ComputerWorld publishes a Q&A with a number of academic Computer Science luminaries offering their perspective on how the field might remake itself into an appealing career choice. Grady Booch offers his own interesting commentary. Are there ideas from virtual worlds?
I have no doubt of the hard technical edges here, yet I also wonder an imagined echo in Booch's comments: indeed, can the social component to algorithm and computer science be the source of new technical advancement? From trusted-computing, social software, online search, service-oriented design and software architecture - perhaps there can be a social component to advance algorithm development.
Social Algorithms sound so very "Numbers" to me, sorry :)
On the other hand, there are some big issues in virtual world game design that are highly technical in nature. Pathfinding can be a big issue in zone load (although that's somewhat particular to the way that Eve works). Game systems that dynamically balance themselves in large worlds where it's impractical to do the data entry and balancing for them manually are likely to be important to some people, especially when you're talking about multiple servers with different conditions in each one. I can think of a predictable Eve example of the way that NPC markets react to local player purchases and sales, decreasing the margin of profit as the aggregate transaction volume increases (and that's a fairly simple example).
Posted by: Daniel Speed | May 04, 2006 at 07:19