Philosopher's Cup

[WarHampster]

I challenge you to create an interactive computer program that expresses a philosophical idea.

Suggest rules.

[Connors]

• Resources posted as open/creative commons/ etc are fine.
  
• Please post attribution for anything that's not yours.
• Don't submit after the submission date, even though chances are it will be moved forward anyway.

I like the theme! It's open to a broad range of interpretations. Reminds me of what we were discussing in History class, I bet I can draw from that.

[WarHampster]

Suggested start: right now.
Suggested end: October 8th.

Reuse of code and assets is fine.

[GMG Kurt]

oh god I just came up with the perfect idea for this.

[x]

I actually think this is an excellent idea. I might knock something small up.

[WarHampster]

I have started my game.

It features poetry and breakcore.

[Charlo]

If you need some inspiration, I found this list on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophical_concepts

[Zoo]

Does the winner get the philosopher's stone? If so, I'm in. I could use a bit more elixer of life. I only have 600 years worth, and I want to outlive Yoda.

[WarHampster]

I could send you hallucinogenic truffles, but I can't gurantee they'll positively affect your lifespan.

[x]

I might try to do a really simple text based adventure in a functional language like F#.

[WarHampster]

My entry is going to be a sort of experiment in which participants use a function of the following type signature:

language -> music

The purpose of this experiment is to demonstrate the neuroscientific hypothesis that figurative language excites diverse regions of the brain, such as those involved in audio perception. Participants will select pieces of figurative and literal writing that they are familiar with. The function will convert one of the pieces to a breakbeat. After listening to the beat, the participant will be asked to identify the writing from which it originated.

Hypothesis: participants will identify figurative writing more quickly and with greater accuracy than literal writing.

Neuroscience is the new philosophy!

[Connors]

I wish I'd given myself more time to program something, I hate deadlines. Maybe I can still whip together a game in Processing.

[WarHampster]

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

(Douglas Adams)

But seriously make something, anything! This is a challenge of spontaneity, of anarchy - take the first thing that pops into your head and spin it into a thing made of zeros and ones and cough it up onto the internet to be assimilated into the whirlwind of of bits and bytes and words that make some sort of sense if filtered through the right models.

[x]

So I made this nifty little text based adventure engine in F# in ~40 lines. I say nifty because its purely functional, and thus entirely side-effect free. I'm going to try and see what I can do with <= 100 lines of code, including all game data definition (dialogue and descriptions). We'll see how I go.

[WarHampster]

That sounds really cool! I think that forcing oneself to work inside restrictions (however arbitrary) can spur creativity.

Do you use F# often? My experience in functional programming is in Scheme and SML and while I understand the appeal of pithy code I think I'd go crazy trying to organize a large project under that paradigm.