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MultiVerses – a word game based on recent ideas in cosmology

A game by Ron Hale-Evans, author of the book “Mind Performance Hacks” (a great book, btw). The theme of the game is multiversal cosmology as described by Russell Standish in his book “The Theory of Nothing” and by Greg Egan’s book “Permutation City”.

Players compete to create high-scoring multiverses, which are collections of words that score by having high Kolmogorov complexity — which is represented by the number of laws or rules each universe, or line of words, in that multiverse implements — and high measure, represented by the number of functionally-identical universes in a given multiverse.
Terms like “Kolmogorov complexity” and “measure” are not mentioned in the rules, and you can play MultiVerses without knowing anything about them, but they were in my mind throughout the game design process. Again, this game is not a simulation, so for example, “measure” is not complex, but a small integer.(Ron Hale-Evans in his anouncementof the game at the everything-mailinglist)

At this page you can find the rules of the game (currently Version 0.9.3).

Posted by kuehleborn on April 9th, 2010 Posted in Geeks

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