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Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games

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osmium writes:

> I think there is a needed but missing word in the English language
> to classify things that are, for all practical purposes, infinite
> but not infinite from the standpoint of a picky mathematician.  Does
> any language have such a word?  Peninfinte is as good as I could
> come up with in English.

If there was a real need, there would be a word.

There are words that come close enough. Opening a large thesaurus at
"large" I find a number of candidates: one of "immense", "enormous",
"humongous", "ginormous", "superabundant" might be taken and defined
in a context to mean a number that is so large that it won't ever be
exhausted.

Another tack would be to play with "generative" and use several words
(this is often done in practice!) to convey the idea that the game
generates its plot, map, whatever as the players make choices, in a
way that won't be exhausted as long as anyone can possibly care.

> And as a WAG, there are no non-picky mathematicians. In the same
> sense that there are no white crows.

I suppose a mathematician is one who does mathematics. And mathematics
is what mathematicians do. Possibly in the same sense that there are
white crows.

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Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games Brian <briansipler@yahoo.com> - 2013-05-18 18:13 -0700
  Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2013-05-18 19:31 -0700
    Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games "Chris Uppal" <chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org> - 2013-05-19 10:12 +0100
      Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games "osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> - 2013-05-19 05:43 -0500
        Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi> - 2013-05-19 14:22 +0300
        Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2013-05-19 08:39 -0700
        Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games "Charles Hottel" <chottel@earthlink.net> - 2013-05-19 13:45 -0400
        Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games "Chris Uppal" <chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org> - 2013-05-20 08:30 +0100
    Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games Brian <briansipler@yahoo.com> - 2013-05-19 14:55 -0700
      Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2013-05-22 07:52 -0700
        Re: Programming Open-Ended Plots In Games Brian <briansipler@yahoo.com> - 2013-05-22 12:19 -0700

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