I recently realized that I have been wasting my time on a dumb effort for the last 35 years. It all started back in 1983. My game for the Atari, Eastern Front (1941), had been a big hit, and Dale Yocum of the Atari Program Exchange suggested that I release the source code for it. This was an exciting idea, as nobody had ever release source code for a commercial game before then, and I readily agreed. However, I insisted that the source code be thoroughly explained, so I spent some months writing up a long explanation of all the algorithms used in the game. The entire package came to some 150 pages. We charged a lot of money for it, so it didn’t sell many copies. Still, I hoped that the buyers would use the ideas in the package. I was disappointed, because only one game appeared using any of the ideas we published in the source code: Ghost Ship, by Kellyn Beeck. Perhaps somebody else used some of the ideas without my knowing, but I rather doubt it.
A few years later, I had another hit game: Balance of Power. In 1986, Microsoft Press invited me to write a book explaining how it worked, and again I agreed that this would be a good idea. We didn’t publish source code, because it was too specific to the Macintosh, written in Pascal, using 16-bit integer arithmetic. Instead, I explained the geopolitical considerations behind the game in a series of chapters that broke it down by topic, and then provided the equations and algorithms, explaining in great detail exactly what each term meant. It was a manual on how to build a geopolitical game. Again, I had high hopes that other people would use some of the ideas.
Again, I was disappointed; I am under the impression that nobody ever applied the concepts used in Balance of Power. Indeed, as far as I can tell, in the 34 years since I published that book, there has never been a geopolitical game as sophisticated as Balance of Power. Perhaps I missed something, but most of my friends have been on the lookout and I have had a number of games referred to me; none of them came close to Balance of Power in algorithmic sophistication.
A Different Perception of Reality
It’s only recently that I have realized just how different is my perception of reality. It is best represented by this classic image from the movie The Matrix:
Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. I see the same thing when I look at the real world: it is not a collection of objects, but rather a system of processes, and those processes are best understood through mathematics. I don’t see all the numbers, but I know that they’re there, and I can put together primitive mathematical representations of simpler parts of the world. I can look at a car traveling down a road and know that the distance it will cover is equal to its speed multiplied by the time interval. With Eastern Front (1941) I could write a simple equation for the damage an attacking military unit could inflict upon the defender:
Casualties = 3 * (strength of attacker / strength of defender)
With Balance of Power, I could write a simple equation for the number of fighters who would join an insurgency against the government:
Fighters = Political Immaturity * Population * Previous Success of Insurgency
Here, Political Immaturity is a constant I defined for each country based on my estimate of how much people respected the rule of law. The Previous Success of the Insurgency was simply how successful the insurgency had been in the previous year in its battle against the government.
It’s this kind of thinking that has driven all of my design approaches. Indeed, the central focus of all my design efforts has been designing interesting algorithms that capture the truth of some system, be it military, political, physical, environmental, emotional, or narrative. That’s the entire point and purpose of my design career, and I have seen my work as more demonstrative than expository. That is, I have always expected that the ideas I incorporate into my work would serve as working examples to others. In this, I have failed completely.
I have devoted as much time and energy to teaching people about my design philosophy as implementing it. I have written six books, academic papers, articles for magazines, and 1500 pages of text on this website. I have delivered hundreds of lectures all over the world. I have prepared videos explaining my work and given classes over the Internet to small groups. I have even invited a few special students to my home to spend days in intensive tuition, trying to imbue them with the style of thinking I use. And yet, after all this work, I don’t think I can point to a single person who is truly following in my footsteps. There are a handful of people who have made some goodly progress in this direction. After all this time and all this effort, I remain a solitary figure walking across a desert landscape.
Why Failure?
Why have I failed after so much effort? The simple answer is that, as my wife says, I’m too far ahead of my time. Perhaps I’m a misunderstood genius. There’s a grain of truth in these answers, but I don’t think that they capture the bulk of the truth, because I am dead certain that most other people have the native intelligence to understand the ideas I’ve been peddling. The main problem, I think, is that the world doesn’t yet perceive a need for the ideas I peddle.
This concept was first enunciated by Thomas Kuhn in his milestone book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he observed that scientific revolutions were not initiated by geniuses; they happened only when scientists perceived a need for a new idea. For example, had Albert Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity just twenty years earlier, it would have been ignored and Einstein would today be another unknown scientist. That’s because in 1885, physicists were fairly confident that they understood how light propagates. Then in 1887 two American scientists performed the Michelson-Morley experiment that shattered the existing understanding of how light works. At first, physicists were incredulous at their results, so they repeated the experiment, expecting to find that the American yokels had screwed it up. When they got exactly the same results, they tried to find flaws in the analysis. Then they tried a variety of patches to their theory—but those didn’t work. All through the 1890s, physicists struggled with the conundrum created by Michelson-Morley. They failed. Thus, by 1905, when Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, physicists were desperate enough that they were willing to consider a theory that, on its face, seemed insane. Space contracting? Time stretching out? Mass increasing? It was crazy! But it successfully explained Michelson-Morley, and it was successful everywhere it was applied. Lots of physicists tried to come up with experiments that would disprove Einstein’s theory, and they all failed.
In 1885, physicists didn’t perceive a need for special relativity, and they would have rejected it out of hand. In 1905, physicists were trapped in a bad hole, and special relativity offered a way out, so they grabbed it.
Another good example from science is provided by Gregor Mendel. This humble Augustinian friar experimented with the peas he grew in the garden at his monastery. He cross-bred them and kept track of various traits across generations. His paper presenting his results was published in 1866 and was ignored, being cited only three times in other scientific papers in the next 35 years. He knew that he was onto something important, but was disappointed that nobody recognized its significance. “My time will come”, he told a friend. He died in 1884, unnoticed and unrecognized.
Then in 1900, biologists were struggling with some problems in evolutionary theory, because their existing theories of inheritance didn’t explain what they observed. Some biologists started carrying out research that replicated Mendel’s work, and it was at about this time that somebody stumbled upon Mendel’s paper. It was with great embarrassment that biologists realized that Mendel had founded the science of genetics and nobody had noticed. Oops.
Here’s another example: Charles Babbage. This fellow invented the computer—in 1840! It wasn’t electronic, it was mechanical, using gears and cams and levers. It was an immensely complicated design and, since it relied on mechanical components, would have been huge and horridly expensive had anybody ever built it—which never happened. It was simply too big, too expensive, and too complicated. While nobody really believed that it would work, the real problem was that nobody saw any use for it. After all, what would you use a computer for in 1840? Spreadsheets? Airline reservations? Word processing? It simply didn’t fit into the world of the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until 1990 that somebody built a working version of his simpler difference engine, a kind of limited-use calculator.
I think that my own experience is a faint shadow of the stories of Gregor Mendel and Charles Babbage. I do not rank my own contribution as being in the same ball park with theirs, or even in the same league, but I think it fair to say that it belongs in the same sport. I’m right, I’m sure of that, but my ideas aren’t useful just yet. The goal I seek (making the computer a medium of artistic expression) is as yet of little interest to society. Sure, people agree that this would be a good thing, but as yet there’s no sense of desperation, no realization that we have failed using existing styles of thinking. People are still bewitched by the progress that has been made and still believe that getting true artistic expression is just a matter of fiddling around with existing techniques for a little longer.