Yeah, I felt this way many times with Axe. One good solution, though, is to use a high level compiled language (Axe/C/C++) with some assembly mixed in every now and then. That way you get the best of both worlds. It's what I do.

...and then a major compiler like MSVC++ drops inline assembly on AMD64 targets. Unfortunately even mid-level languages like C/C++ can't always get low level enough.

If you haven't noticed lately, only one single forum admin is regularly active posting publicly anymore on the forums and two on IRC: Shmibs and Qwerty.55. In Deep Thought's case, even his IRC bots are gone, but it might be due to 57o9 shutdown.

Still here, just in the background!

I'd do more work on the forums if Deep Thought didn't get to everything first 

There really isn't much left by the time I notice it. I've mostly just been handling the member and downloads approvals, which tend to be forgotten by everyone else.

1 Token = 1 Byte. So 1 Program will take up almost all the memory.

In TI-BASIC, yes. Not if you use any sort of compressed format and dynamically decompress text as needed.

Imagine the mouse is the object you want to test collision with and the white tile is the star shaped bullet. If the mouse is in any of the colored areas, no collision. If it's in the white area, collision.

There's no way with the native SMF site to restrict the URL of image avatars. As far as I can tell, the best we could do is to disable avatars on low-post-count members.

How do I get this theory out in a way that it has a chance of survival and in a way that no one steals it?

The method used in science is more or less the honor system along with a little bit of first-come, first-serve with regard to papers.

That said, what you have isn't a theory in the scientific sense, it's a hypothesis or a model. Something becomes a theory when it has a wide body of experimental evidence behind it.


Edit: Also, what they said ^

Quote from: squidgetx on December 27, 2012, 10:37:27 am

I've only played the first few hundred levels of the free version but as far as I can tell the optimal number of moves is always the absolute minimum. I've never played a level that required more moves than there were "flows"

oh well.. i downloaded it too and played a couple of levels, and indeed, it's always the same numbers as there are different colors, so making a generator wouldn't be that hard i guess, but then you'll need to make a solver too, to see if it's possible to solve the generated one..i don't think this will be easy

Right, the minimum number of moves is always the same as the number of colors because the lines never cross.

As for generated maps, there's actually a slightly different way to do it than proving a particular random map is valid. My thought isn't fully developed because topology is somewhat of a weak area for me, but here it is:

Imagine you're specified to have K colors in a plane for your puzzle. Within this space, there exist k lines stacked on top of each other in any particular order in a way similar to this:
At the endpoints of each of those lines is, well, an endpoint. These will become the points between which the flow is drawn. Now, we can use these lines to generate any possible puzzle by a certain series of stretching, bending, and compressing operations from at least one possible color order. The only real rule is that the lines cannot cross (i.e.: the boundary conditions can't change). This generates what can be called a homotopic configuration: A set that can be continuously deformed by those operations back into the original lines. All possible valid configurations MUST meet this criterion, so we know the set of homotopic configurations contains all of the solutions we're looking for. But wait, there are two other criteria valid solutions must meet: That the configuration fit into an NxN grid and that the flows completely fill the grid. The former criterion is really the problematic one because it's discrete. In a continuous space, we could just wrap the flows around very tightly and "fill" the loose parts, thus making the second criterion trivial except given the first. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to guarantee that the generated solution will fit in the discrete grid nor that it can be "expanded" to fill the grid, although the latter shouldn't be too difficult.

Other related questions:
Is the set of homeomorphic flows identical to the homotopic set?
Can all homotopic flows be "expanded" to fill a grid?
Is there a way to generate the set of all valid flows without specifying color ordering?

Clearly I've put a bit too much thought into this since I downloaded the game

What precisely constitutes a derivative work can be very vague. If you took the sprites and modified them, then they're probably considered a derivative work, unless you made a lot of changes. If you made your own sprites based on the design of the previous ones, then they may not be a derivative work, depending on how similar they are. In any case, the best option is to get the author's permission. Second best is to do nothing and wait for any copyright violations to be defended.