Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Fayrik]

I really should learn to stop responding to threads like this. I'm sure I'll learn one day.
Today is not that day.

quCPUs will not act anything like a Multi-Core machine.
Multi-Core CPUs don't act as a single processing unit. The clue is in the name. Dwarf Fortress can be used on Multi-Core computers - in fact, the option is already there.
[PRINT_MODE:2DASYNC] will seperate the graphics frames and game frames, resulting in a slight performance increase. Yes, a slight performance increase.
It's a cold hard fact that multi-core processors will only speed up multi-threaded programs, which DF by nature cannot do. Most of processing power is taken up with (I believe) path finding. Path finding is a single task, and is impossible to mutli-thread, so multi-threading DF would cause more problems, and would offer an absolute minimum benefit.
I'm personally content with the fact DF runs on just one of my cores. That saves one for Stonesense, one for my music player, and one for my web browser.

Quantum computers though, will be able to process a single task faster. The processor may be in a different architecture though, which really is a whole new can of worms - we'll just leave that as it won't even run Windows, Mac, and for a short while, Linux. Let alone DF.
But, in a hypothetical situation, a quCPU would run DF faster. It's a long way off yet though.

[UberNube]

First, I should point out that I'm far from an expert on quantum computers, and Wikipedia is not the most reliable source.

Anyway, as far as I can tell from reading the wikipedia article on quantum computers, they won't actually speed up games and stuff that much. They simply allow for a few more tricks to be used when creating algorithms. Effectively, this means that some very specific tasks will be done much, much faster (such as breaking encryption), but the majority of tasks will see very little speed up. Of course we might see someone find a very efficient quantum path-finding algorithm or a quantum sorting algorithm which would speed up DF considerably, but even if that happens we shouldn't get our hopes up.

A quantum computer could probably run existing software, but I'm fairly sure it wouldn't run significantly faster without completely rewriting the code. It's like trying to port a very early 3D game to a modern PC. You might get it to run, but it sure as hell won't take advantage of your shiny new graphics card. If we ever see DF running on a quantum computer, don't expect miracles unless Toady seriously overhauls large chunks of the core code to take advantage of the architecture.


Then again, I've looked a bit at a quantum algorithm (shor's algorithm) and it looks nothing like current algorithms. I'm really not sure that a quantum computer wouldn't require a complete rewrite (although someone would probably make a q-compiler for c++ which would simplify things).

[Aerval]

Sorry guys, but don't expect that DF ever running on a quantum computer and even if, don't expect it to be that fast. As stated before, a quantum cpu is total different to a normal cpu and df won't work.
For comparison, you may have heard about the new windows 8 and its compability to ARM - cpus. They had to rewrite the whole OS for it. This will be needed for other applications as well. But the difference between the ARM - cpu and a normal x86-cpu is much smaller than compared to a quantum cpu.

One thing we might hope for are material optimizations for todays cpus. It is said that a graphene cpu might work about 30 times faster than the ones from silicium. This could speed up every single core. (But it's still all in development so nobody knows for sure)

[GreatWyrmGold]

And, of course, as computers increase their speed, DF will increase its complexity, so FPS will be relevant, barring a plateau of complexity or an unforseen boost in computing power.

[Symmetry]

Quantum computing would run the pathfinding in DF extremely fast, but current designs (sort of) require a new computer for each problem so you'd have to build a new quantum computer for each frame.

[MagmaMcFry]

I just read the article and thought wtf?

In the article it says that they managed to simulate a quantum computer on a quantum computer.

How the hell is that even remotely helpful?

[Sizik]

I just read the article and thought wtf?

In the article it says that they managed to simulate a quantum computer on a quantum computer.

How the hell is that even remotely helpful?

They simulated a quantum system, not a quantum computer.

[MagmaMcFry]

Your point being...?

[Dienes]

It's a cold hard fact that multi-core processors will only speed up multi-threaded programs, which DF by nature cannot do. Most of processing power is taken up with (I believe) path finding. Path finding is a single task, and is impossible to mutli-thread, so multi-threading DF would cause more problems, and would offer an absolute minimum benefit.

Quantum computers though, will be able to process a single task faster. The processor may be in a different architecture though, which really is a whole new can of worms - we'll just leave that as it won't even run Windows, Mac, and for a short while, Linux. Let alone DF.
But, in a hypothetical situation, a quCPU would run DF faster. It's a long way off yet though.

Pathfinding in a game like DF is actually a great candidate for mutithreading. It is a single task per unit. Each unit reads from shared memory (the game world) but only writes to private memory (its own path). If each unit gets a thread they can be divided between all available cores seeing a speedup for total pathfinding time proportional to the number of cores. Depending on how actions by different units in the same tick is resolved now toady may need to add some minor checks to keep it the same, but the total time would still be faster for people with multi-core processors.

Second quantum computers may not be faster in the clock speed sense so when running a classical program they could be much slower than our computers now. What quantum computers can do is solve specific kinds of problems in far fewer steps than is possible on classical computers. For example factoring a 768 bit number took researchers 10^20 steps (100 billion billion) where a quantum computer would take about 1 million steps. So even if each step took 100 times as long on a quantum computer it could still solve that problem a 1000 billion times faster than a classical computer. But to get that kind of speed increase it needs to be the right kind of problem and it needs to be rewritten as a quantum algorithm.

[Laurin]

When DF 1.0 comes out, we may all have computers holodecks able to run it!

 

Dwarf Fortress: using Virtual Reality to display ASCII.

I suppose it would look like the beautiful 3D rendered ASCII art that some people have made for ADOM:
http://www.adom.de/adom/gallery.php3

 

[Max White]

Dwarf fortress: Yea, you read that right.

[Malarauko]

All the technical crap aside i'm looking forward to being able to build MULTIPLE magma weapons.