10 KiB
Subreddit for Eliezer's new story, Mathematically Specified Demons And Their Behavior
-
Author: u/None *
-
Score: 24
-
Created: 2015-03-05T19:50:54
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+8] (4 minutes later)
So EY said:
Maybe the most critical task over the next 5 years is causing this to happen to the Friendly AI problem, and maybe one way to try that would be for my next work to be titled Mathematically Specified Demons And Their Behavior.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/2xo5vn/spoilers_ch_113_drudge_work_planning_thread/cp1zhdr
It's making me want my next story to be called Mathematically Lawful Demons and Their Behaviors. Because if I could harness like 10% of the effort that goes into scrutinizing every single line of an HPMOR chapter and suggesting wiser character moves, into scrutinizing and inventing AI designs, the world would be a safer place than it is now.
http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/2x0wua/chapter_110/covytni?context=3
Even though EY said that mostly as a joke, I think it's actually a pretty cool idea and maybe we should make it a reality even if Eliezer doesn't write it. Combining math and fiction sounds pretty cool and I envision it would be something similar to Fine Structure, especially to the fights between four-dimensional creatures in Fine Structure.
u/None [+4] (13 hours later)
Isn't this basically rationalfic of The Laundry Files?
u/None [+2] (14 hours later)
Yes, that was actually already given as an example for this concept. In order for it to be useful though, Eliezer's story would have to explore even more math than The Laundry Files.
u/None [+3] (15 hours later)
How much math does the Laundry Files go into, precisely? I need to decide whether my next reading after slogging through Plato's Camera and Player of Games is going to be Excession plus Laundry Files, or I'll just skip to the Slayers light novels.
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (19 hours later)
There's not a huge amount of math. It's partly there for flavor, and partly there as a worldbuilding dynamic (computers are dangerous, and sometimes software engineers think up some math that was better left unthought). I really, really like the series, for whatever that's worth to you. Mostly it plays with the spy genre, rather than being overly mathy, or teaching much new math.
I think that in concept it's what EY would like, except that he doesn't hold a high opinion of Stross's work.
u/None [+4] (19 hours later)
I think that in concept it's what EY would like, except that he doesn't hold a high opinion of Stross's work.
Well, Stross basically spends his singularity-focused works holding an unfavorable mirror up to Silicon Valley culture -- or at least, that's what I remember Stross saying. Practically anyone who was a part of high-tech culture over the past 20 years (I was on Slashdot when it was still cool!) is going to feel a little targeted by Stross. But, well, why not? Techno-nerd culture deserves an outsider's comedic eye as much as anything else -- we just don't deserve to be uniformly tarred and feathered as a malign conspiracy to take over the world.
I really enjoyed Rapture of the Nerds, but in the same way that I enjoyed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was funny, and meant to be funny, and plainly not meant to inspire the reader to actually believe in the ideas being presented. Whereas I think, if I remember a link from an /r/rational thread properly, that EY likes his futurist fiction to pass on the "secret" to how one casts the True Patronus Charm.
So anyway... HOLY SHIT THERE'S A SITE CALLING ITSELF MathFiction!?
There's not a huge amount of math. It's partly there for flavor, and partly there as a worldbuilding dynamic (computers are dangerous, and sometimes software engineers think up some math that was better left unthought). I really, really like the series, for whatever that's worth to you. Mostly it plays with the spy genre, rather than being overly mathy, or teaching much new math.
Maybe-read, then. Because I really do anticipate hugely enjoying the Slayers light-novel series.
u/None [+3] (18 hours later)
I actually haven't read it, but here's what a MathFiction profile about it says:
The mathematical references are frequent and explicit. For instance:
Quote from the Laundry Files: The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (Wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted in to P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms -- translation: all your bank account [sic] belong to us -- and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time. This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will.
It is these "Dho-Nha geometry curves" which allow beings to be summoned forth. Later, the mathematics is "explained" a bit more as we are witnessing a controlled summoning during a class for staff at the Laundry:
Quote from the Laundry Files: That's not to say that it's safe, though -- you can kill yourself quite easily by treating the equipment with disrespect. Just in case you've forgotten, this current is carrying fifteen amps at six hundred volts, and the baseboard is insulated and oriented correctly along a north-south magnetic axis. The geometry we're using for this run is a modified Minkowski space that we can derive by setting pi to four; there's no fractal dimension involved, but things are complicated slightly because the space to which we're mapping this diagram has a luminiferous aether.
More than half of the published book focuses on this very mathematical plotline, and then it switches at the end to a different story (on the quantum mechanics of gorgonism!)
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf431
u/None [+1] (19 hours later)
The geometry we're using for this run is a modified Minkowski space that we can derive by setting pi to four; there's no fractal dimension involved, but things are complicated slightly because the space to which we're mapping this diagram has a luminiferous aether.
wat
u/Sparkwitch [+5] (20 hours later)
They're opening a portal to a simplistic universe where pi is a whole number. The resultant geometry isn't iteratively complex but it does require that light waves proliferate on a medium.
u/None [+1] (20 hours later)
Wait... you mean Stross actually investigated and proved that, and didn't just pull some math jargon out of his arse?
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (a day later)
He probably pulled math jargon out of his arse here. Then again, "setting pi to four" might be a reference to the taxicab metric or the chessboard metric: in both of them, the "circles" of uniform radius have circumference 8r.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
You can also set pi to four by being in a saddle-shaped region of spacetime, such that the distance around a point is larger than it should be compared to the distance across it. This might have been true in our universe at some point near the big bang when expansion was warping space away from the singularity.
u/Chronophilia [+4] sci-fi ≠ futurology (a day later)
In hyperbolic space, only circles of a certain size will have a circumference four times their diameter. In L^p spaces, the circumference/diameter ratio is constant, it's just not necessarily pi. I think that's closer to what "setting pi to four" should mean.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+3] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (10 hours later)
I really like this, but it's a trap. The problem with identifying bugs, instead of formulating a positive mathematical proof is that you'll miss unexpected bugs. Which is sad because sometimes I want to emigrate to Equestria.
Are we anywhere near the mathematic types developing a symbolic logic for morality as Heinlein postulated in Starshipe Troopers?
u/None [+4] (13 hours later)
Are we anywhere near the mathematic types developing a symbolic logic for morality as Heinlein postulated in Starshipe Troopers?
No. All real reasoning is stochastic. Deontic logic cannot capture real morality. All hail probabilistic programming, the one true lord and savior.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
No. All real reasoning is stochastic. Deontic logic cannot capture real morality. All hail probabilistic programming, the one true lord and savior.
Why do you think you know that? Not challenging just looking for a good source to validated my similar assumption.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
There are some publications on the matter.
u/Kawoomba [+12] (12 hours later)
Name of demon: Richard
Definition: Demon behaves as do the elements of the empty set.
Behaviour: Unspecified. Dick stuck in limbo.
u/khafra [+2] (6 days later)
...suddenly, everyone believes that there is a greatest prime number, and its name is Richard.