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Quantum mechanics and Tomb Raider (2007)

terrytao.wordpress.com

86 points by zydex 3 years ago · 18 comments

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rasz 3 years ago

>So, let’s make the game a bit more interesting. Let us assume that every time Lara dies, she leaves behind a corpse in that location for future incarnations of Lara to encounter... Then Lara will start noticing the following phenomenon (assuming she survives at all): whenever she navigates any particularly tricky puzzle, she usually encounters a number of corpses which look uncannily like herself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Returnal_(video_game)

"Selene explores the planet and is shocked when she comes across corpses of herself. She learns that every time she dies, time loops back to the moment she crashed, sending her back to her starting point. The planet seems to change with every loop, and Selene begins experiencing vivid visions."

  • orlp 3 years ago

    Also somewhat related, the 'Heaven Sent' episode from dr. Who.

moron4hire 3 years ago

This is why I love the level completion replay from Super Meat Boy. It plays all of your previous attempts, superimposed in real-time.

I always thought it'd be really crazy if you could play with all those ghost images in action and there was collision detection with them. So all those "particle" meat boys would be interacting with each other and maybe create some wave diffraction patterns.

sqrt666 3 years ago

Also of interest:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/try-your-hand-at-qua...

egypturnash 3 years ago

The part with the tombs that must be completed by stacking up the corpses of multiple failed Crofts reminded me of the c64 game based on Nemesis the Warlock: https://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=https%3A//www.lemon64.com/g...

It is not necessarily a very good game but the concept of stacking up enemy corpses to climb to the next screen is a fascinating one. Here's a video of someone slogging their way all the way through it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmt4mdyIEuE

andreareina 3 years ago

There's a puzzle in Planescape: Torment that requires dying[1] several times to solve.

[1] he gets better

danbmil99 3 years ago

I didn't notice the author, but I was reading this thinking to myself, this blogger has a better understanding of quantum mechanics than your average internet crank...

residualmind 3 years ago

Hooray for hypertext and the QT links in the article. An insomniac morning turned into brain gymnastics. Especially when I got to Superdeterminism, things started to make sense again, some waves collapsing on me. I have yet to encounter one of those Free Wills in the wild.

someweirdperson 3 years ago

Why does it link to an anchor #more-12?

tpoacher 3 years ago

There is another similarity with tomb raider.

At confined resolutions / lower versions, Lara's most famous "features" become composed of a limited discrete number of polygons, appearing pyramidal in nature, and with an apparent increase in size (a phenomenon known as "boob shift")

But once you increase the version number, you get a nice continuous function space instead.

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