Yes, his thesis was outstanding, and a lot of the best parts ended up in the book.

I really appreciated the big section at the beginning about Doreen Nelson's life work, Design Based Learning, which he also covered in depth in the Building SimCity book. She and Michael Bremmer wrote the SimCity Teacher's Guide (which Cliff Basinger (LGR) found on eBay, made an unboxing video review about, and sent me his copy of. I have been meaning to scan it and put it online -- I'll see if I can dig it up and scan it, since it would make a great addition to the Micropolis project).

LGR - SimCity Educational Version Unboxing & Overview:
An overview of the "School Edition" Lab Pack of SimCity Classic by Maxis. Unboxing, first impressions of the package and testing of the radically rad software ensues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edXRNtuAGTg

More about Doreen Nelson:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21049206

DonHopkins on Sept 23, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (...

>There were many reasons the OLPC failed, but I don't think constructionist education was one of them, when it's succeeded in so many other places.

>EA donated SimCity to OLPC because of its relation to constructionist education, thanks to Maxis's collaboration with Doreen Nelson, who wrote the SimCity teacher's guide, and developed "City Building Education" and "Design Based Learning", in which kids built cities out of cardboard instead of pixels:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20329281

>SimCity can be used educationally, but not in the sense of literally training people to be urban planners or mayors. It's more useful for "Constructionist Education" and "Design Based Learning", as practiced by Seymour Papert and Doreen Nelson.

>[...] One of the teachers [Clair] Curtin hired was Doreen Nelson, a brilliant and innovative educator who had developed a pedagogy called City Building Education, in which students collaboratively built cities out of craft materials and role play. Nelson become a regular visitor to Maxis, and Curtin made some trips to Los Angeles to see City Building in action, where she found the experience of “watching a classroom actually go through a couple of days worth of creation” to be “very inspiring. … I will never forget that experience” (Curtin 2015; Nelson 2015). [5]

>[5]> This translation took the form of a short teacher’s guide, a pamphlet, really, written by Michael Bremer, and published by Maxis in 1989—the same year SimCity was released, explaining the limitations and applications of SimCity, and offering curricular questions and scripts. Within a few years, Maxis became more serious about tackling the education market, and hired Claire Curtin, in 1992, as their first educational product manager, charging her with finding ways to package SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt for the school market. Prior to joining Maxis, Curtin had been the senior producer of Brøderbund’s hit educational franchise, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, a job she had started in 1988, immediately after finishing graduate studies at NYU’s Educational Communication and Technology program, where she had studied with the noted education technology researcher Roy Pea. Over the course of her career at Maxis, Curtin shifted roles and projects, a result of Maxis’s fickle focus and its inability to produce hits beyond SimCity (chapter 5). Later, when Maxis defocused on a hard to reach education market, Curtin would go on to co-design or co-produce the kids’ titles SimTown (1995) and SimSafari (1998). Curtin collaborated closely with Roxana (“Roxy”) Wolosenko, and after Maxis decided not to do any more kid specific titles, the two of them were shifted to Wright’s “Dollhouse” project—a title that was not spoken out loud due to its gender connotations—where they were instrumental, as Wright’s co-designers, in evolving the design focus away from time management and towards people and interactions inspired by everyday life. It is this more human centric vision of Dollhouse that eventually saw release as The Sims, which became, at long last, the second commercially successful Sim title (Curtin 2015).

>page 366> Play has a complex relationship to what is not play. Depending on who you ask, SimCity, the software toy, is either a frivolous diversion or an earnest model—and sometimes both. Right from the start, SimCity had appeal as an educational tool, a quality that Maxis tried to capitalize on. According to Braun, “It was never our intention to go into the education market, but the education market came to us and said: ‘This is what we need if you’re gonna work with us.’ ” What the education market wanted was teacher’s guides that translated and adapted SimCity for classroom use. It didn’t hurt that Brøderbund, Maxis’s publishing partner, was deep into the then hot educational software market, and that along with the investment Maxis received from venture capitalists in 1992, came a hunger for aggressive growth into new markets. Wright, of course, was busy making titles like SimEarth and SimAnt for an uncertain market. Maybe that market was education?

Chaim also wrote a section in his thesis about open sourcing SimCity:

Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27...

>Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold.

His book also covered a lot of interesting stuff about cellular automata, including John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata and universal constructor!

Von Neumann Universal Constructor (wikipedia.org)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22727228

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...

My JavaScript CAM6 cellular automata machine simulator has an implementation of it, but it needs a better user interface if you want to build a non-trivial machine (especially a self replicating one!)

https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/cbad2920fd0fab5b35baf...

More about the theory of self reproducing cellular automata:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960377

https://archive.org/details/theoryofselfrepr00vonn_0

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21855249

"Signal crossing solutions in von Neumann self-replicating cellular automata", page 453-503

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/automata2008reducedsiz...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858465

>>The von Neumann probe, nicknamed the Goo, was a self-replicating nanomass capable of traversing through keyholes, which are wormholes in space. The probe was named after Hungarian-American scientist John von Neumann, who popularized the idea of self-replicating machines.

>Third, the probabilistic quantum mechanical kind, which could mutate and model evolutionary processes, and rip holes in the space-time continuum, which he unfortunately (or fortunately, the the sake of humanity) didn't have time to fully explore before his tragic death.

>p. 99 of "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata":

>Von Neumann had been interested in the applications of probability theory throughout his career; his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics and his theory of games are examples. When he became interested in automata, it was natural for him to apply probability theory here also. The Third Lecture of Part I of the present work is devoted to this subject. His "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components" is the first work on probabilistic automata, that is, automata in which the transitions between states are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Whenever he discussed self-reproduction, he mentioned mutations, which are random changes of elements (cf. p. 86 above and Sec. 1.7.4.2 below). In Section 1.1.2.1 above and Section 1.8 below he posed the problems of modeling evolutionary processes in the framework of automata theory, of quantizing natural selection, and of explaining how highly efficient, complex, powerful automata can evolve from inefficient, simple, weak automata. A complete solution to these problems would give us a probabilistic model of self-reproduction and evolution. [9]

>[9] For some related work, see J. H. Holland, "Outline for a Logical Theory of Adaptive Systems", and "Concerning Efficient Adaptive Systems".

https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machin...

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/5578...

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10841#...