25 KiB
[Q]Worm- Rational Entities
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3jrkq1/qworm_rational_entities/
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Score: 16
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Created: 2015-09-05T17:40:07
Post:
Spoilers for all of Worm. Proceed at your peril.
The common idea is that the Entities are chasing a solution to the heat death, or at least the problem of overrunning the universe once they inevitably begin to compete again- because of their nature as solitary super-predators that explode population-wise. So they choose to spend their time using minor species to test out their shards (powers) as a sort of experiment. All the low-level (to the Entities) conflict in Worm is essentially a result of the constraints they've placed on their shards and then released them as a sort of social experiment, done over centuries. To what degree the experiments are in earnest expected to lead to a single,ultimate breakthrough or are the result of the Entities' violent psychology simply letting them see genocide as an acceptable cost for minor gains (they have a lot of time) is unknown.
One of the things that often comes up in the fandom is the idea that the Entities in Worm are stupid/acting massively inefficiently. And I was wondering how others on this site would view their actions or what they'd change, keeping in mind their particular
Entities are supposedly just plain old uncreative, by word of God. Even with shards capable of perfect precog or massive feats of computation and inference, they still need to use lesser species to experiment by drowning them in conflict and watching how they apply the powers. Would this really be necessary? With that sort of computational power? Or is the use of lesser species just a hedge against their own biases? Would peaceful symbiosis be preferred?
What would you change to make their story more..palatable?
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+14] Time flies like an arrow (49 minutes later)
The entities are acting stupidly. Really, really stupidly. They built shards to inhibit cooperation in favor of conflict, which means that shards are only getting used by a single person most of the time. As anyone who has posted to even this (comparatively small) subreddit knows, a whole bunch of people working in concert together are going to be much better at finding solutions than a single person working alone.
So if I were a less stupid entity:
- Encourage cooperation, not competition.
- Target shards at people with a high general intelligence factor.
(That's assuming that giving people shards is somehow efficient in the first place, which I'm not convinced of, but we don't know enough about the entity's limits or capabilities, nor about the various costs incurred. It's well possible that they can beat the heat death of the universe with half a second of thought, if we knew what they could actually do. It's implied that every use of energy is just pulling from a different universe, so somehow that means heat death is still a problem?)
Edit:
- Give the host society some sort of feedback on their energy usage. Parahumans currently have no way of knowing what kind of power they're drawing, or even that the energy isn't "free", so why would they optimize for efficiency? They're just going to be blowing through their power stores without fear of consequence, which is the opposite of what you'd want if you were trying to get some novel applications that are good for preventing the heat death of the universe.
u/None [+19] (2 hours later)
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u/alexanderwales [+9] Time flies like an arrow (2 hours later)
To be clear, I'm not proposing that the entities cooperate with each other, only that they use cooperation in their subjects in order to produce better solutions.
u/None [+7] (6 hours later)
But that was something they'd planned for. It should be noted that their plan went wrong here, because the main strategist died.
Part of that strategist's plan involved cooperation, with Tinker shards equipping armies and such. What they didn't want to allow, at least in the first reality they experimented on, was global cooperation or long term peace- enter the Endbringers. And, even then, it should be noted that the Entities had god knows how many worlds to play with. Minor and major variations on their experiments were likely planned, perhaps even cooperation and competition across worlds or the sort of chaos you got in late Worm with the S9000, but controlled.
According to Wildbow to some degree even having static threats that'd just stick in one place like Nilbog were to some degree planned for, though th
u/Kishoto [+6] (2 hours later)
Do the Entities do what they do because they're hoping that the conflict will breed innovation? And they're just doing it very inexpertly? We've seen that conflict DOES tend to this in humans, although there's still a degree of cooperation needed, as your best scientists can't also be fighting on the front line.
u/None [+4] (2 hours later)
It's been a while since I read Worm, but can the entities actively conceive of cooperation as a solution to problems? Part of their original problem was that they couldn't really figure that out.
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (2 hours later)
The entities are capable of perfectly modeling humans (shown in Eden's interlude if nowhere else). They're also capable of blocking cooperation when it happens. So ... it would take a very specific sort of psychology in order to recognize that humans will attempt cooperation with each other and then subvert that, while also not understanding that cooperation is valid for arriving at solutions. Possible, but seems utterly contrived to me.
u/None [+12] (3 hours later)
One possible answer: Cooperation tends towards a certain set of solutions - Shard A can do X, Shard B can do Y, but combined they can do Z, Z is massively useful. Perhaps societies, if allowed to cooperate enough, settle into a pattern of certain uses of shards for optimum, which is fine and dandy for them, but annoying if you're devouring universes for science. The best way to work out unconventional uses of shards, then, is to encourage novel combinations of shards as dictated by necessity.
I still don't get why they don't land on a planet, upload a bunch of creative monkeys, and feed in data until something useful comes out, at which point they enact the suggested interaction themselves.
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
I actually think one of the things the entities are being shown as really (sensibly) good at is adding in restrictions in order to steer away from optimal solutions. That's the whole reason that Manton limits exist; if you give someone the ability to use force fields and make them fight to the death, of course they're going to use that force field in order to just bisect the brain of their opponent. If you give them telekinesis, of course they're going to just end the fight by squeezing someone's heart. So the Manton limits are in place in order to encourage creativity by putting a roadblock in front of the optimal path.
So I'm not sure that the entities would have too much trouble with finding a way to restrict the solution space to those uses which are creative/novel. But maybe you do have a point.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
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u/GreatWyrmGold [+1] (4 months later)
Theoretically, they have a perfect vision of the future...but it's an expensive power. It takes a lot of energy to simulate the universe that well; it's hardly inconceivable that just going through enough brute-force calculations to find a universe where they solve the heat death problem would consume more energy than the Entities have access to.
u/GreatWyrmGold [+1] (4 months later)
They can see cooperation as a possible solution. That doesn't necessarily mean they see it as a good one.
u/Drazelic [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (3 days later)
Perhaps everybody's just wrong about the Entities being made for preventing Heat Death through experimentation.
Because if you look at it from that angle, the Entities don't look like they're optimizing for producing practical schemes for combining powersets to reverse heat-death.
They look like they're optimizing for creating individual powers that are really good at keeping the user on top of things in a world of constant, endless conflict, where literally nobody else can be trusted.
What sort of a conflict has those aspects? An invasion by superpowered infiltrator pod-people? A cosmic-level zombie plague? If we follow this train of thought, the implicit 'actual threat' the Entities are preparing for starts looking pretty scary.
u/None [+16] (10 hours later)
The stupidest thing the entities do is not announce themselves and communicate with their test subjects. You're looking for ideas. You have no need for a double blind here.
"Hi. We are effectively what you would call gods. We are trying to stop entropy in the multiverse. We would like your help. We are willing to help you. This is Panacea-Shard. Use it to help yourselves. This is Accord-Shard and Contessa-Shard. Use it to help us. A catalog of other available shards are available. Please consider carefully the implications of a multiverse and its entropic decay we seek to reverse. Here is our work so far. And here is a crapload of Tinker-Shards. Try to find some combination that reverse entropy on a multiversal scale instead of just stealing from other universes. This is your new best friend, Simurgh. It will let you know when someone has found something significant, and will build anything you can imagine sufficiently well, just in case you need some vital testing apparatus. This is your other new best friend, Behemoth. We're putting it right here, in this barren wasteland, and it will crap infinite energy into the environment for you to use to power whatever you need. Just build something around it to eat the energy. This is your other new best friend, Khonsu. If you need to be somewhere, or need more time to think, walk into the spinny thing. Oh look, you've invented a Khepri already? Yes, that's what we're talking about, very good. Let's get this done."
u/Subrosian_Smithy [+3] Nudist Beach (4 days later)
Reminds me of this CYOA fanfiction, where after hacking his way to godlike power, the protagonist starts dealing with the Entities as a whole:
It was at this point I realized that, given my current capabilities and all the horrors the Entities were responsible for, I might as well go genocide them. However, it was not impossible (improbable, but not impossible) that there were a few entities who might possibly be described as ‘benevolent’. Therefore I would target my extermination of the entities on a case-by-case basis.
First target: Abbadon
Verdict: Subject appears to not give a shit about the ‘hosts’ either way, and does not actively harm or assist them. Seems to like screwing with other entities however. SPARED.
By my estimates (and highly accurate multiverse-wide D-scans), there were roughly 2*10^3010 Entities in existence. This would take a while. Ultimately I just decided to fork my consciousness 10^3008 times so each fork would only need to deal with 100 entities before re-merging. I had more than enough bodies to do it without needing to grow any further.
The particular thread of consciousness this narrative will follow had to deal with the following
Subject: #001
Verdict: This entity is extremely blunt about its intentions at a given world, blatantly stating that it needs them for their problem solving abilities, and its nature. It does not have a partner, and does not give out powers. SPARED.
Subjects #002 & #003
Verdict: These entities are even worse than Eden and Zion. They give out powers to people most likely to sacrifice themselves to protect others, then get their conflict quota by assaulting the target world with an endless stream of kaiju. ERASED.
Subject #004
Verdict: Uses standard methodology of granting powers to those who suffer trauma. These powers do not mentally influence host species, unlike those granted by subjects Zion and Eden. Does not use endbringers or manifest an avatar, merely allowing psychology and infighting to produce conflict. Still commits genocide at end of cycle. ERASED.
Subject #005
Verdict: Grants 30,000 shards (power granting included) to a single host, who is selected as the one most likely to lead their species to greatness, with them usually becoming a benevolent dictator. It doesn’t grant Tinker powers. Ever. At end of cycle, it copies the functionality of the specie’s technology, adding it to its own repertoire, and uses shaper powers to copy-paste back all the shards it gave out before leaving. Worth noting is that this entity seems to have taken up the hobby of etching quite intricate designs onto small planetoids. SPARED. CONTACTED.
Subject #006
Verdict: This entity is using the Standard Eden/Zion methodology. Analysis indicates it spawned from them about 10 cycles ago, and evolved to go solo. ERASED.
Subject #007
Verdict: Uses methodology from subject #004. Will now be referred to as Cycle 4. ERASED.
Subject #008
Verdict: Subject is using methodology 2 (endless kaiju barrage). ERASED. Cycle in progress, derailing. Stopping kaiju maker. Re-programming remaining shards to bud to hosts likely to improve people’s lives and removing mental contamination.
Subject #009
Verdict: Subject is not granting powers per say, but twists target civilizations towards species-wide mad scientist syndrome. Still commits genocide at end of cycle. ERASED. Dub as methodology 9.
There are 91 more entries. Do you want to continue reading? Y/N.
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u/GreatWyrmGold [+1] (4 months later)
I'm pretty sure the differences between humans and Entities would make such communication confusing at best.
u/2BR02B [+5] Marxist-Lurianism (9 hours later)
Well, I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that the only shards that would even have a chance of doing something against entropy would be thinkers and tinkers. Thinkers because perhaps that species would be able to see something in the data that you couldn't, and tinkers because of the unique position of technology wherein it can actually improve over time. It seems that it'd be really stupid to give shards that appear to violate conservation of energy (e.g. Most blasters) but don't (because that would discourage hosts from trying to find solutions). Tl;dr: Few shards would be actively helpful for their goals, and many are probably actively hampering them.
u/None [+3] (10 hours later)
It probably isn't just entropy. There is the issue of the psychology and nature of the Entities in the first place. They are eventually going to stop cooperating and just swallow everything again. Heat death is probably a minor concern compared to that.
In that case figuring out the psychology of multiple species might help.
If the Entities could maintain some sort of equilibrium or engineer themselves even better than before they have all the time they need.
u/chaosmosis [+4] and with strange aeons, even death may die (13 hours later)
I played around with similar thoughts a while ago. One interpretation I came up with is that the entities are not sentient, but shards are. The entity is essentially a giant biological bureaucracy of shards, and the shards are all highly selfish competitors. Were the shards to attempt to solve entropy directly, their methods would be determined not by the ideal value of information but by the ease of negotiations, political alliances, unimportant path dependent occurrences, that sort of thing. So using planets as natural experiments and tying each shard to a host that is difficult to manipulate offers a way of preventing biased incentive structures from determining the results of their study, which seems similar to the lines you're thinking along.
u/Farmerbob1 [+5] Level 1 author (a day later)
I believe the Scion entity didn't trust itself to be creative. They seek out other life forms because they recognize their own lack of creativity, even though it does seem as if they are, in fact, capable of being creative. Eden seemed like it might be creative after being exposed to Abaddon, but died because creativity overwhelmed it, and it crashed.
On the one hand, we say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but what happens when you don't realize that you have, in fact, learned from history, but you don't quite understand that you have grown?
One could also make the assessment that Eden and Scion were approached by a far more successful member of their race. Abaddon was a single entity, not a pair. After it interacted with Eden, eventually Eden and Scion's existence were ended. This indicated to me that Abaddon was far smarter and more creative than Eden and Scion. It set a chain of events in place which led to the death of two of it's competitors, and all their future offspring.
Abaddon started from the same source as Eden and Scion. Somehow, it developed differently. So on one level, the space whale learning process worked. Evolution will now move forward. Eden and Scion were simply unable to compete with the more advanced Abaddon.
u/WarriorOfMars [+3] (2 hours later)
Devour the sun for energy, let the humans use the shards to try to cope with the microcosm of the heat death that results. Use the Endbringers to cull counterproductive efforts.
Society could stratify around groups of people most capable of providing a habitable environment, competing for the most viable ideas and access to resources. People who can't figure a way to use their power toward this pursuit will still have the drive to make something of themselves, so cape conflicts are still plausible.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (3 hours later)
If the entities are capable of simulating events to produce something like Contessa's power, then they're capable of creativity the same way the Artificial Nature in Karl Schroeder's Virga series is.
u/None [+1] (6 hours later)
I've never read that work. I assume that it's essentially creativity through brute force?
Personally, as I said above, I think separating creativity from being able to think very, very fucking fast and "well" here -as the Entities can- involves some folk conceptions that I find difficult to buy when applied to things other than humans.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (8 hours later)
Something like that. Karl Schroeder's shtick is sophisticated reasoning without consciousness. Artificial Nature does it via rapid simulation.
u/TimTravel [+1] (21 hours later)
Things like path to victory cost them lifespan. They have a certain amount of a certain resource, and deplete it by using their abilities, and recharge it by giving their powers to "mortals" and taking them back and seeing all the new combinations and doing something with that information. I don't remember anything about heat death of the universe being mentioned.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (23 hours later)
Heat death of the universe is Word of God.
The entities are trying to answer a question. How do they survive when they're done? When all's said and done and they've taken every planet and everything's shifting toward the same ambient state. How do they survive the heat death of the universe? They don't have the answer, and if they're going to use simulations to figure it out, they need as much data as possible to justify the expense, by the time they reach that point. They don't have a lot of creativity, so they borrow it from others. From humans.
u/None [+1] (52 minutes later)
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u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (56 minutes later)
We don't know how much energy it takes to open or maintain a portal though. It does take power though, and this is a plot point.
u/None [+1] (an hour later)
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u/gbear605 [+4] history’s greatest story (2 hours later)
Maybe things with more mass (and thus more energy) take more energy to go through the portal?
u/None [+2] (2 hours later)
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u/gbear605 [+2] history’s greatest story (2 hours later)
These are giant space whales. Your argument is invalid.
(Seriously though, I think it's entirely possible. Maybe things with more energy "destabilize" the portal, thus making it cost more energy to keep it going. There's no way to prove that your strategy would or wouldn't work, since the only power like it in Worm is Phir Se's, and his was sending stuff back in time...)
u/None [+2] (2 hours later)
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u/gbear605 [+1] history’s greatest story (2 hours later)
He had portals that could go back in time sorta. It was weird.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (3 hours later)
If you can go back in time you can use it for computation, and live forever in a never-quite-closed Groundhog Day loop.
Of course to outside entities that would look like you just vanished, or if your own extrapolated future states aren't stable you'd fall out of the loop in a randomized state, but to you you're as immortal as you can be in a different direction of time.
u/tvcgrid [+1] (2 days later)
Hmm, if it helps, his name essentially means "again" in Punjabi
u/None [+1] (55 minutes later)
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u/None [+3] (6 hours later)
I...dunno.
The way Wildbow uses "creativity" is something that I don't really get. I simply intuitively don't buy the dualism between creativity and massive, massive processing power of the sort the Entities have shown. My natural instinct is that we focus so much on creativity and consider them different because of the weakness of our computers currently and because we can't really model others' brains that well, so everything gets put down to some unpredictable spark like "talent'. This shouldn't be a problem for the Entities yet they're still "dumb".
u/Murska1FIN [+4] (17 hours later)
The idea is essentially that the Entities, with their huge processing power, have to bruteforce solutions by going through all the possible solutions in the vast, massive solution-space one by one. While creative beings, such as humans, can look at the question and the results of various attempts to find the solution and then grasp the shape of the answer, skipping over vast fields of solution-space that definitely do not contain the right answer. Thus creative beings need much less resources to find the same answers.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Humans, by virtue of evolving in an environment that didn't reward fancy long-ass mental gymnastics (well..more like you need the ability to think fast without superpower brute-forcing), have a bunch of heuristics to help them think things through,yes.
The problem is that a lot of these heuristics have their problems or work well enough for six foot creatures navigating a much smaller environment. The Entities have shown power that would make them need it as much as a plane would need a horse to traverse the landscape, even if the horse had advantages the gap in speed is just too great. Not to mention that they themselves can learn and it would be significantly easier for them to learn the valid human mental tools than it would be for humans to just explode in processing power.
u/Murska1FIN [+2] (a day later)
Maybe the Entities figure that it's better to be cheap than to be fast, and so linking together a large number of small processors that already exist and need little to no resources to use (and that have heuristics that give them the possible ability to happen upon regions of solution-space that the Entities have a difficult time reaching due to their own mental architecture) is a good idea. Or maybe they do work on the problem on their own as well, and just figure that there's no reason not to take advantage of humans as well while they're at it.
Obviously it's a plot device to force the story to exist, but I don't find it sufficiently distracting to really stop me from enjoying the story anyway.