q&a planning.txt

NOTE: If you are not Andrew, you will probably have no clue what I'm rambling about in this file. Don't worry about it; I'm not even sure I'll use most of the stuff here anyway.

not q&a but still good wording:
- 1:1 mapping between Feynman diagrams and RTS replays!!!
- limitations/caveats of quantum mechanics analogy
  - people don't understand quantum mechanics (so can't just explain QM analogy and expect people to understand the game)
  - it's only an analogy (so be very careful how you word comparisons to QM)
- if anyone asks if this is related to quantum mechanics, tell them how it's not related to quantum mechanics
- physicists wouldn't like it if I answer with "kind of" because physics is a precise science and "kind of" is an imprecise answer
- brighter yellow area in game serves similar purpose to field in quantum mechanics
- The way Achron works is like "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Plausible Deniability lets you substitute your reality without ever rejecting anyone else's.
- Zach describes it as RTS in which "[the other player's] reality is determined by what you see"
- "inspired by quantum mechanics"
- these should be memos/letters from The Mentor
- you can't cheat w/o anyone knowing that you did, right? http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/430139/october-31-2013/the-word---see-no-evil
- cheat with plausible deniability
- is it safe to rename share paths to entangle?
  - sharing paths seems to be a way of doing entanglement
  - the way entanglement seems to usually happen in QM is 2 particles come together and interact in some way, but they collectively don't have to decide how they interacted until they're measured later
- when I read that quantum mechanics is fundamentally different from classical mechanics because in quantum mechanics you can do X but in classical mechanics you can't, I try to understand what X means by trying to figure out what it means to do X in an RTS game
  - so far my experience with [insert X here] has been that other RTS games don't let you do X, but if you did X anyway you could plausibly deny to the other player that you did it (even in the replay)
  - surprisingly often I already added X to the game or was already thinking of adding it
  - in fact the way the game started out is I was thinking about all the cool things I read happens in QM, and wondering if it's possible to do them in a game
  - I think there's a connection between what you can do in physics and what you can do in games that hasn't been sufficiently exploited yet

UI:
have visibility circle (like in menu), when hovering over Q&A box all of it becomes visible
after pressing continue button, nothing changes but moving mouse away shows level map/menu

old descriptions on website home page:
I'm still trying to turn <a href="https://github.com/ad510/plausible-deniability">Plausible Deniability</a> (formerly Decoherence) from a proof of concept into an actual game. Despite my best efforts to keep things simple, that codebase simply refuses to be easy to hack on.

The main thing I worked on last summer was the RTS game <a href="https://github.com/ad510/decoherence">Decoherence</a>, and I finally got it to the point where you can play a basic multiplayer game. The reason it's taken so long to get to this point is that the game lets you manipulate what you did in the past, and every time you do this the game has to make sure it is in a valid state <i>at every point</i> in the past. Therefore, whenever I add a new feature, it introduces a bunch of non-trivial edge cases that I have to handle to make the game work again. So I'm glad I finally got it to the point where I can start playtesting it, and I hope to continue making progress.

For the 2013 <a href="http://globalgamejam.org">Global Game Jam</a>, I made an RTS game prototype that lets you change what your units did in the past, but only where it is impossible for other players to see you doing so. You can download it from the <a href="http://globalgamejam.org/2013/decoherence">Global Game Jam</a> website or the game's <a href="https://github.com/ad510/decoherence">GitHub repository</a>.

after 1st paths level:
...That means that even when watching the replay, your opponents will never see your units taking multiple paths, and in fact the most suspicious evidence they'll see will be seemingly "lucky" coincidences in which your units were in the right place at the right time. But taken together, these carefully chosen "lucky" coincidences may well make the difference between winning and losing the game.

By the way, this is analogous to how a quantum computer works. Real particles in nature take all of the paths available to them, and they only have to make up their mind about where they are when they are seen or otherwise measured. Since this gives them a certain amount of hindsight by the time they are measured, they can often be found in places that form unlikely coincidences with respect to where other particles ended up. It is then possible to take advantage of these coincidences when they occur to make a computer that can solve certain problems much faster than otherwise possible.

after discover infiltration and start following potential traitors:
After this latest incident, it's clear that we can't trust anyone and that we must keep an eye out to make sure no one's secretly working against us.

Now we could just leave it at that and move on. But I think there's a deeper lesson to all this. We know that the NSA is capable of doing crazy things, maybe even some things we don't know about yet. But we also know that no matter what mind boggling techniques they use against us, they all have one thing in common, which is that the NSA can only use them when we're not looking. Otherwise, if they try to change something that we saw happen in the past, it would violate causality and we'd get a smoking gun confirmation that they're doing something they're not supposed to. Therefore, by watching everything the NSA might be doing, not only do we ensure that no one is working against us without our knowledge, but we also prevent them from hiding their wrongdoing using those techniques that are so difficult to detect.

This makes it more important than ever that we never take an eye off what anyone is doing. Ever.

(note: double slit experiment)

Q: Can *real* particles change what they did in the past?

Well, just like none of the antimatter particles "saw" you changing anything in the past, we've never seen a particle in real life change what it did in the past. But we have seen real life particles do some *very strange* things, and soon you will learn how to do some very strange things too. ;)

(note: relativity)

(note: what happens after particles annihilate)

(note: matter-antimatter artificial decoherence boundary/system)

Q: ...

...

That said, through careful experimentation, we can say with quite some confidence that at least one of the following is true (note: check with physicist):

1. Particles do not have a well defined position until you measure them. (This would be like if your proton was smeared out across all of the yellow areas until the antiproton "saw" it.)
2. Particles can teleport. (This would be like if you teleported the proton over to the other group of electrons instead of changing what it did in the past.)
3. Particles can change what they did in the past.

Q: How can you tell that someone can do something like time travel if you never saw it happening?

Suppose you were controlling the antimatter. Every time when the level starts, you flip a coin and put the antiproton on one of the sides of the map depending on whether you got heads or tails. (Or better yet, you wait several seconds before flipping the coin so you know that the person controlling the matter didn't just know the initial result of the coin flip. It's not like you have to make up your mind right away, since the matter can't see where the antiproton is until it moves across half of the map.) Since the side you put the antiproton on is a completely random choice, you'd expect that the other player can complete the level within the time limit about half of the time, at most. So wouldn't you be a little suspicious if the other player did that 10 times in a row? Or 100? Or 1000?

Notice you could do that without ever seeing the other player time travel. But that means they have an excuse for their apparent "cheating." Maybe they were just very lucky. So if you play this game against someone who doesn't know you can time travel and they accuse you of cheating, show them the replay and say that you were just lucky. And if they accuse you of seeing the entire map, show them all of the situations in the replay where your units were at all the right places before the other player even started moving their units there (since you changed where your units went in the past after you knew where their units would be). You'd have to be very lucky for *that* to happen, wouldn't you? Maybe they should play you again and you might not be so lucky next time? Or maybe you're just psychic. (note: maybe move this section to a later level's Q&A, maybe with the question: Time traveling and using amplitudes is fun, but if I play against someone who doesn't know this game lets you do that, wouldn't they still get suspicious that I'm "cheating?")

(note: experiment to detect in real physics more complicated due to additional restrictions from prev answer, but used for particle physics "discoveries" such as higgs)

(note: after sharing paths level, explain how in laser photon being in 1 place increases chance of another atom having emitted photon to same place (from QED), and is this a good place to mention entanglement?)

(note: after infiltration but before following potential traitors, have obvious initial conclusion of don't trust anyone and can't make any assumptions about unseen areas, a lot of free space between particles we're made out of (nucleus vs atom size analogy), at every point in that "empty space", there may or may not be... usually don't measure things carefully enough so impossible to tell whether they're there, but look a little closer and they influence everything that is happening in our lives)

(note: after sniper level, say how finding electron at 1 location decreases chance to find another nearby, emphasizing they don't make up their mind about where they are until you see them, and how this "exclusion principle" creates chemical properties of atoms (from QED))
(note: snipers actually pretty similar to bell's theorem example, if enemy has some marines and some snipers you'd expect to see snipers some of the time but actually you see all the marines first, if enemy switches precedence then you see all snipers first instead, to be similar to bell's theorem example have 2 marines and 1 sniper and switch precedence after 1st measurement, if you try to use this to communicate with 3rd player then you learn the enemy's precedence rule but can't communicate anything to 3rd player, also units don't teleport in replay)
  - einstein's perspective: you can explain away uncertainty by saying it's caused by imprecise measurements, but here's a situation where the unit must either be a marine or a sniper and measuring it affects another unit very far away, but quantum mechanics doesn't say which one it is, so the theory must be incomplete

(note: after level where NSA never infiltrated another country, like http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/10/23/readout-president-s-phone-call-chancellor-merkel-germany, say that replay only shows one way it could have happened and impossible to ever know what "actually" happened, in real world there's these "replays" called Feynman diagrams)

(note: after identical twins level, say philosophical implications of never having to make up your mind about what your units do and that replay just shows 1 way opponent could have done that, and how distinguish radio waves from 1 source vs 2 close sources when can't tell which star the photon came from (from QED))

(note: after seeing the entire map level, say that nature is like superuser, show how paths/amplitudes and wavefunctions are equivalent in 1 player game/nature with option to explain how decoherence really works)

according to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc entanglement = measurement:
- sharing paths implies that either one thing or another is going to happen when the path is seen, so it's the same thing as measurement
- picking where a unit is seen means picking between the mutually exclusive outcomes (from a 3rd player's perspective) of what would happen if the unit is seen at each of those places, so until the 3rd player sees what happens it looks like sharing paths
- quantum eraser: if it's possible to undo the effects of the "measurement" (e.g. share paths of healthy & unhealthy marine, then attack the healthy marine until it has same health as unhealthy one, or do this in opposite order) then from 3rd player's perspective the outcomes are identical and can mess with them for longer (in practice this rarely happens)