I was having a conversation with a friend of mine recently about the nature of knowledge. As with just about any discussion of epistemology with me, much of the conversation was about critical rationalism. In this discussion, I came to realize something. One of the key foundations of critical rationalism is the idea that no amount of evidence can prove an idea to be true, but a single piece of evidence can refute/disprove an idea. I see this as paradoxical.
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The all-important black swan
If someone is interested in the truth, it’d be a blessing to them to learn exactly what falsehoods they believe. An ideal truth-seeker would love to be wrong, because it would give them the chance to improve their ideas. This is the basis of scientific thinking, but it’s not a very good description of how people actually behave. Most people (especially those with little training) react defensively to criticisms of their ideas and show a strong preference of comfortably holding familiar ideas rather than putting them to the test. Why is this?
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I’ve updated Autocell to version 2. In addition to cleaning up the code, adding better error handling, and (I hope) improving the interface slightly, I’ve made the following changes to the rules:
- You can now set cells to be drawn as images. Defining the image a cell should use is as simple as making a rule of “draw <CELLTYPE> <URL>” (See Langton’s Ant for example.)
- The directions northeast, northwest, etc. have been added, as have fareast, farnorth, etc. The “far____” directions refer to cells two steps away.
- The special noun “neighbors” now includes the NULL cells at the border.
- New verbs “cellAt” and “neighborsOf” have been added. They both take a 2-by-1 array ([x,y]) of the cell in question as their right-parameter. The “cellAt” verb returns the type of the cell in question, while “neighborsOf” returns the set of neighbors.
- A new two-parameter verb “+” has been added. Right now it only operates on the 2-by-1 coordinate arrays discussed above. (Example: [1,-10] + [23,7] = [24,-3])
- In the same vein, a new special noun called “thisPos” has been added. It is the coordinates of the cell being evaluated.
That’s all!
Posted in Code | Tagged Autocell |
It’s not that interesting, but I made a little one-player text-based RPG in python (3.1.2) this morning/last night. I’m happy with it, just because it’s the largest thing I’ve ever done in python. The whole thing is based off of this blog post. You can get the source code here: http://raelifin.com/files/code/rcrpg.py
It’s all public domain, but I like credit (yada, yada).
Posted in Code | Tagged game, python, text-based |
My latest quick project was to write a basic scripting language for building cellular automata. The framework is built on javascript, and I made a nice little interface to go with it. As long as you’re using a browser that isn’t terrible, you can check it out here. All the code on that page except the utility functions is public domain, but please give credit where credit is due. If you end up examining the source, I apologize for the mess; I was trying to fit everything in one file, and not use jQuery or other libraries.
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