Chris Crawford

Off topic, but you just reminded me of the classic game Balance of Power, by Chris Crawford. He has some very interesting thoughts on global political power plays that definitely influenced me as a 20-something. http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/my-books/balance-of-power-the-book/i…

> In 1986, Microsoft Press invited me to write a book explaining how it worked, and again I agreed that this would be a good idea. We didn’t publish source code, because it was too specific to the Macintosh, written in Pascal, using 16-bit integer arithmetic. Instead, I explained the geopolitical considerations behind the game in a series of chapters that broke it down by topic, and then provided the equations and algorithms, explaining in great detail exactly what each term meant. It was a manual on how to build a geopolitical game. Does one of you know the title of the book? That sounds fascinating. Edit: nevermind, I found it here: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/my-books/balance-of-power-the-book/i…

He does write at the Introduction of one of his books [1] about it: "While this approach will fail to satisfy those few dedicated person who want to delve into the innards of the program, I think it will satisfy the needs of the greater number of people who wish to understand the concepts behind the game. Finally, I apologize to all those readers more knowledgeable about geopolitical matters than myself, who may wince at the necessary simplifications. I am first and foremost a game designer, not a political scientist. Simplification to achieve clarity is the essence of my work; clarity can be extracted from a muddy reality only by denying some of reality’s richness." [1] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/my-books/balance-of-power-the-book/i…

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-mind/history-of-thinking/index.h… History of thinking is the book which Sapiens / Homo Deus would like to be. I think it is one of the best complete arguments on the nature of our relationship to computers.

Interactive storytelling of some form, as usual. He still blogs regularly: http://www.erasmatazz.com/

From 2018 - https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/why-i-am-e… "There’s no question in my mind that such software could generate reasonably good murder mysteries, action thrillers, or gothic romances. After all, even the authors of such works will tell you that they are formulaic. If there’s a formula in there, a deep learning AI system will figure it out. Therein lies the fatal flaw: the output will be formulaic. Most important, the output won’t have any artistic content at all. You will NEVER see anything like literature coming out of deep learning AI. You’ll see plenty of potboilers pouring forth, but you can’t make art without an artist. This stuff will be hailed as the next great revolution in entertainment. We’ll see lots of prizes awarded, fulsome reviews, thick layers of praise heaped on, and nobody will see any need to work on the real thing. That will stop us dead in our tracks for a few decades."

The following page, http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/c839b0d2d6b6417787b1/the-language-of… has the following boneheaded mistake, which is all the more frustrating for being phrased in such a patronizing way: > You probably don’t know this, but when two factors are BOTH required for a process, you multiply them together. If either one can compensate for the other, then you add them together. So our formula boils down to just this: > Rate of photosynthesis = some constant * rate of water uptake * amount of sunlight on the leaf Nope. You don't get ten times as many moles of glucose per mole of water just because you have ten times as much sunlight (because it's sunny instead of cloudy), or ten times as many calories of glucose per joule of sunlight just because ten times as much water is available. Let's use the variables R for the rate of photosynthesis, k for the constant, Q for the volumetric flow rate of water, and E for the amount of sunlight. Crawford is saying R = kQE, if the only process consuming the water is photosynthesis (incorporating the water into carbohydrate molecules). This is wrong. The correct formula under these assumptions is R = kₑE ∧ kₕQₚ, where kₑ and kₕ are two new constants, Qₚ is the maximum possible flow rate under the conditions, and ∧ is the pairwise minimum function: a ∧ b = a if a < b, otherwise b. This correctly expresses Crawford's model in the previous paragraph, "If one of these two is in short supply, that limits the…

They don't stay hot forever, though. They eventually grow old and wrinkly and gray and sick. You could argue that they're still hot that way, but most people will choose the young hot person over the old hot person. That's what it's saying that "when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you." I.e. you will start to lose that beauty in many different ways, no matter how desperately you try to hold on to it, with plastic surgery, spending all your time in the gym, etc, and you will no longer be able to win your internal game of being more beautiful than others that you valued so much, before you have died (unless you die young, then... I guess you win, if you call that a victory). And for intelligence, a common saying is "The more I know, the more I realize I don't know". An intelligent person will just see more and more out there they could be learning and aren't, or don't understand and want to, and no matter how accomplished or smart they are, they can probably always find someone smarter and have used their intelligence more effectively over the years. There's a game designer named Chris Crawford, for instance. Really smart guy, designed some classic games in the early Mac years and worked for Atari way back in the early days. But at one point he left the game industry because he saw it going the wrong direction for interactive storytelling and started building a storytelling game engine called Storytron that was super…

Chris Crawford called this "process intensity", it was a distinction he saw even back to 1983 with Dragon's Lair: https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/jcgd-volume…

OT: what a nice website! No ads, no bloat, no useless white space, no annoying formatting, but instead: - browse-able sub directories!!! - readable links - intuitive navigation - and, well, interesting content https://www.erasmatazz.com/index.html

Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary checks. The result was a crash just before winning the game. This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding failed cracks): https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/jcgd-volume…

When I saw his simulation on the display it reminded me of a nuke plant simulator I had on the Atari way back in the day. I believe it's this one here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scram_(video_game) which had its source code released here: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/source-code/index.html

This is the next part after "What is the Essence of Computing" discussed a day or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33383881 EDIT: Starts with this: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/c839b0d2d6b6417787b1/why-software-su… (light edit above, I had missed that this was the first article in an apparent series before)

Chris Crawford keeps two jars of marbles as a constant reminder of this. http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html

Very Interesting, reminds me of the z-machine / zill. The URL is wrong, try this: https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/fourth-generation-interacti/reconsi…

"I was a smart kid, but once I boasted to my dad about how smart I was, and he came down hard on me. “Don’t you ever think that you’re smarter than other people!” he snapped. I took that lesson to heart, and all my life I have reined in my assessment of my own intelligence. But of late I have tired of this pose; at seventy years of age, I shouldn’t be posing. Dammit, I’m a genius, and it’s time I admitted it to myself." - http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/seventy.html

Looks like the page moved, this is the new URL: http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html

Yes "to create value in any way" is wrong, I should have written something more nuanced. I think you are right on this mainly being about his super valuable teachings not being utilized and this specific post not being about the author thinking he's a genius although he does think so[0]. [0] http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/a-genius.html

http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/gemma.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/seventy.html

He is, and the heaviness of that is not lost. http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/seventy.html

Oh man, just reading (http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/object-versu… for the first time. This person is definitely a genius. We have that word for people like this.

For example, in this post [0] he argues that a pinecone was cushioned by the snow and that's why it didn't bounce off the rail. But he fails to notice that there's the same amount of snow on the rail and on top of the pinecone. Instead of his hypothesis, what I think probably happened was that the pinecone bounced on the deck and then up to the rail, where it was before the snow started falling. It's not a matter of looking at objects vs processes like he claims, it's a matter of looking at what objects (in this case, the snow on top of the pinecone) can tell us about processes. [0]http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/science/an-odd-discovery.html

At the top of the linked article is a link to a previous blog entry entitled "A Genius????" that lists a bunch of "smart" things he's done that presumably qualify him for being a genius but that he cringes at calling himself that. http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/a-genius.html

Here are some I like: http://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/mouse/blah/ https://idlewords.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://slatestarcodex.com <-- Currently unavailable https://erasmatazz.com https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

Here's another one: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/jcgd-volume-…

Didn't someone (well-known on HN) write an essay with descriptions of UIs that would be controllable using Solresol-ish voice commands​, with more advanced users using three-or-four syllable commands up from the monosyllabic ones for lay users? It was a very 90s website. Edit: found it. http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/jcgd-volume-…

It used to be posted on his home-page (and I think the wikipedia article used to link to that?) But I couldn't find it on there any more. It's available on most abandonware sites though (use the Mac version with a mac emulator, the MS-DOS version has some important bugs in it). [edit] The source code for it is available still on his homepage, but You'll need paschal and assemblers for MacOS to build it I imagine. http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/source-code/index.html

Most of the work went into the simulation, not the UI. That's why it looks like it could be done simply in flash. (BTW I used JSF, with JQuery and CSS, but that does not matter so much). He has been working on this project for well over a year, and has blogged his work: http://erasmatazz.com/TheLibrary/GameDesign/DesignDiaryBotP/DesignDiar…

Here is his page on the Le Morte d'Arthur project that he references. http://www.erasmatazz.com/page78/page397/LMDNotes.html

https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/life-in-general/marbles.html """Civilization will not survive more than a few centuries into the future. If that sad assertion be true, then what will the earth look like in the far future? There was a television show some years ago entitled “Life After People”. It did a good job of showing how the artifacts of civilization would decay, erode, disintegrate, and disappear. What’s surprising is that most of the stuff won’t last more than a few centuries. Our big cities, freeways, bridges, skyscrapers, and so forth will be untraceable within a millenium of the collapse of civilization. What will survive for longer? ... This is why I occasionally dig a deep hole — perhaps two feet deep — on my land, drop a marble into it, and cover it up again. I always dig such holes on flat land halfway between the slope and the creek. The soil erosion here is slowest. For many years, the rains will slowly move dirt down the slopes toward the creek. On this flat section of land, the process will be very slow, and the loss of dirt to the creek will be matched by the gain of dirt from above. But eventually the former process will outperform the latter process, and dirt will start eroding away from above the marble. Eventually, all the dirt over the marble will be washed away and it will be exposed. """