– In which Dorn riffs on Lona’s recent “Bitlife” blog post.
I thought I’d take a break from parallel blog play, and try to continue (sort of) the theme of Bitlife that Lona’s post so elegantly contrasted with being In the Real World (IRL). Thinking about a game that simulates the Real World reminded me of a game we played as kids, one we invented for ourselves, which set that simulation on its head: we in the Real World simulated a board game. We had this huge pair of wooden dice and we decided our basement was a similarly expanded game board. We were the game pieces, and we had to scramble over the game “squares”: chairs, tables, boxes, TV sets. (I have no idea why we had those huge wooden dice. At the time I perhaps thought it was just de rigueur 1960’s home decor. They were probably made of Norwegian Wood.)
Playing the game (which we called “Game“) felt something like I imagine participating in a Human Chessboard feels, but our game was much simpler, maybe about equivalent in complexity to a Human Candyland. One had to move the required number of squares and race to the end. One couldn’t use the basement floor, not because it was forbidden or boiling lava or anything, but simply because, just like in the Candyland universe, moving game pieces outside the squares had no meaning.
(Human chessboards have been played on for centuries and can be found all over the world. The picture below from Wikipedia shows human chess at the World Bodypainting Festival in Pörtschach am Wörthersee, Austria.)
So we have board games that simulate being IRW (Hasbro’s classic Game of Life is an example), and IRW activities that simulate board games, like human chess and our Game. Bitlife is a computer app that simulates being IRW–I wondered if there were IRW activities that could simulate a computer app?
I thought of one almost immediately. Given that smart phones actually have an app that allows them to act as a telephone, maybe that old party game Telephone counts? But since Telephone actually predates computer apps (and computers, and maybe even telephones), that feels like a cheat. Instead, how about an IRW activity that simulates a simple digital adding machine?
I thought of a human digital adding machine “game”. I don’t know if I am inventing it myself. I have never heard of it, but that might just be because it’s no fun. It sounds awfully math-geeky, even to me. In a pathetic attempt to make it sound more fun, you could mentally replace the word “ball” where-ever I use it below with “bottle of beer”.
Human chess can be understood by learning the moves that chess pieces can make on a chess board, and then letting people take the places of the pieces and move by the same rules. My human digital adding machine can be understood (I hope) in the same way.
The humans playing Adding Machine all stand in a line. Each human might receive a ball during the game from another human. If a human ever receives a second ball, he or she must give one ball to the person to his or her left, and throw the other ball away.
Another human plays the adding machine User. He or she inputs the numbers to be added by handing out balls to the people playing the Adding Machine components. At the end of the process, the User gets the answer to the arithmetic problem by seeing by who is left holding a ball, and who is empty-handed.
Here is the machine that these humans are simulating. Marbles fall down tracks, and the humans (except the User) correspond to the little wobbly wooden switches that cause marbles to fall to the left (passed on to another switch/human) or to the right (thrown away). The wooden switches and humans each have a value, from right to left 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc., and the arithmetic performed is in binary, just like most computers. Watch this video to see the adding machine in action.
Can you imagine a line people standing in a row passing balls back and forth, and then the User checking to see what answer they came up with? Does it help to imagine them half-naked and covered in body paint?
This whole idea of an addition problem being solved by a group of people who don’t know what the problem is, and don’t even need to know how to add, or speak the language of the User, reminds me of a delightful conceit found in the Pulitzer prize-winning book Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
In the book, Hofstadter explores many wonderful and fantastical concepts, including conversations that are held with a sentient ant colony. The ants aren’t sentient, but the way they move and interact with each other reveals an overarching organization, and even intelligence. Here’s an excerpt (Aunt Hillary is the name of the ant colony). It’s long (as is the book), but if it grabs your imagination, give the book a try! Thanks!
– Dorn
6/26/19
