No Man's Sky is a new mmo (massive role playing computer game) that is still in development...I happened upon it reading a story about an archaeologist who had taken up the subject of the world of World of Warcraft, and other games, as an archaeological dig...seriously...which reminds me of a conversation while a docent cataloging seashells at Bower's Museum with a precocious visiting kid about just when something becomes a fossil...but that's an aside!...thought here is just what can be studied in the fashion of archaeology, and it would seem anything, and it doesn't have to be old, or fossilized!...but in reading the archaeology story, I stemmed off into the No Man's Sky story, and it has something that I thought of way back when I worked at Disney (maintenance deliveries)...I'm not a mathematician, but back then I was so taken with the books, and posters, coming out about fractal geometry, that my interest acquired a glimmering of how things can be random, and yet ordered, different yet the same, and I sent in an I Have An Idea idea that envisioned a Disney ride that would be different each time through, that algorithms could do that...and so they can!...one of the designers of this new game in this video link goes over how it works...the 'math'...he explains it very well, in a charming modest fashion...in one part he explains that where we see creatures and landscapes appearing as we move about, he sees the 'math'... there are pages in the book, The Power of Limits, that shows how different fish, their body shapes, are proportionally self similar, which is how the creatures in this game are morphed...and, and, there was an old mac computer game, The Blind Watch Maker, I think it was called, where one could morph a creature...there would be a grid of creatures somewhat alike in little boxes...the creature in the middle box was the start, and one would click on one of the other boxes...that creature would swap places with the middle box, and the new creature in the middle would combine elements of both...and so the game would go...in one portion of this video is just such a grid of creatures in boxes...apparently, the 'math' the algos, in very sophisticated fashion, make worlds inhabited with creatures, plants, buildings, and such, from a library of grid boxes...and a kind of role of the dice makes each realm/planet unique...
have a look:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ueBCC1PCf84"
And this term, 'procedural' is at the heart of the method...
quote
Procedural modeling is an umbrella term for a number of techniques in computer graphics to create 3D models and textures from sets of rules. L-Systems, fractals, and generative modeling are procedural modeling techniques since they apply algorithms for producing scenes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_modeling
unquote
oh...on another note, it's been difficult to sleep because of the heat, and I find myself looking up things on my iphone in the middle of the night...last night some John Oliver youtubes, one in particular, his interview of Stephan Hawking...don't know why, but my ears perked up when Hawking mentions 'imaginary time'...
quote
| “ | One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_time unquote Hawking's take on what is 'real', and what is 'imaginary' laps over my thinking about the archaeologist, and if digging World of Warcraft was a serious, 'real' pursuit...sometimes, sometimes, the everyday has a kind of wow look and feel to it...don't know but my brain is confusing the two!... quote And asked what keeps him awake at night, he replies: "If I have questions about the universe on my mind when I go to bed, I can't turn off. I dream equations all night." from interview of Stephan Hawking http://www.news.com.au/world/stephen-hawking-reveals-hes-often-mistaken-for-a-character-from-the-simpsons-and-that-he-dreams-equations/story-e6frfkyi-1225918794511 unquote Dreams, I'm thinking now, may be 'procedurally' generated...they blossom out of some thought or feeling we have that stimulates a rich library to make a dream for us...took a bit to find the two 'ls' in procedurally! editeditedit always |
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