^According to my wiki-fu, chausses were sort of knee-high stockings made of mail.
There are two ways to achieve beard/artefact equality, and one would take _very_ long; i think you can expect about three artefacts per year. Once you go past 100, you might even run into the "revealed squares" limit. Blamelesscloister's numbers after 31 years are 94 beards, 78 mood-generated artefacts and 6 named items.
That'd be another way to boost artefact numbers - have a large military, set them up so that they get many item uses (constant training, constant battle), swap out named items for something new and let them go about naming.
I gave up on my "minecart stack memory" plans, which proved a good idea - there are some weirdnesses at work which prevent it from working at all the way i built it. Main problem was that carts started taking dozens of turns to fall onto a stack and could get wedged in place in the open air above a stack by following cart-propelled carts. Might be worth some later looking into, because stacks _could_ be a valid way to store fixed graphic data that could just get cycled through the display. I ran out of place for further tinkering in that fort and shelved it.
On the whole, my fiddling with a machine-/microcode teaching program was more interesting. For maximum insanity, i eventually ventured to build a factorial calculation programme that used as operations only "increase", "decrease", "test" (for zero, if true, skip next instruction), "jump" (unconditional) and "halt". Yeah, the program became kind of large. Every "copy the content of register a to register b" turned into thirteen lines of machine code and executed as eleven operations for every bit of information copied. I ended up with something between 80 and 90 lines, which'd overtax the typical architecture that'd work with such a restricted instruction set. And the program executed at about ten instructions per second, so getting done with the big test, 7!, took several hours of unsupervised running. At least i got rid of the final "multiply by one" step, which by itself would have more than doubled the time consumption. An optimised dwarven computer might conceivably be able to run three full instructions per day, ~1100 per year; my program should be able to calculate 5! in two and a half years, improvements for runtime efficiency could possibly lower it to two years flat. This could be done with a four-instruction computer (realising "halt" as "jump to last memory location" or somesuch) with seven-bit adress space. Someone wanna build it? Anybody?
Yeah, i think a bigger instruction set might be the better idea; if multiply or at least bit-shift were available, the number of operations would just melt away.
Author
Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6095571 times)