Rich Digital Physics#
Every world contains a set of fundamental laws that govern everything within it. These laws are the physics laws of the world. It is important to note that the word "physics" refers only to a set of fundamental laws; it does not necessarily involve the familiar physics laws of our atomic reality. In our atomic reality, if two objects exert forces on each other, the magnitudes of these forces are equal but opposite in direction. In the world of chess, the queen can move any number of squares horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.
These laws are invariant. Unless a world is undergoing an upgrade, these invariants remain constant and unchangeable. These laws form a higher-level structure upon which stable structures can be built. Structures have predictable patterns. For worlds that attract human participants, some degree of predictability is necessary. This is because human thinking is like a pattern-matching machine. For example, predictable patterns in cause and effect help human participants plan ahead and make thoughtful decisions. Lack of sufficient structure can lead to insufficient predictability, resulting in frustration and reduced engagement. For example, playing badminton in a courtyard where the wind blows chaotically from different directions can be frustrating.
We can refer to the fundamental laws of a computational world or a world made vivid and interactive through computation as its digital physics.
Taking the Pokémon video game world as an example, the type system of Pokémon describes a subset of the digital physics of that computational world.
Taking the Age of Empires video game world as an example, the counter system describes the relative effectiveness between military unit types. The counter system constitutes a subset of the digital physics of the Age of Empires computational world.
The more rules a world has, the more interesting interactions can occur between these rules. The more complex and rich the digital physics system, the more complex processes, artifacts, and events can be formed. Richer digital physics enables richer computational worlds.
Engineering New Worlds#
Accompanying physics is engineering: the practice of manipulating objects based on our understanding of the physics of a world to create novel and valuable configurations. Just as any design process is constrained by specific rules that make construction and thus design itself possible, engineers are similarly constrained and enabled by the laws of physics to manipulate the material of a world to create valuable things. In digital physics, what can be engineered? What should be engineered?
Taking the Pokémon video game as an example. Given the type system, players can design optimized Pokémon teams to counter specific type combinations in opponent teams.
Taking the Age of Empires video game as an example. Given the counter system, players can design armies with mixed unit types that are either optimized against specific unit types in opponent teams or optimized against specific unit types from the same team.
Players can create new things within the boundaries of their digital physics.
However, for the above two examples, digging deeper encounters an insurmountable wall: players cannot design individual Pokémon or military unit types. The physics of these engineering activities are not supported within the computational world. New Pokémon and new military units are not designed within the world itself, but are introduced by the developers of those worlds—the gods of those worlds—through their narrative boundaries. This means that the superset of Pokémon itself is part of the digital physics of the Pokémon computational world, and the superset of military units itself is part of the digital physics of the Age of Empires computational world. This setup makes it difficult for these worlds to maintain their dramatic nature because
(1) the dramatic parts of a world depend on the enumeration of objects present within it
(2) this setup requires the gods of the world to continue injecting new objects to maintain drama.
When the enumeration of objects remains in a steady state, regardless of how they may be combined, the combinatorics tend to saturate. Meta-strategies—the dominant strategies that emerge within a world—begin to form and become rigid. Resource and power allocation among human participants also tend toward steady states. All of these effects dampen drama. In our atomic reality, new things constantly enter existence through natural evolution or human discovery and innovation, disrupting civilizations and social norms, creating drama. For example, adaptive mutations in viruses lead to global supply chain collapses. The invention of the printing press leads to the creation of fictional communities among strangers, resulting in nation-states. If the existence within a world is determined by a single company, then that world is constrained by the lifecycle of that company and its ability and willingness to deliver—the autonomy of that world is diminished.
For a self-governing world that seeks sustained attention from its human participants, it needs ongoing drama. For a computational world that is not on the blockchain, the characteristics of Pokémon, military units, usable items, consumables, transportation, castable spells, and everything in technology and skill trees are typically defined by their sole god. All of these elements are commonly referred to as the features of the world. For a self-governing world with rich digital physics, they can be referred to as inventions within the world—created by the inhabitants of the world from within, rather than introduced by their gods from outside, allowing the world to maintain its autonomy. The use of blockchain may not be technical but cultural and philosophical—a rare opportunity for a computational world to be much more sustainable and redesign methods and business models for globality than a centrally driven world.
Composable Engineering#
The tower of human knowledge is built through the combination of knowledge: recombining existing fragments of knowledge to unlock new cognitive and practical possibilities. For example, by combining knowledge of manufacturing telescopes and knowledge of precise drawing through mechanical devices, Galileo produced knowledge of celestial motion that contradicted what the church claimed. This knowledge had long-lasting effects and laid the foundation for almost all of the physical sciences that followed. When the combination of knowledge is hindered, human progress slows down.
Composable Engineering is defined here as the right to recursively combine engineering artifacts within a world, with no limit on the depth of recursion. For example, combining Pokémon teams produces an object with a recursion depth of zero—because teams are not composable. A team is assembled to battle against other independent teams; within the scope of the Pokémon computational world, no superstructure can be built upon a team. Enabling systems to be recursively composable may mean that multiple teams can be combined into a pool, along with a team selection strategy that takes an opponent team as input and returns the most effective team from the pool against that opponent team. We can call this combined team and selection strategy a battle group.
To recurse to another level, imagine multiple players, each controlling a battle group, forming a guild and battling against another guild. In guild-level battles, each battle group acts as a chess piece on the board, moving as an atomic unit on the map. Special rules may determine how guild-level resources are shared across battle groups on the map to address variables such as morale or supply. Note that as we recurse, game mechanics may change; game mechanics at different recursion depths may also be interdependent.
Composable engineering artifacts in a self-governing world will allow for "invention compounding," where the knowledge combination process that drives human history in our atomic reality is similarly driving the evolution of our computational worlds. Composable Engineering will also enable knowledge encapsulation, which means, "I don't need to know every detail of your invention to incorporate it into my invention process." Knowledge encapsulation is somewhat analogous to the separation of concerns principle in software development. By enabling the separation of concerns, large engineering tasks can be envisioned and accomplished by chaining together smaller engineering tasks. Different tasks require different skill sets and resource types, naturally encouraging labor specialization. With labor specialization, the world may become more inclusive than what was previously possible—residents with different backgrounds, skill sets, and interests can find their place in the world as creators and contributors.
This allows for diverse entry points into the world, meaning more drama and more life within the world.
As a closing thought, by introducing certain cryptographic primitives into the technology stack of our self-governing worlds, information asymmetry can be introduced at the boundaries of composition: "I not only don't need to know every detail of your invention, I can't even peek into your invention. But through certain publicly available quantitative measures, I have confidence in the practicality of your invention, so I am willing to transact with you and incorporate your invention into mine." This asymmetry protects intellectual property by giving inventors a choice to conceal the details of their invention and prevent free-riding, without rendering their invention unusable.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the following contributors for their contributions to my thinking: 0x113d, t11s, ludens, Peteris Erins, and Alan Luo.
This article was originally published in "Autonomous Worlds," N1, 2023.
Original author: @guiltygyoza
Original article link: https://aw.network/posts/composable-engineering
Translated to the Chinese community by @hicaptainz