Following on from our recent note concerning Quidditch in academia, may we also recommend a paper by Raphael Crawford-Marks, Lee Spector, and Jon Klein of the Cognitive Science department at Hampshire College, Amherst, US? It’s entitled: ‘Virtual Witches and Warlocks: A Quidditch Simulator and Quidditch-Playing Teams Coevolved via Genetic Programming’ (in: Late Breaking Papers of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2004). Published by the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, 2004.)
“Creating a Quidditch Simulator presented some unique challenges. Being an imaginary game, the rules weren’t completely described, and some of the imagined rules didn’t really make sense once the game was implemented. However, with a few modifications to Rowling’s vision, simulated quidditch is as fast-paced and exciting as she described.”
Note: The image is from a previous paper on Virtual Quidditch co-authored by professor Lee Spector.
Coming soon: Quidditch as a source of feminist agency.