Hi guys. Author here (one of them). I'm so happy that the paper got here on HN without us doing anything. This is a big thing for researchers. Normally our papers end up in a dark corner of internet.
This paper is a pre-print. We submit it to a workshop (GAS2022) and it is still in process of peer-review. So it will have many more changes until get accepted. Including some suggestions from here :D
Super cool to see the paper! Given that some of the authors are in Montreal (a large video game development hub), do you think you'd ever continue this path with primary research?
Yes absolutely. Some of the authors are in the field since mid 2000s. As for me, I'm about to finish my PhD and try my luck researching game development. The dream is to build a video game research lab. But that might take some time.
Well that's the thing... I haven't published anything yet. I don't even know which blogging platform I'll use. It's on my TODO list though so.. One day.
> But regardless of these details, software has two main qualities that give it this advantage in terms of preservation: It's interactive It's deterministic
No sure if we are talking of the same thing here but a
Software is deterministic, but the randomness in a Game makes it non-deterministic, even if the emulation is deterministic. See, for exampe, a loot in a dungeon crawler. It will be different everytime.
The randomness in games currently available boils down to picking from a set of very large numbers and executing a limited number of code paths. That is to say, there are no non-deterministic video games, because all outcomes must be programmed.
A problem that can crop up with emulators is a lack of random seed values between runs, leading to, for example, a dungeon crawler with the same loot every time.
This paper is a pre-print. We submit it to a workshop (GAS2022) and it is still in process of peer-review. So it will have many more changes until get accepted. Including some suggestions from here :D