• Member Since 20th Mar, 2012
  • offline last seen 1 hour ago

Kelvin Shadewing


E

Equestria is a real, living, breathing world of peace and freedom... or so its inhabitants think. But a secret lies forgotten beyond its boundaries. How will a pony react when they discover they don't really exist?

[This story has nothing to do with the movie Source Code, which had nothing to do with actual source code, which this story does. Pinkie Pie knows what I mean.]

Chapters (2)
Comments ( 32 )

Well, here you go. Another story. Yup.

Anywho, the nerd in me wanted to write a story for other nerds. So I wrote one about Equestria being just a program. And yes, I got the idea while watching Tron. No, Alan will not physically go to Equestria, but he will communicate with the ponies at some point.

For those knowledgable in C++, feel free to nitpick the snippets of code I included. I know the code to writing a sim like this would be far more complex, but I only wanted to include enough fir readers to get the gist of what's going on. Besides, an entire chapter written in C++ would not only be boring, but likely against the rules. So don't take the code snippets too seriously. They're just samples of what Alan sees on screen.

Is Alan named after Turing?

I think you've managed to find an idea that hasn't ever been done. Congratulations.

Definitely reading this.

Interesting concept. But using an enum for the species seems questionable to me. Wouldn't it make more sense to use subclasses of a basic Equestrian superclass?

Also, you are just asking for trouble if you write a virtual world in C++ instead of a safer language like Java or C#. :twistnerd:

36,273 errors? How does one even get that many errors? Did he write the entire simulation in one go, failing to use any of a dozen good programming practices to make his life easier? And those are only the errors the compiler can catch. Run time errors are infinitely more devious, and based on the complexity of the simulation and his sloppy debugging process, I wouldn't be surprised to see them popping up frequently.

I'll track this, because there needs to be more programming-based stories. Also, because I want to see what happens when Equestria gets swallowed up in a segmentation fault or stack overflow. Or corruption of the call stack. I'll even settle for memory leaks and infinite loops. I wonder what that would be like from Celestia and Luna's point of view. They probably wouldn't even notice, losing any awareness of events that transpired since the last write to disk.

1417464 Dunno him. Sorry. I named him after Alan from Tron, since that's what inspired this story.

1417641 Because I know C++. And as this is just a fantasy story, I didn't wanna overwhelm the readers by including too many advanced codes. I just wanted to make it realistic enough that it would make some ammount of sense to non-programmers, unlike the bizzare jumble of code seen on Donatello's computer in Ninja Turtles 3.

1417646 The errors was just a joke. But yes, there will be glitches in the system. Partly for comedy, partly for plot.

1417646

36,273 errors? How does one even get that many errors?

He must be one of those die-hard vim users, or some other plain text edtitor, who doesn't believe in modern IDEs that can catch and highlight virtually all compile time errors in real time as you write code before they actually become compile time errors. "IDE? I don't need one of those new fangled things they call IDEs! I've got vim!" :rainbowwild:

Either that or he forgot to tell the linker where his libraries were located and they are all unsatisfied link errors.

1418613 Alan Turing? Father of modern computing and artificial intelligence? I mean, one of the key concepts of artificial intelligence is the idea that someday, a computer could pass a Turing test, imitating human behavior so perfectly that another human couldn't distinguish between human and machine. That's basically what Alan is doing here, creating a perfect AI. And from my research, it seems Dr. Alan Bradley, creator of Tron (the program), is a nod to the human-machine interface corporation Allen-Bradley (probably more fitting, as Tron was more about human-machine interaction [and freedom of information and viruses] than it was about artificial intelligence).

1418730 I use emacs, it doesn't catch errors as I type. Can't say I've ever gotten anywhere near 36,273 errors, though. Of course, I tend to compile every time I test a function, so it's not like there is enough new code to house 36,273 compile-time errors. And most compilers ignore duplicate errors. "Oh, 500 implicit declarations of strcmp? I'm go to save space and only mention it once." However, I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of those were "semicolon expected" errors. They're (usually) really easy to fix, but every time one pops up, it makes you feel like an idiot.

1420264 I used to use Emacs a lot. But I finally jumped on the Eclipse bandwagon. I still use Emacs a lot for fan fic writing though. Either that or jEdit. Lately I've been using jEdit a lot more because I simply started to get fed up with limitations in emacs (such as inability to support multiple modes in the same buffer), and the fact that I just got tired of having to remember an entirely non-standard set of keyboard shortcuts for just one program.

1420516 Writing fan fiction in emacs? I think you win most insane writer ever. And yeah, it is kinda ridiculous that emacs uses a different set of keyboard shortcuts. After a long night of programming, I had opened up Word to do some other work, only to try and save with C-x-C-s. It worked, but I felt silly. Although I do enjoy referring to cut-pasting as kill-yanking.

1420625 Emacs actually makes a great writing tool with flyspell mode and nxml mode. You might actually enjoy an article I wrote a while back. I'd be interested in your comments. Of course, leave the comments over there. Not here.

1413371
I don't know much about C++, but if it's the base class, wouldn't it be public?

1418730>>1420625>>1422072 Shut up about text editors. That is not the point of the story. Please continue your conversation in PM or IRC or anywhere that isn't someone's comment box.

1422087 You must be thinking of C#/Java. C++ uses a function call to main().

1423708
I was actually thinking of C#. Good to know.

Awsomesuace dude, best story yet! I look forward to seeing how this plays out.

Since this is taking forever, I'm gonna do something I've never done before: skip ahead. Next chapter will be set a bit further into the future.

Very intriguing.:pinkiesmile:

this would explain pinkie's reality breaking abilities she's glitching the system

Celestia fights for the user.

You have a fav just on the premise alone. Can't wait to see were this goes.

Seems pretty interesting so far.

Also, "Tell mom I said happy birthday!" I couldn't help but smirk at that. Its my mom's birthday today.

Ok, ill admit. This is interesting.:twilightsmile:

Oh also, i was wondering why you took down Transcendent Bonds. I thought it was a good series.:fluttercry:

This is always so awkward, but is the Nightmare Moon thing a viruse or someone hacking into it?
Oh how nerdy/geeky we are:facehoof:

Ew, 1TBS :fluttercry:

Only two chapters, and this has existed for over two years? :fluttershysad: *sigh* I guess the author got bored or something...

8794238
So, it is dead? Why not mark it cancelled, then?

8794901
An open project is never truly cancelled; it's just waiting for someone to fork it.

Login or register to comment