20 KiB
Information based magic. Memetic and anti-memetic.
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Author: u/hoja_nasredin Dai-Gurren Brigade*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3pvy7n/information_based_magic_memetic_and_antimemetic/
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Score: 7
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Created: 2015-10-23T09:34:36
Post:
Was thinking about the possibilities of a magic system based on information.
Let's stay classic: medieval setting and only a restricted group of indivduals can do magic.
We need to
1. Brainstorm magic spells.
2. Chose what we like.
3. Define a set of hard rules for this magic
4. See how people on the setting could abuse them.
So far I got: High level spell "Antimemetic field": People forget about the user a split second after seeing them. It is a more powerful invisibility.
A travelling memory: You have the plot of this awesome book that when written will be amazing. You can't sleep at night thinking how awesome it would be. But as soon as you tell the plot to someone else you can no longer remember the details and the listener is the one now plagued by the plot.
Maybe the spells need to a ascrifice of information to work: Like you lose the memory of your mother, or youneed to bring a living human whose mind will be totaly wipped clean.
P.S. What are good SCP to take inspiration from?
P.P.S. Basicaly I'm thinking about a hard magic sytem around memetic SCPs.
Comments:
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+16] Utopian Smut Peddler (5 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/chaosmosis [+3] and with strange aeons, even death may die (17 hours later)
What stops people from creating arbitrary unimportant secrets?
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+6] Utopian Smut Peddler (17 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/chaosmosis [+2] and with strange aeons, even death may die (17 hours later)
Hmm. You could make it so that the more widely known the unsolved riddle or secret is, the more power that can be gained from it. Maybe it steals processing power (or something) from the corners of people's brains, and devotes all that power to the one who knows the secret's answer. That would encourage people to pursue risky strategies.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+2] Utopian Smut Peddler (17 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+5] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (an hour later)
I think Charlie Stross's "Laundry" series might be useful to read. Demons are infovores, they feed on structured information and entropy gradients.
u/hoja_nasredin [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 hours later)
Yeah I read the first 2 books. I liked tha angle but all those infovres seemed to much like technobubble. The fact that demons eat minds is very good but IIRC it is the only time the information angle was importnat and could not be swapped with a generic "I destroy everything" monster.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (3 hours later)
Keep it up, Bob powers up and it takes off in a variety of different directions.
u/Jakkubus [+3] (6 hours later)
So far I got: High level spell "Antimemetic field": People forget about the user a split second after seeing them. It is a more powerful invisibility.
Sounds like Imp from Worm and ForgetMeNot from Marvel Comics.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (7 hours later)
People get more powerful the more famous they are. This is basically the opposite of what /u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer is saying. Instead of wizards hoarding secrets and speaking in riddles, they would be trying to spread knowledge. They would be all about trying to tell (and create) the most compelling stories they possibly could. This is the basic magic system for Shadows of the Limelight.
If you want to adapt something like that to spells:
- Memetic bomb: A nascent spell gets attached to a meme of some kind. Maybe this is a piece of news, a new song, or a saying. From then on, the power of the spell that eventually gets cast will be dependent on the strength of the meme (and use up that power). Wizardly power would then be tied to which memes they had lashed their spells to, as well as how well a wizard was able to help a meme spread.
- Memetic casting: The spells that are most powerful are those which are most known. Fireball is iconic, so it's powerful. Glibness is unknown, so it's weak. This provides a feedback effect for casting; as a spell gets more powerful, more people will know about it, which will make it more powerful, etc.
u/PL_TOC [+1] (a day later)
I like this, but I think that larger memes while powerful, could be unwieldy and inflexible compared to secret or niche information. There wouldn't be any immunity established for things that hadn't been encountered and survived. That's not to say wizards wouldn't actively be spreading precursors to allow people to become susceptible to more complex meme structures.
u/OrzBrain [+3] Fingers to dance, hands to catch, arms to pull (6 hours later)
High level spell
"Antimemetic field"Aisha's Important Obliviousness: People forget about the user a split second after seeing them. It is a more powerful invisibility.Fixed that for you.
u/PeridexisErrant [+3] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (13 hours later)
If only we had an example of this power, to explore how it might be used!
u/Lugnut1206 [+3] (18 hours later)
i feel like i read something about this before but i can't remember where or any of the details
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (9 hours later)
The Beginner's Guide to Magical Site Licensing.
You're talking about SCP and antimemetics, but have you read qntm's antimemetics series? It would be strange if you hadn't, but I can't tell if you've read them from your post.
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (14 hours later)
I read two of his SCP anti meme stories.
Are the rest worth readign as well?
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (15 hours later)
There's only one more right now, I believe.
u/crumjd [+2] (a day later)
/u/Transfuturist inadvertently performed [Summon Author] (http://myelvesaredifferent.blogspot.com/2007/02/summon-author-is-good-term-for-common.html) so now I am here and must comment. ;-)
Was thinking about the possibilities of a magic system based on information.
That immediately puts me in mind of the [black hole information paradox] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox).
This is the observation that:
Particle interactions are predictable. (Electrons repel each other)
Predictable interactions are reversible. (Two electrons that have interacted will be further apart)
All that get gets tossed out the window when a black hole wanders into the picture. (We have no idea how many electrons got sucked up. They're all contained inside the event horizon even if that volume of space wouldn't normally hold them.)
If you treat "information" in an anthropomorphic way it seems to get where you wanted to go. If we take "you can't destroy information" to mean "you can't get rid of the knowledge in a letter" then Wizards would have some sort of a spell that gets the knowledge from the ashes. For even more fun maybe they can recreate the letter (or something more important?) from the knowledge and the ashes?
You wanted to abuse the system, you say? Then let's overthink information theory! What does encryption do to these wizards? The information exists, but isn't readily retrievable without more information. Or how about Godel's paradox? (Credit to a reader Para on my story for thinking about that one. I don't know if they hang out here or not, but "Hi" if you do.)
- Define a set of hard rules for this magic
Wait, I wasn't supposed to go for the esoteric physics first? Blast...
"Antimemetic field": People forget about the user a split second after seeing them.
You're probably just thinking back to your last date with Aornis Hades there....
Anyway, sounds like a fun idea. Now back to the nether hells normally occupied by authors of web fiction.
u/PL_TOC [+1] (45 minutes later)
Why use SCP stuff? What kind of memes are we dealing with? Are they sentient or sapient? Do they have a culture or society?
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (56 minutes later)
SCP is just to get ideas. They are the only ones I know that deal with information based magic seriously.
Memes are not sentient. In the worst case it is a virus spell written by a mage, but nothing too complex.
TO simplify thigs the setting is mediveal fantasy with mages.
u/Transfuturist [+4] Carthago delenda est. (9 hours later)
If magic is a natural aspect of the world, there will be natural creatures whose evolution has stumbled upon that aspect. You should seriously consider creatures that have memetic and antimemetic effects, and in a medieval setting they could certainly come across as demons. Mages themselves could come across as demons, or present themselves as creatures or forces of nature, depending on the versatility of the memetic system. I would recommend at least one legendary-level character that does just that.
To make things really interesting, detection and prevention of these effects should not be easy, or even possible. It should be very hard to resist memes and antimemes. This could be reflected in cost. A mage that imprints backups onto their own mind to counter memetic interference may become a little inhuman, or be forced to sear backups into the minds of others.
Possibly antimemes and memes have to balance, so the mage imprints the antimemetic impression of information onto others minds so that his own will have a sustained memetic effect. You could approach Imp's invisibility in this way, the mage using a supernaturally large portion of their attention to erase themselves from the attention of others. Long-term, short-term, and attentional memory could all be distinguished in this system, maybe modeled as a trifurcated pool of resource allocation, where you could diminish someone's long-term memory to increase the breadth of their attention, or to steal it for your own. Perhaps antimemes and memes have to actually balance, as in per-person, and a meme in one mind requires an equal antimeme in another. This means that Imp can only weakly disappear in the minds of a crowd, which may be all that's needed, or strongly disappear to the view of certain people, such as guards or a ruler to be assassinated. Maybe Imp steals whatever attention anyone devotes to her.
I kind of want to write something along these lines now. Maybe for the next contest. The important thing to remember is, when making a hard magic system, you're making a mathematical model of it, not just a list of effects. If you have a model, then you can play around with it and see what kinds of effects that could arise and how people would use it or model it themselves.
u/None [+2] (2 hours later)
Why not make it possible to "upload" into memetic form?
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 hours later)
You mean a mage sacrifices his body and turns into a meme that passes from one guy to another?
u/RidiculousAvgGuy [+2] (13 hours later)
Santa Claus?
Actually, this would be a good way to make gods. Get enough belief/thinking behind something and it blooms into a full on entity.
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (14 hours later)
Santa Claus?
Ok. I'm failing a bit at immagining how he works. He is a meme the whole world knows about. SO on christmas he switches minds off and make people buy presents?
u/RidiculousAvgGuy [+1] (14 hours later)
A comprehensive list of the things people want is compiled, and them factors are shifted to make them happen.
Or, if he was actual magical power, he draws from everyone who believes in him to cast a massive spell and make gifts appear.
Like I said, gods.
u/PL_TOC [+1] (an hour later)
It will be difficult to implement hard limits on a system like information science but you might want to incorporate some of these things.
Consciousness augmentation in the form of apps, information overlays, and macros.
Knowledge/memory transfer, theft, blocking.
Manipulation of senses.
u/traverseda [+1] With dread but cautious optimism (2 hours later)
Thinkomancy, generally used for long distance communication. What they don't tell you is that it can be used to share your intuitions about things. Makes for great small squad tactics. Some poeple think there might be people using it for long term planning...