Spacegate
- Thread starter Veracity
- Start date
AlbinoRhino
Active member
You are sure one dedicated astronaut! 
There is no way I could have stuck with such an involved project as this like you have. Thanks for the updates.
There is no way I could have stuck with such an involved project as this like you have. Thanks for the updates.
My hope was that I could eventually reverse engineer how the planets are generated.
If we assume that the first letter designates difficulty, the remaining six letters allow 26**6 = 308,915,776 different planets at that difficulty. That is 28.2 bits of information.
If I wanted anomalous plants + anomalous animals at difficulty G, how many of those 308 million planets have both? It's not a common combination; the Wiki knows of none, but my database contains 6 examples, out of 2766 known planets. (152 of which are unvisited by me, yet, and hence unverified). That is .21%, so I'd expect to find more than 670,000 such planets at G difficulty. How many of those have no other life? How can I generate (a set of) coordinates to select such a planet?
Reverse Engineering is a daunting prospect, so I am continuing to collect data until I feel like trying some strategies.
I note that taltimir has, apparently, discovered a correlation between which hostile alien trophy is generated by hostile aliences with particular images (sgalienbX.gif):
spear: 1, 2
blowgun: 3,4
loincloth: 5,6
totem: 7,8
necklace: 9,10
So, that is two planet attributes which draw from the same part of the bitspace. There are only a handful of planets that have been publicly shared that contain trophies. Considering that we know planets for all 5 trophies, there is no competitive advantage to NOT sharing such coordinates, but I suspect that most people are not obsessing on Spacegate like I am. The fact that built in support for it into VMF probably accounts for some of those.
Reverse engineering will consist of saying "76 of the 2767 validated planets (and 5 of the 152 unvalidated planets) contain anomalous animals. What do all of those coordinates have in common?" Not sure how to do that, yet. If I generate a code from 0 to 26**6-1 (or 26**7-1), perhaps they are all divisible by XXXX? Or perhaps they all have bits X,Y,Z set?
If we assume that the first letter designates difficulty, the remaining six letters allow 26**6 = 308,915,776 different planets at that difficulty. That is 28.2 bits of information.
If I wanted anomalous plants + anomalous animals at difficulty G, how many of those 308 million planets have both? It's not a common combination; the Wiki knows of none, but my database contains 6 examples, out of 2766 known planets. (152 of which are unvisited by me, yet, and hence unverified). That is .21%, so I'd expect to find more than 670,000 such planets at G difficulty. How many of those have no other life? How can I generate (a set of) coordinates to select such a planet?
Reverse Engineering is a daunting prospect, so I am continuing to collect data until I feel like trying some strategies.
I note that taltimir has, apparently, discovered a correlation between which hostile alien trophy is generated by hostile aliences with particular images (sgalienbX.gif):
spear: 1, 2
blowgun: 3,4
loincloth: 5,6
totem: 7,8
necklace: 9,10
So, that is two planet attributes which draw from the same part of the bitspace. There are only a handful of planets that have been publicly shared that contain trophies. Considering that we know planets for all 5 trophies, there is no competitive advantage to NOT sharing such coordinates, but I suspect that most people are not obsessing on Spacegate like I am. The fact that built in support for it into VMF probably accounts for some of those.
Reverse engineering will consist of saying "76 of the 2767 validated planets (and 5 of the 152 unvalidated planets) contain anomalous animals. What do all of those coordinates have in common?" Not sure how to do that, yet. If I generate a code from 0 to 26**6-1 (or 26**7-1), perhaps they are all divisible by XXXX? Or perhaps they all have bits X,Y,Z set?
ASH has no problem handling numbers as small as 8 billion. Depending on the complexity of the algorithms, I wouldn't even need to code my experiments in Java - although I could certainly build in ASH Runtime support for prime factorization, if that would be useful.
AlbinoRhino
Active member
Quite an accomplishment! 2956 planets / 5 spacegates = 591.2 days! Wow.
Magus_Prime
Well-known member
I got my first trophy item recently thanks to this script! Thank you!
Magus_Prime
Well-known member
In 2021 I was able to get all of the primitive alien trophies, except the blowgun, courtesy of this script. Thank you!
One more to go.
One more to go.
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Sweet!
Did you specifically farm planets that were known to have the trophies?
I found them via visiting random planets, because I was trying to augment the database, but I was patient.
(Time to release an updated database; I've been exploring RANDOM every day with 4 multis - and with my main, when in aftercore.)
(Revision 301 has that.)
Did you specifically farm planets that were known to have the trophies?
I found them via visiting random planets, because I was trying to augment the database, but I was patient.
(Time to release an updated database; I've been exploring RANDOM every day with 4 multis - and with my main, when in aftercore.)
(Revision 301 has that.)
Magus_Prime
Well-known member
I have it set to try planets known to have trophies. Once I get the last one I'll set it to random. How close are you to your goal of completely exploring the possible range of planets?
Completely exploring? Ha ha ha!
Coordinates consist of 7 letters (A-Z). That means there are (26 ** 7) = 8,031,810,176 different planets.
I have visited 4,339 planets so far.
My original goal was to collect a sufficiently large sample that I could, perhaps, reverse engineer from coordinates into planet features, and then, from desired set of planet features into a set of coordinates that contain them. How many planets have both exotic animals and exotic plants, for example?
There are 8 billion planets. If 0.27% of the ones I have visited have both exotic animals and plants, that indicates there should be more than 22 million of them out there.
Considering that 8031810176 fits within an ASH int, I could certainly iterate over the set of known planets and do bit-wise operations looking for clues. For example, "all planets with hostile aliens have bits 1 and 13 set, and all with image sgalienb10.gif have bis 2 and 19 set".
I have no idea if it would be that simple.
Coordinates consist of 7 letters (A-Z). That means there are (26 ** 7) = 8,031,810,176 different planets.
I have visited 4,339 planets so far.
My original goal was to collect a sufficiently large sample that I could, perhaps, reverse engineer from coordinates into planet features, and then, from desired set of planet features into a set of coordinates that contain them. How many planets have both exotic animals and exotic plants, for example?
There are 8 billion planets. If 0.27% of the ones I have visited have both exotic animals and plants, that indicates there should be more than 22 million of them out there.
Considering that 8031810176 fits within an ASH int, I could certainly iterate over the set of known planets and do bit-wise operations looking for clues. For example, "all planets with hostile aliens have bits 1 and 13 set, and all with image sgalienb10.gif have bis 2 and 19 set".
I have no idea if it would be that simple.
StorellaDeville
Member
Thank you , Veracity! This is one of the many things that interest me that I have done nearly nothing with, so I'm grateful for all that you've done on this.
And a billion other things. One billion thanks. <3
And a billion other things. One billion thanks. <3