[FRIAM] [WedTech] Fwd: GMU CDS/CSS/CSI Colloquium, Friday 10/28, 3 PM: Rob Axtell: We Are NOT Living in a Simulation

[Stephen Guerin]

Hi Bruce!!

Your observation of a puzzle being at just the right level of
difficulty reminds me of this simple and elegant classic book for game
designers:

Raph Koster: Theory of Fun for Game Design
https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210
"Now in full color, the 10th anniversary edition of this classic book takes
you deep into the influences that underlie modern video games, and examines
the elements they share with traditional games such as checkers. At the
heart of his exploration, veteran game designer Raph Koster takes a close
look at the concept of fun and why it’s the most vital element in any game.

Why do some games become boring quickly, while others remain fun for years?
How do games serve as fundamental and powerful learning tools? Whether
you’re a game developer, dedicated gamer, or curious observer, this
illustrated, fully updated edition helps you understand what drives this
major cultural force, and inspires you to take it further.

You’ll discover that:

Games play into our innate ability to seek patterns and solve puzzles
Most successful games are built upon the same elements
Slightly more females than males now play games
Many games still teach primitive survival skills
Fictional dressing for modern games is more developed than the conceptual
elements
Truly creative designers seldom use other games for inspiration
Games are beginning to evolve beyond their prehistoric origins"


_______________________________________________________________________
Stephen.Guerin at Simtable.com <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
CEO, https://www.simtable.com <http://www.simtable.com/>
1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828


On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 8:39 PM Bruce Sherwood <bruce.sherwood at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Living in a simulation:
>
> During the 1990s Ruth and I greatly enjoyed games such as Myst, and we got
> to thinking about what made a good game in that genre. For us, it was that
> the 3D graphics should be beautiful, that the puzzles should be neither too
> difficult (and we gave up) nor too easy (boring), and that the puzzles
> should be organic to the game. Many games included such inauthentic
> elements as inserting a chess puzzle into a game where chess was utterly
> irrelevant. From these thoughts comes the observation that the 3D graphics
> of our world can be very beautiful indeed. What about the puzzles?
>
> My favorite example that may be taken as evidence that we are in a (very
> good) simulation is the puzzle of the "missing solar neutrinos". Quick
> summary: Some decades ago when physicists came to understand the fusion
> reactions in our Sun, they were able to calculate how many neutrinos would
> be produced in these reactions and, therefore, how many per day we should
> detect here on Earth. When the first measurements were made, by Ray Davis,
> only one-third of the predicted neutrino rate was observed. The theoretical
> physicist John Bahcall had made the prediction, and there's a lovely story
> of his expressing how depressed he was that he apparently had made a
> mistake in his calculations, but the physicist Richard Feynman  to his
> credit  consoled Bahcall by suggesting that maybe there was some
> interesting physics in the discrepancy.
>
>  Indeed there was some quite wonderful physics. It turned out that there
> are three different kinds of neutrinos, the ordinary "electron" neutrino,
> which is emitted in the Sun's fusion reactions, the "muon" neutrino emitted
> in the decay of the muon (which is very similar to the electron but a
> hundred times heavier), and the "tau" neutrino, involved in even more
> energetic particle events. Moreover, a neutrino in flight is actually a
> mixture of electron neutrino and muon neutrino, and there is in time an
> oscillation between being an electron neutrino and being a muon neutrino.
> This oscillation is such that an electron neutrino emitted from the Sun has
> about a 33% chance of being observed on Earth as an electron neutrino (and
> about a 67% chance of being observed as a muon neutrino). Davis's equipment
> was sensitive ONLY to electron neutrinos, which explains the "missing
> neutrinos".
>
>  1) Notice that if the Earth had been either somewhat closer to the Sun or
> somewhat farther away from the Sun, Davis could have seen the neutrino rate
> predicted by Bahcall and there would have been no puzzle. Smells like the
> game is well designed, rather like the seeming coincidence of the Moon just
> eclipsing the Sun.
>
>  2) The puzzle was VERY hard to solve, but not impossibly hard. It had
> just the right level of difficulty.
>
> 3) The puzzle was very much organic to our game.
>
>  These features of the puzzle suggest that we may be in a computer
> simulation written by a very good designer, one who knows how to pose good
> puzzles, puzzles that are organic to the game and at the right level of
> difficulty. All within a game that is also beautiful.
>
>  Bruce Sherwood
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