Will Wright just blew my mind. This guy is great. It wasn’t so long ago he announced his forthcoming, ground-breaking videogame “Spore” (see some of my earlier posts regarding that videogame and it’s technology via this Link). But to see a theoretical side (with nice, supporting 3D charts and images), watch this video (Link) over on C|Net. When “Spore” is released, I’m going to create more Will Wrights.
reBang
Sven, here’s a link to Will Wright’s Keynote at Accelerating Change 2004 also called “Sculpting Possibility Space”: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail376.html . That’s the first time I saw his map of the uploaded player paths through The Sims and my mind was very much blown as well :-D http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/1339196/in/set-42234/ .
Since then I’ve been thinking about how Google Earth will help us map the possibility space of physical world systems (social, technological, economic, environmental, political, etc.). The last slide of my Accelerating Change 2005 presentation was a mash-up of the Sims possibility space map and a Google Earth view of our planet from space: http://slfuturesalon.blogs.com/second_life_future_salon/2005/09/brave_new_virtu.html .
Now, thinking directly of Spore I’m very, very excited to see what it says about a necessary direction for evolutionary processes. If Spore is sharded so that there are parallel but non-interacting versions of the Spore universe, we’ll be able to see if optima in the possibility landscape are such strong attractors that evolution recapitulates itself more or less across shards (which can be thought of multiple universes with similar initial conditions). How interesting would it be to see hundreds of thousands of players across multiple shards all converge on an optimal species? I think we’ll see that *if* we get shards (wow, I’ve never wanted shards before :-). This is very serious stuff concerning evolution and development in any system.
I vaguely remember either reading or hearing about “Possibility Spaces”, but don’t recall more than that. Maybe my mind just wasn’t in the correct frame of space(!) at the time. In any event I look forward to getting caught up. Many thanks for providing those links. They’re a good starting point.