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operating manual. The chess player who has made a bad move cannot explain
his error away by pointing ro some external empirical fact that he could not
have known but that , had he known it, would have led him ro make a better
move. Neither maya programmer whose program behaves differently than he
intended it to look for the fault anywhere but in the game he has himself
created. He may have misread the computer system's manuals, or otherwise
misunderstood his computing environment-just as a novice chess player may
misread the rules with respect to, say, castling-but no datum existing in the
world outside the computer system he is using can be at all relevant to the
behavior of the world he has created. A computer's failure to behave exactly as
its programmer intends cannot even be attributable solely to some limitation
unique to the computer. In effect , every general purpose computer is a kind of
universal machine that can in principle do what any other general purpose
computer can do. In this important sense, a specific general purpose computer
has no limitations unique to it. The computer then is a playing field on which
one may play out any game one can imagine: one may create worlds in which
there is no gravity, or in which rwo bodies attract each other, not by Newton 's
inverse square law, but by an inverse cube (or nth power) law, or in which time
dances forward and backward in obedience to a choreography as simple or
complex as one wills ; one can create societies in whose economies prices rise as
goods become plentiful and fall as they become scarce, and in which homo–
sexual unions alone produce offspring. In short, one can singlehandedly write
and produce plays in a theater that admits of no limitations. And, what is
most important, one need know only what can be inferred directly from one's
computer system manual, or constructed by one's own imagination .
An engineer is inextricably impacted in the material world . His creativity
is confined by its laws; finally, he may do only what may lawfully be done.
But he is doomed to exercise his trade in a Kafkaesque castle from which there
is, even in principle , no escape. For he cannot know the whole plan that
determines what rooms there are in the world , and how what doors berween
them may be opened . When, therefore, a device an engineer has designed
doesn't work, he cannot always know, or tell by his own reasoning alone,
whether he is in an antechamber to success and only his blunders keep him
from opening its doors , or whether he has wandered into a closet from which
there is no exit . Then he must appeal to others, his teachers, his colleagues, his
books, to tell him, or at least to hint at, a formula that will compel the
insouciant attendant (nature) to lead him out and on.
The computer programmer , however , is a creator of universes for which
he alone is the lawgiver. So , of course, is the designer of any game . But
universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of
computer programs. Moreover, and this is a crucial point , systems so formu-
