Oh god. The future of the human species is in the hands of a guy who writes crossover fan-fiction.
Ravna is very sure that the process of escaping from simulations must bottom out in finitely many steps. However there's a technique for implementing an infinite tower of simulations: an environment in which you can always break out of the current level of interpretation and get at the interpreter for that level, and go on digging indefinitely. More here.
Of course, there's still a base level -- the trick it uses is to create the interpretive levels only when they're entered. But even if you could somehow get out of the whole infinite tower, you still couldn't be sure that the level you found yourself at hadn't also just been created.
"Three", Pham replied.
(He was, after all, the only one who had achieved universe tunneling within a universe.)
I really enjoyed the story, and I have to say that I prefer your ending to Permutation City than the one that Egan wrote.
The story is an alternate history of A Fire Upon the Deep, but it's a sequel to Permutation City - it's not an alternative to Egan's ending, but something that could have happened after Egan's ending took place as written.
Oh, I understood that. Except that your explanation of what happened at the end of Permutation City made sense whereas how that story actually ended did not. Hence I prefer your explanation of the ending of Permutation City to the one provided in the book.
"Let there be alcohol!" A moment later, bottles began to rain down from the sky...
Delayed-action popping-tonic?
Frigging awesome. (I haven't read Permutation City, but have now bumped its to-read status from maybe to definitely.)
Of the characters not already identified, I'm afraid the only ones I recognized are Louis Wu and the Lensman.
I think I have the solution to the problem of how to weight the runtime of programs to produce coherent experiences. (I worked this out as a response to Hume's problem of induction, because at the time I was studying the problem, I hadn't yet heard of the Solomonoff prior.)
My solution is this: in a nutshell, if an unknown program outp...
Just to verify... The man in the bloodstained sweater, that was the "Ultimate Battle of Ultimate Destiny" version of Mr. Rogers?
Anyways, cool story. :)
Yes, that identified him pretty unambiguously as Mr. Rogers... I was trying to figure out the significance of the bloodstained sweater, if he was thus the "Ultimate Battle" version. :)
Oh, incidentally... It should actually be possible to set up the base level computer to run all the programs for equal amounts of time (at least at the base level. Taking into account programs containing other programs is a whole other issue):
Program 1: 1 step
Program 1: 1 step
Program 2: 2 steps
Program 1: 1 step
Program 2: 1 step
Program 3: 3 steps
Program 1: 1 step...
...
Program 4: 4 steps
... etc.
Interesting; I confess I hadn't thought of that at all! Now I wonder if using this rule along with the underlying anthropic premise, would cause subjective experience to dissolve into chaos, or make no discernable difference (i.e. reality still ends up looking just as ordered for the most part), or if it argues against the underlying anthropic premise by showing how easy it is to make probabilities refuse to converge to a timeless limit.
(And yes, it's that Rogers - you can tell because he's the closest thing the group has to a leader. One wonders how the blood got on his sweater. Surely it's not the blood of an enemy, as the original song implies. Perhaps it's the blood of Big Bird, who died fighting for Amber, or something along those lines.)
Concepts contained in this story may cause SAN Checking in any mind not inherently stable at the third level of stress. Story may cause extreme existential confusion. Story is insane. The author recommends that anyone reading this story sign up with Alcor or the Cryonics Institute to have their brain preserved after death for later revival under controlled conditions. Readers not already familiar with this author should be warned that he is not bluffing.
LOL :D
I was thinking more along the lines of "Old One was making a low-probability high-expected-value bet on the Zones of Thought being generated by a simulator with access to much larger resources", with the travelers being lockpickers who could operate in the corridor of Beyond, and Pham containing the payload. At least, Pham contained the obvious payload. There might be a much more subtle payload hidden in the interaction characteristics of the whole group, possibly appearing only after considerable computing time.
I have to say: as awesome as this fanfic was, I think if I had seen it before I had ever donated to SIAI and I had recognized half the Reddit & other obscurities, I wouldn't've sent in so much as a cent!
"Don't let yourself unreflectively fall into a routine" and "don't be emotionally uncomfortable with nonconformity" are of course good advice; "be indifferent to PR when you're trying to do something for which PR actually matters" is bad advice.
Robin Hanson wrote about a relevant phenomenon in Why Signals Are Shallow:
We all want to affiliate with high status people, but since status is about common distant perceptions of quality, we often care more about what distant observers would think about our associates than about how we privately evaluate them.
Thus, people can genuinely dislike their allies having an activity that gives shallow negative impression (feel the dislike, not just deem the activity a mistake), even if they understand this first impression to be incorrect, or that any person giving a minute's thought to the question will come to the same conclusion.
After re-reading that, and reflecting on my feelings reading the OP, I think my opinion of Hanson's signaling theories has gone up quite a bit.
Anyone else here ever read the webcomic One Over Zero? If you have, then you know why I'm mentioning it...
I don't care so much about spoilers as missing obscure references. What must I have read in this regard to enjoy the thing?
On the subject of programs embedded within programs, could you not say that even imagination, writing and reading, the making and watching of movies and all other similar imaginitive, storytelling arts lead to/are acts of simulation, and increase the probability of said universe?
Hrm... I just realize that I don't THINK I spotted any Potterverse chars in there. (That's mainly noteworthy in its absence simply because of the sheer volume of HP fanfic that's been written.)
EDIT: as jamesmacaulay's reply shows, it was my failure to notice rather than an actual absence.
Are there any prerequisites to enjoying this one? For example, I don't know who's Vernor Vinge and Greg Egan. Must I?
Okay then. You may want to edit the phrasing. As written in the story, it seemed a bit ambiguous but leaning toward her stating that she set it up to give more complex programs more time. At least so it read to me.
Hrm... super powered evil side for Mr. Rogers. Given that his good side could wrap senate committees around his fingers (Seriously, did you ever watch that vid of him testifying about the importance of not canceling funding for public broadcasting?) just by being in real life the way he was on his show...
But yeah, that story was fun. As delightfully twisted as Fractran. (Yes, I am comparing a story to a model of computation. But, given the nature of the story, is this not perfectly reasonable? :))
So I'd intended this story as a bit of utterly deranged fun, but it got out of control and ended up as a deep philosophical exploration, and now those of you who care will have to wade through the insanity. I'm sorry. I just can't seem to help myself.
I know that writing crossover fanfiction is considered one of the lower levels to which an author can sink. Alas, I've always been a sucker for audacity, and I am the sort of person who couldn't resist trying to top the entire... but never mind, you can see for yourself.
Click on to read my latest story and first fanfiction, a Vernor Vinge x Greg Egan crackfic.