Right from the beginning, it presented video in scrawny rectangular boxes in the middle of your screen, pixilated and colorless, and so often intertwined with hideously compressed sound that occasionally wasn’t synced correctly. If Sega CD excels at anything, it’s certainly not full-motion video. Ultimately though, I hope that the concept of emergent microcosms can be a powerful framework for thinking about-and unifying ideas related to-open-ended computational universes.Genre: FMV Developer: Psygnosis Publisher: Sony Imagesoft Players: 1 Released: 1994 ![]() I would also recommend checking out the work of Lu Wilson (who developed Sandspiel Studio with Max Bittker) who is doing some incredibly generative work around the kinds of primitives that can yield emergent microcosms.Īnyway, there is a lot I've left out here (and we still need that Standard Model for the digital cosmos!), so I would certainly welcome suggestions and ideas here. You might also enjoy the tutorial “ So you want to build a generator… ” by Kate Compton. ![]() įor reading material about some of these models, the book The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation by Gary Flake is fantastic. And if you want to see lots of fantastic examples in Processing, I highly recommend the Coding Train. I would recommend Processing as a great language for beginning to program these kinds of emergent microcosms yourself. This is just a taste of the different ways of generating emergent microcosms, but if you want to try this at home, there are tons of resources available. ![]() But let’s dive into this emergent microcosm taxonomy in some more detail. And the computational frameworks behind these digital universes involve shaders, agent-based models, evolutionary computation, and even L-systems. In brief, what are the components of emergent microcosms? The major model categories are cellular automata, falling-sanding games, and physics-based simulations (such as rigid body and particle simulators). But in the meantime, here’s my small attempt at a rundown of the kinds of systems that allow for the creation of different emergent microcosms (note: this is based on a Twitter thread about emergent microcosms I wrote recently). Ultimately, I would love it if some sort of Periodic Table or Standard Model for emergent microcosms were developed: an articulation of the different elementary particles and rulesets that can allow these microcosms to arise and how they can be productively recombined. Įmergent microcosm is a fuzzy category, but it roughly spans biology and artificial life, complexity science, simulation, and creative coding. In other words, they are emergent microcosms. And they’re related because no matter their origin, these computer programs are capable of unspooling entire emergent computational cosmos. ![]() This category actually involves a number of types of programs and styles that are often examined separately-or, at best, are only considered together in a somewhat loose way-but I think that they are fundamentally related. In all the excitement around Large Language Models and other trendy aspects of Artificial Intelligence, I think that we’ve forgotten an under-appreciated group of computer programs: relatively small snippets of computer code that can generate complex and delightful virtual worlds.
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