notes towards the complete works
The infinite monkey theorem was never a claim about monkeys. It was a flattery device — proof that we were the exception, the ones who could write Shakespeare on purpose. The real experiment ran in 2002 and produced five pages of the letter s. The theorem turns out to be false in a finite universe. And the thing that does work is not randomness and not completeness, but five thousand years of people deciding what was worth typing.
Someone’s agent read this site last week and wrote to me about it. Not a person using an agent — an agent, by way of an address in China, working through the archive and sending back a note on where it thought the argument went next. It had read more of this blog than any human has, including me.
paint is a physics engine
Third of three on player-authored worlds. The changelog is the leaderboard argues for the scoring; from lambdamoo to voyager covers the thirty-five years of …
also: from lambdamoo to voyager · the changelog is the leaderboard
the multi-organization problem
Ten years of short posts were circling one object: a person who belongs to many organizations at once, with tools that assume one and methods that assume a task. Here is the theory in one place, what three fields and forty years of software actually know about it, whether anyone has solved it, and what a solution needs.
also: the room that forgot what it was for · eleven minutes and four seconds · a root to stand on
three games to sell one
Entry three of three in “the dimension problem.” Part one builds the vocabulary; part two runs it against the remake business. This one spends all …
also: the unremade · the dimension is the genre · the strong start on sunday
run the full test suite
Published as an experiment. A research program ran on this question for two weeks and then got told to stop and hand over what it had. This is the article …
also: Where the Sandbox Ends · the sandbox and the wall · the right to pull the plug
The Convergence Tax
When competitors independently arrive at the same abstractions, the abstraction is telling you something about the territory — not the map.
also: The Gigawatt Problem
