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Author Topic: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.  (Read 5215 times)

SalmonGod

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #45 on: April 27, 2011, 05:44:49 pm »

It's ironic I would discover this thread today.

I was thinking about Grandroids this morning.  I was wondering just how intelligent those creatures might get.  I remember vague notions of the Norns being capable of communicating with the player and simulating emotions.  I watched one video of a guy teaching his Norns to be masochists by inflicting pain on them and then giving them a reward.  They would learn to like it and then start inflicting pain on each other.  So there's something there.  I didn't know what to think of it.

I'm expecting Grandroids to be a good deal more advanced, with more potentially intelligent and lifelike creatures.  Supposedly nothing about their behaviors will be pre-programmed.  He's going to put together the components necessary for learning and see what happens.  They'll have to learn to walk and everything.  That's nothing new.  I've seen demonstrations of robots and the like that didn't have pre-programmed walk cycles.  They were given the AI to figure out how to do so from scratch, and did it.  So true learning AI is possible, as far as I can tell.

But those robots were created solely for the purpose of demonstrating learning capability and only given one learning task.  The Grandroids creator wants to do more than that.  It seems like he wants to take those concepts and breath true life into them.

So my imagination ran with this.  I imagined watching this creature develop and learn language and how to manipulate and survive in its environment... and then me, trying to teach, guide, and protect it.  I suppose this would make me something of a god to this creature.  I wasn't sure how I felt about this, but I knew I wouldn't be the same as that guy who made the video about sadomasochistic Norns.  I'm just not that kind of person, so I wouldn't do anything that I'd need to feel bad about, right?  I imagined eventually being able to hold conversations with a grandroid creature.  Then I imagined the creature's reaction when I told it I was going to shut down the computer and go do something else for a while...

...

I had a lot of trouble getting past that thought.
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Asmageddon

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #46 on: April 28, 2011, 09:47:57 am »

If we want to continue working on AI, we should realize that human feelings are in fact only result of what is going on in our brain, and that everything that can learn and has feelings(it needs to have some impulse to do anything, since being sentient it will no longer just do the job it was programmed to do) is not much different from us, humans.

I personally consider intelligence to be meter of how much I'm supposed to respect a person, and if we make humans smarter than ourselves, we will have to accept that they're better than us and therefore we should treat them with respect.

We can of course program them to only have impulses like "avoid being hurt" and "complete orders of humans", but this is not much different from a kid taken from mother and conditioned to be a slave since birth...
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Jeoshua

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #47 on: April 28, 2011, 07:40:13 pm »

Then I imagined the creature's reaction when I told it I was going to shut down the computer and go do something else for a while...

Why should you even tell the Grandriod anything at that point? If the program has a save-state, it's generally assumable that the creature would notice nothing of time passing or discomfort or any of that.  When the simulation stops, so does the creature.  It's just like the time-dilation thing, except instead of time slowing, it would stop.

If God shut down the universe to go out for a bite to eat, when he came back and loaded the "savegame", we'd not have noticed anything in the interim.
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Bdthemag

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #48 on: April 28, 2011, 07:51:58 pm »

Man the computer the universe runs must be really good, it can go through the big bang with perfect fps!
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Jeoshua

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #49 on: April 28, 2011, 07:57:09 pm »

Read closer and think of the implications of that, BD.

The experience of a conscious agent within a simulation is independent of the "frames per second".  If the FPS dips, so does the agent's experience of their surroundings.  So one second will be one second to that agent, regardless of how fast their experience is calculated.

So no, the Big Bang's FPS would have been abysmally low.  Actually thinking on it that's not really guaranteed, because the same amounts of matter and energy were extant at that time as there are now - it was just more densely packed.  Simulating that explosion would fundamentally be no different than simulation the universe at any other time... just more dramatic.
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dree12

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #50 on: April 28, 2011, 08:19:04 pm »

If we want to continue working on AI, we should realize that human feelings are in fact only result of what is going on in our brain, and that everything that can learn and has feelings(it needs to have some impulse to do anything, since being sentient it will no longer just do the job it was programmed to do) is not much different from us, humans.
Be careful there. Being sentient does not mean it won't do the job it was programmed to do, just that its programming is too complex for us to understand. This is somewhat of a paradox: we are simply reacting to our surroundings in a preprogrammed way. However, we think we have feelings, and they are not just certain arrangements of particles! If we create a human from scratch, atom for atom, does it have the free will of a normal human? This argument is disputed by many, although that is the same process as when a human is born. Perhaps we should start calling ourselves "replicating" rather than "reproducing".

Going into AI, there are interesting phenomenan possible with current infrastructure. The brain of a gnat, for example, may be possibly computerized in the near future. But does that simulation really have feelings? Personally, I think we are just as mindless as a ANSI C "Hello World!" program running on DOS.
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SalmonGod

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #51 on: April 28, 2011, 08:21:48 pm »

Then I imagined the creature's reaction when I told it I was going to shut down the computer and go do something else for a while...

Why should you even tell the Grandriod anything at that point?

I didn't say I was wise in my daydreaming.  I just found myself trying to emotionally process being in that position.  It was an overwhelming thought.

I also had some Plato's cave ponderings.  I imagined trying to help the creature process the nature of its existence as a computer program, showing it video feeds of the "real world", and wondering what that experience would be like.
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In the land of twilight, under the moon
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Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.

Jeoshua

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #52 on: April 28, 2011, 08:24:24 pm »

I imagined trying to help the creature process the nature of its existence as a computer program, showing it video feeds of the "real world", and wondering what that experience would be like.
Unless the creature existed in a simulated 3d environment with a standard "movie type" input stream... it would probably be about as overwhelming and non-understandable as feeding a million DB of white noise and flashes of light into a human's sensorium. 
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SalmonGod

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #53 on: April 28, 2011, 08:29:54 pm »

I imagined trying to help the creature process the nature of its existence as a computer program, showing it video feeds of the "real world", and wondering what that experience would be like.
Unless the creature existed in a simulated 3d environment with a standard "movie type" input stream... it would probably be about as overwhelming and non-understandable as feeding a million DB of white noise and flashes of light into a human's sensorium.

I assumed a 3d environment, and setting up a plane with a texture linked to a live camera video feed.
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In the land of twilight, under the moon
We dance for the idiots
As the end will come so soon
In the land of twilight

Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.

Starver

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #54 on: April 29, 2011, 03:44:02 am »

Personally, I think we are just as mindless as a ANSI C "Hello World!" program running on DOS.
There's a loosely and transiently collected bunch of atoms and informatic signals, here, identifying itself as "me" or "I".  This 'me' is sitting and interacting with (among other things) a separate set that 'me' calls a "keyboard", having received impulses from another set described as a "monitor".   All of these are obeying (most probably deterministic) physical laws in their internal functioning and interact in countless ways with each other as well as all the other collections (and meta-collections) which ultimately composes the environment of their existence.  The "I" collection definitely has impulses within itself representing a similar world-model as apparently contained by the unknown entity (provisionally entitled "dree12") whose existence is only indicated through a number of proxy interactions.

That is assuming the "I" is truly correct in its world-model even of the keyboard, never mind the external entity, but that way lies territory for which the classic Cogito argument needs to be invoked.


In other words, I agree with you.  But then I was always going to, the way I've been continuously programmed and re-programmed by the universe. :)


I imagined trying to help the creature process the nature of its existence as a computer program, showing it video feeds of the "real world", and wondering what that experience would be like.
Unless the creature existed in a simulated 3d environment with a standard "movie type" input stream... it would probably be about as overwhelming and non-understandable as feeding a million DB of white noise and flashes of light into a human's sensorium.

I assumed a 3d environment, and setting up a plane with a texture linked to a live camera video feed.

To what degree is the simulated creature an exact environmental simulation?  Does it fully perceive "line of sight" objects and only them?  In seeing a flat image of a live video feed, projected as per a flat plane, does it not only have difficulty in understanding that that parallelogram is a perspective view of a rectangular wall, but also that (unlike its own world) there are things that are partially obscured by other objects (if not outright hidden) and are furthermore not plainly labelled within its consciousness with an id-tag of some kind (whether or not they are to be consciously ignored) and has to be analysed in a way far beyond the level of "That is <screen1>, upon it is <texture_livefeed1>".  Is the problem not so much that, Matrix-like, it has to learn to "see the code", but that it is seeing the code and it has to learn to "see the representation".  And match the application of that representation of its internal world with the dimension-shaved representation of an external world being given in a completely ineffable manner.

And in trying to create a simulated world that we recognise and can work with, there are a number of layers of abstraction between "what the code does" and its representation to us as a 'petting zoo' with which we can interact.

There are a number of aspects to even the background simulation which are anthropocentric.  I'm not talking about bipedalism, here, but that there are a number of imported aspects (common to most simulated or 'gamiverse' worlds).  There's a "down" and an "up", I'm pretty sure, which has no reason to exist (certainly has no basis regarding large amounts of matter concentrating a force of attraction towards a particular surface) but is a sop to our environment.  Euclidean geometry is almost always a given, as is the existence of paths that are either looped or have exactly two ends.

If it's a 3D world being represented, that just panders to us even more.  Why should the world not be 4D in nature?  The maths and code behind working out the interactions in such a world isn't any more complicated than for a 3D world, or a 2D one.  Memory issues, of course.  Plus representing the world to the viewers, i.e. us.  Although (again) the maths for making a 3D approximation of a 4D world is similar to that which we already need to apply to a 3D world (or the first approximation of the 4D one) in order to represent upon a 2D display device...  (I think there's at least one person on this forum with a rotating tesseract as their avatar image, which does exactly that in taking a 4D entity and bringing it down to 2D.)

But this eventually leads back to my "old chestnut", the Conway's Game Of Life board containing such complex patterns that 'they' consider themselves conscious.  Never mind that we can poke various pixels on and off if we want, check the state of the entire board (freezing it at will, reverting it, wiping it).  If a mass of pixels that is an 'entity', or 'consciousness', does exist it won't look like a stick-figure man write-huge, 'throbbing veins' of pixels pulsing up and down its arms, picking up a "pixelated rock" group of cells and throwing it.  It'll be a mass of information that moves by "translating" itself across the grid and as well as that growing and shrinking with no reason to obey any Conservation of Mass/Energy laws such as appear to work within our own universe.  It will interact with its environment by the stable (or meta-stable) state of 'its' own cells meshing with cells currently not part of 'itself' and the surface meshing translating (for both the being and the interacted object) into ripples of altered states passing through the respective 'masses'.

(Hypothetically, I imagine that the "skin" of a Conway-being would be a mass of 'feeler' tendril structures, continually maintained and/or regenerated by the underlying substrate.  As and when these feelers 'feel' something else this disrupts them, sends a ripple down to the substrate which absorbs it (translating it into a subtle disturbance in a form of transmitted signal, probably far more complex than a "glider stream", to travel towards/form part of the creature's consciousness/awareness) and then reinforce the tendril to prevent its re-assimilation or loss.  But that's probably anthropomorphising things far too much and it'd be nothing like that anyway.)

And thus would we recognise 'consciousness'?  We have the unique power to look across the entire substance of a mass of cells, but could we truly say "that group of cells is thinking"?  To us, we can rewind, poke, prod, etc, and the consciousness would know nothing about it.  One 'time line' may cease to continue even while another run-through from a past position now has a 'creature' with a pixel changed here, there... Or whole segments of it whited (or blacked) out through an over-hasty application of a "paintbrush".  If, indeed, it was restarted.

From a theological point of view (as a comparison, not wishing to start that debate again), the omnipotent deity could be doing all kinds of things to us right now.  Maybe "gravity" is God interfering with every single particle, in every single tick, making sure that they all obey some force that is not programmed into the original simulation.  You cannot even trust that the book you put down just now won't suddenly become a raging bull elephant if we are being actively prodded and poked.  But we would have to accept it as part of our universe that such things happen.  Gravity is natural because it happens, paperbacks turning into preposterously petulant pachyderms is not natural because (at least from my current knowledge) it does not.

A Conway-creature with an analytical mind would derive what it could of its universe.  It would never derive a law of conservation of mass, energy or momentum, because none of these exist in its world.  It may derive a "speed of light" equivalent, which may be a measurement that we know as one-cell-per-tick (the absolute fastest that any change can propagate across a mass of cells) except that this would require a mass of cells primed to pass on this change at that speed.  "In a vacuum" (in a 'cell-off' expanse) the fastest speed is the speed of a glider cell (or equivalent) travelling through this expanse.  Which is of an order of one diagonal cell every four ticks, IIRC, though I think there are ones that move one cell non-diagonally in two ticks.  However, there would be no way to examine individual tiles as being "on" or "off", and the scale of the "tick" would be far shorter than any "observational equipment" could be 'built' to directly measure, themselves being constructs who might have a resonance at the scale of the ticks, but could not actually count the individuals.

The Conway-creature taking upon itself the role of an experimental geometer would be able to establish that his world has an orthogonal bias (there is an underlying grid system), due to the relationship between the horizontal/vertical expanses and the diagonals.  Not that it could imagine a diagonal distance as Root(2) the distance of the equivalent axial distances, as Manhattan or pseudo-Manhattan metrics only are relevant in such distance calculations.  Either way, consider this in the same way as we don't really know whether anyone currently understands the universe correctly (theory of relativity, quantum theory, string theory, M-theory...  all good models and are good (capital-T) Theories for some aspect or other (or several!) of our universe, but may not be "The Answer".  And the fine details of the universe may be as unknowable, certainly unprovable, even if some GUT comes up that is completely accurate.)


TL;DR; As far as I can see, simulated consciousness in an "our world" type of simulated environment are abstracted beyond their own understanding.  Simulated consciousnesses in an environment more suited to themselves are abstracted beyond our understanding.  There may be a half'n'half solution, but I anticipate compromises on both sides of the board to bridge the gap between one-trick ponies (even if it's a pretty good trick of pretending to be a fully interactive 'pet dog'-like being with apparent emotions, et al) and the truly esoteric kind which we may never even realise the full nature of.
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Asmageddon

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #55 on: April 29, 2011, 12:22:08 pm »

The only way this thread could be better would be experimenting on elves. :D

Also, I'd like to know on what you are basing the assumption that "fps" would be lower during the big bang?
As far as I'm concerned all of the forces have infinite falloff distances, and nothing suggests that "virtual collision-checking 'force' " would have finite range.
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Armok

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #56 on: April 29, 2011, 01:49:47 pm »

the "virtual collision-checking 'force' " is electromagintism, so it does indeed have infinite range.
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wolflance

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #57 on: April 29, 2011, 01:55:09 pm »

*Skim thru the thread*
I can only say I am impressed.

Dwarf Fortress: When one nerdy though can lead to discussion about cosmology, time-travel, origin of humanity and catsplotion. All in detailed !!Scientific!! terms.
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Asmageddon

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #58 on: April 29, 2011, 02:03:18 pm »

the "virtual collision-checking 'force' " is electromagintism, so it does indeed have infinite range.
Pardon me, then, sorry for making you experience my ignorance. Anyway, why do you think that big bang, or any other events for that matter could have any effect on fps?
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Jeoshua

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Re: I just had the nerdiest thought ever.
« Reply #59 on: April 29, 2011, 02:21:21 pm »

I have a similar wish to know what reasoning there could be for a dense conglomeration of matter having an effect on the objective processing speed of a simulated universe.  Certainly, such a conglomeration would have a marked effect on the subjective experience of the surrounding space, as has already been pointed out vis a vis gravity's effect on perception of time.  But the objective "fps" would seem to be quite the same no matter if the particles of matter were widely separated or closely packed.

Either way, all particles would need to be simulated.  In fact, in such a hot, dense environment, science has shown that certain of the fundamental forces merge together.  So if anything there would be less required calculation, hence BETTER FPS...
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