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Quantum mechanics and Tomb Raider (2007) (terrytao.wordpress.com)
86 points by turingfeel on July 3, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments



>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."


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


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.


Sounds like Super Time Force, where your previous attempts remain and assist future attempts.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zrYrd1AuQR0


"Braid" has that kind of collision.


Does Not Commute, by Mediocre AB, is a fun mobile game that plays with this concept.



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


That reminds me of old flash games

This one had all kind of weird mechanics. You die if you touch the green spikes (living the gray corpse) and have to press the button in the middle to continue: https://youtu.be/IWdz-tZyJUI?t=410

And the sequel had superpositions: https://youtu.be/JXLEwDNRp2k?t=232


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

[1] he gets better


The game Cursor * 10 [1] also requires you to cooperate with previous version of yourself to solve puzzles. It was a fun small game.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor*10*


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...


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.


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


Apologies, that’s my mistake I didn’t realise it was in the url when I copied and submitted.


Fixed now. Thanks!


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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