Pistons can only push rows of 12 blocks; the Game Boy screen is much wider than that. I can imagine building a system to push groups of 12 separately without any exposed mechanism when idle, but I think that is likely to be impossible.
You could divide the screen into rows 12 blocks wide, each powered by an array, with a 2 block gap. You put the arrays one level below the display level and push the blocks up (via sticky pistons) each turn. You’d still have to manually fill in the gaps, but that’s only 22 out of 160 lines.
You can combine the arrays like a big stair and only have a 1 block gap, but that requires some manual working of the pistons each turn (because you can’t hide the wiring). Not sure if it’s worth it. I’m 30% confident it can be automated without exposed wiring.
I have been thinking about a gapless way on-and-off over the last 2 days. I don’t have one yet, but I’m 70% confident I can figure one out without the help of the r/redstone hivemind in less than 50 hours of thinking. I’ve put building a working implementation on my Minecraft todo list. There’s no way this is impossible.
… and I’ve build a working prototype. Took about 3 hours to figure it out, 2 hours to get the wiring to work (first big redstone project), another 1-2 hours for the array and timing. It’s trivial to scale and can be easily extended to push in both directions. The whole mechanism is hidden. I think there is a delay of ~8 seconds per 12 blocks, so scrolling the gameboy screen should take ~1.5 minutes. I’m sure you can get this below 1 minute if you try.
Volunteer tasks? I wasn’t aware you (I’m assuming that means Less Wrong or SIAI) had any; perhaps you have a visibility problem?
Or maybe they’re just not as engaging as an open-ended engineering environment with no arbitrary entry requirements and no visible resource constraints. . .
Ok, I understand that SIAI wants more visibility, and that it needs volunteers, but “Perform Search Engine Optimization” (as per http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities ) is not the way to get there. What next, Nigerian scams ?
Ok, I understand that SIAI wants more visibility, and that it needs volunteers, but “Perform Search Engine Optimization” (as per http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities ) is not the way to get there. What next, Nigerian scams ?
SEO is rudimentary marketing. The analogy is absurd.
Especially in our case—we do so little SEO that all the low-hanging fruit for us is white-hat SEO, SEO which genuinely helps people like adding references to Wikipedia and whatnot.
Eh. SEO has a bad reputation among the general population, but from a business perspective it’s generally recognized as a necessity, if a somewhat distasteful one. SEO doesn’t just include throwing together garbage pages to fool Google. (I haven’t actually read the guides linked on that page, so can’t comment on them specifically.)
Given that they’re searching for volunteers, it makes more sense to appeal to the general population than to business people, doesn’t it? (As a non-business-person, certain practices in SEO sound to me much like Dark Arts, though they exploit misfeatures of search engines’ (rather than human minds’) algorithms.)
I wouldn’t say so. For one thing, there’s a substantial overlap between “business people” and “the general population,” especially the portion of the general population that’s likely to take volunteering for SIAI seriously in the first place.
A lot of “white hat” SEO is just a matter of making the connection between search engine algorithms and what’s actually being looked for. Appropriately tagging pages to associated them with relevant subjects, asking people who are genuinely fans of your site to link to it on their site, making yourself visible on the social web, etc. . .
I think there’s a difference between a). telling all your friends about a website, and linking to it from your Facebook page, and b). methodically visiting random blogs and social media sites, and inserting a link to the target website into every comment thread. Given that SIAI is asking for volunteers, I assume they mean the latter. Even if it’s an accepted business practice, doesn’t mean that it’s honest or fair. In fact, just recently I saw a bot doing the same thing on Less Wrong, and it’s gone now, so I assume it got banned...
I’ll repeat myself: There is a middle ground between those two extremes. Posting links at random is not an acceptable practice anywhere credible!
What is acceptable is setting up linking networks between associates and cooperating organizations, among other things. If you think SIAI is worth paying attention to, you can get a lot more done by mentioning it on your blog than by just bringing it up in conversations with your close friends occasionally.
Some exposed mechanism seems okay; it works for LCD displays (and some older ones had a pronounced screen-door effect). You could scale it up, but it is an unfortunate fact about Minecraft that mechanisms far away have no effect.
Pistons can only push rows of 12 blocks; the Game Boy screen is much wider than that. I can imagine building a system to push groups of 12 separately without any exposed mechanism when idle, but I think that is likely to be impossible.
You could divide the screen into rows 12 blocks wide, each powered by an array, with a 2 block gap. You put the arrays one level below the display level and push the blocks up (via sticky pistons) each turn. You’d still have to manually fill in the gaps, but that’s only 22 out of 160 lines.
You can combine the arrays like a big stair and only have a 1 block gap, but that requires some manual working of the pistons each turn (because you can’t hide the wiring). Not sure if it’s worth it. I’m 30% confident it can be automated without exposed wiring.
I have been thinking about a gapless way on-and-off over the last 2 days. I don’t have one yet, but I’m 70% confident I can figure one out without the help of the r/redstone hivemind in less than 50 hours of thinking. I’ve put building a working implementation on my Minecraft todo list. There’s no way this is impossible.
… and I’ve build a working prototype. Took about 3 hours to figure it out, 2 hours to get the wiring to work (first big redstone project), another 1-2 hours for the array and timing. It’s trivial to scale and can be easily extended to push in both directions. The whole mechanism is hidden. I think there is a delay of ~8 seconds per 12 blocks, so scrolling the gameboy screen should take ~1.5 minutes. I’m sure you can get this below 1 minute if you try.
Here’s the video. Here’s the save. Here’s a bunch of screenshots instead of a blueprint or explanation.
...why we can get people to do this but not our open volunteer tasks...
Volunteer tasks? I wasn’t aware you (I’m assuming that means Less Wrong or SIAI) had any; perhaps you have a visibility problem?
Or maybe they’re just not as engaging as an open-ended engineering environment with no arbitrary entry requirements and no visible resource constraints. . .
http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities Less engaging and visible, yes. I was going to quote http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_western/ back at Eliezer, but I don’t think he’s actually surprised, just lamenting the phenomenon.
Ok, I understand that SIAI wants more visibility, and that it needs volunteers, but “Perform Search Engine Optimization” (as per http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities ) is not the way to get there. What next, Nigerian scams ?
SEO is rudimentary marketing. The analogy is absurd.
Especially in our case—we do so little SEO that all the low-hanging fruit for us is white-hat SEO, SEO which genuinely helps people like adding references to Wikipedia and whatnot.
Eh. SEO has a bad reputation among the general population, but from a business perspective it’s generally recognized as a necessity, if a somewhat distasteful one. SEO doesn’t just include throwing together garbage pages to fool Google. (I haven’t actually read the guides linked on that page, so can’t comment on them specifically.)
Given that they’re searching for volunteers, it makes more sense to appeal to the general population than to business people, doesn’t it? (As a non-business-person, certain practices in SEO sound to me much like Dark Arts, though they exploit misfeatures of search engines’ (rather than human minds’) algorithms.)
I wouldn’t say so. For one thing, there’s a substantial overlap between “business people” and “the general population,” especially the portion of the general population that’s likely to take volunteering for SIAI seriously in the first place.
A lot of “white hat” SEO is just a matter of making the connection between search engine algorithms and what’s actually being looked for. Appropriately tagging pages to associated them with relevant subjects, asking people who are genuinely fans of your site to link to it on their site, making yourself visible on the social web, etc. . .
I think there’s a difference between a). telling all your friends about a website, and linking to it from your Facebook page, and b). methodically visiting random blogs and social media sites, and inserting a link to the target website into every comment thread. Given that SIAI is asking for volunteers, I assume they mean the latter. Even if it’s an accepted business practice, doesn’t mean that it’s honest or fair. In fact, just recently I saw a bot doing the same thing on Less Wrong, and it’s gone now, so I assume it got banned...
I’ll repeat myself: There is a middle ground between those two extremes. Posting links at random is not an acceptable practice anywhere credible!
What is acceptable is setting up linking networks between associates and cooperating organizations, among other things. If you think SIAI is worth paying attention to, you can get a lot more done by mentioning it on your blog than by just bringing it up in conversations with your close friends occasionally.
What effort have you applied to making your volunteer tasks this catchy and rewarding?
You didn’t get muflax to do this, he did it of his own accord.
Some exposed mechanism seems okay; it works for LCD displays (and some older ones had a pronounced screen-door effect). You could scale it up, but it is an unfortunate fact about Minecraft that mechanisms far away have no effect.