For a space that is 'populated':
Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by loneliness.
Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.
For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated'
Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.

"Game theory models are ubiquitous in economics, common in political science, and increasingly used in psychology and sociology; in evolutionary biology, they offer compelling explanations for competition in nature. But game theory has been only sporadically applied to the humanities; indeed, we almost never associate mathematical calculations of strategic choice with the worlds of literature, history, and philosophy. And yet, as Steven Brams shows, game theory can illuminate the rational choices made by characters in texts ranging from the Bible to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and can explicate strategic questions in law, history, and philosophy."

"World of Warcraft is the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), with (as of January 2008) more than ten million active subscribers across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia who play the game an astonishing average of twenty hours a week. This book examines the complexity of World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds. The contributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spending hundreds of hours as players, conducting interviews, and studying the game design--as created by Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s developer, and as modified by player-created user interfaces. The analyses they offer are based on both the firsthand experience of being a resident of Azeroth and the data they have gathered and interpreted."

amazing

"@crayz: There's exactly zero people on earth who could bang out some beautiful CoffeeScript/Lua/Ruby and actually walk you through how each line of code is turned by the computer into a physical reality of flowing electrons

I beg to disagree: this is my job and there are hundreds of people in my field (computer systems architecture) which can do so as well.

I beg to disagree with your disagreement. I can tell you in abstract terms (combustion, heat engines, Carnot cycles) how a car engine works, but that doesn't mean I could repair one. This is a personal limitation: there are undoubtedly mechanics that know every part of particular engines, who could strip and reassemble them with their eyes closed.

A computer, on the other hand, is an engine with a billion parts, a machine of such staggering complexity that it can only be approached through layers of abstractions, layers which individuals specialize their careers understanding. I don't doubt that you (or I, or any undergrad who has taken a systems course) could outline these layers, but to to even understand the transformation of code to electrons on this abstract level would require you to be a serious expert in javascript interpreters, operating systems, and processors. To concretely understand it, to literally map a line of code to electron flows on the transistor level, is beyond human comprehension.
posted by Pyry at 6:08 AM on September 12"

"Code Hero is a game that teaches you how to make games with a code gun that copies, edits and shoots Javascript in Unity3D."

"The fact that the money goes to charity is irrelevant: if you are trying to say that you want the game to go to the person who does the most “good” by donating money, that is such a myopic view of goodness that it makes me quake with anger. Have you considered that there are people who should play this game who maybe don’t have a bucket of expendable cash they are sitting on?

I understand that when you get something powerful in your hands, your next thought is “how can I put this toward some form of social good?” But you are subverting the intent of the original project, and doing it in a way that makes it an exclusionary practice, rather than a thing of beauty and grace that travels from hand to hand, building a rich lore that goes along with it.

Instead, you would like someone to say, “I won it in an auction so I could meet Will Wright.” Which is maybe the worst thing that could’ve happened to Chain World.

Addendum: I do see the irony of this. On some level I think it’s funny that this “game as religion” thing was immediately twisted into something stupid by its very first “disciple.” But please don’t mistake this for performance art: this is a very real instance of someone “crapping on a great idea”."

"early history of tarot indicates that the cards were used to compose poems before they were used for divination"

Just discovered via @rhizomedotorg...only to discover it's shutting down! BUT it was open sourced:

All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

The section on finding IF is designed to help you find interactive fiction that suits your tastes. This reading list has a different purpose: identifying particularly influential or unusual work that has shaped the development of interactive fiction or probed the extreme boundaries of the medium.

"The intention of this work is to address matters of Interactive Fiction's craft and theory; to review where IF has recently been, and offer some thoughts as to where it may go; to pull together some of the seminal discussion on Interactive Fiction, and to commission new material to advance our understanding."

I had no idea was more than a gimmick at first glance, thank @waxpancake for the amazing interview:

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) is a method of displaying information (generally text or images) in which the text is displayed word-by-word in a fixed focal position. Aside from a basic reading aid, RSVP is being researched as a tool to increase individual reading rates. RSVP is also being utilized for research in the fields of Visual Impairment, Dyslexia, perceptual and cognitive psychology. RSVP is available in software on multiple platforms and in many different languages worldwide.

third video down: Helicopter Taxi, is awesome. At first I thought the idea of a "digital toy" that's so close to a physical one—but just on an iPhone screen—was whack. But after watching the video my mind is spinning the storytelling possibilities of simple augmented reality.

This is a "bookmarklet" that turns any page into Katamari Damacy. Try clicking the Katamari! link above.

This was the winner of the 2011 Yahoo HackU contest at University of Washington.

How does it work?

Short version: css transforms (for things stuck to the katamari), canvas (drawing the katamari), and z-index (illusion of depth).