Looking-glass worlds

Listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go

e e cummings, 1 x 1

Victor Frankenstein built his monster from chemicals and the vital spark of electricity. We too are going to use electricity to create life, but our electric current will animate a digital computer. Before we can understand how to create life using a computer, we must establish some important ideas about computer simulation. We need to step away from the idea of the computer as a device for carrying out instructions and instead think of it as place in which to build other types of machine. I want to introduce the notion of different orders of virtual machine and show how this idea relates to the information in the previous chapters. First of all, though, we shall look at how a computer may be used to create virtual objects and virtual environments in the first place. How exactly are binary numbers and logical operations used to generate virtual reality?

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Last modified: 06/04/04