"F(human)=human" makes sense in a way but is also boring, so I'd propose that F(human) would have to equal something that is somehow more human than human.
F^-1(human) would presumably be something like a human but less anthropomorphic. Neandarthals wouldn't be a bad approximation.
Perhaps we should state it in words as the anthropomorphising function. It makes the input more human featured-behaviourally, structurally, etc.
Maybe then it would just strip away non-human-average features? Sort of like a smoothing function?
Then we could say that humans are anthrpomorphized (big word, abbreviating to AN) apes, which works fine. Applying the de-AN function (^-1() for the confused individual above), would enhance anamalistic features. Less grasping, talking, planning, etc. Eventually, repeated applications either become boring, or reach a non-smooth discontinuity.
I suppose reapplying it to humans could instead make different races with some kind of distinction.
Also, it would appear that several of you are quite math-nerdy. I approve (Although I'm sure you'll note from the level I've used here that I didn't get past second year university math).
Well if we're talking human features enhanced you run into the issue of which features are human? Until Jane Goodall's work we thought war was specifically human but now about all we've got is art.
We recognize ourselves with the most variation so there's probably not a particular set of traits we can call human without always falling short. In this case F(human) should probably produce something like the Greek gods with their intense polarized personalities and general greatness, though at that point the issue of childness ecomes serious business.
"F(human)=human" makes sense in a way but is also boring, so I'd propose that F(human) would have to equal something that is somehow more human than human.
F^-1(human) would presumably be something like a human but less anthropomorphic. Neandarthals wouldn't be a bad approximation.
Anthropomorphism is the application of Human characteristics to non-Human things (creatures, phenomena, material states, objects and concepts). Ergo Anthropomorphizing a Human is an illogical and meaningless concept, as a Human is not a non-Human thing and thus not eligible for Anthropomorphization.
Anthropomorphism could be thought of as a direction rather than merely motion towards a specific end goal. What I'm asking is this: if we reach "human" and then continue moving in said direction, where does that take us?
And what you were just told makes that question much like "if we reach ""north"" and then continue moving in that direction, where does that take us?
Our thumbs would be so opposable, they wouldn't be able to get near each other!
I can't parse that. Opposable thumbs refers to how they can face the opposite direction of your other fingers (touching your index finger to your pinky is only barely in our range of motion and you couldn't hold something very well between the two,) I thought.
Lemme give this thing a try.
F(Vulcan)=Spock
How about F((Hyena)(Pig)(Bear))=one of Dr. Moreaus beasts (one of the antagonists in the movie I think).
Although Dr. Moreaus beasts were anthromorphosized to the point of bieng near human. Even to the point of bieng slightly altered humans. I remember that two of the seemingly human characters were actually a highly evolved (or whatever) big cat of some kind and I think, a dog. I only have the movie to reference from though, not the book.
Edit: How about something that is as far from human as you can get? F(Spider)=??? (and don't say Spiderman, lol)
F(jellyfish)+(lobster)+(Anomalcaris)=Something pretty damn alien.
Spider-centaur seems to be the term people use for F(Spider) as shifting mandibles towards a jaw just doesn't make any mechanical sense but WoW has some spider-people that aren't so much centaurs and they even have a caste with fewer stance limbs, though for some reason the spiders can also be beetles or something.
As for your F(jellyfish+lobster+Anomalcaris) I like to imagine the head cavity just flat out has a jellyfish it it acting as the brain.
I can see a lobsteranomolocaris-man, but not how you mix jellyfish in...exoskeleton vs jellyfish plan are hard to mix.
Imagine a caterpillar. It's got bony plates but they had softer tissue connecting them. Though it may just be that the plates are soft to begin with and slide around under and over each other.
Figuring out where to put the tentacles takes some thinking but starfish have mixed hard parts and tentacles very... convincingly?
Just add some stinging tentacles somewhere and the jellyfish part would work.
heheh, yea I'm trying to break the function by throwing non-bipedal body plans into the works.
How about something non-bilateral? Like, oh I dunno, radial (Jellyfish, Coral, and Sea Anemonenes) or penta-radial (starfish, Sea Urchins)?
While we are at it: F(Horse)=Centaur
Humans have five things projecting out of their torso so people don't have that much trouble imagining a starfish molded into a similar shape. It totally ignores starfish anatomy though so for a better starfish-man you could shift the middle up into more of a ball and maybe throw some sensory organs on it and then swing two of the arms around and up while they walk about on the remaining three. It's no longer pentaradial but when you're making something "more human" non-bilateral symmetry should obviously be the first thing you'd expect them to lose.
While we are at it: F(Horse)=Centaur
I don't think that follows from our other discussions. F(horse) should be a horse with hands that runs around on its hind legs, not a horse that has substituted a human torso for its head.
Or a human with a horses body and rear end coming out of thier backside, lol.
Still, it all comes down to the definition of anthropomorphic or humanoid we are looking at, anthro like 'furry' anthro or anthro as in having primate attributes, or anthro/humanoid as in having two arms, two legs, and a head.
How about F(Jellyfish+Manta Ray)? Probably would look something like those aliens from the Abyss movie.
Demon Souls has some airborn manta rays with tentacles dangling off their underside. The bastards are frequently behind scenery and launch harpoon stingers at you at the worst times.
Or stupid times when the scenery will block it but you can't tell from the sound so you probably jump into a bottomless pit or something anyway.
Clearly this just means that "north" is a poorly defined direction. Try the same thought experiment with the East Pole and you'll find that you can easily keep going east. 
That's a real bastardization of what it is to be a pole.
Nonetheless if you go East from Human you just end up back at human eventually so you've still got the same problem.
I actually had this idea once that time as we know it is not the actual time the universe - or even this galaxy - has been through. If time slows down with increasing speed, then we are travelling at about 99.99% of the actual universe's time flow, due to orbiting the Sun and the Center of the Galaxy. Considering the roughly four billion years since the galaxy was created... if our 0.000C speed gave us 99.9999% of the galaxy's own timeflow, we'd be roughly four thousand years behind any intelligent species located closer to the galaxy core, and that's not taking the whole "almost blown up halfway through evolution" thing Earth has experienced.
So, the whole concept of "Very Advanced Alien Species" might not be that far-fetched.
Closer to the galaxy core you've got a higer gas density which means stars closer together which means a more frequent purge of life via radiation from supernovae.
The relativity bit is wrong as well though. Gravity gets weaker as you move objects further away from each other and an orbit is where your tangential (to the path you are moving on,) movement counteracts your radial acceleration producing circles or ellipses. As such at greater distances slower moving objects find stable orbits while fast moving objects may escape the system. Objects moving slowly but not in optimal directions will fall towards the greater mass thus increasing their speed until they either hit it or are moving sideways fast enough to produce an orbit path.
Because the moon goes in the opposite direction the Earth spins the tidal bulge it produces is always behind it which produces a small gravitational tug backwards slowing down the moon in such a way that it's distance from Earth gradually increases.
Plus you need to recognize how the places closer to the center interact with those further out- exploding stars send debris in all directions and it ends up in planets or other stars so life has really just had to wait until stuff heavier than hydrogen was present enough to show up on planets with the right sorts of stability. But lie you said the almost being blown up stuff has a big impact so chances are such that there should be worlds out there with intelligent life millions of years ahead of us, whether you use liberal or very conservative estimates for planet values.
The forms we will take X many years into the future will not be Human; assuming they have evolved far enough to deviate sufficiently to be defined as different species.
In the same way that we are not Chimpanzees, our future selves will not be Humans. Or at least, will not be Homo Sapiens.
The only flaw with that statement is that we didn't evolve from Chimpanzees. We co-evolved with them, which is why we're so closely related, but we humans took a different (more successful?) evolutionary path than chimps.
We're descended from things like chimps, but probably not chimps as we know them today.
Yes but ,unless you give them a particular memorable word to use you can't expect everyone to go typing out "the common ancestor between humans and chimps."
We're descended from things like chimps, but probably not chimps as we know them today.
Tree shrews!
Uhh, no. Picture a chimp. That's pretty much what the last ancestor we shared looked like. Chimp have been showing some neoteny trends but to non-experts you wouldn't really be able to recognize the differences in any significant way.
and that's not taking the whole "almost blown up halfway through evolution" thing Earth has experienced.
You're referring to the Permian extinction? Mass extinctions like that tend to accelerate evolution, as the best adapted organisms survive and repopulate quicker. The branches of advanced reptiles that evolved into dinosaurs or mammals would've had an uphill battle without the boards being cleared.
Well no, it's less adapted animals that stick around after those events. Trilobites and anomolocaris were the best in their environment and because any upstart newbie had to not only adapt well enough to survive but also compete with them there weren't many chances for that sort of thing.
That old saying "in the land of the blind the man with one eye is king" really makes sense right after mass extinction events. Now some worm that holds itself up with bits of calcium going through it's middle basically looks through the paper and sees that both trilobites and anomalocaris went and left empty apartments and bam, the first guy into either niche has an advantage so pretty soon you see all kinds of fish taking up those roles. When nobody else does something you don't need to be good at it, just being a novice is good enough to have a huge head start and then you can spend a few thousand years actually refining the ability to either compete with members of your own species or any others that settled on a body plan that wants some of the same stuff you want.
Once in awhile life just figures out something revolutionary like aerobic metabolism and the whole system is shaken but the gaps between those chemical novelties are around the scale of billions of years so it's environmental shifts that favor one thing over another that drive most of the shifts in our forms.
The test of whether or not two individuals are of the same or different species is generally if the can/will interbreed and produce viable offspring (this leads to fun little anomalies like ring species). So it is difficult to say if we are a different species from our ancestors or descendants because that is a test we can not perform. My point is they will probably think of them selves as human even if we would not.
It can also be determined based on genetic variation.
And while our future selves will probably consider themselves human, as changing the species name would be silly, they will not consider themselves the same as the current era humans, in the same way that we do not consider ourselves the same as the humans 30,000 years ago.
There's not actually a good measure of how much genetic variation is equal to a new species.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that evolution has a direction or goal, certainly assuming that human evolution can be predicted by extrapolating the 'recent' trend is wishfull at best.
It is far more likely that humanity will devolve into a slackjawed, lazy, ultimate consumer of the matrix movies, rather than the hyperintelligent 'grey' everyone assumes is the logical endpoint.
Besides endpoints in evolution are equal to deadends, extinction is always lurking nearby for hyperspecialized (eg ultimately evolved) species.
Offcourse, near-extinction events function like evolutionary bottlenecks or rapids if you will. But then the changed conditions that caused the extinction will put a different set of evolutionary stresses on the species, evolving it into something else.
My on-topic point is: evolution has no role in magically created fantasy critters, besides selecting for survival/growth of populations in the emergent ecologies.
Depending on how/if randomised mythical species are generated, they can be generated in-vitro-sillico as complete species before worldgen or have a pre-worldgen-history evolutionary phase where species are planted (by the devine Toad of Creation) and strife to outcompete eventual competitors.
Successful populations can spread and/or diversify into subspecies unsuccessful ones can dieoff or spontaneously mutate to attempt survival/mimic bottleneck evolution.
I'm not sure on the wisdom of in effect adding an entire new layer of history to worldgen and a tracking layer for n populations of m species with p subspecies.
I think in general evolution is unnessesary, however a short period of titan and overall HFS history/evolution would be good for the continuity of the universal timeline.
It is engraved, that the HFS was driven/locked away by the elder gods, well .... that sounds like fun to emulate.
(heh. Also sounds like a plausible game concept: SlavestoArmok, Prequel. Titanquest. As a Deity of [insert + spheres here], draw species to your cause, grant them mythical powers and defeat Armok and the enslaving deamons so that your chosen people can be free.)
Well ya. It could be that the HFS locked away is so tough just because all of the weak things aligned to whatever sphere(s) the Gods decided to remove from the world were actually easy to kill while the tough stuff was more feasibly rounded up and locked away in the glowing pits. If we had a system automatically describing powerful and alien stuff with those sorts of words you could even randomize the groupings that got tit
owned (titan'ed- not tit,) without having adorable balls of fluff and unicorns spring out the depths of hell. Instead calling the hair balls and horned night-mares would be appropriate from the perspective of anything used to the usual stuff above and near the surface.
At first it seems like you'd have things you just wouldn't want to be "good" races like snake men but if we called them land-mermaids instead I don't think you'd even get much of a reaction.
I think this sort of thing is inevitable once the procedural generation parts get a chance to extend over more aspects of the world, so long as we don't just set up a dice roller to plug things together without any rhyme or reason and then deem the results a bad idea and never venture down that path again.
Homo Sapiens has remained largely unchanged for the pat several dozen thousand years.
Evolution is a SLOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW process. It can take a million years for any appreciable differences to arise.
It comes and goes, sometimes it's quite fast, other times it's much slower, sometimes it stops entirely.
There was actually a study done recently to determine how quickly humanity is evolving. The answer? faster than ever. The rate a species evolves is largely based on the available genepool, and our population keeps growing. It seems that very little physical evolution has occured recently, but more subtle changes are happening constantly.
There's not much directionality to it though. We've got the same general optimization stuff going on as anything else but the special selective stuff acting on us is mainly disease resistance and surviving around the ultra dangerous... other humans...
I think that I'm the only one that's not talking about evolution, I just want to ask something.
Will be possible to mod venoms and extracts that just works on some species?Ex:Insecticides...
Yes, it will be possible!
Insecticide or goblinicide sounds wonderfull. I was already planning to make a Centre for Goblin Studies custom workshop where dwarves dissect goblin cadavers to find out how they tick and make new ways to make them stop ticking. The problem with creating poisons like that is that I can't really think of many ways to deliver the toxin to the stuff you're trying to kill. Presumebly if you make the poison as an extract, there still won't be a "Smear Anti-Kobold Toxin on Pig Tail Sock" job making it difficult to use. Perhaps you could burn it, flooding the area with toxic smoke?
The aliens survived our most powerful weapons but were felled by simple water.
or robot version:
The humans survived our most powerful magnets but were felled by just a little lead solder and some pointy sticks.
The problem with creating poisons like that is that I can't really think of many ways to deliver the toxin to the stuff you're trying to kill. Presumebly if you make the poison as an extract, there still won't be a "Smear Anti-Kobold Toxin on Pig Tail Sock" job making it difficult to use. Perhaps you could burn it, flooding the area with toxic smoke?
Burning it probably wouldn't do anything, although vaporizing it would. You could also use a cave-in to fill the area with poisonous dust. You could also produce a poisonous gas directly at a custom workshop.
Creatures have the best repertoire of poison delivery methods -- they can spit globs of contact poison, breathe clouds of poison gas, secrete contact poison on their skin, or inject poison. I'm assuming the ability of vermin to inject poison hasn't been removed, but I doubt they have any of the new abilities. Anyway, you could send out war animals to poison the goblins, or you could manufacture poisonous vermin at a workshop and have them dumped outside the walls.
Were we able to define where the material is produced or does it have to be the same tile as where the dwarf works?
If it's something like the center most tile we'll be able to mod in something like smoke-pumps for dwarves to work at, though unfortunately impassible building tiles don't act as walls so we can't make them
dangerous if used inproperly FUN.
a question: Will there be lava pipes like in the old version in addition to the lava at the bottom of the map?
In one of the talks he mentioned that you could get lava without having to dig down to hell if you embarked at a pipe. In either a talk or update he mentioned that he finally had it so that the pipes would generate in a way that didn't floor the underground.
Yeah, even if only a handful, I would love to hear about some of these new critters. Are they tamable? Are they mountable? Can they be made into pets? Are they deadly or really deadly? Are any of them special, like poisonous, fire-breathing, really cold, made of weird materials, ect.?
Probably most of those.
I find this anthropomorpism math derail awesome and hilarius!
No
Seriously, that's 15 minutes of consciousness I'm never getting back.
You know, you don't have to read it.
You clearly haven't looked at the personality/thoughts pages of most of the people in here.
*I'm kind of rushing so no simulated line about gets extremely grumpy at skipping posts or something.
It'd be cool if you could inject your own dwarves with poison. Euthanasia etc.
Suicide booth workshops will be easy but you may need to put them in their own rooms and lock the doors.
Someone already started a thread in relation to this.
I think most of them may be fictional or drawn from stuff like DnD because there aren't many true cave critters that aren't arthropods. Amphibians are already well represented in DF for subterranean, although a couple more wouldn't hurt.
I'd like to see some salamanders.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3666877 times)