If there was no government...

If the government just crashed, for whatever reason, and was unable to enforce any laws or provide any government services:

Obviously, crime would be on the rise. It would probably start with small crimes like theft. As people became used to the idea of crime, things would crawl their way up to murder.

The first and most important thing would be to group up with other people. Survival would be much easier in groups.

As the group grew, we would have to find some sort of place to base our operations. A school of some sort would probably be the best place to go. Schools have all of the infrastructure necessary to run a small group like that.

The group would start out as socialistic, with each person giving something to the group to help each other survive. The driving force behind capitalism is greed, so such a system would be too dangerous at first.

The two major focuses of the group at first would be:

• Building an effective defense system
• Finding sources of energy (eg. food, gas, solar power, etc.)

We could, in theory, simply rob stores for these things, but that could quickly become problematic.

The best way to go about this, at first, would be to find and defend various supermarkets. This is still robbing, but it's on a much larger scale. Eventually, however, we would have to find renewable sources of energy.

Once we have enough to support the growth of our group, we would have to start focusing on increasing the size of the group.

Diplomacy with other groups would be very important.

For example, one sort of diplomatic situation might go as follows:

• Some members of the group go to a supermarket which is controlled by another group.


• We ask if our leader can talk with the other group's leader.


• If they don't want us talking with their leader, then we'll just leave them alone and be done with it.


• If they let us, then we'll discuss merging groups. There would be innumerable advantages to merging: bigger is better, we can share, etc.


• If they like the idea of merging, then we merge.

If our group gets big enough, there will probably be other equally large groups. Then we can reinstitute capitalism, trade with other groups, and have wars with other groups.

Things will be back to normal :)

Polygon Collision Detection and Response

Hello.

To express my regret for not having posted recently, I'm going to explain my method of polygon collision detection and response.

It's quite simple really. For polygons described in a series of points and a single test point, here's a description of the algorithm I use to move that point the shortest distance outside the polygon:

• Assume the current closest point is infinitely far away.
• For every single line segment between the points:
  • Find the point closest to the test point on that segment. You can use whatever method you wish for this part. This part's just a little bit of vector calculus. Here's a hint: if the closest point is not one of the endpoints on the segment, the vector to it from the test point will be perpendicular to the segment.
  • If that point is closer to the test point then the current closest point, then it becomes the current closest point
• The current closest point is the fastest way out of the polygon.

There's a lot of math involved, but it's simple linear algebra and vector stuff. I'm sure you can figure it out.