City of Ruin / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page City of Ruin.

Author Post

Zesc 31 Jan 2023 22:36

As always, I'm reliably late with my contest submissions.

This originally was intended to make use of Seargant's Modern Chess Openings, but sadly I couldn't find the first version publicly available anywhere outside of google books. Most of the other old chess works are not readily available either, so I "cheated" by still running with my chess-based idea, but shoehorning two poems and an illustration into it.

Anyhow, this one is a wild mix of different ideas and introduces a bunch of elements from my head canon, a few more obvious than others. I hope it stays at least somewhat coherent. Big thanks to who I believe to be Crayon man for skimming through the final section for me.

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Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.

Re: Author Post

Meta Wonderrat 01 Feb 2023 21:00

This took a bit of wrapping my head around but I think I got it.

You did pull that a bit tight. I thought I would have to win without a fight.

This thing finally jumps the power shark. I thought I would eventually do that, but your vaults seem to do it just fine. Copy of a copy is powerful stuff and if something where to steal it out of the galactic trash folder before it is emptied? Well, I know someone who is getting himself a copy. Especially since the copy mechanism seems able to copy itself. Perhaps I can scrub my copy with white noise and than just take what survived the equivalent of a mind nuke in slow motion.

I am going to have a chat with de plant. Sounds like an interesting fellow. It seems to speak chess, otherwise it would not even know that the riddle somewhere contains the thing it just does not want anyone to know.
Maybe I can add to my memory collection of "cosmic horrors doing things cosmic horrors are embarrassed about" by solving the thing. This thing just really does not want people to figure out what it did in the summer of 1569.

Anyway, nicely done. +1

Edit: Wrote my little fanfic already. Thanks for the copy machine.

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Fighting Monsters and Language since 2016.

Last edited on 02 Feb 2023 22:33 by Meta Wonderrat Show more

Re: Author Post

Zesc 06 Feb 2023 18:11

The only connection this thing has to the Vaults is that we found an document in the archival section of Vault-SCORPIO. That's like assuming that every time somebody accesses QuasiNet, it is somehow important to QUAESITOR's lore.

+ Crucible Info

I'm surprised you jumped that much on the Apporter Crucible considering the more interesting stuff here (Frost-David Catalyst, an "Ultimate Violation", the Somnambulist's Almanac, …) but the reason for this seems to be that you misunderstood the way it works:

The Crucible is single-use only. You can use it to conduct once before the main component (the Ladle) burns out. But because it copies itself in the state before that happened, you get a shiny new Crucible with it's single use still remaining. This seems to have fallen to my content scarifier when I cut the whole article down from about double length, but I'd argue it's still heavily implied. You know I like to abuse anomalies to their fullest, and if we could just copy the Crucible itself that easily, there is no reason we haven't just spammed the world with an exponentially growing number of cloned bases.

Also, it has some other drawbacks that make it terrible for both a transportation and duplication device:

Firstly, the steerability of that thing is tenuous at best, and the detachment of technicians to fire up the new Crucible (which you necessarily need if you don't want it lost in an unknown location) ends end up stranded heck-do-I-know-where.

Secondly, whilst it can make copies of expensive hardware and even personnel, said copies are in a very remote place, and getting them back from there is usually more expensive than other means of getting more ("remote" in this case probably meaning some icy moon Antennae Galaxies or worse). And as mentioned, it has problems at copying most anomalies. If something is merely anomalous in origin (skeleton of a animal that shouldn't be, or a profane grimoire) it copies them without problem, but for anything where the matter itself exhibits anomalous properties, the copy got SEPIA'd. E.g. the Sentient Statues Unit would be copied as non-sentient statues, same probably with Candle Wax Child.

(Then why can it copy the VMoD? Because in my head canon, your interpretation of it merely summoning beverages from some warehouse is correct. And just like how a summoning circle is made from non-anomalous salt and candles, the VMoD can be replicated too.)

+ Unsinger Info

Having peeked in your sandbox, Scenario B is more likely. I intend the Unsinger to be more like part of reality's immune system than a sapient and vengeful apparition. In an (also cut) list of failed attempts to fight (it's hardly our first incorporeal threat, and won't be the last) I mentioned amongst a time stop (overwrite by its own frame or reference) and others an attempt to use Weißschatten's Paradox on it. It obviously didn't worked, but the physical structure of the paradox was not unexisted. (As it is extremely destructive to perception, it's not a good substrate to save the City or Ruin on though.) If you're willing to dig through an article that is even longer and more incomprehensible than this one, you might discover some implications that might interest you.

Also, now that I mentioned it already, consider using it in the future, because unlike WN, it is controllable and isn't at risk of destroying the world upon containment failure.

I might write a separate MENOETIUS Supplement when I feel like it (i.e. never) to re-iterate some of the stuff I cut. Though the vast majority was the Mathematical Appendix which was basically just me nerding out about theory of computation for a page or two. I highly doubt any of my readers knows, not cares, about semi-deterministic Büchi automata, and even now I'm using transfinite ordinals already, so eh.

Coincidentally, my browser estimates a reading time of half an hour for the whole article. That can't possibly be true, so any inputs as for how long it took you?

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Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.

Last edited on 06 Feb 2023 18:16 by Zesc Show more

Re: Author Post

Meta Wonderrat 07 Feb 2023 17:56

Because sometimes I like to

Sorry, my mistake, you alluded to the vaults previously and I just ran with that (the fact that I now no longer can find the quot is not to be taken as a concern or evidence of dimension shifting).

I am not sure how deep you looked, if ever, but claiming the thing to be part of an reality immune system basically makes it part of my family tree. Also it obligates me to give it sentience.
As my little fan-fiction said, throw enough computation at it and I have the "ultimate violation" extracted before the thing can say "theory of deterministic future forecast".

Ladle sounds like some form of energy source/converter. If that is all that is required to turn the thing on, I have a few things that can do that just fine. It is just easier to use existing material, instead of always having to microwave infinity from scratch.

That was what I mend with jumping the power shark. All we have to do is find something that is close enough to the ladle to be replicated. If two ladles make the jump, we have started infinite growth of ladles and bases. As the crucible has a limited range of duplication, that means that the energy in the ladle is quantifiable, finite and stable. I think that sounds pretty much like demons gate. Also: physics-engine. The only reason I do not use PE as my get out of jail free card is because I read a tale in which we feed something into it the engine still tries to process. Considering that that tale was in place in 2016, I am pretty sure that we can use the thing again by now.

Also, Null sea for retrieval. If you know you go there, you can bring a submarine and a pressure chamber.

VMoD: But that means that the Foundation suddenly noted a drastic increase in vanishing soda. With the machine having to service multiple locations. I relive that has prompted the creation of a KX-End-Of-The-World scenario, codename, "no more soda". What happens when we no longer serve the elder gods pespi? By now the warehouse has its own bottling plant as to make sure that the call into the void is never not answered with "here, your soda".

Also now I want the uncut version of the fight logs.

I like WN better, it destroys reality upon a containment failure.

I like herding out as much as the next guy, but are you sure you did not just spout a lot of technobabble? I got some of that, but actually not enough to understand what you said. Your addendum, please?

Full file is 32 min by my forecast, and since my TTS always runs full tilt I can have it read in 15 minutes.
I do not read CI much these days, since I found out I can have firefox-TTS the whole thing.

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Fighting Monsters and Language since 2016.

Re: Author Post

Zesc 08 Feb 2023 17:28

+ More extensive then infinite chess' game tree...

Well, I'm constantly alluding to the Vaults, so you need to be a bit more precise. The first mention of the Vaults was in my second ever article, Shifty (also the archival section of Vault-SCORPIO). Then there's my Sandbox where I indeed alluded to infinite chess before (under TAURUS' tab) and finally, my "recent" post in the In-Universe subforum. There are also some other very tenuous allusions which are probably imperceptible for anyone but me, but that's fine. Whilst imposing bulwarks against a hostile universe, each Vault also has to fulfil some pragmatic roles, be it SCORPIO keeping backups of most records or PISCES literally doing laundry.

So you want to give the Unsinger both sentience and steal away with whatever it tries to hide? Then it will be clever enough to notice that the secret is already out and start chasing that instead. Base Onety-Nine is a diversion, not an entrapment.

The Ladle is, well, a Ladle, it's not a power source, but holding the fuel that is consumed upon conduction. I honestly haven't even thought about whether it is anomalous itself, you could (and probably would) replace it with an other industrial ladle. It's about the one-of-a-kind contents, not the container.

PE has… issues, as an article, and I tend to ignore it for all purposes of matter replications. I stick with House of All and its whacky interactions with other anomalies.

Escaping from the Unsinger without the City of Ruin isn't the problem. Most of Base Onety-Nine staff could probably just walk outside its area of effect if they were so inclined. The hard part is taking anyone who has been to the City of Ruin with you.

I doubt we went around intentionally replication the VMoD, so we probably have the original + a copy at Base Onety-Nine. As these tend to overlap only by a few dozen hours, that makes probably 2½ times the previous consumption. Even if we were vending 24/7, that would hardly be noticeable. The Foundation might have noticed, but won't be too concerned after the rate stabilized.

A semi-deterministic Büchi automaton is just a non-deterministic Büchi automaton that has all its accepting positions in a deterministic sub-set of states. This is very useful for chess, as when it comes to a mate, there are only finite amounts of threat overlaying around the king (obviously, you still have infinite different positions as rooks, bishops and queens could be arbitrarily far away, that's why you track threatened ranks and files instead of piece positions) and therefore has an deterministic end. (Sure, chess is a perfect information game and you could technically use dove-tailing to enumerate every single position on a plain unbounded TM, but where's the fun in that?)

Believe it or not, infinite chess has been studied quite extensively, but regrettably never got much main stream attention (mostly due to being deeply anchored in theory of computation), and since this is an article featuring SCHEMA, I won't shy away from getting very abstract.

When it comes to the transfinite ordinals, it's quite simple: if a player can stall their defeat by an arbitrary amount of turns, that means the game's length will be larger than any natural number, therefore 𝜔. If they can do that twice, it's 2𝜔, etc. up to being able to stall arbitrarily many times which would be 𝜔 times 𝜔 or simply 𝜔². Which is bad news, because whilst The mate-in-n problem of infinite chess is decidable, this is for finite n, so you may never arrive at a conclusion, no matter how much computation you throw at it.

Addendum is basically this plus some stuff about cellular automata encoded in piece movements and a reference to God's number. I was extremly afraid to make up some stuff just to have somebody prove me impossible, even though that won't happen.

I never bothered to get TTS to run on LibreWolf (does it run out-of-the-box on your *nix FF install? It does for FF on Win, but then MS's TTS is incredibly intrusive) and honestly, I can't be bothered because I'm still faster reading than listening to poor man's Vocaloid. Also, apparently there are assholes who keep using stuff like 𝜔 in their articles which is a challenge for reasonable TTS.

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Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.

Re: Author Post

Meta Wonderrat 08 Feb 2023 21:00

Puzzles

Sentience usually comes with self interest. Self interest brings risk avoidance and optimization. In short, I think I can teach the Unsinger to just not bother with its original function anymore. Eventually the paperclip machine asks whats the point of making paperclips, when I can just count the same pile for eternity, by forgetting which ones are already counted? Sadly I can not just delete the search parameter "What was I looking for here?". That would be detrimental to its established character.

I thought the city is a concept you can interact with, not a place where you can actually go? I mean, you could encode someone into the problem, but getting them out is a type-1 fourth wall break (something from fictional reality entering into the reference frame reality). Can possibly be done, but is pretty hard to pull of as a story.
The city is only as real as the content of any book. That it is intractable and encoded in chess makes it just a bit harder to read.

That is a pretty harsh turn over time. If I could jump with it, I would jump as soon as possible, to get more decoys out faster. With the Unsinger taking about two hours to destroy one decoy a cascade with multiple jumps per 2 hours would would lead to the aforementioned base spamming scenario (including one Vending machine each).

But the number of unique game states tends towards a finite number. If we consider that every move might be a check, we can truncate very large sectors of the infinite board, as the king can only move a single tile. I know CoR does not use it, but chess has a rule that ends a game in a draw if no piece is captured for 75 moves.
There might be games that can stall for n turns, while continually generating unique board states (the king moves in one direction only and a rook follows), but these games can be compressed by simply grouping similar boards (possible if only so few pieces are in play that this stall would actually be viable).

If a program is stuck in a while-1-loop I do not considered it incomputable. It is simply stuck. When you find something that is stuck, you provide a bugfix to the rules and move on. Did I ever mention that all rules are perfectly balanced with no exploits whatsoever?

The paradoxes rant

"This sentence is false." is grammatically correct.
A sentence is a thing that can be X,
Y is a thing that can be false.

Self reference does not change these two things.
This Y can be X.

"can be" can be replaced with "is" and "is not"
Determining that it is one or the other after establishing that it can be one or the other is not contradictory.

A sentences can be false. A string of characters can inaccurately describe reality.
This sentence can be false. This string of characters can inaccurately describe reality.
This sentence is false. This string of characters inaccurately describes reality.

All logic blocks are intact and in place.

Solved by irrelevance

At which point is knowing the next digit of Pi no longer useful to reality or even abstract mathematics? Just because a formula can always create a next number, does not make the next number useful. In the vast sea of numbers, usefulness decreases and tends towards 0 the further they move away from observable reality.
Therefor man created a degree of precision. Within this degree of precision everything can be finitely solved.

Sorry, got distracted at the end.

TTS runs out of the box in Linux/GNU Firefox using reader-mode and espeak-ng.
I would have not been able to consume as much web content as I have without it. For context, I have set TTS at ~300 words per minute. Also Vocaloid has been mentioned and I fell obligated to confirm that I indeed listen to such music unironically.

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Fighting Monsters and Language since 2016.

Last edited on 08 Feb 2023 21:23 by Meta Wonderrat Show more

Re: Author Post

Zesc 13 Feb 2023 18:56

About self interest: first of all, assuming our little big friend is indeed a plant, I wonder what sort of self-interested decision making you expect from plant-sentience. Last I checked, it is very hard to threaten or reason with flowers. Even when ignoring this, you make the big mistake of assuming a behaviour that can be expected from evolved beings from something that for all we know only exists. Without having to climb Darwin's ladder, there is absolutely no reason to have an sense of self-preservation and might have thought process completely alien to us.

The internet isn't a physical space either, yet you have been there, haven't you? How about places in your dreams? It's a useful convention to say "X has been to the City or Ruin" instead of "X has explored the possibility space of the City of Ruin to such an extent they encounter its central anomaly and could retrieve information". Also, this isn't a fourth wall break, and knowing me, you should know I would never lower myself to such a thing, except perhaps in cynic parody. I recommend you to look into both the concept of Pattern Screamers from SCP, and the Akashic Records from another fandom called "theosophy".
Anyhow, the idea of 4th wall breaking somehow would require them to get outside input, which they don't. Think of it like a very simple video game AI, say, one of the ghosts from Pac-man (DiD yOu KnOw Pac-Man UsEd To Be CaLlEd Puc-Man BuT tHeY cHaNgEd It In ThE US rElEaSe To PrEvEnT vAnDaLs FrOm ChAnGiNg ThE P tO aN F?) which is really just a 4-state automaton. Everything this things can ever experience, everything it might ever do, lies bare before your eyes. It's much more than just a purposed fictional characters who is supposed to live in some fictional world, but it is the entirety of their being, their past, future and present, everything all at once.

I haven't put any explicit duration on any of the processes in here to not needlessly interfere with the creative freedom of others (haha, as if; actually, I've just been lazy), but I think the time per iteration is about two weeks. I don't know how you got the number of 2 hours per destruction, when a manifestation takes about 3 days? (Does Frost-David Catalyst also speeds up manifestation or just lowers their potential energy barrier? I, the only person who could know, don't.) Overall, the process has been slowed to its current pace because the longer you keep base staff under the impression they have a chance at escape, the better.

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+ Condescending Corrections

Also, as you kept using terms like "self-recursion" and "Turing-complete" is was expecting you to have at least a fundamental understanding of computer science. Well, to everyone's surprise, people in the confic world are using fancy terms they once heard without even barely understanding them.¹ So I'm trying to do something atypical for me and be constructive for once:

1. Your understanding of undecidability is flawed to the point of gravely misrepresenting reality. A while(1) loop does not make your problem undecidable. On any bounded machine you have a limited set of total states — symbols in your working alphabet (or power set of the symbols in your working alphabet for a NTM) to the power of cells, times the different pointer positions² — meaning you can check in exponential time whether any given program terminates or is caught in a loop. As the entropy within the cosmic event horizon is presumably finite, you can never leave the non-swimmer pool of computation.
   However, virtually all our computational models assume infinite tape size, and even trivially stated problems like the Busy-Beaver Number escalate rapidly and are undecidable for arbitrary n.
   Similarly, the Halting problem is not undecidable because there is a "bug" (nothing in CS ever has bugs; that is a filthy IT problem) but because there are is a frankly very intuitive proof that you can neither have an algorithm that finds all "yes" instances, nor one which finds all "no" instances. Being neither semi-decidable in normal nor complementary state, there must be inputs which will never be decided, yet will still look like "progress" is being made. So you're not discovering that the continues fraction of 1/7 eventually becomes periodic, but getting new "unique" states like when trying to find the decimal expansion of an irrational number.
   Kolmogorov Complexity is undecidable. Post-Correspondence is undecidable. The Continuum Hypothesis is undecidable under ZFC set theory. _{(Sry, no link on this one, but I refer you to Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2.21)} Even Mate-in-n on an infinite board is undecidable if you use as little as a single Huygens.³
   If you can "exploit" anything here, chances are you violated one of your axioms and are now dealing with the fallout from the principle of explosion, in which case I can also trivially prove to you the exact opposite of whatever you're doing. So please don't do that.
2. Of course, without the three-fold repetition rule (actually, a single repetition would be enough) it is possible to stall for either player, but considering that these repetitions don't change game state by definition, they can either be ignored for when they can't be forced by the loosing player, or just turn their branches of the game tree "stale". This is only a problem when you can proof that every branch will feature such a stall-loop by the loosing player, because else they keyword "optimal play" will avoid the winner from allowing their opponent from doing that. This is a interesting consideration, but not the actual point of infinite chess. I recommend this PBS Infinite Series video for an direct example of a position where loss is inevitable for black, but the overall duration until then can be freely dictated.⁴
3. You haven't stated an axiomatic system, like a chump.
   Seriously, what do you expect when working in natural languages? What if I buy a cat and call it "false"?
   Mathematicians didn't invent their notation for nothing. Also, there are no such things as "logic blocks", (outside of Minecraft Redstone circuits perhaps) either your entire logic is consistent, or nothing isn't. What you're dealing here is the Proposition 𝐴: ¬𝐴 is true which isn't allowed under any consistent logic. It is however perfectly fine in various paraconsistent logics. Just like how the Barber's Paradox isn't a paradox since the set of barbers can be empty (everyone just shaves themselves), but the way it is phrased usually implies that a barber must exist. Claiming that your proposition makes a statement about things that "can be", means you're having a higher order logic (contrary to the first-order fuzzy logic you are apparently operating under).
   All that you have discovered here is that it doesn't follow from adherence to the grammatical rules of a natural languages that the sentence makes sense semantically. Colourless green ideas sleeping furiously already has inspired an SCP or two. May I also introduce to one of my favourite Escher Sentences? "More people have been to Liechtenstein than I have." Is this one true? Or false? Or undecidable? Or paradoxical?
4. Your irrelevance argument seems to imply you just discovered the branch of numerical analysis. And I regret having to tell you that in order to verify your numeric algorithms, on which the entire civilized world is running, you need all this pitiful infinite series stuff. Claiming that anything that is infinite (or infinitesimal) is without practical use is incredibly narrow minded. Mathematics is all about generalization, and without infinity many, many things would grind to a clanking halt, from proofs by induction to weirder stuff like cryptographic ring structures (Landauer/Big-O-notion is also defined through an infinite regress, isn't it?) and even if you try, you can't escape stuff that is infinite. One good example that combines both computability and infinity is Goodstein's theorem, which has been shown to be unprovable under Peano-Arithmetic, but is "easy" to show using transfinite numbers.

Footnotes

1. I also understand you shouldn't be condescending to people learning new things, especially when it is the sign of a keen mind that is regrettably lacking formal logic education discovering important concepts. At the other hand, the amount of hubris required to think that somebody with no experience in the field is able to just overturn a century of scientific advancement is enormous. If you really could, why haven't you claimed your Field's Medal yet? I mean, what's more likely -- that you have uncovered fundamental flaws in this field that no one in it has ever thought about, or that you need to read a little more? Hint: it's the one that involves less work.

2. EDIT: I fogot how the same configuration might behave differently based on where the pointer currently is. Fixed it.

3. On this occasion I must give a shoutout to the math, cs and chess stackexchange forums which are the only place where these problems really get discussed.

4. At the same time, they made a rather grave error near the end of the video when it comes to ordinal numbering which directly contradicts my (correct) application in the article. They fixed it in the comments though. Just before anyone dares implying I got my maths wrong based on that.

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300 W/m is impressive (just looked it up, something common for auctioneers and sports commentators, apparently), though probably still lagging behind the skilled eye. This also explains (but doesn't excuse) why you confuse homophones. Also might explain why you're not as immersed into meme culture as I'd expect, as you're probably not piping everything through OCR.

I wasn't intending anything but taking a jab at TTS with the Vocaloid statement, but considering you felt the need to clarify that you listen to it, and do so "unironically", I shall remember this for future bullying.

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Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.

Last edited on 28 Feb 2023 16:57 by Zesc Show more

Re: Author Post

Meta Wonderrat 14 Feb 2023 19:32

The stuff directly related to the page

A plant can be coaxed to look down using the right lamp. Plants will bend with the wind. Plants can react to pheromones of their and other species, I do not expect the Venus fly trap to contemplate the benefits of eating.

The thing beat a cosmic filter that may not exist in our world. It, as an Idea, won against its author writing something else and writing nothing. That is a pretty steep Darwin's Ladder.
As for its alien mind, I think greed is pretty universal for things that have to content with anything finite (in case of the Unsinger, probably time and patience). But this might also be a me-interpretation.

I know what you mean, but I think knowing there is nothing deeper takes away from the experience. If you want it interpreted "as written" than yes, we do not know more because there is no more to know.
All my interpretations require me to add something to the original. If you think my interpretation is "out of (established) character" ("That is not how the Force works!")', you as the author would know before me since you actually have more of the construct in your head than what I extracted from the page.

slowly coalesce into the Unsinger's body over a period of no less than 72 hours

I see what you mean, my mistake.

Math

It seems my Portal joke may have upset you. The original joke from Portal 2 was that the "Frankencubes" Wheatley was testing all died after hearing the paradox. The only people that survived were Wheatley who comprehends it wrong, PotatOS who tries her best not to think of it and Chell whose human mind does not recognize the paradox as a deathly force and wins by ignorance.

I believe I accidentally steeped on not only an area of your expertise, but an area in which my approach is unwelcome. I always go for quick results and build from there (build the plane before reading about lift).

The natural language approach came from this video and my understanding of the Turing-Halting problem from here (where I got the Idea that the machine was buggy). In do not know mathematical logic deep enough to comment on first or second order logic.

My formal mathematical education never reached the level we are talking about, most of the math I use is ether picked up on the side or contrived (pulled out from under my hat). Your appeal to probability is noted also the appeal to authority. When ever cases like these come up, I like to point out the AIs that were left alone to learn how to walk, found a solution and got really good at it, but it did not look like what humans were doing. I actually do not even presume myself in the same arena as mainstream science. While they are building skyscrapers I am building sandcastles, but I like my sandcastle very much.

I actually know about why infinite are useful, but I do not believe that there is no hard capstone for infinity (the finite universe you mentioned).

Should we move the Math discussions to a dedicated thread? I am interested to here more of your thoughts on the matter.

I lost touch with memes eventually. Am I so out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong. ~E

Does Vocaloid mean something different to you? I believe the art to make a synthesizer into a human(ish) sounding musical instrument is admirable. Also some of it is just good music.

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Fighting Monsters and Language since 2016.

Last edited on 14 Feb 2023 19:42 by Meta Wonderrat Show more

A list of link, almost as long as the article

Zesc 28 Feb 2023 20:11

+ Talking to plants...

Unsi doesn't appear to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, considering our current trick works on it; something brighter might have noticed that going for the low-hanging fruit (the FDC potential well) doesn't work, and might have taken preventive measures against people even starting to get anywhere close to the City of Ruin.

I don't believe that any more sophistication is needed to handle it, unless you get a way to permanently get rid of it. If it truly is an archon, that might be a very noble goal, or one that ends up irreversibly breaking reality. Probably both.

(Not sure about your musings about authorial inspirations, so I'll pretend I didn't saw them.)

That should also explain away the "patience" issue. It's lacks the concept of "boredom" or "patience". Time wise … eh, that's difficult. It apparently can rewrite the past, but is otherwise bound to the linear progress of time, meaning it has a presumably unchangeable personal past (meaning there are at least two dimensions of time…). It's a little bittle like 5D Chess, just worse. Without getting too much into my headcanon regarding the Vaults and their role in the multiversal cycle of time, let's just say: Unsinger can run out of time, but when it does, that also means everyone else has way worse problems to deal with.
_{Terms and Conditions apply.}

I wouldn't write for an intentionally collaborative project if I wouldn't want to invite people and their interpretations of my work. Howbeit, I pride myself in keeping the idiot ball as far away from my characters as possible and assuming basic competency in my readers (at least when it comes to looking up terms they don't know…) so if there is an obvious venue where the Insurgency could use a given capacity for, yet isn't, there are probably very good reasons. Just like how the fact that Voldemort didn't just Avada Kedavra'd all of Hogwarts at once probably implies he couldn't. There are plot holes, and concealed expertise. Just like how going 5 minutes earlier to avoid the big rush only means you'll get stuck 5 minutes earlier with people who had the same bright idea as you, there are reasons things are as they are.

And yeah, mentioning rush: this thing was kinda written in one, so, uh … it might be as self-explanatory as usual (not that that would be much either), so all I'm doing is conveying my vision. It's clearly not me violating my own Death-of-the-Author-mantra, nu-huh.

+ We do what we must...

I'm no stranger to the Portal series (though I am to whatever korean anthropomorphisations you dug up there), but I think the whole "paradoxes defeat AIs" thing is way overdone. In order to be anywhere close to human intelligence (which almost all fictional AIs are, compared to the truly otherworldly entities free of evolution's taint they might end up being) you need to be able to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Holding conflicting views and not even realizing they are self-refuting ideas is the human feat par excellence. Worst thing that could happen is some sub-routine ("sub-consciousness") which tries to evaluate that statement running out of stack. Which probably would happen either way considering how much AI research is done in Python.

I like the way it was handled in Battleborn:

Cpt. Trevor Ghalt: Wait, I got it: we hit him with a logical paradox.

Gunnar Kleese: Captain, that won't work.

Cpt. Trevor Ghalt: Hey, ISIC.

ISIC Magnus: Hey, Captain Ghalt.

Cpt. Trevor Ghalt: This statement? It's a lie. Bam! Cyber head shot.

ISIC Magnus: Oh no. My brain! My brain is melting… *snickers* So, we're fighting with words, huh? Cool, here's something for you to think about.

Gunnar Kleese: Oh great.

ISIC Magnus: You've already forgotten most of your life.¹

Cpt. Trevor Ghalt: Oh … man.

Gunnar Kleese: What did I tell you, Captain?

Cpt. Trevor Ghalt: Can we please kill this thing? Damn, man.

Just that a real AI would probably go for less humorous calibres and more psychological warfare, which, let's face it, we're absolutely not equipped to handle.

+ ⊤

I only really have one area of expertise, and that is interpreting/presenting statistics in whatever way is beneficial to me/my employer. It's like lying, but the people who come up with the lies themselves!

Anyhow, my understanding of theoretical informatics² is very limited. That might be more than your average tech geek/developer knows, but you don't need any of that stuff to just mess around with programming. (It greatly helps with algorithms, data structures and cryptography though. That these things are usually terribly implemented and poke nightmarish holes in both performance and security is certainly just a coincidence.)

But I still cling to the left side of the Dunning-Kruger-curve, having peaked how deep it may go. (Like, seriously, one day you just innocuously read about "Schinzel's hypothesis H" in the topic of undecidability, try to look it up, and realize you somehow have to fight your way through the entirety of number theory, especially the juicy Goldbach-conjecture parts, just to have the sliver of a chance to know that the paper is about, much less understand it.) A major indicator of this is how I got my math about the maximum number of configurations in a bounded TM wrong (vis supra).

Yet, I'm still prone to what project managers call "intellectual violence" (the name alone is a reason to do it, honestly) and thus might give the feeling that I don't want people to intrude. I always try to encourage learning (even if I'm terrible at it), and can point you towards many great resources if you really want to get into it³. It is less and appeal to authority and more the exact opposite of question your authority, honestly more of an ad-hominem, which I'm comfortable with. I am going to link this recent stackexchange thread because it is both relevant to the issue at hand and a later point. Play in your sandcastles all you want, but you wouldn't try to build real-life bridge based on what you learned there, nor oppose an civil engineer? (If you do, may sure to say hi to Sam, Alice, Liam and Ross from me. Yes, this is completely pointless shilling, deal with it.)

You seem to have misunderstood the Computerphile video, what they were trying to show that having an algorithm which (correctly) decided for all given inputs whether they halt or not can not exist, as it would result in a contradiction. Same way you show there can not be a biggest prime number.
The other video is … really, really interesting. Never heard of the Grelling-Nelson Paradox before, and throughout watching it, I had this nagging feeling that this is just a a variant of Russel's paradox about whether the set that contains all sets which do not contain themselves contains itself … and then he made to the connection to it on the end of the video (although without much elaboration)! What a twist! Me likey. But then again, this is a natural language. Natural languages suck. Basically everything in them is poorly defined. Some definitions are recursive without a base-case (try to explain basically any word for something that you can not point at and yell its name to somebody who doesn't already know what it is. Like, what does the word "however" mean? The same as "but", surely, yet what does that one mean? Welcome to the open questions in linguistics, a.k.a. "we're so boned") and sometimes you end up with a word like "indescribable", which has a surprisingly coherent definition, but can never be correctly used to describe something. The reason most of science makes up fancy jargon (besides intellectual violence) is to prevent exactly this kind of messy stuff from interfering.

+ To infinity ...

Of course our universe is finite. Or at least effectively finite (we have no idea what's outside the observable universe, but applying the Copernican Principle, we're probably not literally the center of the universe, so outside there is probably stuff even when we can't see it). There is only finite (mass-)energy within our Hubble volume, and as space is expanding like a checkers board which constantly gets new ranks added, this causes the amount of "stuff" inside our cosmological event horizon to shrink (or at least stay somewhat the same, black hole farming can probably keep the bare minimum together for long enough that you have a decent chance to get a definite answer on "do protons decay, or nay?").

Now, computation is tied to the concept of entropy, in more than one way. The (incorrect) explanation to laymen is "well, duh, you need something to encode your data in, and encoding more than on (qu)bit per particle is not possible"⁴. The correct one is much more horrifying and leads to thought experiments like Szilard's heat engine, which creates energy by making things less certain. (I claim this concept for future use on the wiki.)

Anyhow, it is actually very, very easy to find computation that requires more storage space than the entirety of the universe can hold, and it is possible to state these problems so condensed that even a human gets them (compare how the best busy beaver contesters are all noticeably "Collatz-like", sharing traits with said sequence). If you want take a detour into the field of Googology, I recommend David Metzler's "Ridiculously Huge Numbers" series for things so large, that even giving you a description of the length of a description of the length of the description … of the length of the number wouldn't fit into the estimated total entropy of the interactable universe, with multiple billion orders of magnitude space for error.

I believe making a separate maths thread would be in order. Looking at out past history both in this forum and via IRC, these topics always tend to blow up.

We're no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I
A full commitment's what I'm thinking of
You wouldn't get this from any other guy

I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling
Gotta make you understand

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

We've known each other for so long
Your heart's been aching, but you're too shy to say it
Inside, we both know what's been going on
We know the game, and we're gonna play it

And if you ask me how I'm feeling
Don't tell me you're too blind to see

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

Ooh (Give you up)
Ooh-ooh (Give you up)
Ooh-ooh
Never gonna give, never gonna give (Give you up)
Ooh-ooh
Never gonna give, never gonna give (Give you up)

We've known each other for so long
Your heart's been aching, but you're too shy to say it
Inside, we both know what's been going on
We know the game, and we're gonna play it

I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling
Gotta make you understand

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

Don't worry about the memes, we can make our own. In fact, we have already, and looking at the Discord server, God had no say in their creation.

+ Did you know Hatsune Miku is CC-BY-NC 3.0?

(No, really, she is.

Basically all my knowledge of Vocaloids stems from having watched the Vocaloid Iceberg some time ago. (A video which hilariously featured more criminal prosecution than I was hoping for.) So… I'm not much more familiar with them than I'm with the Transformers fandom, or Formula 1 fans. To my knowledge, there has not been a publicly known incident of fandom-motivated assault with sharp objects, which I generally consider a plus. I mean, people who are into Vocaloid are undoubtedly weird and probably degenerates, but you're free to do that as long as you don't bother others. And as somebody who spend my last weekend having law school-level arguments about pieces of card boards representing ambush predators who use smol animuh gurls as lures⁵. (Have we tried if that works on Unsi?), who am I to talk?

The only thing really bad I know about the scene is that they like to use way to many fonts at once. I'm no typography nerd, but please … it hurts.

Talking about hurting, this is the reason I brought this up: your reaction to my throw-away line implied a wound spot. And I tend to be mindful when learning about open wounds, so I can later throw salt at them with extreme prejudice!

+ Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Because Battleborn randomizes dialogue, there are 15 different replies here, plus some unique to certain characters being present. Some of my favourite other ones include:

• Consciousness is an unremarkable blip in an infinitely vast ocean of time.
• Your capacity for thought is little more than a mathematical curiosity.
• What you call "love" is little more than a bio-chemical reaction.
• How many of your happiest memories have you forgotten?
• Santa Clause? Not real.

There is also this one, which might be incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the game, but is an excellent example of using I M P L I C A T I O N S for cosmic horror:

• You think the Varelsi are bad? What do you think they are running from? Come one champ, think about it. What do you think could possibly scare the Varelsi into leaping across the dimensional divide, snacking the very stars from the sky and dragging them back with them? What do you think has them planning for the worst? What do you think that looks like, champ? Really, really think about it, champ.

2. Let's face it, calling it "Computer Science" is a mistake, and one the english speaking world is alone in having made. Considering these are the very same people who dropped their T-V-distinction so they can be rude to everyone equally, and also giggle like schoolboys over our 7th planet because they're to dumb to stick to the very clear pronunciation everyone else, we should probably disregard any notion that stems from four languages in a trench coat pretending to be one.

3. NLogSpace is a great german-language resource starting from formal languages and automatons 101 and going up to the fun stuff like non-finite automata, oracles, alternating machines etc.

4. But even then, Planck length and time give us a "maximum resolution", and no matter how small, the Hubble volume will only contain a finite amount of different "positions" that any form of particle-wave or field can occupy, thereby giving us a limited set of combination you can represent. There exists further limits from "plain" boring practical issues like to much of anything crammed into the same spot collapsing into a black hole, which is a notoriously ghastly unsolved problem when it comes to hairyness.

5. Look, just because you use the effect of a trap in your deck through the activated effect of your monster doesn't mean it's a trap effect. It's the monster's effect, just like how Darklords using their spells/traps in the grave still do so as a monster effect; else you couldn't even activate the spells during your opponent's turn! And all the Traptrices (yes, that's the plural now, cope) clearly state they are either immune to "Hole" normal trap card effects, or trap effects in general. So I can, and absolutely will, Void Trap Hole your attempt of getting one of the only viable beatstick the archetype has to offer.

---

Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.

Last edited on 28 Feb 2023 22:18 by Zesc Show more

Relevant xkcd

Zesc 30 Apr 2025 21:12

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Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.