Holy cow. What a neat idea:
The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is at best to succumb to another necessity, the necessity of the law of large numbers. The good player does not fool himself, and accepts that ther [sic] is exactly one chance, which produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he experiences. [Via Roll the Bones]
Sounds vaguely intelligent design, but it’s certainly poetic. Which in turn reminds me of a concept from J.L. Borges’ Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius: the idea of a civilization wherein the practice of philosophy is not the search for truth, but rather the search for the most beautiful and astounding of ideas.
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What he’s saying is much simpler than intelligent design:
He’s saying that if you roll fifty dice, you’re unlikely to get all fifty the same. But if you roll them a hundred trillion times, that unlikelyhood becomes a certainty.
This is something which is becoming more and more important and readily applicable in MMORPGs, where if it CAN happen, it WILL happen, even if it is highly unlikely.
:)
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