You've been logged out of GDC Vault since the maximum users allowed for this account has been reached. To access Members Only content on GDC Vault, please log out of GDC Vault from the computer which last accessed this account.

Click here to find out about GDC Vault Membership options for more users.

close

The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Math for Game Programmers: Solving Nintendo's CodinGame Challenge
Speaker(s): Mike Acton
Company Name(s): Insomniac Games
Track / Format: Programming

Did you know free users get access to 30% of content from the last 2 years?


Get your team full access to the most up to date GDC content

Overview: CodinGame is a site where coding puzzles are presented and you can solve them online for fun. One of the "Very Hard" puzzles is a Nintendo sponsored puzzle, which grabbed Mike's attention. Although he will walk through his specific solution, the solution itself isn't the point. He'll walk through his whole process from figuring out what the problem actually was, to researching a couple of finer math points, to optimizing the final result. It's a case study in process rather than a particular solution. He'll cover the initial data analysis to figure out the problem (and all the dead ends I went down that didn't produce fruit) and the various strategies for solving (and rediscovering some of the finer points of Knuth's work). Concretely, he'll also provide math background on polynomials, galois fields, polynomial factorization and the Berlekamp algorithm. He'll tie specific processes or approaches to other problems others are likely to encounter in games and tools (e.g. CRC) to ensure it's relevancy and to keep it from being just some solution to some random puzzle.

GDC 2017

Mike Acton

Insomniac Games

free content

Programming

Programming