Grand Creation

When describing my research to a broader audience, I’ve been using the following mantra: “Things that persist, persist. Things that don’t, don’t.” It’s a good segue into describing simple chemical autocatalytic cycles. Anyway, I finally looked up the source of that quote and traced it to one Steve Grand in his book Creation, published back in 2000. I promptly went to the library, borrowed the book, and read it cover-to-cover. 

 

I had never heard of Steve Grand who became famous for creating the popular computer game Creatures in the 1990s. I don’t recall ever hearing about Creatures, a game where players nurture alien species named Norns, helping them to grow and learn within a virtual environment. I did hear about tamagotchis, so-called handheld “digital pets”, which function on a similar premise. Never having played with either, I plead ignorance to the aficionados who can point out the dissimilarities between the two.

 

Creation is a strange book, at least when reading it twenty years later having spent a bunch of time reading and thinking about complex systems while probing the question “what is life?”. I recognized much of what Grand was trying to describe. I agree with him that reductionism is flawed when it comes to describing biology, and that one needs to analyze life at different functional levels rather than just focus on its material mechanistic aspects – especially tempting to a chemist who is trained to think at the molecular level of action. As I work my way through Rosen’s much heavier treatise on the nature of dynamics and what it means when we try to model a system, it seems that Grand has worked his way to similar conclusions without the heavy theory.

 

But not having the theory means that Grand struggles to describe what seems indescribable, and one gets the sense that he is grasping whatever straw-like metaphors he can come up with. I say this with the utmost respect for his book, since I don’t think I could put into coherent words the swirl of thoughts I have about similar questions. I appreciate how challenging it is, and that’s why I find Creation to be a strange book. It attempts to appeal to a general audience with an interesting hook (designing life-like organisms in a virtual world), but feels nebulous when you read it. If I read it twenty years ago, I don’t think I would appreciate how challenging it is to describe what Grand attempts. The subtitle of his book is “Life and How to Make It”. It’s a grand goal (pun intended), but not an easy one because the notion of life, and in particular organic life, is more slippery than an eel.

 

For those Creature gaming enthusiasts who read Creation, Grand does a nice job describing what goes into his mind as a designer to try and give the user-player the feel of life. For someone like me who has never played the game, I found it interesting because his approach is quite different from how I would approach the problem. Our goals are different, of course, but I think game designers and scientists can learn from each other in this respect. Grand doesn’t worry about the mechanics at the molecular level; what he does is use a neural net to mimic feedback and feedforward loops. It’s elegant in its own way, and I’ve been pondering how some of his ideas can be married into graph theory to solve the problems I’m working on. I particularly appreciated the way he approached the analog-digital divide. And with his computer-programmer perspective, seeing movement as a copy-and-erasure process when applied in the virtual space of bits, was eye-opening to me.

 

I enjoy having my mind stretched. Grand’s book does that in a way that’s different from most of what I’ve read, which has tended towards the dense and academic. But it’s still a strange book that doesn’t fit any particular niche. Perhaps I did read it twenty years too late. Grand doesn’t worry about getting things right, like the scientist would. It’s as if he’s feeling his way towards the solution of a problem like going into a dark room arms stretched out to figure out what’s around you. Like an explorer! Perhaps it is not so different from a broader notion of research after all.

 

P.S. The title of this blog post comes from the book spine which essentially reads “Grand Creation”