

Deep Space – A Simulation Drama [video] - simonswain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HJPilemNns

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Udo
This reminds me of the much, much less sophisticated simulations I did back
when I got my Amiga. It's an inspiring talk in that it gets you into the mood
to do these kinds of experiments, too.

For example, I think complex inter-species behavior could emerge if instead of
colors, civilizations could have a set of quasi-genetic attributes. Like
aggression, risk taking, need for colonization...

I think I'm going to dedicate this day to exploring that :)

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simonswain
Please share your results when you do!

A future revision of this was going to have Intents, so each empire basically
did what you mentioned.

If it was going to be a game, the player would set the intent, or proportion
of different intents, for their empire (eg colonize, trade), and not be able
to micromanage specific plays.

Hostile or otherwise encounters with other empires would affect rules of
engagement for future encounters.

Soon enough everything would get complex, messy and unpredictable and much
more interesting to watch!

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eevilspock
I’ve been thinking about ways to use simulation to teach young and old
(particularly the young) about complexity and unintended consequences, things
that are not easy for most people to grasp well, but are essential for our
society to escape simplistic ideologies and simplistic solutions, for all of
us to have a more intelligent discourse on how to make the world better.

Such concepts are better understood or taught through interactive simulation
(where the interaction is the users tweaking the settings, coefficients,
equations or rules) combined with easy to grasp graphic representation of both
the simulation in progress and the results.

Some of the things I’ve thought of illustrating this way:

\- Game Theory. For example have a population where individual sims engage in
prisoner’s dilemma repeatedly with a random other sim each time (until it runs
out of money). What are the results when different portions of the sim
population use different strategies? Is there a way to setup the
rewards/penalties in a way that encourages the best greater good even when
individuals behave selfishly?

\- complex systems, positive and negative feedback, chaos, emergence,
evolution

\- The Mathew Effect (e.g. rich get richer, poor get poorer). The general
concept of vicious/virtuous cycles.

\- the notion of the Tragedy of the Commons. And also the Tragedy of No
Commons.

\- market economics, supply and demand, the invisible hand. when does it work
and when does it not. what happens when consumers have perfect knowledge, and
what happens when they have different degrees of partial knowledge?

\- Cooperation vs competition, in evolution/ecosystems, economies, politics.

Please let me know this overlaps with your interests!

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simonswain
Thanks for the detailed comment.

The market economics part is interesting to me. I touched on it in the Q&A at
the end of the talk. Initially I wanted to have ships trading to make up for
deficiencies in their homeworlds (agriculture, raw materials), which would
also help generate revenue, and lead to conflict. However it's not so simple
(hey! let's build a functioning commodities market and HFT/algo trading
system). The seed of this idea came from Traveller[1]. It's worth checking out
the trade system in the first edition of that game.

The original planet sim was much more complex (along the lines of World3 [2])
and explored finite resources, overpopulation, technology growth and a whole
lot more, but again, for the talk that would have been overkill. I think it's
worth exploring this angle as it would provide a whole different dynamic, and
would be great to see at huge scale (1000's of systems or larger) and playing
out at a slower pace.

Also from Traveller, the idea that information cannot move faster than the
speed of light, so it has to move at the speed of transport, which creates
great dynamics for trade, and the command & control aspect of warfare.
Centralized governments are not so effective. A treaty could be signed, but
fighting forces will not know until the knowledge reaches them. A war can
start and end before the seat of power even knows it had started.

There are so many things that could go in to it. Basically the presentation is
a simple version of what I'd like it to be, but I stripped it back to the
essentials (spaceships and lasers!) to make the talk interesting.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_%28role-
playing_game%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_%28role-
playing_game%29) [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3)

~~~
dirkk0
This was an awesome and very inspiring talk.

It would be interesting to create a game where the population has limited
ressources on a planet and if it overdoes the exploitation it gets extinct
(like 'How bis is our island'
[https://twitter.com/dirkk/status/549866431480074240](https://twitter.com/dirkk/status/549866431480074240)
). Also I was equally inspired by Vi Harts and Nick Cases 'Parable of the
Polygons' ([http://ncase.me/polygons/](http://ncase.me/polygons/)).

'Boidz' and 'Game of Life' make complex behaviours from a simple set of rules.
It was very smart of you to throw in some simplified physics rules (and
civilization rules etc) to make these work together.

I can't access your website right now (is it down?), so I don't know if you
run a blog or something. Will you continue to work on this?

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simonswain
Site should be back now, sorry about that.

I'll revisit Deep Space at some point, there's a lot to do on it.

I have some other related but different I'm working on.

Hopefully I'll get the chance to talk about them somewhere (hint hint).

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yoha
Link to the simulator:
[http://www.simonswain.com/deepspace/make_empires](http://www.simonswain.com/deepspace/make_empires)

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Renaud
What an amazingly satisfying result from simple, basic rules.

If you were looking at these simple simulation without knowing what rules they
follow, I'm pretty sure it would take a fair amount of efforts to discover
them.

Imagine how much of a complex task we're setting ourselves with trying to
understand the world we live in and the insanely complex emerging properties
of our basic human behaviour.

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Lambdanaut
There's a game a lot like this on Steam called Eufloria.

I really like how Deep Space incorporates planet's orbital paths into the
simulation. It'd be even better if orbital dynamics were simulated more
accurately on the ships as well.

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pan69
Where do I get the t-shirt?

