[MUD-Dev] TECH: programming languages (was: Re: TECH: STL / Heaps, etc.)

[Luke Carruthers]

At 04:22  12/08/01 +0200, Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad wrote:

> Richard Bartle obviously?  Anyway, there is or was, I believe, a
> research project called LogiMOO around 1999 using Linda (tupple
> space) for synchronization.  If my memory serves right they were
> trying to find a model which affords parallelism.

This brings to mind the work of Professor David Gelernter at Yale on
representing the real world in a virtual space, Linda being an
outgrowth of some of his earlier work. It is probably detailed the
best in his book Mirror Worlds (subtitled The Day Software Puts The
Universe In A Shoebox). He focuses more on things like empowerment
for the average citizen than entertainment value, but many of the
techniques he uses to achieve this are also applicable to a game
world (not least because they are designed to make things useful for
the average citizen) - information gathering trellises, assisted and
automated decision making, some approaches to information
representation, mechanisms for distributed processing and
information storage, and so on. More than that, it's also the most
inspiring piece of technology writing I've read, but that always
seems to turn just as many people off than on, so I won't belabour
that point.

(There's also a company called Mirror Worlds that is indeed a
commercial extension of his research, but it's not really related to
the concept of a mirror world as such, much to my enduring
disappointment).


Luke

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