If after 40 years we still haven't got the kinks out of the original ship/vehicle building rules, it would not be surprising if anyone implementing would miss some.

The test suite for any sort of vehicle builder is crazy because of complexity, edge cases, and unclear or contradictory. Same goes for chargen (enhanced especially) and the skill trees can have interesting intersections, etc.

I'm not surprised Interview as a substitute for Interrogation was not present.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 1:22 PM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
Another problem is how to determine IF the software really is following 'the rules' (whatever that actually may be).

While playing one of MicroProse's old MT rpg's (which actually really had a very CT feel, both in timeline setting, date, & play) it became obvious that the 'rule' that allowed 'Interview - 1' to be used in place of 'Interrogation' was not implemented in the coding.

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On Tuesday, August 25, 2020, 11:21:53 PM MST, <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


Though if you use equations that are not simply handled by a human (I have no bone to pick with that), it behoves us to provide a clear explanation of said equations and provide some characterization of results to illustrate how different factors will impact such an equation. I kinda hate software that does mystery math and forces me to generate many, many runs to begin to grok what the underlying equations look like - what factors impact and how much (and maybe why).

Side question: I use equations here... then I thought maybe 'algorithm'. When do equations become an algorithm? I suppose equations are very mathematical and at some point relate to equalities or systems of equations and an algorithm is really just another way to say 'method to do <something>'. Or maybe there is no difference, even of flavour.

-> It's a game of the last century looking to create a far future using as a model parts of the Earth some 2-3 centuries ago.

-> If the name hadn't been used, they could almost have called it 'Timemaster' for that reason.... ;0P

On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 1:29 AM Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
(dangit, I'm doing the "hitting return too soon" thing again :p)

> tl;dr: we are no longer bound by paper and dice

nor by rules or tables that a human can read, or equations that a human
can solve by hand*.  We can now turn many or all of those tasks over to
computers, and I submit that we should.

* or simple tools like a pencil or even a calculator.

--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org

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