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Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into existence. If, like me, you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is…
‘I talked to a woman of the Kaminari once,’ he says, ‘before the Spike. Don’t give me such a look, it wasn’t like that, we were just friends. But one night on Ganymede, we got philosophical. The Universe is a game, she said. It makes us into players. We can’t see the moves that are not allowed. Like in chess. There is…
The absence of disease is not health. Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 different countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And what I found is that most companies and schools…
For a while, one’s speaking is largely “fake” — that is, one is thinking in one’s native language but substituting words quickly enough to give the impression that the thinking is going on in the second language; however, as one’s experience with the second language grows, new grammatical habits form and turn slowly…
To stop teaching literature and the other arts on the grounds that they're bad for us would be like refusing to study diseases because they're bad for us. However, maybe there should be a moratorium on requiring those who don't really want to, to take courses in the "humanities." We first have to figure out where we…
What you eventually discover as you continue to play is that Portal is a game about escaping from rooms that operate according to rules you are unaware of. You learn that each room is a puzzle, increasingly booby-trapped, and the game requires you to understand more and more complex physics in order to get out. If you…
As you successfully lock in Tetris puzzle pieces, you get three kinds of feedback: visual—you can see row after row of pieces disappearing with a satisfying poof; quantitative—a prominently displayed score constantly ticks upward; and qualitative—you experience a steady increase in how challenging the game feels. This…
The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make…
no matter what the odds are at one point in spacetime probability materialize
These two articles reflect some religious disquiet at the prospect of contact with ETI. When faced with an alien civilization of enormous powers and the likelihood that they are not even approximately human, the differences that divide us on Earth are likely to seem increasingly trivial and irrelevant. At least for…
In MMOs, individuals collaborate to solve complex problems within the virtual world, such as figuring out what combination of individual skills, proficiencies, and equipment are necessary to conquer an in-game boss dragon in the example above. As part of developing efficient and effective solutions, players are…
. . in real life mistakes are likely to be irrevocable. Computer simulation, however, makes it economically practical to make mistakes on purpose. If you are astute, therefore, you can leam much more than they cost. Further¬ more, if you are at all discreet, no one but you need ever know you made a mistake.
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human…
Our visual processing abilities are by no means hardwired and fixed from birth. There are limits, but the brain's nothing if not plastic. With practice, we can improve the attentional mechanisms that sort and edit visual infor¬ mation. One activity that requires you to practice lots of the skills involved 1 visual…
Conway’s Game of Life is perhaps best viewed not as a single shorthand abstraction but rather as a generator of such abstractions. We get a whole bunch of useful abstractions—or at least a recipe for how to generate them—all for the price of one. And this points us to one especially useful shorthand abstraction: the…
Rounded numbers are cultural attractors: They are easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes. So we celebrate twentieth wedding anniversaries, hundredth issues of journals, the millionth copy sold of a record, and so on. This, in turn, creates a special cultural attractor for prices, just below…
Social networks allow people to connect with each other and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, users tend to connect with like-minded people and read agreeable information, a behavior that leads to group polarization. Motivated by this scenario, we study how to take advantage of partial homophily…
...Carlsen is demonstrating one of his most feared qualities, namely his “nettlesomeness,” to use a term coined for this purpose by Ken Regan. Using computer analysis, you can measure which players do the most to cause their opponents to make mistakes. Carlsen has the highest nettlesomeness score by this metric…
The first thing you'll notice about Real-life is that it about 9 months to start a new character, mainly because two other players have to "register" for a new player to enter the game, fortunately now-a-days "registering" is happening more and more frequently, unfortunately this means that the "sever" getting…
The gameplay itself is extremely open-ended, though it's structured in such a way that you'll have a fairly clear path to follow when you're just starting out. Real life features a great system whereby newbie players will automatically be guided along through the early levels by one or more "parent" characters who…