61 KiB
[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread
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Author: u/AutoModerator *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/6z25yi/d_saturday_munchkinry_thread/
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Score: 13
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Created: 2017-09-09T15:06:43
Post:
Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!
Guidelines:
- Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
- The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
- Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
- We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.
Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.
Good Luck and Have Fun!
Comments:
u/IgnorantTwit [+7] (2 hours later)
New poster, so I'm kinda unclear as to what this entails, but here goes.
The power to increase/decrease your own weight, but you can only do so by a factor of, say, 5. So an 80lb person can make themselves anywhere between 20 and 400lb.
u/Gurkenglas [+5] (2 hours later)
How does this interact with items you carry or material that goes in/out your body? Does muscle/bone strength increase/decrease proportionally or does one almost lose consciousness at 5G? If the latter, try https://xkcd.com/620/. Insert remark about averted universal heat death.
u/IgnorantTwit [+2] (2 hours later)
I'll say that it applies to anything currently inside your body, and the effect doesn't apply to things you hold.
So if you have something hidden in your stomach the effect applies to that, and stops once it's taken out.
Regarding muscle mass/strength/etc, I'll say that it doesn't increase, ie it stays as it was when the effect is not being used.
Edit: so the square/cube problem would apply.
u/ShiranaiWakaranai [+6] (2 hours later)
and stops once it's taken out.
Define "out".
Let's say I implant something in my hand. I then use my mass changing power. Then I chop off my hand. What happens to the mass of the implant? Does it revert? Does the hand still count as part of my "body"?
What if, instead of chopping off my hand, I just leave it dangling by a long string of skin? Or perhaps an intestine for longer range...
Or better yet, what if I get lots of skin grafts? I mean, LOTS of extra skin. I could say, wrap a rocket in my skin, thus making the rocket "inside" my "body", and then decrease its mass so I can launch it into space for much much less fuel.
u/None [+2] (4 hours later)
This became horrifying really fast.
u/ShiranaiWakaranai [+10] (7 hours later)
The problem with trying to munchkin is that if your methods are too normal, someone would have already thought of it. So this really only leaves you with two ways to munchkin:
(1) Design methods that exploit esoteric scientific facts, so people who don't know these facts can't think of these methods.
(2) Design methods that involve such cruelty or self-mutilation that normal people's brains would censor them before they can even think of it.
I'm not a very smart person, so I usually rely on (2). My first thought whenever I'm asked to munchkin a superpower is: Can I chop off my hand to use it better? Surprisingly often, the answer is yes.
u/addmoreice [+1] (3 hours later)
or I put it in my mouth.
u/xkcd_transcriber [+1] (2 hours later)
Title: Wings
Title-text: Please do not try any of this and die or get arrested.
Stats: This comic has been referenced 47 times, representing 0.0280% of referenced xkcds.
^xkcd.com ^| ^xkcd sub ^| ^Problems/Bugs? ^| ^Statistics ^| ^Stop Replying ^| ^Delete
u/GaBeRockKing [+4] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (3 hours later)
Oscillate furiously to run a generator?
That's kind of a hilarious thought, actually.
u/Tinfoil_Haberdashery [+12] (4 hours later)
"Hey, man! It's been a long time!"
"Yeah, no kidding! Good to see you!"
"So what are you doing for work these days?"
"Oh...you know. Oscillating furiously."
u/metric_units [+4] (2 hours later)
80 lb ≈ 36 kg
400 lb ≈ 180 kg^metric ^units ^bot ^| ^feedback ^| ^source ^| ^block ^| ^v0.8.0
u/None [+2] (11 hours later)
[removed]
u/phylogenik [+1] (13 hours later)
Also nobody mentioned Randi's prize yet so this is the obligatory reference.
By that do you mean this thing? Or is there some other one in play now?
(it's also a bit of a gimme since the point of this topic is usually explore ways to best apply superpowers for fun and profit)
u/I_Hump_Rainbowz [+1] (6 hours later)
I dont know if this would be to powerful but the power to ingest any organism and add their "abilities" to your body.
Like if you were to eat a bears nose you could add some or all (depending on how condensed the nerves in a nose can be) to your own nose.
The gut bacteria from a cow to allow you to digest grasses.
The brain of another human to absorb the memories/knowledge.
You would not be able to eat steal and add it your skin or anything like that. If you happen to eat a bug with a heavy iron carapace then you could add that to yourself but it would limit the movement of your own body/disfigure yourself.
You can eat flesh to heal yourself. If you were to loose a limb you could eat enough meat/bones whatever to regrow another limb.
I think the best way to use this power would be to work in a cremation building and eat the brains of the deceased. Maybe this would have the side effect of changing your own personality but I don't know enough about Neurology to understand if that could be a real fear with this ability.
u/ulyssessword [+4] (9 hours later)
Eat a starfish.
Cut yourself in pieces, and regrow into multiple copies of yourself.
???
Profit.
u/I_Hump_Rainbowz [+2] (9 hours later)
I would think that a starfishes simplicity is what allows it to do this. This is why we reproduce through fucking and not splitting like worms.
u/vakusdrake [+3] (18 hours later)
I mean I somewhat doubt the complexity matters here. After all you can use this to digest grass by getting their gut bacteria, despite the fact that's utterly impossible without a much larger digestive system than what humans have. This ability just doesn't seem limited by normal biology otherwise most examples you gave wouldn't really work particularly well.
Of course you also need to be able to somewhat control which traits you take on as well otherwise this ability would decrease your intelligence massively the first time you used it on an animal so things probably need to be better defined here.
u/None [+1] (5 days later)
Actually, I don't think worms reproduce by splitting. Worms reproduce sexually, just like we do, except that they each have both male and female organs. Every worm you've split has died a horrible death.
Source: http://www.wormfarmingsecrets.com/general-worm-composting/the-myth-of-cutting-a-worm-in-half/
u/ShiranaiWakaranai [+2] (7 hours later)
If you were to loose a limb you could eat enough meat/bones whatever to regrow another limb.
If you chop off your hand and eat it, would you regrow it?
Can you grow more limbs? Like if you eat a spider, do you get to have 8 limbs?
Can you eat a unicellular organism and gain the ability to reproduce via mitosis, thus allowing you to create countless clones of yourself?
Also, since you can copy bacterial abilities, the best way to use this power is to actually get a lab for growing bacteria. Bacteria mutate really fast and get all kinds of amazing abilities, including resistances to all kinds of poisons and temperatures and pressures and starvation conditions. Gain enough bacteria abilities and you'll become nigh indestructible.
u/Gurkenglas [+3] (8 hours later)
Let's start with the brain of a biologist or doctor to tell you that you should hurry up and eat a carrion eater so you don't succumb to the brain you just ate.
u/ShiranaiWakaranai [+1] (8 hours later)
I think you replied to the wrong person. I'm more interested in bacteria than brains.
I mean, sure knowledge is nice and all, but you could always just ask the person for their knowledge rather than eating their brain lol.
u/Gurkenglas [+2] (9 hours later)
I just thought that it would be good to first be able to tell that going for mitosis won't just melt me, and then considered how the biologist might then tell me how I already fucked up.
u/I_Hump_Rainbowz [+1] (9 hours later)
I don't know if that is how it would work. By adding gut bacteria from a cow you are basically allowing the bacteria to live in your stomach. This is different from gaining their powers. Like I said to the starfish dude, these powers probably only work due to their simplicity. Otherwise we would probably have developed regenerative powers ourselves over the years.
The spider part would work with growing exoskeleton limbs out your back but not giving you another pair of human arms. If you were to eat birds to gain wings it would grow on your first set of arms.
Now if you were to eat flying ants and grow an exoskeleton set of wings would you be able to grow them big/strong enough to hold yourself?
same with spider limbs. Could these be strong enough to support your weight? or would they break under pressure?
I could see it being possible to add the spiders eyes inside of your own puples. maybe eat a bullet shrimp to get those really cool eyes.... also maybe eat a bullet shrimp to deck out your pinky finger?
u/vakusdrake [+1] (18 hours later)
Ok so the obligatory answers here are probably as follows: Use this to get really famous for your abilities, have scientists figure out the best ways to use your ability to learn a great deal about biology related topics. Or more interestingly you could try to use your ability on brains, not to get their knowledge necessarily but to add their brain matter to your own. Eventually you should be able to reach superintelligence by going down that route which is pretty much an automatic win condition.
Of course exactly how these sorts of plans would need to work isn't immensely clear because the ability isn't particularly well defined.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a day later)
Hmmmm....
Octopus makes a good start. Colour-changing, and, if I consume a mimic octopus, really good control over it.
Bat for echolocation. Maybe flight, though I'm less sure of that one; I might only end up with wings strong enough to lift the weight of a bat.
Wolf for sense of smell. (Well, wolf nose, at least).
Mantis shrimp to see colours to an extent that no human can match. (Dubious benefit, really; it's kind of like the complete opposite of colour blindness. I'm going to see clashing colours where other people see a monotone.)
Then I'll start putting some serious study into biology...
u/AnimalFactsBot [+2] (a day later)
Octopuses can eject a thick, blackish ink in a large cloud to distract a predator while the octopus uses a siphon jet propulsion system to quickly swim away headfirst, with arms trailing behind.
u/I_Hump_Rainbowz [+1] (a day later)
I am not sure if this count help our protag bot.
u/mixbany [+1] (11 hours later)
I am new here so I hope this has not been done to death. There is a short story I read years ago that I have wanted to munchkin.
You have the supernatural power to clean. You can destroy all dirt and grime in a room within seconds. You could also clean everything off of a person's bones as quickly. The cleaning process is something like a very choosy black hole where the material is whisked out of our world.
u/ShiranaiWakaranai [+6] (12 hours later)
I like "cleaning" superpowers, they are super exploitable.
The reason is because "dirt" isn't well-defined. How do you determine what's "dirt and grime" and what's actually supposed to be there? How does it determine that say, a coin or a cushion on the ground isn't dirt, but an empty paper bag or a bread crumb is? How does it determine that a stone on a wooden floor is dirt, while a stone on a stone floor is the floor itself and shouldn't be destroyed? How does it determine that the uranium in your nuclear power plant isn't dirt, but the depleted uranium is?
Now, if your cleaning ability did something like summoning a broom and sweeping the floor, it wouldn't destroy ALL* dirt and grime. So clearly, you must have some ability to specify what is considered dirt, and what isn't. Perhaps, the ability reads your mind to guess your intentions and acts to fulfill them.
So, take an elevator to the top of a tall building in a crowded city. Look out the window. See the sea of people on the streets, crowding around like garbage. Trash, every one of them. You can now clean this human filth.
With enough mental sophistry, your cleaning ability effectively becomes an extremely precise banishing ability, erasing all parts of the world you dislike while keeping everything you do.
u/696e6372656469626c65 [+4] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (12 hours later)
Perhaps, the ability reads your mind to guess your intentions and acts to fulfill them.
Alternatively, something counts as "dirt" if over 50% of all humans would, upon seeing it on an otherwise clean surface, say, "Yep, that's dirtying it up."
(I always like choosing the more reasonable interpretation for vaguely defined powers; it makes them less stupidly exploitable, and also makes successfully exploiting such a power much more satisfying.)
u/None [+3] (14 hours later)
So then the question is how many people you can get to agree that humanity is horrible.
u/ShiranaiWakaranai [+3] (14 hours later)
the more reasonable interpretation
Eh, what is considered "more reasonable" is fairly subjective though. For example, if you look at this superpower from the perspective of a scientist trying to build such a "cleaning" device, it seems more reasonable to me, that the device would simply read its user's mind for opinions on dirt, rather than read the minds of the entire human race for opinions on dirt. The former is far, far easier to build than the latter.
u/tonytwostep [+1] (16 hours later)
Much more likely/reasonable, the device's creator would "preprogram" the definition of dirt into the system, to prevent someone from using it to commit mass genocide, or just banishing the entire earth ("this entire planet is garbage!"). Even just from a practicality perspective, hardcoding a definition seems much easier than reading the user's thoughts and interpreting their personal definition.
Or, perhaps the power is limited in range (only things within the same room, or say, 30 ft) and/or power (it can only clean X grams of material per hour), which would prevent such extreme abuse - in which case you could still, say, "clean" a target's heart from the other side of a room, which might make you an effective assassin.
If you wanted to actually do something beneficial for humanity, rather than commit murder, you could "clean"/dispose of extremely harmful substances, such as spent nuclear fuel. Even just spending all your energy scrubbing the air/water/etc of pollutants, would be a huge benefit for society.
u/ShiranaiWakaranai [+1] (17 hours later)
Much more likely/reasonable, the device's creator would "preprogram" the definition of dirt into the system,
Yes, that would be the reasonable thing to do, but this interpretation wouldn't match the description we are given. This device has to destroy ALL dirt and grime. ALL. Dirt is context-specific, and thus impossible to pre-program. New contexts and situations arise all the time, with the definition of dirt changing dynamically. If you drop some exotic previously unknown material on the ground, and it becomes dirt, the device has to somehow recognize it as dirt and destroy it, while not destroying any exotic previously unknown material that isn't dirt.
Otherwise the device wouldn't be destroying all dirt, it would just be destroying some common variants of dirt.
Or, perhaps the power is limited in range (only things within the same room, or say, 30 ft) and/or power (it can only clean X grams of material per hour), which would prevent such extreme abuse - in which case you could still, say, "clean" a target's heart from the other side of a room, which might make you an effective assassin.
Yep, we're told that it takes a few seconds to "clean" a room. So no instant cleaning a planet or a universe. Still means you can utterly destroy anything you want within a few seconds though, as long as its sufficiently small (or close). Actually I'm not sure what metric is being used here. Is it mass that determines the time taken? Or proximity?
you could "clean"/dispose of extremely harmful substances, such as spent nuclear fuel.
That's not really a munchkin though, since you're just using the power for it's intended purpose. Cleaning air/water/waste (possibly nuclear).
u/tonytwostep [+2] (a day later)
I think the main issue here is that we don't have enough technical details on the scope of this power from /u/mixbany.
- What defines dirt/grime? Is it user-defined? Does it carry its own broad pre-defined definition (in which case, in the scenario you described where an exotic new material is spilled, it would not be able to clean that up)?
- We're only given 1-2 examples of its use, but nothing about the limits of its use. How much dirt can it clean per second? What's the range? How often can it be used, and does it need to be recharged?
- When black holes consume matter, the matter doesn't disappear - I'm not a physicist, but from my understanding, a lot is converted to energy, some is released as Hawking radiation, etc. When he says "the material is whisked out of our world", does he mean it's simply teleported away from our planet, to another location within our universe? Or is it completely removed from our universe? Both have heavy connotations for the use of the power.
Because the power is so vaguely defined, we can't really munchkin without making broad assumptions (like, the user can define "dirt/grime", or the range & power are infinite, etc), which make breaking the power extremely easy...
u/Jiro_T [+1] (4 days later)
Over 50% of humans, given sufficient knowledge.
u/thrawnca [+2] Carbon-based biped (a day later)
Down quarks are such a drag, keeping the up quarks from realising their true potential. Begone with them!
u/vakusdrake [+2] (19 hours later)
Well nobody's said it yet so I'll state the obvious world domination/optimization answer. I believe I saw something like this online before but that version was much more exploitable because it didn't just get rid of material but could change things in a much less limited way in order to make them "clean".
Nonetheless even if you can only remove material doesn't mean you can't still achieve world optimization.The way you go about it is to rely on the fact the power can clearly use information you don't have access to. So if you have enough of a transhumanist streak then one can likely take a bunch of randomly generated bits and find a way to make yourself view all the bits that wouldn't make up the source code for your perfect FAI as unclean. So just represent your bits as ridges of varying size and the power will delete all the one's that wouldn't be belong in that part of the sequential sequence of the aforementioned seed AI source code.
Anyway with enough time using a system like this you should be able to inscribe an entire source code for your seed AI that also happens to be a botnet virus thus allowing it to spread as soon as you get it onto your computer and instantiate itself.TLDR: With the right setup you can use this ability to generate arbitrary information.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a day later)
I think you might need to have a good idea in your mind what the right data will look like, though...
u/vakusdrake [+2] (a day later)
See I don't know about that, after all presumably this could be used to clean an entire city of grime even if it's so dirty and has been for so long that you have no idea what a clean version would even look like. It's not clear that needing to know what the "clean" version of affairs looks like is necessary.
I mean the fact you can use this ability to generate information you don't know was sort of my main point.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 days later)
Hmmm. Valid point. But, as counterpoint, the information about the clean state of the city exists. If I go into a room that has not been cleaned in thirty years and I wish to discover the colour of the floor tiles under the dirt, then I can use this power; or I can use hot water and a scrubbing brush.
The power is not, in usual usage, generating new information. I see that it can generate information that the user in particular does not know, but it's not coming from a vacuum - that is then information recorded in the environment around him.
u/vakusdrake [+1] (2 days later)
The power is not, in usual usage, generating new information. I see that it can generate information that the user in particular does not know, but it's not coming from a vacuum - that is then information recorded in the environment around him.
Ah but whether something is new information in that sense is far more ambiguous than you would think. For one the power presumably has omniscience since there's no talk of lightspeed limits or any of the other limits you need in order to obtain information without violating thermodynamics. Meaning if one or more varieties of multiverse exist (whether many worlds or eternal inflation or any number of others, which aren't mutually exclusive) then there will most certainly be a universe wherein the source code you're looking for exists.
Hell it doesn't stop there either. Since we aren't limited to future light cone limits it could pick a reference frame in which any future event has already happened. Meaning that any information can be drawn upon since boltzmann brains will inevitably come into existence possessing that information.Plus even besides all the ways in which the information you're looking for could exist in another universe or the far future, there's other questions as to whether the information isn't just implicit. After all erasing the grime from a city is changing the state of it's physical system to create information that hadn't previously existed. More generally any physical change creates information which hadn't previously existed just based on the formal definitions of information. So in a formal framework the difference between deleting physical structures that count as dirt in a way that happens to generate the source code of a GAI and any other application is not that clear.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 days later)
...you seem to be operating on a basis of if it didn't specifically say the power can't do that, then assume that it could.
When I look at the original description of the power, I am not seeing any information that it can generate that couldn't be generated with warm water, soap, and a few hours. (More than a few, if we're talking about an entire city). So I see no indication that it's breaking lightspeed limits - drawing info from alternate universes - or anything of that nature.
After all erasing the grime from a city is changing the state of it's physical system to create information that hadn't previously existed.
By its very nature, the act of cleaning is a deliberate attempt to revert the state of an object to a newly-purchased state, i.e. a past state. While cleaning with soapy water is not perfect - and thus will likely leave a subtly different system - I see no reason to outright assume that this power does not simply recreate a past state.
u/vakusdrake [+2] (2 days later)
By its very nature, the act of cleaning is a deliberate attempt to revert the state of an object to a newly-purchased state, i.e. a past state. While cleaning with soapy water is not perfect - and thus will likely leave a subtly different system - I see no reason to outright assume that this power does not simply recreate a past state.
Except that's not really necessarily true, since taken as a whole in the city cleaning example there would likely have never been a point in the past in which the city was ever not filthy. Reverting things to a previous state just clearly isn't what's going on here.
...you seem to be operating on a basis of if it didn't specifically say the power can't do that, then assume that it could.
And I'm operating on what seems to be the strictly simplest interpretation of cannon. Whereas you are assuming a massive among of limitations which aren't even hinted at in the original text in order to force things to conform to you particular intuitions about how the power ought to work.
Also even if you could only revert objects to their previous state it would still be pretty trivial to arrange a setup practically indistinguishable from my original setup in order to extract the previously mentioned AI source code, simply by separating the information medium into a great may individual "pieces". That doesn't really solve the greater problem you seem to have with "information creation", and getting a rigorous definition of what counts as new information (that doesn't rule out many applications you would want to work) here would be quite difficult.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 days later)
Except that's not really necessarily true, since taken as a whole in the city cleaning example there would likely have never been a point in the past in which the city was ever not filthy.
Each individual bit can be reverted piecemeal.
And I'm operating on what seems to be the strictly simplest interpretation of cannon.
You and I have remarkably different ideas of what is meant by "simplest". I'm trying to model the power in such a way as to minimise alterations in the laws of physics necessary to make it work, and secondarily to minimise omniscience of the power.
Also even if you could only revert objects to their previous state it would still be pretty trivial to arrange a setup practically indistinguishable from my original setup in order to extract the previously mentioned AI source code
Maybe I'm just being dense here, but I'm not seeing how this works. Elaborate? I'm not even seeing how to get one bit of the AI in this way (though if I can get one bit reliably, I can then see how to get all the bits)
u/vakusdrake [+1] (2 days later)
Each individual bit can be reverted piecemeal.
That still doesn't work because it's relatively easy to come up with examples wherein the parts of something were never clean. For instance an object that ended up covered in soot as part of it's manufacturing process and was never cleaned before being used as part of the infrastructure in the aforementioned perpetually filthy city.
More importantly however the power working this way would conflict with cannon. Since the OP said it worked like a very selective black hole, meaning it can only delete material. However this means that cleaning an object that had heavily rusted would make it smaller according to cannon whereas if you were merely reverting it the mass of iron would remain the same. So certain types of cleaning are going to be impossible because they require moving material around or creating it.
Importantly here cleaning an object will never be the same as reverting it's temporal state. Because a few atoms of the material will always have escaped due to processes ranging from sublimation to quantum tunneling.Maybe I'm just being dense here, but I'm not seeing how this works. Elaborate? I'm not even seeing how to get one bit of the AI in this way (though if I can get one bit reliably, I can then see how to get all the bits)
It's pretty simple all you have to do is start with say a bunch of 0's then turn them into 1's. Then selectively have the 1's that aren't part of the AI's source code declared unclean and reverted. Actually I think that plan may be somewhat simpler than the original one I devised. The medium you use for the bits isn't super important it just needs to be such that the default state is all 0's before you inscribe anything onto it and the bits need to be represented as physical states (as opposed to magnetic fields).
Only being able to revert things to their previous state still doesn't change the fact the power needs to possess knowledge you lack, and in fact given the sheer complexity of nearly any object (assuming the cleaning is truly perfect at the atomic level) it will have more information than you could even fit inside your mind. So coming up with a consistent ruling on the information it has is as I said before difficult.You and I have remarkably different ideas of what is meant by "simplest". I'm trying to model the power in such a way as to minimise alterations in the laws of physics necessary to make it work, and secondarily to minimise omniscience of the power.
Given total violation of thermodynamics is a given I'm not sure to what extent trying to assume other laws apply really simplifies things here and given the ability to extract information out of thin air with no expenditure of energy or interaction with the relevant system is a given. So making further assumptions that it just so happens to be limited to only one ill-defined "type" of information doesn't simplify things.
Importantly exploiting the thermodynamics violations seems pretty likely to let you somehow extract negative energy via creating areas of lower than vacuum energy. Which if you could make it work would allow FTL and potentially causality violations as well.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 days later)
That still doesn't work because it's relatively easy to come up with examples wherein the parts of something were never clean.
Hmmmm. Point taken. Reversion to the past is not a suitable cleaning method.
Since the OP said it worked like a very selective black hole, meaning it can only delete material. However this means that cleaning an object that had heavily rusted would make it smaller according to cannon whereas if you were merely reverting it the mass of iron would remain the same.
Well, you can always have missing bits, as long as the remaining bits are clean. But your point above nixes the temporal reversion idea, anyhow.
It's pretty simple all you have to do is start with say a bunch of 0's then turn them into 1's. Then selectively have the 1's that aren't part of the AI's source code declared unclean and reverted.
This only works if the power is somehow omniscient; that is, the power somehow knows how the AI works.
In general, cleaning does not require omniscience. Even if the cleaning is perfect on the atomic level. Sure, it needs to handle a massive amount of information, but it's all on a very simple basis - it simply needs to decide, for each atom, whether or not that atom needs to vanish. That is, it needs a rule for deciding what is or is not dirt.
What you're proposing is, in effect, a rule of "it's dirt if it's not part of a suitable AI". And then let the rule - somehow - have to decide what a suitable AI is. So... it's a question that you cannot answer. With ordinary dirt, you could, in principle, with perfect knowledge of the atomic structure of everything, decide which parts are and are not dirt - so the only information that the power really needs, to clean the object, is the atomic structure of the object (which is present right there to be queried) and the state of your brain (to decide what is and is not dirt). But, under your proposed rule, there is nothing in your brainstate which says which bits are or are not to be considered dirt; the power, for the first time, requires external omniscience.
Importantly exploiting the thermodynamics violations seems pretty likely to let you somehow extract negative energy via creating areas of lower than vacuum energy. Which if you could make it work would allow FTL and potentially causality violations as well.
Now, this is a more interesting application of the ability. From cleaning to potential time travel without requiring omniscience on the way...
u/vakusdrake [+2] (2 days later)
Eh it's starting to become clear which interpretation you want to go with is based heavily on preference. Anyway even if you can't put forward a consistent model that works like how you're proposing, I can certainly believe one is possible. So see my other comment for how that would be exploited if you can only rely on information intrinsic in the prexisting material it can look at.
Now, this is a more interesting application of the ability. From cleaning to potential time travel without requiring omniscience on the way...
That actually does basically allow omniscience if you remember what I said about drawing on information from boltzmann brains in the far future. If you can do time travel then you can draw on any information that will ever exist in the future, which eventually includes anything of finite complexity. Also FTL means in many models of the universe (such as eternal inflation) you can draw upon other universes for information even without time travel.
Better yet with time travel you can set up a code phrase, then come up with some elaborate meaning for the power to read into it in the future, so as soon as you get the power all you have to do is say the code phrase. Of course as is always the issue with time travel everything ought to have already been overtaken by a singularity AI retroactively since a short time after the big bang.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 days later)
Boltzmann brains contain only knowledge equivalent to random noise. So yes, it is true that with a sufficient source of randomness I'll eventually be able to find any given piece of code, it's only useful if I can verify it... and it is the verification step that provides the greatest difficulty.
But if you can time travel, then there are other shortcuts to provide information. (There's an interesting attempt to make use of this in Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality; which ultimately fails, but the principle holds...)
u/vakusdrake [+2] (2 days later)
But if you can time travel, then there are other shortcuts to provide information. (There's an interesting attempt to make use of this in Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality; which ultimately fails, but the principle holds...)
I mean given it only fails by what is effectively author fiat I think that sort of thing ought to work. Still verification is an issue since value alignment requires hitting a small target in mind space.
However it's not an insurmountable issue. For instance you could have the power look for places in the future where instead of boltzmann brains you got a boltzmann universe nearly identical to our own that will develop on its own without relying on random chance. Then you extracted information by viewing the future of these universe, basically ripping off their AI tech, and you can determine friendliness by seeing how the GAI acts once out of containment.
In addition you might well look for a universe where the AI researchers created neuromorphic AI first and due to pure random chance (cosmic radiation flipping bits or whatever) the created AI happened to be an exact copy of you, except for its knowledge of the power (don't want it trying to manipulate you into instantiating it). Then just look at it after it escapes containment to make sure it acts in a way that indicates it has improved itself without changing its values.There's also something of a question of whether verification isn't already implicit in the power. After all when it looks for the code for an AI that meets your friendliness standards it may just look at all possible outcomes of codes it could give you and check for the ones that don't lead to unclean outcomes. Or at least if it doesn't automatically do that I think you could get it to with the right conditional statements.
Anyway assuming the power can't affect the period before you received it (otherwise this scenario could never arise to begin with) then you'll probably find yourself in a world controlled by GAI the instant you get the power due to the actions of some other timeline's version of you.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 days later)
I mean given it only fails by what is effectively author fiat I think that sort of thing ought to work.
Oh, yeah. It's certainly worth a try, if you ever figure out time travel.
an AI that meets your friendliness standards
This is one potential point of trouble, and it is a big one. What happens when you search through future worlds for the perfect AI according to your list of criteria might not be what you intend to happen...
u/vakusdrake [+2] (2 days later)
Will check that out and get back to you once I've got out of class
u/vakusdrake [+2] (3 days later)
This is one potential point of trouble, and it is a big one. What happens when you search through future worlds for the perfect AI according to your list of criteria might not be what you intend to happen...
I don't think this is nearly as bad as it seems, since the metrics I'm using can rely on my own intuitions and don't all need to be formally defined. More importantly however siren worlds are relatively rare so when I tell it to find a world that meets them (so long as I'm not telling it to maximize IC) then it's staggeringly unlikely to end up with a siren world.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (3 days later)
Is the cleanliness power not maximising Cleanness, then?
u/vakusdrake [+2] (3 days later)
The point is that it maximizes cleanness by inscribing a source code that meets my requirements, however all source codes that meet IC will have equal cleanness to avoid the aforementioned over optimization issues.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (3 days later)
Hmmmm. Thaaaaaat... should avoid the Siren World problem, I guess. Then you just need a really, really good set of requirements.
u/vakusdrake [+1] (2 days later)
Still in the spirit of considering the least convenient possible world I will consider a scenario where the power's knowledge and thus cleaning is imperfect and involves interacting with it's future light cone using some form of previously unknown radiation that travels at c. Also assuming the power is dumb enough that you can't use it to generate novel information which would require significant cognitive work for a human to devise. Again this interpretation of canon already has some avenues of exploit I don't know how to patch, and may not be actually be totally consistent with canon but I digress.
In this scenario then I would go the world domination route more directly. Simply deleting much of the world's weaponry and a great many individuals who would only get in my way latter in my plan (as well as people who had committed crimes that would be considered worthy of the death penalty, since I have a perfect method of determining guilt). Also I would remove all the world's pollution returning the atmosphere and oceans to a preindustrial state.
At that point I would begin communicating using a variety of means that couldn't be traced back to me carving my messages in the sides of mountains, or any number of other places that ensure they'll be seen. I would force the world to start changing its laws in accordance with my instructions, lest non-cooperative leaders be deleted. Resistance is pretty damned futile when I can have a power that routinely deletes anyone with intentions to rebel. Of course at some point I would put myself in a position of power from the shadows with only a few people knowing I was responsible for all this. However keeping secrecy is pretty easy when you can remove memories (by deleting the handful of neurons holding the memory in someone's brain and any records) or just make people who intend to screw you over not exist.
Basically it would be pretty easy to make a utopia by wielding this power. I would say dystopia except it would actually violate less rights than current governments. After all there's no need to do government surveillance when anyone who intends to commit a crime is either destroyed or their information carved into a wall at the police station. Effectively there would be no militaries and the only police force would be a minimal one to pick up criminals. The ability to force total compliance with the law with unlimited force solves a pretty big number of coordination problems as well.
Once I've cemented power I can also do more than just restructure society my power has a great many other applications such as:
All pathogens simply cease to exist among humans or domesticated animals, invasive species disappear.
Cancer is no longer an issue and by killing senescent cells the effects of aging can also likely be diminished (based on some studies that did that).
People can voluntarily have memories removed if they are causing significant psychological harm.
Civilization can get unlimited easy power by building power plants and having my power automatically delete electrons within certain structures inside them. The structures don't need to be power plants either I could have pretty much any large machine have a box inside which my power would delete a certain number of electrons in order to get current.
I could mass produce many chemicals by deleting components of existing chemicals. Better yet I could produce rare elements by deleting protons and neutrons from heavier more common heavier elements, so suddenly lead, radon and a great many other heavy elements spike in value since they can be turned into any lighter element. The applications of having pretty much every element and isotope become as cheap as any element heavier than it will probably have an insane number of applications that I couldn't even imagine.
I stop any genetic diseases from continuing be deleting sperm/eggs/zygotes that have a particular genetic sequence (though some genes do seem to have an advantage for people with only one copy so I might only delete sperm if the egg already has a copy). Of course just deleting part of a genetic sequence for all of someone's DNA would probably kill the cell, so existing people would have to rely on gene editing which I would dump massive research into.
Plus I can do better than eliminating genetic diseases, for instance my power can be set up so that it selectively deletes sperm/eggs in order to maximize the intelligence, health, etc of resulting offspring. As well as just preventing unwanted pregnancies. Of course all of this is just a stopgap measure until I can implement genetic engineering on a wide scale.While I posited the power couldn't generate novel information that doesn't mean it couldn't be used to generate significant amounts of knowledge. Just answering questions using its observational power would be enough to make massive breakthroughs in a wide variety of topics from physics to genetics.
Anyway you get my point, I would be able to create a post scarcity utopia relatively quickly. From there I have the ability to put massive resources into research and my power would be able to alleviate a significant number of concerns with regards to AI and other techs. As well as ensured I had monopoly on all tech and didn't have to worry about competition.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 days later)
Well, that's certainly interesting. Removing most weapons and all pollution seems well within the limits of this power, as is removing given people. (Not sure whether or not the power can read other people's intentions, so it might not be all that straightforward to determine guilt, but this won't stop you from achieving world dominance if you're careful and ruthless enough).
Hmmmm... as to any other nitpicks amongst your further ideas (I'm not suggesting they wouldn't work, just trying to find places where things could go wrong):
All pathogens simply cease to exist among humans or domesticated animals
Useful, though might I recommend learning the difference between beneficial bacteria (e.g. gut flora) and harmful bacteria first. (Ideally, in fact, learning a lot of biology; I'm sure some otherwise quite deadly bacteria play important parts in decomposition, for example).
It might be best to do this in only a limited area first and then expanding only once it's been seen to work. (Recommendation: A large hospital. For two reasons; first, if something does go wrong, they have the staff to identify the problem, and secondly, no-one's going to think that the elimination of bacteria in a hospital is surprising enough to investigate further).
People can voluntarily have memories removed if they are causing significant psychological harm.
Slicing bits of neurons out of someone's brain may well leave them a drooling vegetable. Especially if memories are stored in a highly distributed manner... test this first on people who are about to die (condemned criminals at first, I think).
Civilization can get unlimited easy power
I could mass produce many chemicals by deleting components of existing chemicals. Better yet I could produce rare elements by deleting protons and neutrons from heavier more common heavier elements,
Oooooh. These two - these two I really like. Brilliant.
Anyway you get my point, I would be able to create a post scarcity utopia relatively quickly.
You could certainly change the world, and arguably for the better. (I wouldn't say certainly for the better, given that you'd be in charge of everything and I don't think that 'in charge of everything' is a thing that any single individual can really handle - but you would be including a few clear changes for the better in with the package, like unlimited easy power).
I don't think it would be completely post-scarcity, though the world would certainly have different scarcities while you and your power remain present. (Major scarcity: matter. Your power works only by destroying it, never creating it, so your power has a limit there.)
From there I have the ability to put massive resources into research and my power would be able to alleviate a significant number of concerns with regards to AI and other techs.
That would be helpful...
As well as ensured I had monopoly on all tech and didn't have to worry about competition.
...not so helpful. Wanting to get there before the "other guy" tends to help humans to work harder. (The easy fix for this, of course, is to control two or three different tech companies yourself and play them off against each other...)
u/vakusdrake [+2] (2 days later)
Useful, though might I recommend learning the difference between beneficial bacteria (e.g. gut flora) and harmful bacteria first. (Ideally, in fact, learning a lot of biology; I'm sure some otherwise quite deadly bacteria play important parts in decomposition, for example).
Yeah I'd start by just removing all the lifeforms that aren't already present in basically everybody from everyone's bodies, since people are dying all the time. After that though I could refine things a bit eliminating harmful infections which are nonetheless extremely common, likely by just going through lists of common diseases since all the rare stuff was already eliminated.
Slicing bits of neurons out of someone's brain may well leave them a drooling vegetable. Especially if memories are stored in a highly distributed manner... test this first on people who are about to die (condemned criminals at first, I think).
While I would test it first (say on some people who found out secret information) it seems very unlikely anything bad would happen. After all I'm only killing a handful of cells and neurons die all the time, hell I might be able to get away with just deleting the synapses forming the memory without even killing most or any affected neurons.
I don't think it would be completely post-scarcity, though the world would certainly have different scarcities while you and your power remain present. (Major scarcity: matter. Your power works only by destroying it, never creating it, so your power has a limit there.)
While at pre singularity tech levels we would have some limits that seems besides the point that this still meets the criterion for a post scarcity civilization even if it's not post singularity.
Of course once we had GAI then you could avert heat death by deleting one particle from pairs of virtual particles to create as much matter/energy as needed. Actually to avoid any slight annoyances due to charge imbalances I might as well just have the power generators work that way, having them delete either positrons or electrons from virtual particle pairs inside the box. Plus I could use that method to create unlimited amounts of hydrogen, though anything heavier would need too many resources to be worth it at our tech level.
I also just remembered that in virtual particle pairs one half always has negative mass making FTL unavoidable, so the shenanigans I mentioned in my other post to obtain FAI without your civ having to do any research seem probably unavoidable....not so helpful. Wanting to get there before the "other guy" tends to help humans to work harder. (The easy fix for this, of course, is to control two or three different tech companies yourself and play them off against each other...)
Yeah I suppose I mostly agree with you. The issues I was concerned with really are only an issue with AI wherein rushing it almost certainly kills everyone. Why competition is a terrible idea was of course covered in Superintelligence and also I'm pretty sure it was in one of Robert Miles Youtube videos, though I'm not sure which one, though they're all pretty great and that channel and the videos he did on computerphile are probably the best videos on the topic on youtube if not anywhere online.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (3 days later)
Yeah I'd start by just removing all the lifeforms that aren't already present in basically everybody from everyone's bodies, since people are dying all the time.
Again, small area first. There might be some beneficial bacteria that there's a dozen variants of - and one of which provides the full benefit, and any one of which occurs in no more than one tenth of the population.
While I would test it first (say on some people who found out secret information) it seems very unlikely anything bad would happen. After all I'm only killing a handful of cells and neurons die all the time, hell I might be able to get away with just deleting the synapses forming the memory without even killing most or any affected neurons.
This depends a lot on exactly how the brain stores memories. Does it really compartmentalise to that extent, or are memories built on top of each other, such that every individual memory touches on almost every neuron in some way?
The issues I was concerned with really are only an issue with AI wherein rushing it almost certainly kills everyone.
Okay, that is a very, very important point. We do not want to kill everybody.
u/vakusdrake [+2] (3 days later)
Again, small area first. There might be some beneficial bacteria that there's a dozen variants of - and one of which provides the full benefit, and any one of which occurs in no more than one tenth of the population.
I wouldn't be going for specific species anyway I would be broader than that, since beneficial bacteria are not likely to be extremely closely related to harmful bacteria. Importantly given all the frozen stool samples from research and the fact that having one's gut flora wiped out is manageable, we can afford to not be overly cautious here.
This depends a lot on exactly how the brain stores memories. Does it really compartmentalise to that extent, or are memories built on top of each other, such that every individual memory touches on almost every neuron in some way?
I think neuroscience would generally support a significant degree of compartmentalization based on research that was able to link memories to individual neurons.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (3 days later)
I think neuroscience would generally support a significant degree of compartmentalization based on research that was able to link memories to individual neurons.
Hmmm. Your article says that a memory can be triggered by poking at the right neuron. That's a long way away from saying that the memory is only held on that neuron. (Also, apparently, memories can move after a few months... so it's possible that this will not only delete a recent memory, but also damage the brain's ability to form new memories at all)
u/vakusdrake [+2] (3 days later)
Given the sheer number of neurons in the brain killing a few of them really isn't likely to cause any issues, like I'm not sure you get just how many neurons there are just involved with memories, ~9,000 neurons die every day anyway so I'm extremely confident there won't be any issues.
As for memories moving around that isn't really relevant since I'll have the power damage/destroy only the neurons that currently hold the memory. Also that article makes me think I can probably get rid of memories by having the power continually delete certain chemicals within those particular neurons so I'm now back to thinking it's more likely than not that I wouldn't need to destroy neurons.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (3 days later)
Given the sheer number of neurons in the brain killing a few of them really isn't likely to cause any issues, like I'm not sure you get just how many neurons there are just involved with memories, ~9,000 neurons die every day anyway so I'm extremely confident there won't be any issues.
And you may well be right. But... I don't know enough neurobiology to know for sure. What if you end up deleting (for example) all the neurons that habitually hold a memory that is fifteen hours old? Then the next time that a memory needs to get moved into that area, there's nowhere for it to go, and there's never a memory moving out of that area... and you end up with someone with only a fifteen-hour memory.
Thing is, there are loads of questions. And I know that I don't know enough to answer them. In fact, it seems likely that experimental data would be required to answer them. (Fictional evidence tends to be horrible. I could write a story about it succeeding, or about it failing in any of a dozen different, superficially plausible ways.)
u/Jiro_T [+2] (4 days later)
I think a lot of munchkining can be avoided if you just assume some kind of coherent extrapolated volition for concepts; something counts as "dirty" or "clean" if a typical human with sufficient knowledge would consider it to be dirty or clean. There are going to be fuzzy areas even then, but there aren't infinite fuzzy areas, and nobody is going to think "area with dirt removed in patterns corresponding to source code" or even "area with nuclear missiles removed" counts as clean.
This is especially so when the effect is based on magic, since perhaps the main difference between science and magic is that magic assumes that high-level human concepts are fundamental descriptions of the universe. (That's why it's a trope to have spells that can't create food or valuables, for instance.)