On Slashdot they reviewed Robert Glass' book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. Fact 21 snagged by eye: "(f)or every 25% increase in problem complexity, there is a 100% increase in solution complexity." On BoingBoing they continued with the controversy of Wikipedia and whether a publically vetted (open source) knowledge base can be trusted. All this led to a few thoughts about scaling problems in future virtual worlds...
...Because of the Wikipedia controversy, Alex Halavais conducted an experiment: he deliberately introduced 13 errors into the Wikipedia only to find them corrected "within hours." On Alex's blog, a provocative comment by Danyel Fisher pointed out that:
(What) you may have forgotten that there’s a (fairly large) number of people who read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_Changes religiously (usually as an RSS feed)... So when you made your change, it popped up on a lot of screens—and one or another glanced at it, said “that’s wrong,” and fixed it. Indeed, check out the RC Patrol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RC_patrol for some idea of how this happens.
Danyel then goes on to suggest that this approach to change is "cataclysmic" insofar as "a great deal of interest gathers around a single page, many changes are made, and a new steady state is negotiated." For this, he cites some stunning work (graphically speaking) out of IBM Watson Labs.
Virtual worlds...
I wondered about Robert Glass' Fact 21 and whether it might underlie the problem of virtual worlds in the future: big places, complete places, lots of emergence... a place where scale gets in the way. Personally, I tend to believe the most difficult scaling problems lie not in engineering and technology per se... but at the interfaces with, and the interactions within the player systems: the game world laws; the stories versus simulations; and all those cataclysmic, productive moments waiting to happen. I can't help but think that we should somehow harness all those buzzed folk scanning RSS feeds - and turn virtual worlds into collaborative worlds, somehow, Wikipedia-like... However, I cannot yet imagine what this sort of world would look like, can you?
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