Len, your post had me chuckling away. :-)
That episode of Bugs Bunny where Bugs is the artist screwing around with
Daffy Duck's image, erasing his bottom half and replacing it with a
horse's, making the frames of the "film" push him off the screen, etc, is
one of my all-time favorites.
The ideas you are talking about are very adventurous Len... way beyond baby
steps. :-)
It is an interesting way to look at devices in a scene. I think consistency
can be violated though if it is good for a kick (like the Bugs Bunny
cartoon mentioned earlier) -- but I guess that is really just the exception
to what is a good rule.
And there are, of course, ways to make a world appear consistent when in
fact it is not. In goal-directed worlds and story worlds many events are
likely to be triggered by the user rather than having an independant
existence. A character might wander in and offer the user some nugget of
information after the user has done something special, but after they are
out of sight of the user this character vanishes -- they give the world the
appearance of consistency by not vanishing in front of the user and by
speaking as if they have more history than a couple of minutes.
I wouldn't always characterise devices (demons?) as pro or anti; some would
simply direct the user away from the edge of the world, or keep them from
seeing things too early for the 'plot' if there is a story. They could be
as simple as a locked door, or a dark room, or a moving light that attracts
attention, or an odd sound... or as complex as everyone that the user asks
for directions tending to send them roughly the same way, or a monster near
the edge of the world scaring the user away, or traffic lights that slow
the user if they are getting to the next part too quickly. Hmmm... in
keeping with your mythological turn of phrase, I am sure there are some
demons that are not for or against humans.
Actually, if you want to follow your mythological descriptions of agents in
worlds further you could have whole populations of gods and demons warring
and setting up alliances, like in the Norse legends or the Greek ones...
Hindu mythology has oodles of gods and demons too doesn't it. One day, when
we have really complex software and powerful machines people will be able
to use some of these ideas for very strange worlds.
In the meantime, it is baby steps for me. :-)
At 03:49 PM 30/11/2000 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>Close. Let's explore the illusion management
>thing. Exploring a world set up with devices
>is part of the answer, but it is still a bit
>too static and predictable. Let's look at how
>God does it (ok, inflate your shoes, Bozos!).
>
>Let's say God does what some theologians think
>and sets up the universe, then walks away. It
>is awfully difficult to make a story where all
>of the characters have free will. Let's pretend
>for the moment that problems of memory management,
>loading and unloading objects, are behind us.
>Free will is a problem. The god-endowed agent,
>ostensibly a user with free will, gets to go
>where they want to. Since they will not necessarily
>do anything interesting or entertaining for God,
>God has to intervene without being seen. How does God get them to
>go where God wants and still maintain an illusion
>of free will? Devils and angels.
>
>Now despite what they wear in the nether or upper
>regions, on Earth, they have to look like something
>that belongs there or they break the illusion. Mind you,
>an environment can be normal or phantasmagoric, but
>unless you make it consistent, the illusion falls
>apart and like Daffy Duck in the cartoon, you find
>out about Bugs. So the first part of illusion
>maintenance is a consistent world. If time goes
>forward, time always goes forward. If there are
>no dragons, there are no dragons. God sets it up
>and lets it run. However, to keep it directed,
>God puts in Devils and angels... God cannot intervene,
>no deus ex machinas, but God makes the devils and
>angels purposeful and they can get in and out of
>the world at will.
>
>Devils try to keep a character from getting to
>the goal set by God. Angels try to keep a
>character on track. Both try to undo the work
>of the other. All the time. Spy vs Spy.
>
>So we need a world where:
>
>1. Devils and angels can watch the estate of mortals.
>2. Devils and angels can plan.
>3. Devils and angels can insert themselves into the
> scene and can even set up the scene (stage offline)
> but cannot do anything outside of the rules God sets up.
>4. Devils can set up a mortal to do themselves in and
> angels can set up a mortal to save themselves, but neither
> can kill or save a mortal directly. Free will, or the
> illusion of free will, is the prime directive, so to speak.
>
>The idea of course, is active agents, feedback and
>the ability to prestage JIT environments. The
>world creator has to define a consistent world and
>actually has to create a hierarchy if you will of such
>agents with goal seeking agendas. How complex you can
>get depends on your imagination, and you may have to
>do some load balancing to figure out just how often
>an angel or devil can appear and in what guises. They
>should always have guises because they are actually
>just abstractions of dualities. By maintaining a
>complete set of all the dualities, you can make
>sure that sequences and parallel events have inputs
>which adjust intensities of events. Guises can
>be anything from another character to a banana peel.
>
>Consider the way SMIL creates presentations and ask
>yourself what you could do if you could use a language
>like XSLT to create objects offline, then insert them
>into the event sets dynamically. Use XML to persist
>states the same way coarse transaction systems persist
>states and for the same reason. State maintenance
>using a means that enables you to send update grams
>to lots of machines is what you want in case you
>want to play this with more than one player. Also,
>remember that you are not allowed to rollback a transaction;
>you can apply a mediating next transaction and that
>is where the devils and angels come in.
>
>If you really want to get wild, devils and angels
>can not only read the mortal, they can read each
>other and play tit for tat. Again, you have to
>load balance so you will need some restrictions
>on what they can do to each other and that,
>most likely means that in accordance with the
>rules of illusion maintenance, they are subject
>to the rules of the guise they use.
>
>Len
>http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
>
>Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
>Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Niclas Olofsson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
>
>
>I agree with len here. One thing that popped up in my mind is this old
>saying that "What if we had all the money in the world, all the time,
>and all the developers. What kind of software couldn't we build then?"
Q. What is the similarity between an elephant and a grape?
A. They are both purple... except for the elephant.
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