3 ms·
Pretty fun story, but not that mindblowing or weird. If a piece of software takes unpredictable inputs like time and date, it's a relatively obvious source of n
by colordrops 2y ago
Pretty fun story, but not that mindblowing or weird. If a piece of software takes unpredictable inputs like time and date, it's a relatively obvious source of nondeterminism. It's not common in games which is why they were befuddled for so long. But their environment was hardly hermetically sealed it seems.
- cdchn 2y agoMaking the system clock always be the same is the ultimate is hermeticity.
- iiio8 2y agoHm, but that clock likely seeds the PRNG used to create the gameplay. If that was always the same then the whole exercise would be pretty boring. So their experiments purposely vary the time. It's just that for some input value, the thing they are running dramatically (well...) differs from other times, and the model wasn't expecting that, nor were the authors.