Regular Memory

The Simple Game

A game so simple it is played mearly by its own existance. Those who exist play it. Although, the game is seperate from existance. The game is a distinct thing that exists in the absence of life. When sentient life arises, the game must be discovered and played before one can say for sure that the life is sentient. It’s almost as if the first rule of the game is that it must be played, and before even this rule is determined the game has already begun. The game in its most complex form could be called Math. Although no one really knows what math is. Some have come to know math in its simplest form. And the simplest form of math might be a close approximation of the game. Although I’ve seen this game take forms that would be unrechognizable to any one form of math. So the game is not math, but math will be used to explain it.

This by no means is in any sense the game, but perhaps to know the true game would lessen some of the magic.

Imagine a triangle. Like all triangle this triangle has three points, or verticies, and three edges. Lets call the verticies of this triangle a “group”. And on this “group” lets defined an “operation”. The “operation” takes as inputs two verticies and outputs a single vertex, and the “operation” works as follows:

  1. For input verticies A and B.
  2. The output is the only vertex in the triangle that is not picked.

One can choose any two verticies and obtain an output vertex. The output vertex appears to always be a vertex that is part of the triangle.

A slightly harder version of this game can be played on a hexagon. Consider the verticies in a hexagon to be a group. Say we travel around the perimeter of the hexagon and label the five verticies A, B, C, D, and E. The define the operation as follows:

  1. If the two input verticies are directly connected by an edge. For example, A and B then the output is the opposite vertex: D in this case.

  2. If there is one vertex in beween the picked verticies then the vertex inbetween is the answer. For example if A and C are picked then the output is B.

Now, we’ve defined two versions of the game above. The goal of the game is to escape the group using the operation. In other words, pick two input verticies, do the operation, and obtain a vertex outside the original group of verticies.

It should be possible. I used to observe hexagons exclusively until I found a way out. I found my way here. Now I’m here and I look back at hexagons, and the way out is odvious to me. Although, where I am now, I play the same game. I’m always combining two elements and getting an output, but, so far, I’m still here. I haven’t gotten out if that’s even possible.

Imagine we played this game on a 3D shape, or a 4D shape, or some shape with N dimensions. Imaging whole worlds and sentient life came to exist inside the shape and came to believe that the whole world or the whole universe was the shape. Imagine this simple game, but played on that shape. A nearly uncountable number of verticies and only one operation or perhaps many operations built from uncountably long chains of that one single operation.

A simple game that complex could take nearly forever to play, yet perhaps time is not something that matters to the game. Perhaps the game is timeless, and from the perspective of the game everything happens instantly.

Imagine though a group of verticies that make up a hexagon. Picking and combining two and getting a result back that’s outside the group. Imagine how suprized you’d be. That’s how it felt the first time I did it; the first time I played the simple game.

Imagine we thought we were playing a 2D version of this game on a triangle. Each operation returns a vertex, but, in reality, we were playing the game on a 3D pyramid, or some tesselation of triangles, or on a 4D triangle through time. We chould reach more than just what appeared to be the three verticies we first saw. After one second, we might never again reach those original three verticies we believed to have originally seen. The first vertex outside of the original set might not exist until decades after we pass away. Imagine a buckyball of hexagons and imagine the operation sends up flying along the surface of the ball, but we don’t see the ball in 3D, we see every result as one of the five original verticies. We’d be traveling all over the ball, but we’d never know it.