On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 17:02, Colin Adams
No I haven't. I'm not a mass-market gamer. I'm an ex-hard-core gamer.
I think that basically, it is the same psychological stuff that is going on in the brains of (puzzle) gamers and people who interactively proves theorems. It is like solving an intricate puzzle, the pieces fitting just being lemmas, axioms, definitions, corollaries and what not. It gives me the very same kick as fragging 8 players with a quad in Quake Live does. That said, it is probably not for everybody. What is true of both is that they are quite addictive. Learning to do a technically hard jump in QL is the very same as learning a new proof technique: when you have it under your wings, you can go to places impossible before. Many "normal" puzzle games fit into the NP-complete class as well, so it would look as if human beings like the challenge of trying to solve hard problems. Theorem proving is simply yet another beast in the zoo, underpinning the other games. -- J.