Need a programmer?

[MincedPhrase]

I've heard that you're understaffed and I was wondering if I could help. I've dealt with a lot of OOP and understand all the code in the Version 0.2 release, but I'm not quite up-to-date on ActionScript 3.0 (which the new 0.3 version will be done in). That being said, I've looked through a lot of the tutorials for it and I believe I have a fairly rudimentary understanding, plus I'm a quick learner so I'm sure that if I saw the actual classes and methods you were using, I could rapidly start contributing new code.

One of the things I did "for fun" was to start correcting the polling issue with the different movie clips on Krystal (Renara mentioned that this was one of the things to be fixed in the new 0.3 version http://legendofkrystal.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=18&p=70#p70). I used ActionScript 2.0 to do it but I stopped part way through when I realized that the post I was reading was made on January 11th, so it was probably fixed with ActionScript 3.0 already.

I've also dabbled in Flash quite a bit over the years, but after seeing the work that's been done here, everything I've done pales in comparison. I'd still be willing to help out with drawing an animating things, but I'm sure that you already have much more qualified people for that, and my talents mainly reside in programming.

Let me know if I can be of any assistance, and feel free to test me as needed.

[Renara]

Your enthusiasm is noted! At the moment though I'm handling programming the v0.3 game engine, really what I could use is a time machine so I can get more done

We will however bring more scripters into the fold once the basics of the engine are a bit more complete, and once it's at a point that more people working on separate features will be beneficial.

What level of expertise do you have in general for programming/scripting? Any academic or otherwise formal courses? Most of what I'm doing and aiming to do isn't hard to pick up, I'm trying to document as I go but that keeps falling by the wayside as it slows me down even more

[MincedPhrase]

I'll get on programming you a time machine then!

I haven't taken many courses and instead learnt almost all I know from online documentation and just plugging away at stuff for hours. That being said, I have worked for a small software company for two years now (it's me and another guy basically) and we've handled some very big projects during that time. I'm fluent in PHP, Python, and VB6, plus I've dealt with Javascript, Java, C++, and a smattering of other languages.

I'd be happy to even help out with documentation if you want, as I've got nothing better to do and it'd help me learn more about ActionScript 3.0 while I wait for you to be done. That way, when you do get it all done, I'll be completely up to speed and we'll have a good amount of documentation to boot.

Temporal Edit: After completing my time machine and going through a long series of contrived events, I've discovered that either I am an alternate version of you, your son, or you from the future. Oh, and the time machine was destroyed during the temporal paradox that was created. So while it may not be exactly what you wanted, at least it's a positive result for science!

[nebrose]

Your enthusiasm is noted! At the moment though I'm handling programming the v0.3 game engine, really what I could use is a time machine so I can get more done

We will however bring more scripters into the fold once the basics of the engine are a bit more complete, and once it's at a point that more people working on separate features will be beneficial.

What level of expertise do you have in general for programming/scripting? Any academic or otherwise formal courses? Most of what I'm doing and aiming to do isn't hard to pick up, I'm trying to document as I go but that keeps falling by the wayside as it slows me down even more

technically with the proper aspects of a time machine is that you can onlt go forward... unless it a tardis from doctor who, then you can go anywere in time... the reason you can only go forward is because you would be trapped without the machine if you go back because it would cease to exist due to not being invented yet... the tardis is as old as time so it can go anywere XD

[Renara]

technically with the proper aspects of a time machine is that you can onlt go forward... unless it a tardis from doctor who, then you can go anywere in time... the reason you can only go forward is because you would be trapped without the machine if you go back because it would cease to exist due to not being invented yet... the tardis is as old as time so it can go anywere XD

I think the more prominent issue would however be that travelling into the past can result in no benefit as everything you do there has already happened. But aside from that I don't believe that time is traversable in the first place; it is a measurement rather than any kind of interactive medium.

Easiest way I find to think of it is that a path is traversable, as you can walk either way upon it. A path can also be represented as a distance, however this distance is just a value, it is not in itself traversable. In the same way, time is simply a measurement, conveniently it is linear or it would have no purpose, but really all it does is demarcate a specific state of the entire universe, i.e - the universe is the path, it is a changing thing that constantly shifts from one state to another. Time is simply a measurement that allows easier distinguishing between these states.
For example; one hour ago the atoms that constituted me were sitting at a dining room table eating, now they are not. These are two unique states of the entire universe, which we can understand only by applying the concept or measurement of time upon them.

In order to "travel through time" you would therefore need to completely restructure every single atom in the entire universe such that they once again had precisely the same properties that they did in the state you wish to revisit (requiring you also to have such knowledge of such states). However in doing so you would simultaneously restructure yourself, at which point the universe would then progress exactly as it did before, unless you messed up in which case you simply created a new state for the universe, rather than a re-creating a pre-existing one. Unless you had some method of removing yourself from the universe, it would be impossible for you to make any changes to it, and removing yourself would require you to do so such that you did not remove any pieces (those that were previously constructed from your atoms or energy) required to accurately reconstruct a previous state, which is a theoretical improbability.

But then I'm a bit of an anarchist when it comes to so called "modern" physics which I believe went off the deep end a long time ago when they started getting hung up on quantum mechanics and all that bollocks. Sure some of these wild speculations have garnered interestingly useful results, but results that can be explained much more simply by other means. I mean, when it comes down to it, 90% of modern day physics is belief in unseen substances (dark matter/energy), and that seems a tad far-fetched to me


Probably a bit more than you wanted to hear, but I'm a bit of a thinker

[MincedPhrase]

This is really interesting; a post about physics in my thread when I'm majoring in the subject. Hopefully this isn't just an April Fools joke on me.

Quantum Mechanics began with Max Planck publishing his explanation of blackbody radiation in 1901. I'll be using some theories from before and slightly after then, but none of them will involve Quantum Mechanics unless I explicitly state that they do (none of them do in this post).

Easiest way I find to think of it is that a path is traversable, as you can walk either way upon it. A path can also be represented as a distance, however this distance is just a value, it is not in itself traversable.

In 1862, Maxwell came to the conclusion that light travels at a constant speed, c. This means that any amount of time can be translated to a distance by multiplying it by the speed of light; perhaps this conversion will be used to represent time as another dimension (but this is just speculation on my part).

However, we do traverse time everyday at a fixed rate, and when you look at the satellites orbiting the Earth we see time dilation effects in accordance with Einstein's Theories of Relativity (the first was published in 1905). This phenomenon means that we can move through time at a variable rate, although still only in the forward direction. So we could "time travel" in the forward direction, ie. move 100 years in the future while only aging five years. But this isn't anything too special, as we could always undergo cryogenic stasis and hope that our descendants would still be around to revive us.

I mean, when it comes down to it, 90% of modern day physics is belief in unseen substances (dark matter/energy), and that seems a tad far-fetched to me

This is a bit of nebulous statement, primarily because I don't know your definition of unseen, but I'll try to discuss as best I can.

In Chemistry, it's all based upon the idea of atoms which cannot be seen directly, but we can observe them by using tools like electron microscopes. The Theories of Relativity gave us the concept of Space-Time, and while we can't see it we can use a model for explaining how gravity works. Photons also cannot be seen (we can see light, but we can't actually see individual photons) yet they help explain ideas like the Photoelectric Effect. Humans have a lot of limitations so we can't directly "see" a lot of things (like magnetism which some birds can sense) but we can use tools to observe them or detect indirect phenomena.

Dark Matter came into the forefront of physics with the observation of the galaxy Andromeda and how it seemed to defy the current theory of gravity. Faced with the choice to either modify the theory of gravity (which had been very well tested, at least in our solar system) or try to "add" more mass to the Andromeda galaxy, they eventually settled on the second. Initially the theories were that the matter was just unseen; in our own solar system we are still discovering new asteroids in the Asteroid Belt to this very day because they're either very small or covered in carbon dust and don't reflect a lot of light. What happened after that was basically putting forth a lot of explanations as to what could be causing the additional mass (black holes, brown dwarfs which could be seen but just don't emit a lot of light, planets, asteroids, comets, etc.) and each were rejected in turn because none of them could account for all the missing mass. Dark Matter is just the label physicists have tossed on this unknown substance to explain something they currently can't, and maybe it will turn out to be something simple like alien spaceships; we just don't know yet.


Getting back to time travel, I'm pretty certain we can do it in a forward direction as we've observed it happening. There are theories for how to travel backwards in time but they use theoretically things like wormholes, so that science is a little too unproven for my taste.

I'd love to continue discussing Physics and the like, however I would personally prefer to stay away from things like time travel as it will probably be a long time before we can really test a lot of our theories about how it would work.

[kivipää]

Me and my firend here at the University have been pondering things loosely affiliated to this for a hew months now. I don't like to write that much, so I'll try to keep it short.

Normally, physical variables like distance, energy and the like have been considered to be continuous. me and my firend, however, made an assumption that there's a smallest possible unit of energy possible based on estimates we made about radiation. This would lead to energy not being a continuous variable, and all integrating would simply be rough approximations. We also know that matter consists of particels consisting of smaller particles and so forth. We're going to assume that there's an end to this, and there's a smallest possible object possible that cannot be split apart, simply because there's no structure of any kind to break to actually make it split.
Taking these two things into consideration, moving mass takes energy. If we have a minimum possible for both energy and mass, we have a minimum movement distance possible, making the space itself not continuous. ANd from here on, examining formulas of modern physics with our non-continous space and energy, everything falls like a row of dominos and we end up in to the conclusion that all variables are non-continous, including time.
As you propably have already realised, this makes our standard time-distance graph look slightly different. And though it was hard to find any evidence about that we might actually be on to something, with non-continous variables the calculations about the charge of the core of an electron suddenly make sense.
This also leads to all kinds of fun things, like for example all movement is happening via tunneling, an so is our movement in time. The whole universe seems to be a colossal, multidimensional movie with rather impressive fps.

DO note that while I am talking about me and my friend, I'm more on the assistant side of the things and have sometimes trouble to follow his thought, although he says that once I understand the gibberish he's spewing at me I have an unreal talent to describe it in the simplest of ways, and that alone saves him possibly weeks of thought.
Also, my neighbour threw an rather impressing party last night so I havent slept in 34 hours. (not counting 2,5 hours of being passed out as sleep) Thus if theres some stupidness or a major flaw or anything that doesn't make sense, it's propably mistake on my recall as the professors here are rather intrested in our theory.

Now then, how does this affect time travelling? Quite simple. if time is a dimension of space, just like depth or width, Universe warps from one moment of time to the next possible moment of time. You want to go backwards in time so you skip warping. You have traveled the minimum unit of time possivle to the past, but universe has not traveled there with you. It's in the next possible moment of time, and thus you are nowhere. There's not even vacuum there with you, as vacuum has energy, and all energy has moved to the next possible moment of time. Same problem with going forward. The universe is in a moment that we can call "now" and not anywhere else. Though since our eyes cannot perceive 4th dimension, you wouldn't really notice a difference. Only effect would be you being slightly younger than you should be.

[chndragon]

This thread is all kinds of win. Also the least expected.

[MincedPhrase]

This would lead to energy not being a continuous variable, and all integrating would simply be rough approximations.

There's actually a way to integrate involving discontinuous functions, the most famous example of which is probably the Dirac Delta function; it's integral is the Heaviside step function which is also discontinuous. From what I've learnt, you can integrate discontinuous functions but it's more complex than if they're continuous. If you're interested in how some of this is done, then you should look into Fourier transformations.

If we have a minimum possible for both energy and mass, we have a minimum movement distance possible, making the space itself not continuous.

I have to disagree with your conclusion here as I think it's slightly off. If there is a minimum amount of energy and mass, then there is a minimum distance that an object can move, but this limit actually goes to zero as the mass increases.

If we take the smallest amount of matter and move it using the smallest amount of energy, then we'll be able to move it one gillabub (some made up unit of measure for this problem; you can choose the next made up name if you don't like it). If we then double the mass of our object, we'll move it a smaller distance than before (probably half a gillabub or less, but it depends on what kind of potential energy function we're dealing with). In this way, we could keep increasing the mass of the object until it becomes infinite, at which point we can't move it any distance.

Now, maybe there's an upper bound on mass (something involving black holes?) but I don't know if that can be proven. I'd encourage you to go back over your conversations with your friend and see if you two can try to work around this issue; I'd really like to see what else you can come up with!

On the positive side, physics seems to be leaning towards the idea that everything is quantized: energy, mass, space, time, and all the other units that arise from those.

And though it was hard to find any evidence about that we might actually be on to something, with non-continous variables the calculations about the charge of the core of an electron suddenly make sense.

I only heard a bit about this mentioned in passing in one of my classes, and if you're going where I think you are, I think it would be very cool to hear more.

The whole universe seems to be a colossal, multidimensional movie with rather impressive fps.

I can't say for certain, but that statement seems to indicate that you believe that the past is fixed and that the future may be predetermined. Renara seemed to also indicate that the past cannot be changed so I'd like to ask two questions to both of you and anyone else:
1) Do you believe the past can be changed and why?
2) Do you believe the future can be changed and why?

As a side note, I like to think of the universe as a big computer that's running this reality, hence religious rituals could be thought of as cheat codes or bug exploits where you do a certain set of actions to receive a reward (if they work). Speaking of which, does anyone know how to summon Krystal?

[Renara]

1) Do you believe the past can be changed and why?

Because it's happened
It all depends on how exactly you define time, if you believe it's a thing that can be manipulated, then sure, you could go forwards and back and make a great big mess of everything, at least in theory. But I don't believe time can be manipulated; the universe itself is just a great big infinite space that is (or rather whose contents are) constantly changing from one unique state to the next, and time is simply a way to label each state and working meaningfully within them by considering one to be an hour behind another and so-on. The concept of time after all evolved from labelling night and day, and yearly cycles, same idea but on a smaller scale, as a result the whole thing is arbitrary as a way for us to measure things like speed and change in a meaningful way; as a measurement it is useful, but I don't believe it's a property of anything that can be changed.

Anyway, if you assume that time is just a label, then you could in theory still perform a type of time travel if you were not only able to accurately measure the state of the entire universe, then during a subsequent state restructure the entire universe such that you precisely reproduced the state that you measured before. It would be indistinguishable from the original state you were reproducing, so in effect would be the same as travelling backwards in time. Though aside from being a tremendous undertaking, you and any apparatus you produced to do it would cease to be as the atoms are returned to the measured locations, meaning that unless your reproduction was flawed it would be impossible to prevent events from playing out exactly as they did before. Even so, arguably you wouldn't be truly reverting the universe to a previous state, but producing a new state that happens to be identical.

It all gets very confusing to describe this notion of time though when by necessity I have to refer to things as being previous or before. To summarise though I do not believe that time is malleable, or the fourth dimension or whatever, I'm also unconvinced of the ideas of time relativity, which can be explained by other means.

2) Do you believe the future can be changed and why?

It'd be nice to believe yes. But I do think that ultimately even people behave in a predictable way; if you were to know everything that there is to know about the universe and everything in it, then you could accurately predict the future with 100% certainty. As to whether such a think is possible I find it unlikely, but ultimately things are playing out in a fixed way, even awareness of this and a will to change it would be predetermined.

As a side note, I like to think of the universe as a big computer that's running this reality, hence religious rituals could be thought of as cheat codes or bug exploits where you do a certain set of actions to receive a reward (if they work). Speaking of which, does anyone know how to summon Krystal?

Shut your eyes and tug on the joystick?

[Kalypso]

Maybe the whole 'space time continuum' theory doesn't really change/destroy anything. Time will always find it's way back to right here and right now. The prospective that time is based on a set of rules, formulas of the mathematical equivalent and sciences that aren't even factual had they been proven is pure theory--so is the possibility that the entire fabric of space itself could be torn apart in their own channel of time (had they been able to come back) upon tampering with the wrong item is pure ridiculousness. Because even if we were able to time travel, the point is that we would be readjusted somewhere else. You destroyed the sun in the Milky Way? Earth, the human race and civilization would find itself somewhere else in the same exact Galaxy in the same exact channel of time, and the entire universe would readjust, and there would still be no factual evidence of when the Earth was created--only, our Earth would cease to exist in the other galaxy, because a black hole would suck that Galaxy up, and it would be come some form of dark matter. No matter what happens, you can't change the present, because time will make itself the present. There is no rules, there is no formula--there is just time--and you can't stop anything from happening, because it was supposed to. That is destiny. But who amounts destiny to scientific fact?

Also, time travel forward is completely and totally possible. So is slow motion forward. There is no "going back" as of yet, but it is possible to change the makeup of your brain to perceive time in a slower or faster motion. This involves changing the perception of motion that your eyes and ears understand motion and sound.

[Smackman]

do the rules of time even apply outside our solar system?

[MincedPhrase]

The concept of time after all evolved from labelling night and day, and yearly cycles, same idea but on a smaller scale, as a result the whole thing is arbitrary as a way for us to measure things like speed and change in a meaningful way; as a measurement it is useful, but I don't believe it's a property of anything that can be changed.

That's always something that's troubled me as well: is time something we made up or does it actually exist? I haven't come to a really good answer, so I default to accepting that time works in formulas even if it may not "actually" exist.

I'm curious, what sort of an experiment or form of proof would be needed for you to believe that time was a real quantity like distance or energy?

...if you were to know everything that there is to know about the universe and everything in it, then you could accurately predict the future with 100% certainty.

Good old Newtonian Mechanics. I'm personally stuck with this theory feeling the most comfortable as I haven't been able to fully grasp Quantum Mechanics, and more specifically, Bell's Theorem (which proved that the universe is inherently random, at least if you only consider one universe).

You've previously stated that you don't believe in Quantum Mechanics or Relativity. Why is that, and what are your qualms with those theories?

There is no "going back" as of yet, but it is possible to change the makeup of your brain to perceive time in a slower or faster motion. This involves changing the perception of motion that your eyes and ears understand motion and sound.

Do you have any idea how one would do this? I've heard it a couple times in my life, but I haven't found a set of steps or documentation on how it's done.

do the rules of time even apply outside our solar system?

That's a pretty big question, and the best answer I can give is: from what we can tell, yes.

Imagine the universe as a large room and we're looking through the keyhole. There's a fire roaring on the far side, and we can see a table and desk next to it. There are also some papers on the table, but we can't make out any text. Occasionally there's a burst of flame from the fire and we see things more clearly (there seems to be a bookshelf against the right wall), but most of the time there's nothing new. Luckily, the owner of the room will come in and move things around, such as taking some of the papers and filing them in a cabinet on the left.

We've barely begun to send probes out pass Pluto, and we still don't know everything about our own solar system. We're orbiting one star amongst billions in the Milky way, which is one galaxy in billions. We really have such a limited amount of information that the best we can do is just try to get everything right for our little playground, the solar system. Maybe our descendants will be able to have spaceships and see things from inside the room, but unless something radical happens soon, we'll only get to view the universe from our little keyhole.

[Renara]

I'm curious, what sort of an experiment or form of proof would be needed for you to believe that time was a real quantity like distance or energy?

Probably nothing short of actual time-travel to be honest. Something like bringing from the future some object that doesn't exist yet, such as a device that's only in the design stages or some such.

You've previously stated that you don't believe in Quantum Mechanics or Relativity. Why is that, and what are your qualms with those theories?

I'll admit that my understanding of quantum physics is pretty limited, as my main exposure to it was in an elective class I did during my computer science degree which was basically just a bunch of major theories. Most other things I've read journals and stuff on but quantum physics is something I've never been able to read in more detail without immediately switching off (or being both simultaneously interested and/or bored ).

But the main example we got during that class for the basis of quantum mechanics was the old Schrodinger's cat experiment, where a beam of light is fired into a closed box containing a 50% reflective mirror; the beam has a 50% chance of either triggering a poison to kill the cat, or doing nothing (leaving it alive). But I've never considered that to be truly random, as the way I see it is that the light is reflected based on whether it bounces off-of (or is deflected by I think is more accurate?), or passes between, the atoms of the mirror. As the more reflective a surface is after all is dependent on what proportion of light colliding with it is deflected rather than passing through or being absorbed. But in effect, if you knew the exact spacing of the atoms in the 50% reflective mirror, and could calculate where exactly the beam hits and at what angle, then you could determine with 100% certainty whether it will pass through or reflect, so it doesn't really represent true random chance.

I'm fine with the other principles from which it arises though, such as the fixed (rather than arbitrary) electron orbits and so-on, though I believe that's covered in other areas of physics anyway. It's the supposed random chance element that I've never been convinced of. Things like uncertainty/probability are of course useful mathematically, as the sheer scale of information required otherwise is vast, but I find a theory based on uncertainty being true rather than just convenient a bit abhorrent

do the rules of time even apply outside our solar system?

That's a pretty big question, and the best answer I can give is: from what we can tell, yes.

I'd say so too given what I've already commented on. But obviously our current measurements are relative to Earth's orbital cycles, so applying them to other systems gets very confusing unless you do everything in seconds, minutes, and hours only.

[Sainiku]

But the main example we got during that class for the basis of quantum mechanics was the old Schrodinger's cat experiment, where a beam of light is fired into a closed box containing a 50% reflective mirror; the beam has a 50% chance of either triggering a poison to kill the cat, or doing nothing (leaving it alive). But I've never considered that to be truly random, as the way I see it is that the light is reflected based on whether it bounces off-of (or is deflected by I think is more accurate?), or passes between, the atoms of the mirror. As the more reflective a surface is after all is dependent on what proportion of light colliding with it is deflected rather than passing through or being absorbed. But in effect, if you knew the exact spacing of the atoms in the 50% reflective mirror, and could calculate where exactly the beam hits and at what angle, then you could determine with 100% certainty whether it will pass through or reflect, so it doesn't really represent true random chance.

I think you missed the point entirely. The point of Schrodinger's cat is to explain how uncertainty effects reality. How an uncertain event can be in two equally contradictory states at the same time, simply because we have not observed it, which makes it therefor uncertain. It is used to explain Superpositioning, when the cat is both dead and alive, satisfying all possibilities, because we have lost sight of it. When you actually open the box to check if the cat is alive or dead, it forces the cat to be in one particular state, and at that very moment the superposition disappears.

Superposition has been tested as well. Using a filament that is so dim that it emits single photons of light, an experiment was used that shot a single photon at a screen with 2 slits. On the other side was a detector, ready to catch it. With only one photon passing through the slits, you would expect a single point being detected on the other side. This however, was not the case. Even with a single photon, the result on the detecting screen came to be a pattern of light and dark stripes, as if that single photon had traveled through multiple trajectories at the same time, thus appearing to be in multiple states at once! The trajectory of photons defies all common sense and cannot be explained by classical laws of physics. That is where Superposition comes in.
This experiment was conceived by Thomas Young in 1799, but was not possible to test until the 20th century when we had the technology to do so. The experiment has been conducted many times with the same outcome, but sadly my book on quantum theory doesn't site a source. lol... i'll look up the experiment's official reports later.

[Renara]

That seems flawed as well though; as a photon is an arbitrary value for convenience (since not all wave formulae work correctly for light as a wave), so it's not a true particle. It's more likely that light is a load of currently immeasurably small particles that travel in a wave like trajectory or that have varying energy values (giving wave like readings), which is why it gives the appearance of being both a wave and a particle. Therefore your "one photon" could have split into a number of distinct beams of light to create the unusual reading.

[trunks2585]

shouldn't this thread be renamed and moved to general?