Real World Connections
The inspiration for Hex, which evolves through seemingly unexplainable upgrades like extra cheese, the FTB protocol, a CWL (Clothes Wringer from the Laundry, for crunching numbers and other things), and "small religious pictures" (icons), came from Pratchett's own early experiments with upgrades on his ZX-81.
The name is a play on two meanings of the word "hex": a hex can be a magical spell, and "hex" is slang for hexadecimal, the base 16 system used to simplify the representation of binary numbers and is widely used in the IT world. "hex" ("6" in Greek) also denotes the number of legs ants have.
In 2001, a new Silicon Graphics Origin 2800 supercomputer was installed as part of the University of Leicester's Centre for Mathematical Modelling and, with Pratchett's blessing, named HEX.
Read more about this topic: Hex (Discworld)
Famous quotes containing the words real, world and/or connections:
“It’s the boxers who attract the real women, after all, with their raw primeval strength, beautifully toned bodies and just a touch of vulnerability.”
—Eamonn McCabe (b. 1948)
“All things change, nothing is extinguished.... There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“The conclusion suggested by these arguments might be called the paradox of theorizing. It asserts that if the terms and the general principles of a scientific theory serve their purpose, i. e., if they establish the definite connections among observable phenomena, then they can be dispensed with since any chain of laws and interpretive statements establishing such a connection should then be replaceable by a law which directly links observational antecedents to observational consequents.”
—C.G. (Carl Gustav)