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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • It works but you do it twice when you could do it once

    But I expect anyone who’s programmed some pathfinding before to, at the minimum, be able to say “run A* twice”. Somehow AIs never understand the prompt well enough

    I think the best option is to make sure to have ‘sorted’ the calls to the fire tiles, you can do that by having them in a separate grid or just stash them to a small local array on stack when you encounter them, and investigate those at the end of the loop

    If there’s no result that’s been found under the cost limit without the fire at each point of the algorithm, you do do the recursive calls for the fire as well, and you flag your result as “has fire in it” for the caller on top

    When getting a result from your several recursive calls, you take the best non-fire result that’s under 15 tiles long, else you take the best result period

    Then once you’re back to the top level call, if there was a non-fire path you will get that result, if there wasn’t you will get that instead


  • I’ve had 100% failure rate on simple requirements that require a simple spin on well known solutions

    “Make a pathfinding function for a 2d grid” - fine

    “Make a pathfinding function for a 2d grid, but we can only move 15 cells at a time” - fails on lesser models, it keeps clinging to pulling you the same A* as the first one

    “Make a pathfinding function for a 2d grid, but we can only move 15 cells at a time, also, some cells are on fire and must be avoided if possible, but if there is no other path possible then you’re allowed to use fire cells as fallback” - Never works

    There for that last one, none of the models give a solution that fits the very simple requirement. It will either always avoid fire or give fire a higher cost, which is not at all a fitting solution

    High costs means if you’ve got a path that’s 15 tiles long without fire, but way shorter with fire, then sure, some fire is fine! And if you could walk 15 tiles and go to your destination but need to walk on 1 fire, then it will count that as 15-something and that’s too long.

    Except no, that’s not what you asked.

    If you try and tell it that, gpt4 flip flops between avoiding fire and touching the price of tiles

    It fails because all the literature on pathfinding talks about is the default approach, and cost heuristic functions. That won’t cut it here, you have to touch the meat of the algorithm and no one ever covers that (because that’s just programming, it depends on what you need to do there are infinite ways you could do it, to fit infinite business requirements)






  • Any advanced user will face dozens of hoops a month on Linux

    It’s never the simple things, nor the very difficult things. It’s small, niche workflows & use cases of your computer that you “sometimes” do, like, I don’t know, editing a PDF, installing shareX or an equivalent that can take a screenshot and upload it to imgur / run OCR on a part of your screen, running a Space Engineers server for your friends, running SSEEdit.exe to dump the contents of a potion overhaul mod in Skyrim and calculate which are the best ingredients to plant in your Skyrim greenhouse and garden for maximizing gold output.

    No need to look up ways to do any of those, I’ll get different ones next week, and then more the week after.

    You know, the millions of things that no one ever does except that guy in 2019 on StackExchange, but that you will have to do and then never again.