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I don't get what it is you are wanting to describe. Do you mean a rational multiplier less than or equal to one? This would include a floating point number.

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

A rational number can always be expressed as a ratio of two integers. But I don't require that abstruce fact. In computers, all numbers happen to be rational numbers. But I'm considering ALL numbers in the range 0 to 1 inclusive, even irrational ones, as the abstract concept.

I represent a player's skill as a number from 0 to 1, let's call this a Portion. 0 is the lowest possible value, and 1 is the highest. It represents what portion of the maximum skill the player has achieved. For the 'walking' skill, 0 might map to 3 kph and 1 might map to 15 kph, so this range is abstract and used for it's mathematical properties. When a player skills up from Portion(0.1), the formula for skilling up is to take the skill that they don't have: (1 - 0.1) (the "deficit"), and multiply this by the skill up amount (e.g. 0.003), then add the product to their current skill. skill += (1-skill) * increase. In this way, as players advance, they skill up slower and slower and can never exceed the maximum skill of 1.0. Multiple things in my game use this kind of math, skills, skill increases, etc, so it needed a type, and I found naming that type to be the hardest naming problem I have yet encountered.

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Brunswick 1y ago

A floating point can only represent a rational number. Why do you want to include irrational numbers?

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

I'm talking about a concept, and an accurate and correct word that describes the concept. I'm not sure why you are derailing the train to try to get me to talk about a different concept.

There IS A CONCEPT of all the numbers from 0 to 1, a very special interval with special properties. And we have no word for it, even though it comes up again and again. People have locked into divisions-of-100 (which is antiquated and should be retired entirely), people have locked into rational vs irrational (which is totally unrelated to the concept of this interval). I'm entirely unconvinced that your line of reasoning is moving towards the answer to my question.

Brunswick 1y ago

I was under the impression you wanted to know what to name a variable. I happen to have the same question if that is the case.

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

I always want to name a variable (or type) accurately after it's actual purpose, so that I don't confuse myself when I read it back later. I would be confused if the variable name lead me to think about irrational numbers.

But I'm not writing the game now. I was just reminded of this by PABLO's post when he mentioned "FRACTIONS".

Brunswick 1y ago

An irrational number can only be represented by a computer in an abstract form (obviously) so if all youre doing is multiplication, division, addition and subtraction and nothing to do with logarithms, roots, or an operation with pi or e, theres no reason to consider irrational numbers. I understand you want a name that represents any number from 0 to 1, which technically is an infinite set including irrational and infinitesimals, but it appears this name doesent exist. I would call it something like a positive subunitary proportion.

Brunswick 1y ago

It appears there is a new SI unit to deal with this problem. The unit is called "Uno". Not sure if this is something that is compatible with your issue.

https://archive.iupap.org/commissions/interunion/iu14/ga-99.html

david 1y ago

What name did you settle upon? The difficulty, I suppose, is that you never know whether the meaning you’re intending to convey with your name is the meaning that other people will interpret.

Ambiguity of meaning will always be a prominent aspect of any decentralized language, like English. It’s a feature as well as a bug.

Example: when you say ALL NUMBERS, does that mean all real numbers? Or does it mean all surreal numbers, which (if I understand correctly) includes values that are not contained in the reals? btw the surreals were devised by Conway when he, like you, was researching a game! (Go in his case)

david 1y ago

btw the method you’re using to calculate your player’s skill seems similar to Dedekind’s method for creating real numbers from rationals, or Knuth’s method for creating surreal numbers. Which I’d need to review to know if that makes any sense whatsoever. But first …

Time for my #100pushups!

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

Nobody cares about surreal numbers. I can't even tell if any of them are in the interval. Real numbers.