: I think it's just a typo.
Turns up at least twice as Cybertonics
: The impression I've always got from the S'pht, and the relationship of them
: to Durandal, to the Controller Cyborgs (like the one we killed in M1), and
: to their "Royalty" like S'bhuth, is that the individual S'pht
: are a lot like autistic savants: brilliant, capable of extreme focus and
: powerful mental abilities, but with no scope of the broader picture and
: likely unable to cope with life as an individual the way a human would.
: They *need* a central, broader intelligence to coordinate them and to
: direct their focus, otherwise they freak or go catatonic (as they did when
: Durandal died again in one level of Infinity, I forget which... and his
: S'pht went 'rampant'). And they pretty evidently communicate
: "telepathically", via radio or some such.
: But they are still emotional individuals in some sense with wants and needs,
: and thus they can dislike what their masters are telling them to do and
: with they had another master that would help them accomplish something
: they'd like more; and they have individual memories, so they can preserve
: their myths across generations even as slaves under hostile rule; and they
: can 'deliberately fight poorly'. Think of it as a brilliant individual
: stuck at a job he doesn't want to do but held at gunpoint if he leaves;
: he's gonna just sit there and fill up the time and do just enough work not
: to get in trouble, but he really wishes he had a better job. A lot of
: brilliant humans in similar situations, just like the S'pht, never even
: think "I wish I didn't have a job" - they need something to do,
: someone to tell them what to do, but that someone needs have their best
: interest in mind or else they poor bloke will be miserable.
Sounds like the S'pht ARE somewhere between AIs and cyborgs. Maybe they represent something like those parts of durandal that are not his primal pattern, and function as outriders for a primary intelligence. What a neat idea... distributed processing, neural style.
: I always figured it was just a hardware abstraction layer. Durandal and such
: AIs are probably written in extremely high-level programming languages,
: way beyond anything that we've got today, and being brilliant
: intelligences capable of things like real-time encryption breaking, I
: imagine they could easily throw together the equivalent of what we'd today
: call a runtime compiler; "Pfhor hardware different than mine? Eh,
: it's simple enough.... scratch together a JIT... transfer to that
: environment... sweet, I'm faster over here even running in
: emulation." Of course, he was probably "running in
: emulation" (on a JIT) back on Marathon as well. Why tie your software
: to any particular hardware when any particular hardware is going to be so
: blazingly fast you can just emulate a runtime platform?
Doesn't seem likely that he could just jump like that, as a neural net... I mean we SHOULD be talking about funda-- what if he doesn't translate himself at all? He inserts himself, doesn't he? Just rams nodes into being until there's a durandal shaped network.
: It's just the realization of "write once, run anywhere", with a
: self-porting ability for the runtime.
See above. By the way, it does seem that all AIs and ships have computer controlled fabrication facilities on board. For all we know, he just builds himself a core and adapts that to talk to the pfhor ship.
: Pattern buffers must be useful to humans as well as cyborgs, although they
: probably don't work the same exact way (in Eternal I excused this as an
: unintended interaction between the PB and the Cybernetic Junction; in
: reality I suspect it's just some hand-waving around a necessary game
: feature). So if mortal humans could use them, why not the Pfhor? It'd be
: just as useful to them as it is to us. Hell, maybe all their identical
: troops are just copied out of a pattern buffer instead of bred or cloned
: or such.
We don't know that they can use them, though. What do they do for humans?
