I'm particularly thinking about the primary, secondary
and tertiary structures of these worlds. If some
of these technical terms throw you a bit, please forgive
me. (You might try Chris Wills book "Introns, Exons and
(something else?!)")
VRML is the primary structure, equivalent to the
sequence of bases, ATCGCTCGCTATAA etc., in DNA, or
the sequence of aminoacids in a protein. The primary
structure totally defines the other secondary
and tertiary structures.
Compressed/Transfer VRML, stripped of comments and
possibly compressed, could be considered equivalent
of the transfer/messenger (forget which at this moment)
RNA, which is the "go-between" in going from, in DNA,
the sequence of bases, to the sequence of amino acids.
Secondary structure... This might be something in the browser
or something we further develop in the future like a
database or some kind of structure that helps us, for
instance, with figuring out what stuff is close to us
and affects us most when we're doing an interactive/highly
complex world. In proteins or DNA, secondary structure
refers to when the sequence loops around itself a little bit.
I think we can do some more development of this in the
metaphor.
Tertiary structure is the 3-D version of the VRML. A particular
primary structure must always form into exactly the same
tertiary structure. From the tertiary structure, we can understand
the purpose, e.g. to catch oxygen to deliver it to the blood in the
base of hemoglobins where there's a little catchers glove with
an iron that'll pick up an oxygen (=rust!). Tertiary structure
is like the 3-D shape formed by the primary and secondary structure
folding and twisting into the 3-d shape defined by the interactions
of the various forces, such as gravity, inter-molecular forces and
properties of the building blocks of the primary structure and
whether they are hydrophilic (water-loving), etc.
When we go from the primary structure to creation of the
tertiary structure, this can be called expression of the gene.
(There can be many genes on a piece of DNA, separated by large
exons? which don't code for genes and are often considered
garbage, though they have an effect in evolution -- think
of comments in your VRML! Oh, and exons are about 98% of DNA,
should we learn something from this?) Expression of the gene
is sort of like viewing the world, with our VRML viewer.
This leads to interesting ideas, I hope. A natural one is
some kind of genetic recombination of worlds, akin to genetic
algorithms, for those of you familiar with those in AI.
Well, hope this gets you thinking! Gee, Brian, looks like
you were doing lots of thinking last night, so you can have
a break.
Adrian
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Adrian Scott, Ph.D. ([email protected])
Scott Virtual Theme Parks, [email protected]
http://www.hk.super.net/~scotta/theme