Joe Gregorio
Brian Beckman: The Physics in Games - Real-Time Simulation Explained is a channel 9 video that I found via jon Udell. The meat of the interview comes at about an hour into the interview when Brian starts to talk about Sticks and Stones physics as opposed to how game physics is typically done today. Jon Udell observes:
We’ve heard it before, we’ll hear it again: a network of many simple parts trumps one big complex monolith. It’s a story that keeps on surprising us, but probably shouldn’t.
That observation is a great introduction to philospher Nelson Goodman's riddle about induction and the color Grue [ via Mark ]. There are patterns that are strongly wired into our brains, patterns where we look for monolithic solutions instead of many simpler parts interacting using simple rules. Breaking from that monolithic mindset is always controversial. You need only look at the contemporary reactions surrounding the advent of evolution and the invisible hand of Adam Smith to see what I mean.
