I have written a few times on world generation [ 1 , 2 ]. A particular interest of mine is the ability to really use the infinite world that it is possible to create with algorithms to create something more than the imagination that is put into it. Ideas which generate something which is more than the sum of it’s parts are the holy grail of ideas. General relativity was this in physics, with relatively little experimental input, a huge amount of predictive power was created. This is the case for games where the terrain is generated procedurally. The developer of the game does not need to design each bit of the world for it to emerge as a huge, possibly infinite world. The problem with these worlds such as Minecraft is that although they are very large in size, they are limited in kind. Minecraft for example uses the concept of biomes. Each has to be developed and tested individually by the developers, making the systems take longer to build and all the surprises are manufactured.

As a dyslexic, I rely heavily on spellcheck to correct my writing and put it into a readable form. I heavily rely on a similar checker when writing code, paying close attention to use before declaration errors that might indicate that I have misspelt something. I also have spellcheck on in vim, which checks snake case words individually! I don’t however have the same thing for mathematics. Notation can be incredibly powerful. The best notation is that where it makes it clear when you have done something wrong. Or better still doesn’t allow you to do anything wrong. When writing long equations I often miss a sign in one place or another, manipulate them wrong and generally propagate these errors until I find a result which doesn’t make sense. I wondered if there was something simple I could use, that would not be any more time consuming than writing the equations out by hand, that would act as a “spellcheck” for my manipulation of equations. I use a lot of equations on this blog