Since around the late 1970s, when Synergetics was first published, a small cabal, not unlike the one surrounding General Semantics (Alfred Korzybski) has continued to mix geodesic domes with spherical geometry and cybernetics, following the authors’ lead. Where did that go?
If you’re into gaming, you probably know the next version of Civilization is about to make its debut, this October. Cybernetics means games and game action, like playing chess against “The Turk” a first AI simulation, actually a little man.
The chess-playing Turk, outwardly purely mechanical, might be remembered as the Napoleon-era artifact which booted AI as a concept, given how many believed in this hoax. Nowadays we play (and/or consult) Watson and Wolfram Alpha, not little men behind the curtain.
Like many classic board games, Civilization tiles the game-playing surface with hexagons, which stretch away in a great plain, the so-called “terraform” or map. These tend to come in levels. War game simulations have been using this hexagonal motif for like forever.
As the growing cabal of Divided Spheres readers know (that’s Popko’s primer on this whole spherical geometry topic), you’ll need 12 pentagons to close this expanding plain into a ball, a real planet. The resulting pattern, the “hexapent” is what “thinking globally” now looks like.
