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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

But you do need a math PhD to code it, because if you were coding it, you'd be Tarn Adams, who has a math PhD. There is no state in which one can be "coding Dwarf Fortress" and "not have a math PhD".

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The most reasonable gloss on "You need a math PHD to code Dwarf Fortress" is "Necessarily, if someone codes Dwarf Fortress, they have a math PhD." The modality "necessarily" is widely understood to refer to possible alternative states of affairs, not merely those states of affairs which are actual. In other words, if an alternative state of affairs is possible, in which someone (whether Tarn Adams or someone else) codes Dwarf Fortress without a math PhD, then it is not true that it is necessary to have a math PhD to code Dwarf Fortress.

Most people in this thread believe that since a math PhD did not play a crucial role in Adams's ability to develop Dwarf Fortress, then it is true that such an alternative state of affairs is possible. (The language of "alternative universes" - usually called possible worlds in the literature - is one way of getting at this.)

I'd posit that there could exist an alternate universe where someone without a math PhD made exactly Dwarf Fortress

Well if such a universe exists, there is probably one where it turns out exactly the same w/o math PhD, and another where its a very different game. In any case, we're not privy to those universe's goings on :/

To that I'd say if you had a jazillion monkeys with a jazillion typewriters, the monkey that types Dwarf Fortress has at most at 50% chance of having a PhD

That universe exists and the game is called Rimworld!

I thought it was discworld

Turtles all the way down

I would make an even stronger assertion that this is almost certainly the case. ;-)

Classic theoretical mathematician answer, but games are applied mathematics :P

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