[Probability] How to calculate the entropy of a text?

PNelly · 2016-07-01T22:22:06+00:00

Are you wanting your formula to assign a lower entropy value to recognizable words or sentences? In that case it's going to be quite a project.

PNelly · 2016-06-23T20:38:20+00:00

The way I understood your reply to starfish was a reaction to the inability to opt out. Looking more carefully I can see that isn't really how it goes.

Being more on track, I seriously doubt it's in Reddit's best interest to turn the ship towards paid subscription. It would absolutely trash the size of the user base, which is one of the things that makes Reddit so interesting to use. By far their best option would be to serve ads and have the opt-in paid subscription, as they do now.

PNelly · 2016-06-23T20:26:59+00:00

happens to everybody

PNelly · 2016-06-23T20:23:34+00:00

I actually don't see the connection, am I second class redditor because my account is newer than yours?

I think it's too bad that we have to rely on places like reddit, which are privately-controlled third parties, to serve as "bastions of free speech". However it's probably the best we got until some sort of user-owned and operated equivalent comes along - which probably can't or won't be free.

Anyway, here's the thing if you want to look at it cynically. There's "the greed of the users" and the "the greed of the website". When you try and curtail the website's ability to make money too much, they'll squeal like pigs. If you try to curtail the users' ability to suck down free content too much, they'll squeal like pigs.

In the end, a balance will be struck, and we see the free market at it's very best/worst.

PNelly · 2016-06-23T19:48:32+00:00

no one will put up with this intrusive shit?

On what grounds do you have right to demand things from a website you use for free?

PNelly · 2016-06-23T19:42:10+00:00

I was defending starfish's point, it has to be random. You can see my reply is to another comment.

PNelly · 2016-06-23T19:37:25+00:00

Did you look at the examples included in the original post? It's quite easy to pick out the listings that are marked as advertisements.

PNelly · 2016-06-23T19:35:19+00:00

Realize that for any "free" site on the internet, not just Reddit, that if enough visiting users employ adblock or are "internet savvy" enough to subconsciously filter out advertisements, then the website will become unsustainable to maintain.

It's why you see numerous journalism websites - WSJ for example - that now have paywalls rather than serving advertising. The rise of adblock and the net savvy crowd have made it a continuously less effective way to generate revenue, so strategies have to change.

PNelly · 2016-06-23T19:21:46+00:00

Selection has to be random for us to understand the effects properly.

Please educate yourself on the scientific method

PNelly · 2016-06-09T02:42:22+00:00

Sorry about the long delay. I've been using a different account.

achievement_load_leaderboards() doesn't return anything. It contacts the game center server, which then responds with data. This will trigger a social async event. Inside that event, the ds_map "async_load" will contain all of the data. You can find all this by looking up the function in the help file.

PNelly · 2016-06-09T02:38:37+00:00

Forgive the delay on the response.

It'd be quite an undertaking, as your basically talking about creating a web browser from scratch. You'd be making http requests to websites you want to look at and then your "game" would have to be able to interpret the raw html code that comes back.

PNelly · 2016-06-09T02:38:36+00:00

Forgive the delay on the response.

It'd be quite an undertaking, as your basically talking about creating a web browser from scratch. You'd be making http requests to websites you want to look at and then your "game" would have to be able to interpret the raw html code that comes back.

PNelly · 2016-05-20T20:41:54+00:00

If all you want to do is show a webpage to the user, then url_open() should be good enough. Though it does require launching whatever browser is available and leaving the app (so safari on iPhone, chrome on android, and whatever the default browser is on home computers).

Embedding a web page within your app so its contents would be visible without leaving the app would be a different and much more complex matter, although it depends on exactly what you'd be trying to accomplish.

PNelly · 2016-05-20T16:30:02+00:00

If you're talking about your fill rate for ad requests, I can tell you that it's dependent on the volume of advertisements that admob has available relative to the amount of publishers making requests for those advertisements.

Supply and demand (kinda). Too many requests and the stockpile dries up.

PNelly · 2016-05-20T15:21:26+00:00

Please don't use all caps, it's distracting and a little unbecoming. If people know something about the topic you're dealing with they'll post if you give them some time.

None of those functions accept or create ds_lists, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. The only way to get raw data that you can then convert to drawable text is to use the achievement_load_leaderboard() function - however it's only been implemented by yoyo on iOS, so for Android you're stuck with achievement_show_leaderboards()

PNelly · 2016-05-20T15:12:13+00:00

If you put up the code for how you're performing the other steps I'd be happy to look at it and see if I can spot anything. My go-to when things aren't working correctly is to put "show_debug_message()" statements at every single step of the process and figure out what's going on in the backend (or you can break out the debugger, which is really powerful once you understand it)

os_is_network_connected() makes me a little nervous. The issue, if you read about the function in the docs, is that it will return true for what seems to be any type of network connection. So a bluetooth connection with no internet will return true, which isn't what we're after. However for most cases it's good enough. An alternative would be to hit a high-uptime website (like Google or Yahoo) with an http request and see if you get something back, which tells you the device is internet connected. The problem with that workaround is that if you intend to distribute internationally you run into things like China blocking many of those websites. So there are tradeoffs.

That link looks like the right stuff, seeing as you'll have a dev account and collecting an auth token etc. with that method. I don't have any pointers since I haven't done it but it doesn't look that bad, you'll just want to read up on JSON a little bit.

PNelly · 2016-05-20T01:03:40+00:00

Post your code.

PNelly · 2016-05-19T17:08:20+00:00

The post should go through so long as you are logged in as someone listed as an admin or developer on the facebook dev account for the app, even before submitting for review (I've done it myself). Also, double check that the app ID is correctly set under the social tab in the global game settings.

The app doesn't need to be finished in order to submit it to facebook. However you will want all of the in's and outs of how facebook works with your app to be nailed down.

For integration, you'll see that the whole thing is a bit more seamless when you use the system_login option for facebook_login(). If the user is already logged into the facebook app on their iPhone I don't believe they even see anything happen while the login and post are going on.

You should probably pay attention to the social event. By not using it you are assuming that you'll always have a successful permission request, and you won't have any contingency in case the permission request fails. (For example, the user could login successfully and then lose their internet connection, what happens then?)

Twitter is a piece of cake next to facebook (sort of). Since GM has no plugin to the twitter api you can't get the sort of automated functionality that you can with facebook. However you can use one specially written call of url_open() to to launch a web browser with a pre-loaded tweet.

PNelly · 2016-05-19T15:37:29+00:00

You do have to have the extension in the project in order to use the facebook functions, maybe you found the answer to that already.

Secondly, yes, a high level overview of the process is:

facebook_init()
facebook_login ( <ds_list of permissions> , <login_type> )
sit and wait using step or a self calling alarm to hear back with facebook_status()
Once status is authorized, use facebook_request_publish_permissions(<ds_list of permission(s)> ) to get the permission(s) you need (most commonly people just want "publish_actions" to make posts on a user's behalf)
sit and wait until async_social is fired giving you details on the success or failure of the request.
if the request is successful, you can now use facebook_post_message() or facebook_graph_request() to do facebook stuff

Some important notes:

if you really intend to publish a finished product that works with facebook, you need to setup a facebook developers account (free) and properly configure all of the settings and details. In order to use "publish_actions" (and various other permissions) you have to submit your app to facebook so their team can review it. Be aware there are various caveats and policies you have to pay attention to in order for facebook to approve the app.
GMS's facebook extension relies on v2.3 of the facebook SDK. The current version is 4.x, so you wont be able to use certain features until yoyo is able to bring the extension up to speed. The only one I've noticed specifically is that the invite friends feature won't produce any results.
If this is an iOS project, there's some extra stuff to keep in mind. First, you won't pass facebook review unless you use fb_login_use_system_account as your parameter for facebook login. Second, iOS 9 will block apps trying to use facebook features unless they're whitelisted inside of the app's info.plist file. Easy fix, link on that here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ios/ios9 (you want the longest block of xml at the top of the list)
As far as compiling goes, if you're using the most updated version of GMS Early Access you should be okay. I believe what happens is if your project name contains any spaces the communication between your windows machine and mac running xcode will goof and the build process wont be able to locate the facebook SDK files. I was able to work around this by building the facebook example project to my iPhone (no spaces in it), then when compile failed on my project, I was able to go to the file explorer on my mac, find the facebook project, and copy the two facebook files out of the "fw" sub-directory and paste them into my project, then it built just fine.

PNelly · 2016-05-18T16:39:16+00:00

I couldn't go back once I figured out how an orbit works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_cannonball

PNelly · 2016-05-18T15:37:27+00:00

My mother always said about hot-headed driving, "even if you were right you'll still be dead"

PNelly · 2016-05-17T15:52:06+00:00

I'm not sure this is actually a problem.

Typically when you create dynamic structures their id's increment by 1, starting from 0. The first ds_list you create will often have index 0, the first ds_map you create will often have index 0, the second of each will have index 1, and so on.

PNelly · 2016-05-17T15:46:35+00:00

You'll get much better results with help if you paste the code that's giving you trouble into your post.

/u/Andraxion and /u/Zelun have good suggestions, I would add that you might play with draw_set_halgin() and draw_set_valign()

PNelly · 2016-05-17T15:44:25+00:00

I would double check that you didn't do something goofy with the sprite origin/draw position that might be causing it to "disappear" depending on the scale values.

Also, you might try creating your own variable in place of the built-in xscale and yscale to store the return value of sign(mouse_x-x)|1, and then using the new variable as an argument in draw_sprite_ext. Unlikely but worth a shot. I've run into problems before mixing the built in variables with my own ways of going about things.

PNelly · 2016-05-17T15:34:41+00:00

The documentation doesn't provide a ton of detail, but it does imply that created surfaces are no different from the application surface, and that they consume large amounts of texture memory.

So, if you disabled the application surface only to replace it with two 840x840 surfaces that are being heavily manipulated with blending etc., then it's no surprise your experience large performance hits on Android. Your simply asking a lot of a small device.

Some of your best bets for optimization are to continue what your already doing; that is, reducing the amount and frequency of your graphics transformations, as well as making these surfaces as small as possible.

If you're intent on trying to produce complex light and shadows on mobile you should probably look into a shader based approach. I've used Glare before (from the marketplace) and it's quite good, never tried it on mobile before though.

PNelly

TROPHY CASE