How does composability improve the openness of autonomous worlds?

Author:guiltygyoza

Translation: MetaCat

Typesetting: MetaCat

This is the last 2/3 of the composability project, the first 1/3 is here.

Engineering as creating in-the-World

Physics accompanies engineering: the practice of using an understanding of the physics of the world to build objects into something novel and valuable. Just as any design process is governed by certain rules that concretely structure, and therefore make, the design itself possible, engineers are both bounded by and enabled by the laws of physics to shape the stuff of the world into something Something of value. What might be possible to design in the digital world through digital physics?

Take the Pokemon video game, for example. Given the type system, players can design Pokémon teams that are optimized to combat specific type combinations in their opponent’s team.

Take the Age of Empires video game, for example. With the counterattack system in mind, players can design armies of mixed unit types that can be optimized for specific unit types on the opponent’s team, or optimized for complementing specific unit types on the same team.

**Players can design new works in the world within the enforced boundaries of digital physics. **However, for the two examples above, digging a little deeper creates an insurmountable wall: **Players cannot design individual Pokémon, nor can they design military unit types. There are no laws of physics in these digital worlds to support such engineering activities. **New Pokemon and new military units are not designed within the worlds, but are introduced into the worlds by the corporate developers of those worlds: the gods of those worlds across their plot boundaries. This means that Pokemon supersets are themselves part of the digital physics of the Pokemon digital world, and military unit supersets are themselves part of the digital physics of the Age of Empires digital world.

This setting makes it difficult for these worlds to remain interesting because

1. The drama of a world depends in part on the totality of objects that exist in it,
2. This setting requires the God of the World to continue to inject new objects to keep it interesting.

**When the sum of objects is at a standstill, their combinations tend to saturate, regardless of their composability. **“Meta”: The core strategy to stand out in the world has taken shape and become rigid. The distribution of resources and power among human actors also tends to stagnate. All of these effects inhibit fun. In our physical world, new things emerge constantly through natural evolution or human discovery and invention, breaking the norms of civilization and society: causing dramatic events.

Adaptive mutations in the virus (Covid-19) are causing global supply chains to collapse. The invention of printing allowed for the creation of imaginary communities among strangers, thus giving rise to nation-states. **If what exists in the world is determined by a single company, then the world is bottlenecked by the longevity of that company and its ability and willingness to ship: the world is less autonomous. **

For an autonomous world to expect continued attention from human participants, it needs to be continuously interesting. For the digital world outside of the blockchain, Pokémon, military units, available equipment, consumables, vehicles, castable spells, and everything in the tech and skill trees are often defined only by their single god, all of which Elements are often called features of the world. For autonomous worlds with rich digital physics, they can be “invented in the world”: invented from within by their inhabitants, rather than introduced from without by their gods, thus preserving the world’s autonomy. **Blockchain’s ability to enable rich digital physics may not be technical, but cultural and philosophical, a desire for a digital world that lasts infinitely longer than a centralization-driven world. **

Composable Engineering

**Towers of human knowledge are created from knowledge combinations: **The reorganization of existing knowledge to unlock new cognitive and practical possibilities. Galileo, for example, by combining knowledge of building telescopes with knowledge of precise drawing through mechanical devices, produced knowledge that celestial bodies moved in ways that were inconsistent with the claims of the Church. This knowledge had a lasting impact, laying the foundation for nearly all physical science since. When the fabric of knowledge is hindered, human progress slows.

**Composable engineering is defined here as the optionality of a world that allows recursive composition of engineering artifacts with no limit on the depth of recursion. **For example, the Pokémon Team project produced an object with a recursion depth of zero, and the team was not composable. Form a squad and battle against other individual squads; in the digital world of Pokemon, there’s no super structure to build on top of a team.

**Making the system recursively composable may mean that multiple teams can form a pool together with a team selection strategy that takes as input the opponent team and returns from the pool the team that is most effective against the opponent team. We can call this team formation and selection strategy a battle group. To go one more level recursively, imagine multiple players, each controlling a combat group, forming one legion to fight another legion. In regimental combat, each battlegroup is like a chess piece, moving around the map as an atomic unit, and there may be special rules on how regimental resources are shared between battlegroups on the map, such as a morale meter, rage meter, or Supply.

Note that game mechanics may change as we recurse; game mechanics at different recursion depths may also be interdependent. And there may be special rules on how regiment-level resources (such as morale meters, rage meters, or supplies) are shared between combat groups on the map.

Composable engineering artifacts in an autonomous world will allow for the compounding of inventions, enabling the same knowledge combination processes that have driven human history in the physical world, thereby driving the evolution of our digital world. Composable engineering also allows for knowledge encapsulation, which means “I don’t need to know every detail of your invention to incorporate it into my invention process.” Knowledge encapsulation is in some ways equivalent to separation of concerns in software development in principle.

By implementing separation of concerns, large engineering tasks can be imagined and completed by chaining small engineering tasks together. Different tasks require different skills and resource types, naturally encouraging workforce specialization. With labor specialization, this allows for different ways of entering the world, which means there is more interest, more life in the world.

As a closing thought, by introducing certain cryptographic primitives into the technology stack underlying our autonomous world, information asymmetries can be introduced across compositional boundaries: ** “Not only do I not need to understand every detail of your invention, I It’s also impossible to peak into your invention, but by certain published quantitative measurements I’m confident in the utility of your invention, so I’ll make a deal with you to incorporate your invention into my invention process"* *. This asymmetry provides inventors with the option of hiding the details of their inventions and protecting intellectual property.

related articles:

Autonomous world and full-chain games

Full-chain games: a typical case of autonomous world

“Digital Physics” in Full-Chain Games

Why is an “Autonomous World” needed?

Why build Onchain Realities?

Media, Rollup and Digital Physics: Faster, Cheaper Old Things Are Exciting New Things