Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
The history of virtual reality, a fake world where things can interact asynchronously..
Three-dimensional graphics, immersion, and user interaction. Walking around a city talking
on a cell phone.
The creatures in a computer game are an excellent simulation of parallel agents. The
problem of creating a satisfying computer game is, in small, an image of the question of why
it is we happen to live in such an interesting world. Thinking about game design gives us
fresh insights into both metaphysics and to non-traditional approaches to story-telling.
Some may remember the excitement over “virtual reality” in the 1990s. Here in the
2000s, we have virtual reality all but fully implemented in our games. Games bring together
the full panoply of computer technology including: simulations of physics, computer
graphics algorithms, artificial intelligence, computer aided design, user interfaces, and webbased
connectivity. In addition, games draw in such traditionally artistic endeavors as the
visual arts, sound design, and story-telling.
The essence of a good gaming experience is forgetting about the outer world.
Absorption. Being in the zone. The flow. But walking to the bakery can be as interesting as
a computer game.
Possible games of the future.
Don’t Worry About Biotech.
I consider how serious are the threats posed by biotechnology, and what might be
done about the problems. The news is mostly good. Our experiences with the virtual
ecologies of cyberspace are numerically illuminating. I also explore the logic behind the
open source genomics movement, which argues that it’s safer to have many different people
tweaking genes than to have this power in the hands of a few large corporations.
Class Four Time Series
What would a class 4 time series look like? It’s not so visual, as we’re hopping
around on a line. But we could have class 4 behavior if it condenses, say on a Cantor set,
which would a paradigmatic example of a strange attractor embedded in a line. I think James
Crutchfield was interested in looking for Class 4 behavior in time series generated by the
logistic map.
Weinberg’s Put-Down
There’s a good reason why Dell and Intel don’t market Turing machines.
Universality isn’t everything.
Frankenstein
The most famous fictional character who tries to create life is Victor Frankenstein, the
protagonist of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus.
Most of us know about Frankenstein from the movie versions of the story. In the
movie version, Dr. Frankenstein creates a living man by sewing together parts of dead bodies
and galvanizing the result with electricity from a thunderstorm. The original version is
different.
In Mary Shelley's novel, Victor Frankenstein is a student with a deep interest in
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