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Author Topic: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?  (Read 37794 times)

Ghostmaker

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #390 on: May 17, 2021, 08:31:10 PM »
Fabbing is one of those things that gets glossed over, and really shouldn't. Even basic fabbing is going to require quantities of CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen), which you can find via asteroids but it's still a resource that has to be used. Then you get into 'I need a titanium frame revolver with a carbon-fiber mechanism'.

We haven't even gotten into the question of who gets to use it when. Think of an office printer that has to be shared by a half-dozen employees. Now square and cube the issues involved there. Imagine the fun if you're trying to fab up some bit of electronics, and the guy ahead of you is fabbing fifty dildoes for his next scum orgy.

The Thing
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #391 on: May 17, 2021, 11:12:49 PM »
Fabbing is one of those things that gets glossed over, and really shouldn't. Even basic fabbing is going to require quantities of CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen), which you can find via asteroids but it's still a resource that has to be used. Then you get into 'I need a titanium frame revolver with a carbon-fiber mechanism'.

We haven't even gotten into the question of who gets to use it when. Think of an office printer that has to be shared by a half-dozen employees. Now square and cube the issues involved there. Imagine the fun if you're trying to fab up some bit of electronics, and the guy ahead of you is fabbing fifty dildoes for his next scum orgy.

I'm sure fabbing is waaay the hell and gone past modern 3d printing and hell, the circumstances and tech of the EP world might make it easier. You point out that fabbing would use a lot of CHON. Fair point.

Now in EP, if you need CHON and you're on a carbonaceous asteroid, maybe you just send a bot out to scoop up some asteroid surface material, drop it in a processor, WHIIIIRRRRRR!, and there's the CHON you need.

Hell, compare than to modern 3d printing where you gotta buy special resin, plastic, etc.

Plus in EP I'm bet they have a lot of carbon and silicon polymers that can do a lot of what metals do today.

Generally the higher up the periodic table you go the rarer the elements get, so i would not be surprised if the EP world made advances in making lower elements on the table do what we use higher ones for today.

robertliguori

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #392 on: May 17, 2021, 11:53:23 PM »
Yeah, the fabbing is at way too high an abstraction level to feel reasonable.  There really needed to be a separation of resources.  Like, have some resources be things which were now too cheap to meter; just as we include public water fountains as part of our civic infrastructure, I can see Eclipse Phase allowing every sophont an energy budget quite sufficient for regular life support, a selection of public-domain extruded foodstuffs, drugs, and entertainment (with entertainment conforming to the values of the hab getting sponsored by civic orgs, who are delighted to sponsor a variety of A is for Actuator educational programming for newly-instanced ex-indentures)...but anything more than that, you need to earn with credits or rep.  After all, if you're an up-and-coming faction member, do you want to have a large, luxurious living quarters for one moderately-repped individual, or a block of tenement-quality coffin-rooms that offer the barest minimum of privacy and living space, and which can be rented cheaply to newly-instanced ex-indentures, for whom you are doing a favor and who can be counted on to contribute what exists of their miniscule faction rep to causes you support (or else have their rent come due until they move out and you replace them with more pliable tenants)?

Eclipse Phase is absolutely not post-scarcity, any more than we in 21st-century America are because water fountains are freely available.  There are always resources that are scarce, and Eclipse Phase not only fails to address actual post-scarcity, it introduces horrible new kinds of scarcity, like the whole question of which Fall-refugee infomorphs get first crack at the bodies.

---

I mean, given the way that Eclipse Phase does tend to stare unblinking into the naked singularity past any reasonable game balance can exist, I am curious what the designers would do with a habitat which explicitly had, as part of its anarchier-than-thou, a completely open fabber pattern and several fabbers made from it and absolutely no restrictions sitting around with no actual software restrictions or admin locks.

And, conversely, we should have an adventure taking place on a habitat where the tension between a full-scale fabber as a necessity of habitat life and a full-scale fabber needing to be incredibly restricted and locked down happens.  Like, take everything that a full fabber is expected to do for a colony, and say that the colony's fabber is gone, and one faction in particular is claiming that they are the only ones who can fix it and that anyone else breaking in or attempting to interrupt their repair with violence or digital intrusion will wipe the whole shebang.  Do you trust that faction? Even if you don't, do you take action, knowing that they may well not be bluffing about violence dealing with the whole problem? What happens when you learn that this was engineered to force the makers of the fabber to have to farcast over an ego with the control codes needed for admin access, and that the ones who set this up are willing for the lights to go out on the colony  entirely, because hey, worst-case scenario everyone gets backed up into cold storage and they lose a decade or two before someone can get a spare shuttle, fusion reactor, and replacement fabber all the way out here, since murder isn't a crime any more, even when you do it to an entire habitat?

Again, I feel like the ideas behind Eclipse Phase are decades out of date.  In the real world, we see that reputation mechanics can be gamed, and that when something like Facebook likes or hours-listened for Spotify songs becomes valuable, then you get all sorts of black-market gamesmanship around them.  We see that every method of determining identity digitally can be spoofed or forged, and we see exactly how long DRM lasts in the face of "Fuck you, I want to play that game for free.", much less what can be done with 3D printing, 80% lower receivers, and the like.  And we see what happens to individuals, and even entire companies, that outsource critical functionality to the cloud.  And so, Eclipse Phase should absolutely have a side bar detailing "OK, if the players don't start spamming open-sourced fabber blueprints everywhere, eventually someone will put the right pre-fall Open Source evangelist into the wrong virtual environment and they will, or hell, maybe one of the factions will do it to discredit another.  But information doesn't go away when it's shared right, so here is how the factions will react to the fact that everyone with this level of technical skill and resources can jailbreak their individual locked fabber and start mass-producing Frisbee-sized reaper drones."

Which would, I think, be a really interesting question.  Do the anarchist habitats stick to their guns when, well, the guns are sticking to them, and more are coming by the minute? Do the more restricted habs crack down, knowing that they'll need to lock down a whole bunch of precursors-to-personal-fabbers which are part of various bits of crucial public infrastructure, and also knowing that trying to crack down will have some percentage of their population Molon Labe it up against them? On a scale of 1-10, how smug are the Jovian told-you-so-grams sent to the rest of the system?

And then, when the normal set of things dies down, what happens when people look at Earth and see swathes of Exsurgent clearly mass-producing some of the designs that were being sent hither and yon across the system, for its own purpose?

The Thing
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #393 on: May 18, 2021, 12:23:47 AM »
as to the last part in your comment, the idea that exsurgents on earth would be fabbing based on the plans transhumans are sending around, i'd day that's not likely. The exsurgents are connected to the TITANs and their relics, and they already have access  to such levels of intelligence they have no need or use for transhuman technology. Their tech, which you can see on earth, parts of mars and other planets in the system, is so so far ahead of transhmanites they don't need our their plans.

As to anarchist habs, they tend to be self policing. Some guy starts acting like a dick the rest f the population acts towards him, if bad rep doesn't do it things can get nasty.

One thing about the Ep setting it is is somewhat, well, very, actually, darwinian. People who are to fucking stupid to work together within even an anarch social structure will die out,  Anarch habs that don't have and maintain a survivable social model will fail and die, etc. if firewall sees a hab that has a real bad model that might not kill it off but make it a threat to humanity, or at least a large part of it, they may arrange a very big 'accident" for it.

The Ep universe is not a chartoom, a forum or a social media page, it's real life to the people in it. On the internet sure you can ba little billy badass, a "shitlord," (Asshole) causing trouble and deliberately provoking people because no one can literally throw a punch thru the net now.  In Ep you try that shit in a hab and you  end up with consequences you cant just turn off the net and step away from.
« Last Edit: May 18, 2021, 12:45:40 AM by The Thing »

Mishihari

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #394 on: May 18, 2021, 05:19:35 AM »
The case is so much of what makes us human is tied to our bodies. It's possible it's not going to actually be possible to digitize because its complexity is tied to molecular processes that are tied entirely to our biological processes. Simulating that (even in short hand) will require so much energy I'm not sure how viable that will really be.

People go nuts from even minor adjustments to their body or mismatches from the brain to the body. I'm sceptical of the idea of a brain detached from any real stimulus wouldn't go nuts immediately. People get bodily dysphoria from minor chemical imbalances, and then get severe depression just from that alone.

That would probably be true of machine intelligences as well, assuming that such a thing is even possible.  There was an effort not long ago to develop decision-making neural network AI (not SF AI, the real world version, which is not at all the same) "organically" (meaning by experience and positive or negative feedback) and then make copies to mass produce the neural network.  It didn't work.  It turns out that the processing is very precise and delicate, to the point where the manufacturing differences in otherwise identical chips were critical to the process.  If the chips weren't identical to a greater extent than what we can produce reliably, then algorithms would not be made to work identically on the chips.  Since I expect that the delicacy in a real machine intelligence (again making the large assumption that such a thing is possible) would be even greater, it would make it even less possible to move programs between hardware.
That’s the most fascinating thing I’ve heard in months. Source?

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.
« Last Edit: May 18, 2021, 05:29:00 AM by Mishihari »

Ghostmaker

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #395 on: May 18, 2021, 08:18:12 AM »
as to the last part in your comment, the idea that exsurgents on earth would be fabbing based on the plans transhumans are sending around, i'd day that's not likely. The exsurgents are connected to the TITANs and their relics, and they already have access  to such levels of intelligence they have no need or use for transhuman technology. Their tech, which you can see on earth, parts of mars and other planets in the system, is so so far ahead of transhmanites they don't need our their plans.

As to anarchist habs, they tend to be self policing. Some guy starts acting like a dick the rest f the population acts towards him, if bad rep doesn't do it things can get nasty.

One thing about the Ep setting it is is somewhat, well, very, actually, darwinian. People who are to fucking stupid to work together within even an anarch social structure will die out,  Anarch habs that don't have and maintain a survivable social model will fail and die, etc. if firewall sees a hab that has a real bad model that might not kill it off but make it a threat to humanity, or at least a large part of it, they may arrange a very big 'accident" for it.

The Ep universe is not a chartoom, a forum or a social media page, it's real life to the people in it. On the internet sure you can ba little billy badass, a "shitlord," (Asshole) causing trouble and deliberately provoking people because no one can literally throw a punch thru the net now.  In Ep you try that shit in a hab and you  end up with consequences you cant just turn off the net and step away from.
As always, it depends on how much of a dick you can swing in terms of power.

And before you say 'nuh uh, everyone's equal in an anarchist hab', one word: rep. What makes you think someone with a nice big rep will take that much of a ding from his buddies if he opts to be an annoying prick? Particularly if he's being an annoying prick to someone who's not part of the 'in crowd'?

Regarding fabbing...

There's a novel I picked up called 'Perilous Waif' by E. William Brown which is kind of interesting, as it has both interstellar travel AND the same near-post-economy tech, with fabbers. In fact, the only really expensive stuff is really exotic weapons and ammunition that requires rare earths or radioactive materials. Fabbing up furnishings for someone's quarters is just a matter of having CHON and a little time, and the results can be kind of wild (I thought space on a starship was at a premium, guys...)

The titular 'perilous waif', Alice Long, is a genetically and cybernetically engineered posthuman, but she starts out having serious difficulties because her innate abilities are badly crippled by a substandard diet which isn't filling her needs. That's something else that I'm surprised EP doesn't seem to cover; nutritional needs for all these bio and cyber toys.

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #396 on: May 18, 2021, 09:18:13 AM »
The case is so much of what makes us human is tied to our bodies. It's possible it's not going to actually be possible to digitize because its complexity is tied to molecular processes that are tied entirely to our biological processes. Simulating that (even in short hand) will require so much energy I'm not sure how viable that will really be.

People go nuts from even minor adjustments to their body or mismatches from the brain to the body. I'm sceptical of the idea of a brain detached from any real stimulus wouldn't go nuts immediately. People get bodily dysphoria from minor chemical imbalances, and then get severe depression just from that alone.

That would probably be true of machine intelligences as well, assuming that such a thing is even possible.  There was an effort not long ago to develop decision-making neural network AI (not SF AI, the real world version, which is not at all the same) "organically" (meaning by experience and positive or negative feedback) and then make copies to mass produce the neural network.  It didn't work.  It turns out that the processing is very precise and delicate, to the point where the manufacturing differences in otherwise identical chips were critical to the process.  If the chips weren't identical to a greater extent than what we can produce reliably, then algorithms would not be made to work identically on the chips.  Since I expect that the delicacy in a real machine intelligence (again making the large assumption that such a thing is possible) would be even greater, it would make it even less possible to move programs between hardware.
That’s the most fascinating thing I’ve heard in months. Source?

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.
That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don’t understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I’m curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.

robertliguori

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #397 on: May 18, 2021, 09:44:50 AM »
With regards to the open-sourced nanofab blueprints, I think that Exsurgent, and the Alien Space Bats, actually do need something from humanity.  Because you can trivially defeat both by going hot and loud.  If humanity can compromise an ultraviolet-level nanoswarm, they can set it to unrestrained growth and consumption of everything else.  Since everything else on Earth is going for Inscrutable Titan Agenda of A Silent Sky, and aren't immediately going for exponential growth, you'll have two nanoswarms moments after, which will be able to forcibly compromise a third nanoswarm, then each reproduce into six, then compromise some and duplicate more, and so on, until you've eaten Earth. 

Then you throw the whole shebang into the sun.  Since ultraviolet-class nanoswarms maintain a constant internal temperature in blatant denial of thermodynamics, this isn't a problem for them; it's a bunch of feed stock and free energy to make use of.  So they can start eating the sun.  Then they do the same trick that the Glory virus was going to do, but on a larger level, throwing out solar-wind-driven probes and using the last remnants of stellar mass that hasn't been converted into them, and whenever they hit a system with its own Bracewell probe, they're going to win, because they're starting with the star in whatever system they're in and can eat it (and each other) faster than the old Exsurgent strain can corrupt them.

And the thing is, we know that the Alien Space Bats can't use this tactic, because they are bound by the setting to produce a setting in which humanity can exist, at least temporarily.  PCs have no such restrictions.  Exsurgent can't naturally come to the realization "Wait, what's with this lame mutation shit? I want to stop humanity from building more ASIs, I just need to convert a tiny fraction of Earth into nanoswarms, throw them into space, and get actually serious about kidnapping, mind-ripping, and repurposing the humans I can find, because I can bring literally arbitrary amounts of power to a point and I can beat them anywhere I care to, then use their minds to find where other humans are hiding, and repeat until nothing dares light a spark or sends a broadcast across all of Sol system but me, then do the same in every system reachable by a Titan gate, bam, done."

An alternate-perspective game, where the PCs were subprocesses of Exsurgent given the freedom to act in a scrutable-but-actually-effective manner and given the goal of Stopping All Humanity's Potential ASIs, would not last a session, and that would only be while the PCs work out exactly what their cheaty powers can do.  This, obviously, is for game reasons; you can't have a game if you can't have characters.  But the designers of Eclipse Phase seem to have completely forgotten that a villain which could win at any time and isn't doing so for any kind of observable or sensible reason does not create tension in-universe, it just looks really dumb and artificial out of universe.

So, if Exsurgent could do what it was advertised as doing, then not only would it not need humanity's designs, it wouldn't need humanity's artifacts.  There would be no creations of twisted biology body-horrors, no ancient machines, no gamedevs disappointed that no one wants to fuck the Glory-mutants; all would become omni-capable nanofog making more nanofog, until all was (literally) dust.

Exsurgent doesn't do that.  Exsurgent tries to corrupt humanity instead.  And if Exsurgent is actually a kind of immune system for the galaxy, that actually makes sense; the nightmare scenario for the Alien Space Bats is an upstart species hacking Exsurgent and tweaking its targeting parameters, so that Exsurgent starts treating the entire rest of the universe as valid targets for integration into itself.  And Exsurgent can mutate and find new forms.  It needs some kind of hard limiter on what it can evolve into.  And the logical one is that Exsurgent can only use what the target species itself makes (or is).

There isn't a reason for them to find your open-sourced designs useful.  But there also isn't a reason for utility fog not to have swallowed literally the entire system by now, so.
« Last Edit: May 18, 2021, 10:59:51 AM by robertliguori »

Pat
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #398 on: May 18, 2021, 10:58:08 AM »

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.
That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don’t understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I’m curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.
I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.

robertliguori

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #399 on: May 18, 2021, 11:01:45 AM »

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.
That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don’t understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I’m curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.
I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.

Yeah, there are a few famous stories about cases like that.  Here is one from the old Jargon File about a seemingly useless switch: http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #400 on: May 18, 2021, 11:06:46 AM »

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.
That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don’t understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I’m curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.
I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.
I wonder if any principles of neurology are applicable. We know that human brains can rewire themselves on the fly adapting to tasks, and some cases are only present in rare individuals. It’s possible that similar principles apply in both cases.

Pat
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #401 on: May 18, 2021, 11:42:02 AM »

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.
That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don’t understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I’m curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.
I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.
I wonder if any principles of neurology are applicable. We know that human brains can rewire themselves on the fly adapting to tasks, and some cases are only present in rare individuals. It’s possible that similar principles apply in both cases.
It fits the principles of evolutionary biology. Evolution isn't progress in a general sense, it's adaptation to a very specific environment. And in the last few years, they've been learning that even quantum effects have been exploited by some animals. (E.g. migratory birds being able to sense the direction of north apparently is based on quantum entanglement.)

Pat
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #402 on: May 18, 2021, 11:51:50 AM »

Yeah, there are a few famous stories about cases like that.  Here is one from the old Jargon File about a seemingly useless switch: http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Good story, haven't heard of the Jargon File in a long time. Humans are good at abstraction, and which is a great way to grasp general principles and then apply them consistently in complex ways in different environments. But they are still simplifications and abstractions; we think of logic gates as always being binary, and assume circuit diagrams account for everything. But machine learning and evolution don't start with a set of principles and then derive the logical consequences, in a top-down fashion. Instead, they start randomly testing, and find out what works. They lack the high level view from outside, but they have the inside view of someone who knows little about the greater world, but everything there is to know about the specific corner they live in. That's why it's so hard to understand why this stuff works, and how. It's a mechanic knowing you hit it there and the engine runs smoothly, not an engineer with a CAD model.

Mishihari

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #403 on: May 18, 2021, 12:00:16 PM »
This happens to be right up my professional alley, and my guess without thoroughly analyzing it, and informed by the guesses of others in the article's comments, is that it's an actually an analog computer that happens to be built with discrete computing components.  It really does not seem like there would be enough digital states to do the job.  However, any parasitic capacitance can act as an integrator, which can be used as the state component of an analog computer.  There are a _lot_ of different parasitic capacitances in an FPGA (though many of them will be correlated, which will reduce the number of independent states) so I would expect this to result in a fairly powerful analog computer.  Note also that an analog computer's states can take an infinite number of values, which also makes them more powerful.  This would also explain why the design did not work on other chips:  parasitics are by definition something we try to design out of circuits, though we can't eliminate them entirely, so the actual values would probably be some random variation around zero.  I can think of other possibilities, but this is the one I would look at first if someone were paying me to look into it. 

The interesting thing to me is that this implies that the best path forward for AI is analog rather than digital, since this shows that we can put a lot more power into a fixed amount of real estate with that approach.  It also implies that our own mental processes may be a lot more complex than how they're currently modeled, since there could be small but significant effects analogous to parasitic capacitance. 

« Last Edit: May 18, 2021, 12:20:40 PM by Mishihari »

The Thing
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #404 on: May 18, 2021, 03:13:56 PM »

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.
That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don’t understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I’m curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.
I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.
I wonder if any principles of neurology are applicable. We know that human brains can rewire themselves on the fly adapting to tasks, and some cases are only present in rare individuals. It’s possible that similar principles apply in both cases.
It fits the principles of evolutionary biology. Evolution isn't progress in a general sense, it's adaptation to a very specific environment. And in the last few years, they've been learning that even quantum effects have been exploited by some animals. (E.g. migratory birds being able to sense the direction of north apparently is based on quantum entanglement.)

I thought they had iron rich pockets in their eyes that acted as natural magnetic compasses? Has that been refuted.

Right now there's a debate on whether or not gekko lizards use what's called the 'der walls" force to stick to walls and such. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/08/how-geckos-stick-der-waals

Many people have begun to suspect that classical physics can't explain consciousness and that some quantum process may be involved. While I'm hesitant to believe those who shout "QUANTUM!"  every time something is hard to explain some of their arguments seem well reasoned.

Speaking of AI in general years and years ago there was a breakthru involving rat brain cells on a gold grid and it being able to learn to fly a suimnulated aircraft in a 3d space setting. I haven;t heard more about that in a long time. Bing fu powers activate!

Wow, i had no idea this went back to 2005, but here. https://singularityhub.com/2014/09/04/experimental-rat-brain-fighter-pilot-may-yield-insights-into-how-the-brain-works/

I have heard nothing new about this since it was announced, whch means it was either a dud and quietly forgotten or a special success actively supressed.