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 | Re: More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) | |
| Posted By: SiliconDream =PN= | Date: 12/22/01 1:04 a.m. |
| In Response To: Re: More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) (SiliconDream =PN=) Okay, now I thought of an actual useful response. It's certainly--some would say trivially--true that undesirable but statistically probable outcomes are suppressed. Ten thousand Trooper grenades get lobbed your way in the course of the game, and according to the laws of probability half a dozen should nail you consecutively and kill you at some point, but of course (in the final timeline you create by beating the game) they don't. If you didn't need to beat the odds once in a while, saving would be unnecessary. The question is, what's doing the suppressing? To an outside observer, the Marine appears simply to be incredibly skilled and insanely lucky, and they might well think that he's got some sort of tech--like the pattern buffer or his Jjaro implants--automatically making sure that probability's always on his side. But that's not how it looks to you. You don't see yourself gaily going head-to-head with a Juggernaut, dancing past each missile, and taking it down without a scratch. You see yourself attacking, dying, restarting from a save, attacking, dying, restarting from a save, until FINALLY you get lucky and survive. And then you say phew and go and save again. Likewise, you don't see yourself conveniently being picked up by Tycho, dispatching Durandal, grabbing his primal pattern, dropping it in Thoth, and saving the universe. (If you did, the game would be a lot shorter.) Instead, you make mistakes, and the characters around you do things that doom the universe. You have to live through those timelines yourself, then consciously step out of them to find the right one. So it doesn't really seem accurate to me to say that the technology you exploit directly influences probability toward a given outcome. If it did, you'd be as mystified by your incredible luck as anyone else, and totally unaware of all those failed timelines. That technology merely gives you the opportunity to rewind time and "roll the dice" again, this time changing the odds with the knowledge you gleaned from the future. The suppression mechanism itself is your own mind; the tech you carry just allows you to loop reality through that mechanism multiple times for maximal effect. I think. --SiliconDream, preparing his next big post once he gets tired of dabbling with the SITH tagset | |
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| Replies: |
| More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) | Scifiteki | 12/21/01 8:44 p.m. |
| Re: More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) | SiliconDream =PN= | 12/21/01 11:50 p.m. |
| Re: More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) | SiliconDream =PN= | 12/22/01 1:04 a.m. |
| Re: More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) | Yossarian | 12/22/01 5:49 a.m. |
| Re: More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) | Mark Levin | 12/22/01 6:02 a.m. |
| Re: More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) | Scifiteki | 12/23/01 8:20 p.m. |
| Re: More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) | Arsonperbuilding | 12/22/01 7:22 p.m. |
| Re: More On Pattern Bufffers(Very, very complex) | SiliconDream =PN= | 12/22/01 7:46 p.m. |
| Dink! | Djof | 12/22/01 8:09 p.m. |
| Re: Dink! | Max | 12/28/01 6:45 p.m. |
| True. | Djof | 12/28/01 7:39 p.m. |
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