My evening start out harmlessly enough, until I found a post of an obscure 1990 paper by Peter Norvig [1.] on quines. From there I moved to replicating object attacks in Second Life, forkbombs in LamdaMOO, the game of self-reproducing programs, and a charming tale about the toaster and the computer scientist in a kingdom not far from here...
A quine (Fn1) is a computer program that generates its own source code listing as output (see here for a good overview). To a small cadre of hard-core, devising quines can be a fascinating game onto itself - the smallest program, most obfuscated, etc.
Mash-up quines and malice and it is not hard to imagine how we get from a clever sport to self-replicating object bombs in Second Life and a host of other viral ills elsewhere. Reaching into lore, Lambda the Ultimate has featured smart talk (in comments) about the software foibles of LambdaMOO and software mousetraps that might prevent these (Fn2).
This evening I found scribbled in at the end of Peter Norvig's paper (from here), a fabulous parable (which can be seen its entirety here) about the engineer and the computer scientist when they confront a toaster.
Spoiler follows:
"The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after."
Of course the king was naive and didn't realize that if one
"(s)elected a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
Fooling around aside. Its fun to think about software at the edges, and there are plenty. The deal, however, might be this one. Virtual worlds start with a bag of clever abstractions including a great number of software-induced ones, and eventually gets around to asking the user to imagine a reality. The real world works the other way around (to the metaphysical). Which is more "error" prone?
Grand Text Auto just posted a CFP for Tangible Play: Research and Design for Tangible and Tabletop Games at the Workshop at the 2007 Intelligent User Interfaces Conference.
I have a toaster and am contemplating its GUI (humor).
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[1.] See ACM citation. Self-Reproducing Programs in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig, 1990.
Fn1. After Willard van Orman Quine.
Fn2. Great points in comments such as "make the connection between the virtual economy and the real economy explicit, you need a rights transfer facility; just limiting object construction isn't sufficient. I should be able to build a vending machine (and its users should understand that when they use it, they're exchanging value for value) - Paul Snively". Hinted in earlier TN discussion here.
wow, tangible play. Very interesting, taking land parties to the next level?
btw, loved the parable.
=)
Posted by: Moses | Dec 08, 2006 at 12:26