Timeline for Can PRNGs be used to magically compress stuff?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
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| Mar 26, 2014 at 22:28 | comment | added | supercat | @foo1899: Incidentally, the game "Pitfall" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitfall! used the aforementioned technique to use generate a 256-screen map on a 4K game cartridge on a machine with 128 bytes of RAM. | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 22:07 | comment | added | user15782 | That's a very good example, it matches the scheme I described of searching for a "good" seed, but takes advantage of the fact that in that scenario many possible messages are good. | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 15:08 | comment | added | supercat | @YuvalFilmus: Exactly. They can also be used in some situations like video game level generation where a small fraction of generated levels would be considered acceptable, but where a video game designer can randomly generate levels until he finds some which are to his liking, and record the seeds which generated those. A very useful concept historically, when coding for a video game machine with 128 bytes of RAM, trying to fit the program into a cartridge with 4096 bytes of ROM. | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 1:40 | comment | added | Yuval Filmus | PRNGs are used in this way to compactly represent (pseudo)random data, for example for the sake of repeatability of experiments. | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 23:27 | history | answered | supercat | CC BY-SA 3.0 |