Gajillion Dollar Opportunity:

The Gates Prize Awaits YOU

To an old physics professor, who thinks he knows better, psychology indicates that an inventor’s psychology is not a pretty picture. However, inventors who are artists have an edge, and this edge will make even that physicist’s on-line museum a success—more so it would be an on-line art museum.

Copyright 2003 Bill H. Ritchie

Here's a quote from a columnist on the IGDA Web site under the title, The Future of Games:

"As an art form, immersive games are in a transitional state, currently positioned on the cusp of something almost unrecognizably different. Future games will employ deeper simulation in order to achieve far greater levels of interaction and complexity, while simultaneously simplifying the learning curve for new players.

"Most game environments of the past have been based on crude abstractions of reality, limiting player expression and requiring users to learn a completely new vernacular in order to play. The games of the future will rely heavily on much more complex, high fidelity world representations that will allow for more emergent behavior and unforeseen player interactions.

"Taken together, these next-generation design paradigms are not simply improvements over older models, but represent a fundamentally different approach to simulating real-world physics, handling artificial intelligence and interface usability."

I figure that someone writing with an insider's perspective knows at least a little about what he's saying when it come so games. So I noted his expression, "something almost unrecognizably different" and I thought of my game, Emeralda. I figure I don't have to go buy an armload of yesterday's games, based on those games based on "crude abstractions of reality" (Myst, Magic, Monopoly, Solitaire, etc.) to understand what he's talking about.

I figure I only have to look inside myself to see what the "almost unrecognizably different" games he's talking about are like. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, clicking the heels of her ruby-red shoes together in order to go home to Kansas, I figure I can just about have my "game of the future" right now, just by clicking my mouse on a few choice software packages and cobbling it together with HTML.

I can role play. I can put myself in the role of an inventor of tomorrow's blockbuster game. Then, my search starts for something to play with, something to shoot (to use one of yesterday's crude abstractions that were the basis of first-person shooter games). I'll switch over to the Web, go to the The Chronicle of Higher Education, and look for an idea.

Aha! A physics professor created an on-line museum of perpetual motion, and the article ended with the sentence, "Inventor's psychology is not pretty." What does he mean? He said they make common mistakes; witness the contents of his museum.

My defenses go up: I want to say, "Professor, I'm an artist, about to paint you a pretty picture - and I might also paint over your museum!" On the sidebar at the right is the professor's article, from the June 27 issue of The Chronicle.

Now, about that Gajillion Dollar Opportunity I promised, what I call the Gates Prize. To win it is simple, really--but not easy. Break into the art professor's memory bank, his "perpetual motion machine of the visual arts" and find out how he or she does it. Get past the "not pretty" parts of technique, politics, moral and ethical issues, money and power, and find the gold.

In other words, put the fine art professor, or artist teacher, on-line, in a form almost unimaginable to us today.

But only almost.

I qualify that unimaginable bit with the word almost because I almost can see it, and with help from some of the other geniuses right around the Puget Sound region, my Emeralda Region--an imaginary place for on-line art gaming--will be realized. Or, should I say, almost realized, because the players--the doers--will be the ones to actually finish the game.

If an on-line, persistent-state game could be created, it could act as its own source of constant energy because the players - in roles ranging all over the art world board -  would be adding their input to a great database in the sky.

Serious artists, however, have discredited this mediated learning theory, arguing that it ignores basic rules of hands-on proximity with the artist/teacher.

Maybe they're just too serious! They should, in my humble opinion, lighten up.

Play my game.

The author made this stamp in honor of Elmer Gatess, a turn-of-the-century inventor and early neuroscientist. Ritchie invented a game called Emeralda and needed a goal, so he created the Gates Prize - akin to the Pulitzer, Nobel or MacArther prizes. This one's for teaching. Then he needed a personage (besides the obvious Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), and Elmer Gates name came up.

Bill H. Ritchie is an Itinerate Professor based in Seattle. He taught college (UW) and after promotion to full professor of printmaking and media arts, he resigned at 43. He then launched several teaching, research and practice companies. In 1992 he discovered Emeralda, a fantasy region accessible only by computer. He invented the rules-of-play and created an operating system for online interactivity for himself.

He writes for the benefit of discipline, using a PDA when he's wandering around and a desktop PC to organize his essays. He has a thousand or more saved, on the island of RIISMA in the Emeralda Region he has a blog under Services.

For further information contact Bill H Ritchie via e-mail at ritchie@seanet.com. His professional Web site is at www.seanet.com/~ritchie. The company name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha, Seattle, WA 98109.

Bookmark from The Chroncle of Higher Education, June 27 issue, 2003

Professor's Online Museum Explores History of Perpetual-Motion Schemes

By BROCK READ

A wheel weighted with swinging mallets. A cylinder rotating in a sealed, water-filled container. A siphon that transfers liquid back and forth in a seemingly endless loop. These may sound like the contents of a mad scientist's laboratory, but they're all real devices, created over the centuries by scientists seeking a machine that can sustain perpetual motion.

To most physicists, the quest for a perpetual-motion machine is a historical aside, an example of pseudoscience at its worst. But to Donald E. Simanek, an emeritus professor of physics at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, it's a fascinating and rich field of study. On his Web site, the Museum of Unworkable Devices, Mr. Simanek traces the history of perpetual-motion theory through treatises, images of bizarre contraptions, and paradoxes physical and mathematical.

The allure of the perpetual-motion machine is simple: If one could be created, it could act as its own source of constant energy. The idea captivated Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched several machine models in his famed notebooks, and it continues to strike a chord with optimistic inventors and opportunistic amateurs. Serious physicists, however, have discredited perpetual-motion theory, arguing that it ignores basic rules of kinematics, dynamics, and gravity.

Mr. Simanek agrees that perpetual motion is, as da Vinci ultimately came to call it, a chimera. But he argues that students should nevertheless examine the history of perpetual-motion machines because it offers a lesson in how the minutiae of physics must be incorporated into theory and research. "Usually, textbooks discuss [perpetual motion] and just say, 'Well, the laws of thermodynamics say that won't work.' I found this didn't help students understand how the thermodynamics were a problem, or how they were tied inextricably to other laws of physics."

On the Web site, Mr. Simanek offers detailed debunkings of specific devices, from weighted wheels designed in the 12th and 13th centuries to a "magnetic shield" that an Australian high-school student recently developed as an intellectual exercise. In addition to its galleries of unworkable objects, Mr. Simanek's museum includes essays on the most common mistakes inventors make, as well as details about con men like John Worrell Keely, a 19th-century mechanic who claimed he could generate power from the "luminiferous ether" that many physicists thought filled space.

"The museum is a beautiful site," according to Hans-Peter Gramatke, a German expert who runs a site of his own on perpetual motion. "There are classical concepts and modern drafts, and they are all adeptly analyzed."

Mr. Simanek says the site was a natural outgrowth of his interest in "the interface between science and pseudoscience."

It also allows him to treat physics with an element of whimsy -- as he does on some of his other Web sites. One of them has links to documents on pseudoscience (http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/skeptic.htm). Another features satire and parody about science (http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/humor.htm).

Most important, according to Mr. Simanek, the online museum has helped him keep in touch with perpetual motion's modern practitioners -- or would-be practitioners.

While some professors have told him that they use his Web site in class, he says most of the e-mail messages he receives come from hopeful inventors who think they have unlocked secrets necessary to create working buoyancy motors and overbalanced wheels.

Mr. Simanek says he tries to steer the would-be inventors toward mistakes in their mathematics and theory, but many won't take no for an answer. "I've learned a lot about the psychology of the inventor," he says. "It's not pretty."