Wyclef: A Rational Reconstruction of Versu Social Engine

Video games often lack an accurate representation of the person playing the game, causing a disconnect between the player and the character’s story. With Versu, a proprietary social simulation engine, not only did choices become more connected to the player, but the player could choose to take the place of any of the characters present in the story. This allows the player to find themselves in the story, while also giving vast replayability to the game. Wyclef is an open source, rational reconstruction of Versu providing increased authoring speed of stories and availability of the social engine to more people. We found that based on the limited documentation provided, it is still very possible to fully rebuild Versu. Additional work on providing authoring of characters and worlds to be parsed by the engine could further flesh out the capabilities of Wyclef

Trend differences in lower stratospheric water vapour between Boulder and the zonal mean and their role in understanding fundamental observational discrepancies

Trend estimates with different signs are reported in the literature for lower stratospheric water vapour considering the time period between the late 1980s and 2010. The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) frost point hygrometer (FPH) observations at Boulder (Colorado, 40.0° N, 105.2° W) indicate positive trends (about 0.1 to 0.45 ppmv decade⁻¹). On the contrary, negative trends (approximately −0.2 to −0.1 ppmv decade⁻¹) are derived from a merged zonal mean satellite data set for a latitude band around the Boulder latitude. Overall, the trend differences between the two data sets range from about 0.3 to 0.5 ppmv decade⁻¹, depending on altitude. It has been proposed that a possible explanation for these discrepancies is a different temporal behaviour at Boulder and the zonal mean. In this work we investigate trend differences between Boulder and the zonal mean using primarily simulations from ECHAM/MESSy (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Hamburg/Modular Earth Submodel System) Atmospheric Chemistry (EMAC), WACCM (Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model), CMAM (Canadian Middle Atmosphere Model) and CLaMS (Chemical Lagrangian Model of the Stratosphere). On shorter timescales we address this aspect also based on satellite observations from UARS/HALOE (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite/Halogen Occultation Experiment), Envisat/MIPAS (Environmental Satellite/Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding) and Aura/MLS (Microwave Limb Sounder). Overall, both the simulations and observations exhibit trend differences between Boulder and the zonal mean. The differences are dependent on altitude and the time period considered. The model simulations indicate only small trend differences between Boulder and the zonal mean for the time period between the late 1980s and 2010. These are clearly not sufficient to explain the discrepancies between the trend estimates derived from the FPH observations and the merged zonal mean satellite data set. Unless the simulations underrepresent variability or the trend differences originate from smaller spatial and temporal scales than resolved by the model simulations, trends at Boulder for this time period should also be quite representative for the zonal mean and even other latitude bands. Trend differences for a decade of data are larger and need to be kept in mind when comparing results for Boulder and the zonal mean on this timescale. Beyond that, we find that the trend estimates for the time period between the late 1980s and 2010 also significantly differ among the simulations. They are larger than those derived from the merged satellite data set and smaller than the trend estimates derived from the FPH observations

Praxish: A Rational Reconstruction of a Logic-Based DSL for Modeling Social Practices

The Versu framework is historically notable for its full-featuredness as a suite of tools for creating highly responsive interactive dramas. However, it has also been lost for nearly a decade, and a similarly approachable and flexible simulationist interactive narrative authoring framework has not yet emerged to take its place. We therefore aim to introduce an open-source rational reconstruction of the Versu framework, drawing on publicly available documentation of Versu's design and implementation to assemble a successor system with similar architecture and capabilities. Here, we present the first component of this system: Praxish, a reconstruction of the low-level exclusion logic language atop which the rest of Versu's functionality is based