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John W. Ratcliff (born 1961) is a video game programmer and designer best known for creating 688 Attack Sub and SSN-21 Seawolf . [1] [2]
John Ratcliff began his career as a software developer writing educational software as well as computer programs supporting cardiovascular research at the St. Louis University Hospital. Together with John A. Obershelp in 1988 he developed the Ratcliff/Obershelp pattern-matching algorithm also known as Gestalt Pattern Matching to improve educational software. [3]
In conjunction with game publisher Electronic Arts in 1987, he helped create one of the first 256 color MCGA games, 688 Attack Sub . Several years later, he followed up with a sequel entitled SSN-21 Seawolf , and in 1997 released the game Scarab .
His most recent released title was as lead engine programmer for PlanetSide , published by Sony Online Entertainment. Ratcliff is also credited in Car & Driver (1992) and MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat (1995).
Ratcliff continues[ when? ] to be an active member of the game development community and has been a contributing author to such magazines as Dr. Dobb's Journal . In 2006, he worked for AGEIA, where his role was to provide open source tools and technology to facilitate the integration of physics into games. Ratcliff is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, with a focus on computer technology and algorithms.
Ratcliff also founded the discussion forums, which he called Atheist Apologetics Research Ministry in parody of Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM) and which, despite its name, did not promote atheism or any particular philosophy, but rather sought to allow greater latitude in discussions than did CARM's forums. He turned the forum over to another user in December 2006.
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
The Los Angeles class of submarines are nuclear-powered fast attack submarines (SSN) in service with the United States Navy. Also known as the 688 class after the hull number of lead vessel USS Los Angeles (SSN-688), 62 were built from 1972 to 1996, the latter 23 to an improved 688i standard. As of 2022, 26 of the Los Angeles class remain in commission — more than any other class in the world — and they account for more than half of the U.S. Navy's 50 fast attack submarines.
A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software.
Computer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. One well known subject classification system for computer science is the ACM Computing Classification System devised by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Systems programming, or system programming, is the activity of programming computer system software. The primary distinguishing characteristic of systems programming when compared to application programming is that application programming aims to produce software which provides services to the user directly, whereas systems programming aims to produce software and software platforms which provide services to other software, are performance constrained, or both.
A patch is a set of changes to a computer program or its supporting data designed to update, fix, or improve it. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, with such patches usually being called bugfixes or bug fixes. Patches are often written to improve the functionality, usability, or performance of a program. The majority of patches are provided by software vendors for operating system and application updates.
688 Attack Sub is a submarine simulator video game designed by John W. Ratcliff and Paul Grace and published in 1989 for MS-DOS and in 1990 for Amiga by Electronic Arts. A Sega Genesis version developed by MicroProse was released in 1991 by Sega.
Ironseed is a 1994 MS-DOS video game, developed and published by Channel 7. It is a space trading and combat game with real-time strategy elements.
An Internet bot, web robot, robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity on the Internet, such as messaging, on a large scale. An Internet bot plays the client role in a client–server model whereas the server role is usually played by web servers. Internet bots are able to perform tasks, that are simple and repetitive, much faster than a person could ever do. The most extensive use of bots is for web crawling, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers. More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots.
The Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM) is a nonprofit, nondenominational Protestant apologetics ministry with an internet and radio outreach. It is involved in evangelism, including full-time support for several foreign missionaries. It is based in the United States and was founded in 1995. Matthew Slick currently serves as president of the ministry. The ministry is registered as a 501(c)(3) organization and is headquartered in Nampa, Idaho.
Raphael Linus Levien is a software developer, a member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of Ghostscript. From 2007 until 2018, and from 2021 onwards, he was employed at Google. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He also made a computer-assisted proof system similar to Metamath: Ghilbert. In April 2016, Levien announced a text editor made as a "20% Project" : Xi.
SSN-21 Seawolf is a submarine simulator game designed by John W. Ratcliff and published for MS-DOS systems by Electronic Arts on April 3, 1994. A 3DO Interactive Multiplayer version was planned but never released.
In video games, artificial intelligence (AI) is used to generate responsive, adaptive or intelligent behaviors primarily in non-player characters (NPCs) similar to human-like intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been an integral part of video games since their inception in the 1950s. AI in video games is a distinct subfield and differs from academic AI. It serves to improve the game-player experience rather than machine learning or decision making. During the golden age of arcade video games the idea of AI opponents was largely popularized in the form of graduated difficulty levels, distinct movement patterns, and in-game events dependent on the player's input. Modern games often implement existing techniques such as pathfinding and decision trees to guide the actions of NPCs. AI is often used in mechanisms which are not immediately visible to the user, such as data mining and procedural-content generation.
In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated assets and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. In computer graphics, it is commonly used to create textures and 3D models. In video games, it is used to automatically create large amounts of content in a game. Depending on the implementation, advantages of procedural generation can include smaller file sizes, larger amounts of content, and randomness for less predictable gameplay. Procedural generation is a branch of media synthesis.
Brent "Buzzboy" Iverson is a programmer best known as a simulations game developer. Among his credits are the PC DOS version of Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, LHX Attack Chopper, and Jane's US Navy Fighters, all published by Electronic Arts.
Jane's 688(i) Hunter/Killer is a 1997 submarine simulator video game, developed by Sonalysts Inc. and published by Electronic Arts and more recently by Strategy First for Windows 95 compatible operating systems. It is named after the 688 (Improved) Los Angeles class of United States (SSN) submarine, and was a successor to the earlier game 688 Attack Sub. It's part of the Jane's Combat Simulations series. It was released on Valve's Steam content delivery service as well as DotEmu.
The Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award was an annual prize given to individuals who, in the opinion of the editors of Dr. Dobb's Journal, "made significant contributions to the advancement of software development." The Excellence in Programming Award includes a $1,000 prize that was donated in the award winner's name to a charity of the winner's choice. The award was launched in 1995 in the print edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal and was given each year until 2009. In his March 1995 article introducing the awards, then editor-in-chief Jonathan Erickson wrote that the award was intended to recognize "achievement and excellence in the field of computer programming." Erickson explained that the winners were "selected by a special editorial committee" of the magazine. Because Dr. Dobb's serves an audience of software developers, the Excellence in Programming Award is specifically intended to recognize resources for programmers: languages, code libraries, tutorial books, and so on. Developers of shrinkwrap software intended for retail sale, custom software for corporate use, embedded software, or general-purpose applications were not considered for the award.
The Wolfram Language is a general multi-paradigm programming language developed by Wolfram Research. It emphasizes symbolic computation, functional programming, and rule-based programming and can employ arbitrary structures and data. It is the programming language of the mathematical symbolic computation program Mathematica.
In computer science, the Krauss wildcard-matching algorithm is a pattern matching algorithm. Based on the wildcard syntax in common use, e.g. in the Microsoft Windows command-line interface, the algorithm provides a non-recursive mechanism for matching patterns in software applications, based on syntax simpler than that typically offered by regular expressions.
