Surreal numbers (a nice introduction for maths here, and wikipedia for the humans here) are the sweetest story of everything, especially of time.
Photo by: Ride My Pony
Introduced by the father of programming Prof. Donald E. Knuth in his book “Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness” (1974) and inspired by the most famous game humans ever invented, the go, this theory explains the birth of the numbers by simple examples, through mechanisms of reproduction and inheritance, somewhat like a sterile evolution.
The theory says numbers have fathers and mothers, and every number can have children who, again, can be a father or a mother. This simple method of construction has so much underlying potential, provided by reproduction, that with surreal numbers we can construct, in a demonstrated way more than a number of infinite numbers, and make operations with them. And this theory needs no axioms at all, it’s 100% pure as nature where everything is built from scratch, without any dogmas and conventions as prerequisites.
Surreal numbers were introduced in Game Theory by John Horton Conway and together with pseudo numbers (a similar theory to surreal numbers) he started to analyse what are those situations in a game when it can be easily predicted when a player will win, or especially loose, in maximum two steps.
And here we can find an interesting relation: it is demonstrated the situation when any of the players who will move will loose, and, the situation when the first player who moves will loose are identical, equivalent.
And there comes the speculation, based on the feeling I’ve got reading through this beautiful world of surreal numbers built by time through reproduction like everything in our lives (at the end of the document, in the last paragraph you can find this theorem) : in games, where time is a factor does not matter which player starts moving first, anyway will loose.
You can’t defeat time, you can’t win a game if there is a time factor in. Time has its own rules above things, about humans. You have to accept it, you can’t run against time. You must play games where the time has no major role, where the winning criterias are others not influenced by time.
Photo by: Ride My Pony
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Force, Come And Be With Me « programming a new canon // January 12, 2009 at 11:47 am
[...] life, but if you are a normal human like the many of us you will be constrained by the … time, or as we like to call, the forces of evolution. We would like to think that all is about us as [...]