Ok, so, about this game thing…

If you look up into the night sky, just to the right of the bit that looks like a giant shopping cart, you’ll see a small blue star, called Sulis. Around it floats a stormy orange gas giant, and around that in turn swims a small moon, called Selene (until I come up with a nicer name).

Selene is gravitationally challenged by all that whirling mass and hence is warm, comparatively wet and volcanic. It’s a craggy, canyon-filled landscape, by sheer coincidence remarkably similar to northern Arizona. The thin atmosphere contains oxygen, but sadly also much SO2 and H2S, making it hostile to earthly life without a spacesuit. But life it does contain! Spectroscopic analysis and photography from two orbiters have confirmed this (never mind how the orbiters got there – work with me, guys!)

There are hints of many species, some sessile, some motile. And just a little circumstantial evidence that one of these species may be moderately intelligent and perhaps even has a social structure. Your mission, should you wish to pay me a few dollars for the privilege, is to mount an expedition to Selene and study its biology and ecosystems. If at all possible I’d also like you to attempt contact with this shadowy sentient life-form.

Nothing is known (well, ok, I know it because I’m God, but I’m not telling you) about Selene’s ecosystems, geology, climate or, in particular, its biology. What is the food web? How do these creatures behave? What’s their anatomy? What niches do they occupy? How does their biochemistry work? How do they reproduce? Do they have something similar to DNA or does a different principle hold sway? What’s the likely evolutionary history? For the more intelligent creatures, what can be learned of their psychology, neurology and social behavior? Do they have language? Can we communicate with them? Are they dangerous? How smart are they? Do they have a culture? Do they have myths; religion? What does it all tell us?

You need to work together to build an encyclopedia – like Wikipedia – containing the results of your experiments, your observations and conclusions, stories, tips for exploration and research, maps, drawings, photos and all the rest. It will be a massive (I hope!), collaborative, Open Science experiment in exobiology…

So that’s the gist of what I’m working on. I was going to open a pet store and sell imported aliens but I decided it would be much more fun to build a virtual world you can actually step into, instead of watching through the bars of a cage. I’ll try to develop a whole new, self-consistent but non-earthlike biology, building on some of the things I learned from Creatures and my Lucy robot. I’ll discuss some of the technical issues on this blog but I’ll try not to give the game away – the point of the exercise is to challenge people to do real science on these creatures and deduce/infer this stuff for themselves. They/you did it admirably for Creatures but in those days I couldn’t give you anything as complex and comprehensive as I can now, and this time I don’t have marketing people breathing down my neck telling me that nobody’s interested in science.

I have no idea what the actual features will be, or to what extent it’ll be networked, etc. I’m just starting work on the terrain system and I have an awful long way to go. Because I’m working unfunded and have only a limited amount of money to live on, I’m going to work the other way round to most people, so instead of working to a spec I’ll squeeze in as many features as I can before the cash runs out. I know it’s absurd to hope to do all this in the space of a year to 18 months – after all, how many programmers and artists worked on Spore? Something like a hundred? But I think I’m as well equipped for the job as anyone, I work far more efficiently on my own, and it’s worth the attempt.

Whaddaya think?

I refute it thus… Ouch!

Following on from the John Searle interview, Paul Almond and I have been having quite a lengthy discussion about what reality means. Usually I’m the extreme one because of my argument that some things that exist only in computers are just as real as those that exist in the so-called physical world, but this time I seem to be the moderate (or reactionary?) one because Paul believes everything is real and his office chair is Albert Einstein (well, sort of, anyway). If you’re interested, the conversation is over at Machines Like Us.

Mystic Pizza

Norm Nason and Paul Almond, over at Machines Like Us, have managed to pull quite a coup and conduct a long and fascinating interview with the philosopher John Searle, on his Chinese Room argument and others.

As anyone who’s read my books may have surmised, I don’t agree with all of Searle’s arguments and I don’t share his disbelief in the possibility of Strong AI (even though I doubt very much that a digital computer is a practical medium for such a thing, long-term). But rather than discuss it here I’ve posted a long comment on the original site. It’s too big a subject to tackle in a blog post really, let alone a comment to one, so maybe I’ll have to write another book. I can’t make up my mind whether I next want to write a book called “Machines like us” (Norm borrowed the title for his site from one of my talks), about mechanism and the human condition, or whether to write one about “Un-physics” – a more general elucidation of a process-oriented view of nature, the behavior of complex feedback systems and self-organization. Does anyone care either way? I don’t suppose so.

Anyway, Paul’s excellent interview with John Searle can be found here, and my somewhat inept and hurried attempts to put forward an alternative view are here. Enjoy.

Bumpy landings for nerds everywhere

I just heard that Microsoft has shut down its Flight Simulator dev team, Aces Studio. It’s not clear whether this is really the end of Flightsim or just a reorganization, but hell! I’d much rather they’d kept Flightsim and shut down Windows.

I don’t do that sort of thing now – at the age of 51 I’ve sort of grown out of it. Kinda. Mostly. But I’ve had every version of FS from V1 to X and loved them all. There are two things about computers that I deeply adore: artificial intelligence and virtual worlds (and even my approach to AI involves virtual worlds in at least three fundamental ways). I love the way we can program a computer to contain a space - a place with its own history and reality for us to explore. And nothing exemplifies that better than Flightsim.

The Flightsim world is just there. There’s no Yerhafters (as in “first yerhafter shoot the troll, then yerhafter say the magic charm”). There’s just a world, scenery to look at, airports to crash into and planes to learn to fly. And it did teach me to fly – after a few years’ practice with FS1 and FS2 it was pretty easy to get my pilot’s licence. I love the way you can make your own challenges, or just freewheel in the clouds. It’s like the way Lego used to be before the human attention span dropped to zero and Lego had to start selling little specialized packs with instructions, because nobody had an imagination any more.

I have such fond memories of the first Flightsim: taking off from Chicago Meigs, or passing over exotic sounding places like Snohomish and Everett. I swear it got colder as I flew north. Of course, less imaginative people could only see a few wireframe boxes in magenta and cyan, surrounding a couple of converging lines. But I knew I was on final approach into Sea-tac on minimums and if I screwed it up it was seriously going to hurt.

And then as the scenery got better and the aircraft more sophisticated, I used to love to step out of real life and go visit somewhere new. I saw India long before I went there for real. I’ve travelled up the Nile, buzzed the Hong Kong skyline and visited a hundred places I’ve not yet been to in this world but will one day. Thank heavens Google Earth is there to fill that gap. It even has a flightsim mode, but nothing to compare with spooling up a couple of Rolls-Royce engines and setting the navs for a night flight to Rome. 

I’m sure there will be bigger, better flightsims to come, maybe even from Microsoft, but it certainly seems like the end of an era.