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Author Topic: Combat  (Read 20349 times)

Neruz

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Re: Combat
« Reply #30 on: September 08, 2009, 08:09:53 pm »

Modern caculus and advanced mathematics and physics gets around the infinity issue by ignoring it and thus claiming to have solved the problem, without actually addressing the problem.

The whole notion of a limit is pretty rigorously defined.  Are you really claiming that calculus doesn't have a sound basis?

Wow, this thread is so far gone.  Someone please kill it.

Oh no, calculus has a very sound basis, it just doesn't address the problem, or the reality.



And Granite, sure it might not be something we are capable of understanding yet, but assuming we don't become extincted, there's no reason to assume we will not become capable of understanding it some time in the future.

Bricks

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Re: Combat
« Reply #31 on: September 08, 2009, 09:53:11 pm »

Has it been experimentally validated that dogs can't learn calculus?  Not that I doubt it, my dog seems to struggle with parabolic motion.
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Rowanas

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Re: Combat
« Reply #32 on: September 09, 2009, 06:40:22 am »

That would be pretty sucky if humanity eventually discovers that we really aren't "good" enough to comprehend deeper physics. I reckon we probably can't because, strangely, we're not the most uber-super-amazing-at-everything race we think we are.
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I agree with Urist. Steampunk is like Darth Vader winning Holland's Next Top Model. It would be awesome but not something I'd like in this game.
Unfortunately dying involves the amputation of the entire body from the dwarf.

Baughn

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Re: Combat
« Reply #33 on: September 09, 2009, 06:44:09 am »

It seems pretty unlikely. By all evidence, the deeper layer of physics are far simpler than things like chemistry or biology, which we can understand pretty well already. It's just harder to figure out physics in the first place, since we can't experiment on it as easily.

However, even if that were the case, I don't think it'd matter. We might not be smart enough to understand physics, but we are smart enough to create being smarter than ourselves - via genetic engineering, artificial intellligence, whatever. Hopefully we're also smart enough to keep them under control until they can uplift us to the same level.   :-\
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Neruz

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Re: Combat
« Reply #34 on: September 09, 2009, 06:46:05 am »

Like i said, just because we're not capable of something now doesn't mean we will not become capable in the future. It took awhile, but we went from Amoebas to what we are now, and it's entirely likely we'll be able to accelerate the process somewhat with the proper application of SCIENCE!

Of course no doubt there will be some mistakes, and it's entirely possible we'll die out or kill ourselves off before we get the whole concept worked out, but you never know. You can't predict the future.

Rowanas

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Re: Combat
« Reply #35 on: September 09, 2009, 06:48:53 am »

Proper application of science? you might want to start hunting down all Fundamentalist religious people about now :D

It would be great if we could create things smarter than us to ponder the deeper mysteries of physics, but it would still have to live an awfully long time.
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I agree with Urist. Steampunk is like Darth Vader winning Holland's Next Top Model. It would be awesome but not something I'd like in this game.
Unfortunately dying involves the amputation of the entire body from the dwarf.

Neruz

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Re: Combat
« Reply #36 on: September 09, 2009, 06:54:06 am »

Pff, why create things smarter than us, would make more sense to just make ourselves smarter.

Rowanas

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Re: Combat
« Reply #37 on: September 09, 2009, 06:59:40 am »

Of course, but there you end up fighting an even bigger battle with weak and scared people arguing over ethics. I'm hoping to have enough money to bribe a geneticist to genetically engineer my kid if I have one. So what if the kid is screwed up in some other way, his minor sacrifice (and major enhancements) would pave the way for greater understanding, plus I'd have the strongest, smartest, fastest kid ever :D. Add in some toddler-age neurolinguistic programming and voila! nothing could go wrong ;D
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I agree with Urist. Steampunk is like Darth Vader winning Holland's Next Top Model. It would be awesome but not something I'd like in this game.
Unfortunately dying involves the amputation of the entire body from the dwarf.

Jamuk

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Re: Combat
« Reply #38 on: September 09, 2009, 07:20:03 am »

Actually, programming in real-time just means that the rate of change of all of the variables in the simulation is scaled based on the elapsed time of the system clock since its last update.

Basically, it means if there have been updates every .1 seconds during lag, then all the variables will be changing by increments of 10 times greater than if they were updating every .01 seconds.
Of course, this means the program will become less accurate as the updates get slower, but the actual rate of change will remain the same.  Instead of an object moving one pixel every update and checking for collisions, you will move it ten pixels and then check.  So, if the computer runs sufficiently slow, you may experience problems like an object moving through a wall.  Of course, if this happens it is the programmer's duty to make the program aware of the discrepancy and adjust its performance so as to not cause as much lag.

A game programmed using turns can be run in either real-time, or turn-based.  You only need to have the program wait until the proper amount of time has passed before updating.
A game programmed in real-time, however, cannot be run using turns.  This is because real-time and code cycles are integrated.
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Baughn

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Re: Combat
« Reply #39 on: September 09, 2009, 09:27:52 am »

The problem with creating beings smarter than us is that they might not share our sense of ethics. It's a very hard problem. (Yeah, read that link)

The problem with creating humans smarter than us is that we know they wouldn't share our ethics; we're hardcoded to be corrupted by power, for evolutionary reasons, and the human brain is so tangled that it'd be probably quite impossible to fix that without making the subject insane.

Come to think of it, it'd probably be impossible to improve our smarts very much without straining our sanity in the first place. It's not for nothing that they say there's a thin line between genius and insanity.

Seriously, I think it's a better idea to create a superintelligent mind from scratch than to try improving ours. We've got way too many complex adaptions that wouldn't show up in engineered minds, but could ruin a superintelligent one. I could be wrong, but that's my opinion.
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Baughn

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Re: Combat
« Reply #40 on: September 09, 2009, 09:34:41 am »

Oh, and the problem with not creating beings smarter than us is that someone else will.

Point of note: As computers get faster, brute-forcing a self-improving AI becomes easier, and the intelligence that AI will have once it starts self-improving becomes greater; assuming that there's a limit to algorithmic efficiency, all AIs are likely to end up at about the same level of smarts-per-megahertz.

However. Making the AI Friendly does not become easier at all.

Rather worrying, really.
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Granite26

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Re: Combat
« Reply #41 on: September 09, 2009, 10:00:15 am »

As long as we accept the possibility that there is something which the human mind cannot innately comprehend, I'm happy.  Doesn't have to be advanced physics.  (If you'd prefer, we can say that liberal arts majors have no chance of fully grasping relativity.  They just can't wrap their brains around it sufficiently to use it in any practical manner.  There's the possibility that there's something out there that is both true and so complicated that even Einstein or DaVinci couldn't use as a tool for solving problems.) 

Also, there is no selection pressure for people to become smarter than they are now (drastically, at any rate).


As computers get faster, brute-forcing a self-improving AI becomes easier, and the intelligence that AI will have once it starts self-improving becomes greater;
We've got way too many complex adaptions that wouldn't show up in engineered minds, but could ruin a superintelligent one.

Wait, our evolved brains have limitations, so we'll program brains without them, only we'll use evolutionary methods to do so?


Typo of the day: evovled.... Say it out loud E-VOV-LLED... YAY!!

Baughn

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Re: Combat
« Reply #42 on: September 09, 2009, 10:48:31 am »

"Self-improving" does not mean "evolved".

Evolutionary algorithms exist, and they are useful for some problems, but they're basically dumb.

A self-improving AI... well, in the limit, if we can make an AI just a little bit smarter than a human, then that AI can write a smarter AI yet, and so on. Think intelligent design, not evolution; this also has a much better chance of maintaining invariants like ethics and whatnot. (See CFAI for details)

That's the conservative assumption, for futurism. For safety, the conservative assumption is that an AI can start self-improving at an intelligence level considerably below that of a human. After all, unlike a human, it could be able to understand artifacts like source code and programming in general at an intuitive level.

When a human programs, it's as if a person without a visual cortex were to paint a picture, pixel by pixel. It can be done, but we can't measure up to beings that really understand it, at a more fundamental level.

Of course, that's just surmise. We don't have AIs yet. I'd be surprised if it turned out to be false, but I can't say for sure - yet.
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Baughn

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Re: Combat
« Reply #43 on: September 09, 2009, 10:53:02 am »

Oh, but..

Using evolutionary algorithms to create an AI is certainly possible. It worked once, after all.

It would, however, be fantastically costly (we hope), and even more fantastically dangerous (we definitely don't hope). I'm not proposing that anyone do that, but in principle it's simpler than the smarter, safer methods. Eventually it might be cheap enough that, if we don't already have working AIs, someone will.
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darius

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Re: Combat
« Reply #44 on: September 09, 2009, 11:19:59 am »

Only thing that I fear is that our sanity is not made to understand finer details of quantum physics. But who needs sanity anyway...  :P
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