This is a short chose your own adventure story I made for my CS1 class. To play, simply type the corresponding letter of your choice in the console.
For example, if the prompt is “do you a) eat food or b) drink water,” you can just type “a” to eat food.
Explanation: (READ AFTER DOING A COUPLE OF RUNS AND GETTING DIFFERENT RESULTS)
read bold for tldr.
I thought it would be interesting to base a choose your own adventure story on the fact that you can “cheat” in choose your own adventure games. From what I observed, it is always in the curiosity of people to explore every possibility of the story to figure out which one was the best one.
So, in this story, I made exploring every possibility the point of the story.
If you don’t know, Schrodinger’s cat (which I may have spelled wrong in the code) is a thought experiment by Erwin Schrodinger created to demonstrate superposition. I am studying physics, but I don’t know physics that well so, I’m just going to take the thought experiment’s premise: There is a cat in a box, and you don’t know what its state is. Its state can be dead or it’s state can be alive. But, as long as you don’t open the box, can be dead and alive.
Obviously, the story explores different scenarios in which, in the story, you discover if the cat is alive or dead… or alive and dead. But in some paths of the story, it is revealed to you or rather, instead, you begin to realize that just as the cat can be alive or dead, you have chosen one out come over another outcome.
YOU are simultaneously waiting 30 more minutes for the woman to come back and going to the cafe to look for her. So, you are Schrodinger’s cat. You can exist in multiple states. One where you go to the cafe, the other where you wait, and another where you never begin to accept the task at all.
And the box? Well, the box is this story. At first the box is unopened; the story is unexplored. ALL of the possibilities are simultaneously true. But at the same time as you are trying to figure out if the cat is alive or dead or even existent, you are also determining your own state of existence, where you are, and what “timeline” you go.
And again, just as Schrodinger’s cat can be either alive, dead, and non-existent, your ability to test every possible outcome means you can be with a living cat, a dead one, or a non-existent one all at the same time. Cheating the story and backtracking is the simultaneous existence of every branch of the story.
Btw, I don’t know quantum physics, I just took a phrase about Schrodinger and ran with it.