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Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

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Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#61

Post by XorNot »

_ak wrote: post #41
Mithaldu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't. In order: Eve is a murder/capitalism simulator and has almost no physics in the first place. (There's 3-dimensional positioning, but you can fly through planets and shoot through other ships as much as you like; also the entire world is static.) No Man's Sky is 90% an art piece with some added murder simulation. Elite: Dangerous, also a murder/capitalism simulator, only unlike Eve it's more about the imme…

> If you're looking to teach physics and astronomics, Kerbal Space Project does that quite well, even though it also ignores relativity and speed of light considerations. KSP "only" has a sphere of influence model. That's why there aren't any Lagrange points anywhere in the solar system.

Also relativity and speed of light are pretty unnecessary in a chemical-rocketry simulator.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#62

Post by Mithaldu »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #59
EvanAnderson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was pretty disappointed about this. The predecessor games to Elite Dangerous, Frontier and Frontier First Encounters, had a Newtonian flight model (and an optional "time acceleration" feature to artificially shorten intra-system flight time).

realistic physics is mega boring in space games. The first elite was much more fun with arcade physics. Frontier combat was rubbish, you just yoyo'ed past each other with 5 seconds of shooting between oscillations. That's with a human pilot driving. Realistically a space battle would be, does the evader want to evade and has more thrust? => they evade, else, the attacker approaches and both get to shoot until one is…

They are boring when the player's tools and gameplay are not adapted to a situation involving relativistic distances. In space warfare sensors, delay of signal reception, interpretation of sensor input, projection of positioning both human-based and automatic, as well as weaponry built and programmable to relate to all of these things become much more important than:

See, point, shoot.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#64

Post by XorNot »

jordigh wrote: post #47
fche wrote: post #17

FWIW, just recently read Sagan's Contact book, and found it really disappointing in terms of fiction-writing technique. The game idea sounds more like a screen-saver ... alas. In his home nonfiction niche, like Cosmos, he was great.

Really? I love it, because it's science fiction written by an actual scientist, one who knows how scientists talk to each other and who knows what the Fourier integral theorem is. The Soviet-American politics of the time in fiction form are also pretty interesting. My only complaint was that God in the digits of pi was a stoner cop-out, but other than that, I love it. I think his depiction of what would happen to hum…

Really? I thought the ending was pretty great in that regard. It was a novel twist of grand revelation which I don't think I've seen used anywhere else.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#65

Post by jordigh »

XorNot wrote: post #64
jordigh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I love it, because it's science fiction written by an actual scientist, one who knows how scientists talk to each other and who knows what the Fourier integral theorem is. The Soviet-American politics of the time in fiction form are also pretty interesting. My only complaint was that God in the digits of pi was a stoner cop-out, but other than that, I love it. I think his depiction of what would happen to hum…

Really? I thought the ending was pretty great in that regard. It was a novel twist of grand revelation which I don't think I've seen used anywhere else.

Well, pi is almost certainly normal. That means that it stores all possible information (for example, the entire contents of the internet). We haven't proved normality of pi, but if we do, then seeing the face of God in the digits of pi is just the infinite monkey theorem. But this is mundane. You can also see them in the square root of two or in e.

I get that Sagan was trying to get the "numinous", but the tiniest bit of mathematical knowledge makes pi mundane, not mystical. If you want to make me mystical with mathematics, oh boy, talk to me about the Gauss Bonnet theorem, the classification of finite simple groups, or the moonshine conjecture. But pi is pedestrian.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#66

Post by Mithaldu »

theoh wrote: post #46
Mithaldu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't. In order: Eve is a murder/capitalism simulator and has almost no physics in the first place. (There's 3-dimensional positioning, but you can fly through planets and shoot through other ships as much as you like; also the entire world is static.) No Man's Sky is 90% an art piece with some added murder simulation. Elite: Dangerous, also a murder/capitalism simulator, only unlike Eve it's more about the imme…

Category of "murder/capitalism" is an interesting one. Do you think that the people who wrote Elite, for example, were so steeped in the values of colonialism or piracy that they were oblivious to the murder/capitalism subtext? If not, it must be human nature, I suppose.

Not so much that he (he's made several games like that) is oblivious to it, but more that it's the most easy thing to simulate in games, and also what people expect. You can do better, as games like Untertale or KSP demonstrate. But it takes a special kind of person.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#67

Post by ctdonath »

varelse wrote: post #35
Mithaldu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Raiders is one game in a long series of games that pretend space travel works like airplanes of the WW2 era. It's a very impressive game for the technology it was on, but doesn't convey any of the concepts Sagan was talking about or is known for.

I get the feeling that the original poster never actually played Star Raiders, a game in which all one does is blow up the enemy, occasionally pausing to chase the robot that delivers recharges from the starbases... That said, 36 years later, it's still playable...

I did play it. That's why Sagan's description reminded me of it.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#68

Post by XorNot »

jordigh wrote: post #65
XorNot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I thought the ending was pretty great in that regard. It was a novel twist of grand revelation which I don't think I've seen used anywhere else.

Well, pi is almost certainly normal. That means that it stores all possible information (for example, the entire contents of the internet). We haven't proved normality of pi, but if we do, then seeing the face of God in the digits of pi is just the infinite monkey theorem. But this is mundane. You can also see them in the square root of two or in e. I get that Sagan was trying to get the "numinous", but the tiniest b…

Conversely he did try to cover this with the statistics - the message was found much sooner in the sequence then the statistics would dictate were it random.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#69

Post by jordigh »

XorNot wrote: post #68
jordigh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, pi is almost certainly normal. That means that it stores all possible information (for example, the entire contents of the internet). We haven't proved normality of pi, but if we do, then seeing the face of God in the digits of pi is just the infinite monkey theorem. But this is mundane. You can also see them in the square root of two or in e. I get that Sagan was trying to get the "numinous", but the tiniest b…

Conversely he did try to cover this with the statistics - the message was found much sooner in the sequence then the statistics would dictate were it random.

But we know this is false. We have computed way more pi than he knew about when he wrote that.

Conversely, we also know that even with the amount of pi we have, we can already come up with any kind of pattern you could want to, by changing the base, by arranging the numbers in a different order, or by picking particular colours or whatever. In a sense, this is an application of Ramsey's theorem. We can find patterns in pi for the same reason that we can see patterns in clouds, or the Bible, or in constellations.

I still think it's cheap potheaded thinking that dilutes the whole "mystery" and "numinous" edge he was going for.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#70

Post by xigency »

blevinstein wrote: post #52
xigency wrote: post #15

Carl Sagan was a very interesting man. I'm sure he would have loved this simple space game I made - http://brainplex.net/space It uses random points for stars, but tracking "the nearest few thousand stars" from Earth would be pretty simple. I actually want to make a scientifically educational game. I want to make a game that demonstrates the concepts of relativity with accurate space travel at near light speed.

I recently spent some time working on exactly this, in 2D: https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting). Unf…

That is really cool! Thanks for sharing that with me. :)
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