A compendium repository to the Arrrrcamp 2013 presentation

Pirate Power Play: How to do computation by playing games

Every pirate likes to play games. Whether to pass the time during long sea voyages or entertain fellow pirates around the drinking table, games are a wonderful pastime. Unfortunately the captain does not always understand. Would it not be great to have a proper defense when the captain scolds you for idling away time? This talk will provide you with enough gun powder to counter any attack your captain launches on you for playing games on deck.

We will dive into the seven seas of computational complexity and discuss a uniform means of understanding them: games! We show that playing games corresponds to certain types of computations. And as every captain knows, before finding the treasure you have to compute where X marks the spot.

We will use ruby to demonstrate the correspondence between computations and games by creating specific games that perform certain computations and playing them life.

We use rvm to manage our ruby versions and gemsets. The project contains a .rvmrc file to change environment upon entering the working directory.

We use bundler to manage our dependencies. It can be installed with

gem install bundler

After that dependencies can be installed with the bundle install command. Note that it references the gemspec file.

We use rake to automate various tasks in the project.

We use rspec to specify the behaviour of our code.

rake spec

The command above will run all specifications. Quit incidentally this is the default task so it suffices to just run rake.

Want to know where I am working on? See the Trello board.