Knuth writes, Wanted: A Name For High-Tech Grief. My vote: fragged¹.

1. Succinct, and a geek reference to Doom/Quake ↩

The Magical Square Root Implementation In Quake III.

Carmack’s Cell phone adventures I am a big proponent of temporarily changing programming scope every once in a while to reset some assumptions and habits. After Quake 3, I spent some time writing driver code for the Utah-GLX project to give myself more empathy for the various hardware vendors and get back to some low-level register programming. This time, I decided I was going to work on a cell phone game.

I had an interesting meta weekend; one of those weekends about weekends … discussing principles about principles. It was a meta sort of thing. It was cool to hang in hometown, but I’m happy to live elsewhere now.

The topic of zen and Q3 came up, which oddly summarized the weekend. Q3 is very tangent to life, yet finding zen in that world is really the same as finding it anywhere. You just need to realize that the rules of the universe are tools, not limitations. Q3, for example, provides two useful tools: gravity and splash damage. Many people have realized that the combination of the two provide for a rocket jumping mechanism that bends the expected rules of play. Add to the mix the team-arena runes, and the possibilities multiply: scout-jump (long distance, lots of damage), guard-jump (no damage), and doubler-jump (lots of damage, long distance). These tools are a step towards zen of the Q3 world.

But, more interesting was our thoughts on how to find zen in any domain. The path to zen (or zen to zen for the meta phreaks) is quite simple: oblivious variation based learning. Learning is really limited when we constrain the bounds of what is possible. The q3 example is good, as it shows how people think in terms of traditional physics. The q3 world is close enough to our own, that most people don’t even consider alternate combinations of movements (other than one’s that would make sense in our reality).

The path to zen in art, I’ve found, is much the same. People limit themselves by assuming what is possible — or assuming what is impossible for them. Generally, a lack of immediate success causes people to assume they will not succeed (they really don’t understand the amount of time it can take to improve) … so most people loose desire where they assume they are failing. If they were able to be oblivious (or ambivalent) to their ability (at least early on) they would be able to work past their lack of skill and be able to freely develop skill.

In software it is much the same. People limit themselves by limiting their understanding of situations, or by assuming constrained models of reality. Ambivalence, to some degree, helps people overcome the inability think clearly and move on in difficult problems. The worst place to be is where a problem closes a your mind to the always-existing multitude of possibilities.