Computer program – A parallel universe

A baby comes to this world and opens his/her eyes to greet the family. I am sure every programmer’s first program would have come with a similar greeting of “Hello World”. A programmer acts as a Brahma and creates a small universe of a computer program where each entity is programmed to behave in a certain way.

A simple program can display current time and temperature on a widget. Or it can suggest you to book an Uber cab to airport since its time to board your air flight. These are some meaningful interactions to our world.

Now, let’s look at some standalone programs like “Second Life”, an online virtual world. Linden Lab acted as Brahma and created Second Life, a universe of its own. Here people from our world take avatars and play role-playing games. They can interact with other avatars or the programmed characters. The computer characters are programmed to show right emotions. For a moment just think what if these are real emotions. I mean what if when a role-playing avatar pushes a bank watchman character, the watchman feels the anger in his nerves like any real person. Or a different perspective could be what if a real person here is programmed by our world’s Brahma to be angry when pushed by another person! Could that mean that all our emotions are pre-programmed and the whole game of our universe is just to push buttons. And guess who is having fun by pressing all the buttons. Huh! all this time we just knew that the person playing “Second Play” is enjoying pushing buttonsJ.

Many people may not know about “Second Life” but how about “Mario”.  Nintendo Brahma creates different series of Mario games with different story line. Super Mario Bros starts with Mushroom Kingdom being attacked by a tribe of turtles who kidnap the princess. Mario then saves the kingdom and recues the princess. Do you think the princess Toadstool is not feeling the anguish and misery, but is only a mere computer object? How can we be sure that these emotions are real or not?

Yet another program is of FIFA video series developed by EA Sports. You can pick a formation and build a squad to win matches to glory. When your team loses, do you think your team players also feel the sorrow!

When Ethan Winters encounters the ghost in the Resident Evil game designed by Capcom, who feels the adrenaline rush - the player controlling the protagonist or Ethan Winters!

As you may have heard our universe is made up of five elements – air, water, earth, fir and ether. By now you could very well imagine all these computer program universes are made up of only two elements 1 and 0. So, may be thats why our multi-dimensional universe has more interesting things to offer.

Just for fun, imagine the Brahmas of these universes - Ebbe Altberg from Linden Lab, Tatsumi Kimishima from Nintendo, Andrew Wilson from EA Sports and  Kenzo Tsujimoto from Capcom, chatting over a cup of coffee. Now, can you imagine the same coffee being served to the Brahma of our universe and to his buddies in parallel universes?