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You are given an opportunity to hard reset our universe (particularly, the Earth). You are also allowed to change one rule about the new universe. What rule would you change? (lemm.ee)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The rule could be anything, as funny or as serious as you want. The universe will progress in a similar way that it has up until this point, unless your changed rule prevented it from doing so.

Some examples might be:

The invention of currency is not allowed.
Iron is slightly less stable.
The Ancient Greeks are able to cultivate Silphium, which does not go extinct now.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to keep this for when I have to explain non-Euclidean spaces during game night.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I always use Chess boards to describe non-Euclidean spaces when I "need" to (aka when I get even a narrow chance to)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

By all means, explain it to me! My best way so far was siting the chase in call of Cthulhu and really it's not a great example.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Heck yeah, I'll try my best!

So on a euclidian chess board, moving your king one space left would be 1 space, one space up would be 1 space, and one space diagonally would be √2 spaces (some simple trig gets us there).

Chess however, does not obey the laws of Euclidian geometry nor does its physical representation show us things to scale. A king's move diagonally is the same amount of space as a move side to side, 1 space.

It's silly, because spaces weren't directly supposed to represent distance or anything, but it's funny that it works out this way

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is a problem I've always had with Square grids in D&D and it never occured to me that from character perspective a character is warping space to move slightly further for the same amount of movement.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Also non Euclidian! Hexagons (the bestagons) also tesselate and fix that problem nicely