?
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoIt gets tough to debate life values, because we all come from a different place, but I'll take the question as just for me. I can't answer for this other guy. His reasons are his own. The problem with spending so much time optimizing an artificial mathematical model (game) is that less work and time is required to create the model than to optimize it. Therefore (to me), it's the losers than spend time working on other people's problems that never move up to the next level: being creative. It's just a mechanical process. (and yes, I'm aware that some creativity is involved in the optimization) My value system is in creating something for other people. So creativity and value to others, are the metric I use when allocating my time. I guess if such a electronic work could benefit people -- by making them happy for a bit or providing them with information they needed or something, it would be worthwhile. I mean heck, under my value system you can stretch a lot of things to make them work. The question (for me) is whether or not those 3 years could have been better spent. Yes, at the end it's all gone anyway. That doesn't mean piss away your life. If anything, it means you only have a certain amount of time to do things you find valuable. My opinion only. To each his own.
- Tycho 16y agoThe other day I was studying 'dashboard' systems for ERP software and the like and it occurred to me how SimCity and Civilization type UIs would fit the bill (if only they worked on reality).
- Gormo 16y agoRemeber the old Caesar series from Impressions/Sierra? It was ostensibly a city-building sim set in ancient Rome, but gameplay was more like a supply-chain logistics simulator. About 3/4 of the time spent playing was in allocating raw materials to production facilities and designing distribution networks for finished goods. If Impressions or Maxis decided to start writing enterprise software, they'd probably dominate the market within a couple of years.
- eru 16y ago> If Impressions or Maxis decided to start writing enterprise software, they'd probably dominate the market within a couple of years. Yes, if the enterprise software makers would compete on their software. They seem to compete more on having better sales teams.
- dan00 16y agoIf someone had fun, how could this time be wasted? It's interesting, that the kind of people, that see this as wasted time, because they think this isn't changing the world, that it isn't ethical to use your own time this way, that these people will always criticize themself and others regardless what they do, because there's always something more meaningful to do. At the end these people won't change anything in the world, but just bring harm to themself and others.
- _delirium 16y agoIn some ways it's equivalent to solving any other seemingly esoteric theoretical problem that people seem to like solving (and some people get PhDs for doing so!). He took a formal system (a particular simplified model of city simulation), and produced a constructive proof of some properties of the system. Of course, the SimCity simulation parameters are unrealistic in a lot of ways, but it doesn't seem inherently any more absurd than the people who get PhDs for game-theory theses that also rely on absurd parameters in their problem setup.