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Artgame developer Jason Rohrer (Sleep is Death, Passage) has just announced his next game, Inside a Star-filled Sky, in cryptic fashion.
If you head on over to Insideastarfilledsky.net, a quote from Rapanos v. United States by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will greet you. Click through and you'll see a series of what appears to be 2D level layouts that also may double as Rorschach tests. At the very bottom is a link to a .zip file titled "enter." Opening the archive will present you with another .zip file simply titled "a." Within that, another titled "t." This continues until you're left with "atablemadeofgreenstone."
A link within that .zip file also sends you to a page with screens that may be more representative of the final game. Here's one:
What does all this mean? A few Bitmob staffers jump in with their theories after the break, but they may merely lead to more questions than answers…. If you think you know, please leave a comment!
Bitmob Community Manager Andrew Hiscock points out that the file names in enter.zip spell out "a table made of green stone," which could be a reference to The Emerald Tablet, a text that supposedly reveals the substance that has existed always since the birth of the universe.
Bitmob Editor James DeRosa suggests that the construction of this secret code through .zip files demonstrates recursion, a mathematical process by which a function needs to apply its own definition in order to define itself — the most common example being the Fibonacci sequence.
The Scalia quote references "turtles all the way down," an infinite regression problem in cosmology. Aristotle described the "unmoved mover": He begins with the observation that movement exists in the universe and that something must have set moving objects into motion. But because we can't have an infinite chain of causes of movement, there must be a first mover, i.e., an "unmoved mover."
This, however, raises the issue of what moved the first mover, and we fall down an infinite regression of first cause.
SInce Rohrer is a game developer, we can apply this concept to computer science in what is known as the "undecidable problem." This means that for a formal system that has a yes-or-no answer, we cannot construct a single algorithm that always answers correctly. One of the earliest undecidable problems discovered was the halting problem, which means that a program falls into a loop from which it cannot escape, i.e., it will run for infinity.
Perhaps Rohrer is playing around with the concept of infinite loops, and how we break those loops? Or maybe he's just playing with us….
