SYNTAX

I have put up a small site called SYNTAX.

Take a board game. Every board game has a core mechanic, a way to win, a way turns are taken, and five other parts like these. Under “way to win” you can pick racing to the finish, most points or last one standing, among others. SYNTAX calls that whole list, the parts and the choices under each, a syntax. Describe a game by what it picks for each part, and you can set it beside another game, or change one pick and see what you get. boardgameBuilder, the tool I put online this week, is built on this one: eight parts and 86 choices.

There are five syntaxes on the site so far: board game, record, personhood, framework and life. The record one comes from Zariia, a simulator where you upload two tracks and get back one file. The first track plays for anyone; the second is encrypted inside the same file and plays only with a key. Personhood breaks a piece of work into who decides what it is for, who writes, who judges, and what is left over. It sits under my work on AI tools, and in it an AI model and code are listed as things. They hold a part only because a person set them up to.

Each syntax also has to say what it leaves out. In personhood an animal holds just one part, its own intent, which nobody states for it. So the animal gets a syntax of its own, life, where its place, its food, its body, what it does and the signals it makes are each either its own or taken from it.

Every syntax can be read as a page or downloaded as a file, free to reuse with credit (CC BY 4.0). The source is on GitHub.

If you read one and think a part is missing, or one does not belong, write to me.

Site: https://syntax.prayasabhinav.net
Source: https://github.com/prayasabhinav/syntax
Write to me:

← Notes