Mathematics of Civilization V | Hacker News Reader

Mathematics of Civilization V

civilization.wikia.com

136 pointsjmstfv14 comments

Not as awesome as http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Personality_value or especially https://wiki.puella-magi.net/Population_dynamics IMO.

Wait what? I don't get the latter link about some anime. It is a manga/anime about magical girls, who eat witches, but when they grow up they become themselves witches??

Yes, thus perpetuating the cycle. _Madoka_ is a bit dark that way. (I'd suggest reading the WP entry on it, but it's a bit spoilery, and Madoka is widely considered one of the best anime of the past decade even for people uninterested in magical girl anime, so you might want to give it a shot without reading plot summaries.)

I love reading about the interesting guts of popular games. Thanks for sharing!

Also, Pokemon has a number of other interesting equations, specifically the capture formula.

I've always been curious about how the capture formula works. Especially since 100+ hours of my childhood has been focused strictly on trying over and over again to catch specific Pokémon.

And then there is the EVE Online "weapon tracking formula" figured out by players. http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Turret_Damage Supposedly the Devs referred to this when they had to make adjustments.

IMHO the author of this article needs to find out about MathJax (free BTW) -- it would have spared him those laborious math-related graphic image insertions as well as their contrast with the page background, and look better besides.

MathJax example page: http://arachnoid.com/NormalDistribution

Mathjax is indeed a great tool, but I don't think one can add a custom JavaScript library to a wikia page because it would be a massive XSS vulnerability.

> ... it would be a massive XSS vulnerability.

Yes, if the MathJax library were to be accessed remotely. This issue is finessed by having a local copy of the library. Since it's free, many sites host it locally (including mine).

But others including Reddit, which IMHO really needs this library also, won't host it, I think on the basis that it isn't used by enough people to justify linking it on every page. So there are definitely arguments against. Ideally it would be a selectable option on a page-by-page basis.

Is there an option for lazy loading? i.e., a lightwieght script that looks for delimited text and pulls in the rest of the library if needed?

> Is there an option for lazy loading?

I believe Apache can run user-defined scripts to perform this sort of thing -- in this case, look at a page's content and decide how to proceed. But high-volume sites don't like such things because it dramatically slows page loading.

I was thinking client-side:

    <script>if (document.body.innerHTML.match(...)) {load_script(https://...)}</script>

Why do you think it's labourious? It's just LaTeX -- see the source code for that page.

They just need to adjust the generated PNGs to have a transparent background.

> Why do you think it's labourious? It's just LaTeX -- see the source code for that page.

I wouldn't say "just LaTex", not in the way I mean when I use MathJax, in which case one can insert normal LaTeX in plain-text form, such as \begin{equation} (equation) \end{equation}, or $$(equation)$$, without requiring the use of special tags.

> They just need to adjust the generated PNGs to have a transparent background.

Yes, but apart from that they render rather badly and don't scale. But I know there are good arguments against loading a math processor for the possibility that there might be mathematical content in someone's page.

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