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The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World
The Planiverse Computer Contact with a TwoDimensional World Author:A. K. Dewdney Once every hundred years or so, a new reality is discovered. In 1884 Edwin Abbott's classic, Flatland, captured readers' imaginations with an ingenious excursion into a two-dimensional society. Now, a century later, Dr. Alexander Keewatin Dewdney, a theoretical computer scientist, takes us on an exciting journey through an amazingly comp... more »lex, self-consistent two-dimensional universe. The Planiverse combines science and speculation, technology and metaphysics, in an astonishing work of the imagination that is elegant, witty, and wonderful.
Dr. Dewdney created a hypothetical two-dimensional universe as an exercise for his computer science students. They developed a program called 2DWORLD to model a detailed, although somewhat primitive, planet. Then one day in May 1980, something extraordinary happened. One of the creatures began to use a word not in the computer's vocabulary -- YNDRD. And as the simple graphics generated by the program grew more detailed, a strange four-armed creature appeared, surrounded by a bizarre alien landscape.
Somehow, the 2DWORLD program had connected with a real two-dimensional world. The creature who appeared became known as yendred, a youthful inhabitant of Arde, a planet somewhere inside the planiverse. And so began a fantastic odyssey into a two-dimensional world -- as Dr. Dewdney and his students followed Yendred on a journey across Arde, sharing his adventures, learning his history, and discussing his philosophy.
With over 125 illustrations and diagrams generated from Arde, The Planiverse is a record of that contact period -- the computer-aided exploration of a new reality -- complete with its own physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, and civilization. Join Yendred and Dr. Dewdney and discover new possibilities and concepts that will change the way you look at your own world.« less