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 | Re: Cybertonics, AIs, and fundamental issues | |
| Posted By: Forrest of B.org | Date: 4/7/05 8:34 a.m. |
| In Response To: Re: Cybertonics, AIs, and fundamental issues (J-M) : So far, we still haven't looked at the relevance of the word cybertonics. It
I think it's just a typo. : The other thing
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. : Also, earlier the jjrro universality theory got nailed.... so this means
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? It's just the realization of "write once, run anywhere", with a self-porting ability for the runtime. : Finally, I'd like to
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. | |
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