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lessdazed comments on AI Challenge: Ants - Less Wrong
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Comments (49)
I think it is true for games with turns like this one.
I am not aware of any mechanism which might cause this to be a meaningful difference. Enlighten me?
'Simultaneity' is easy to achieve when the environment changes in discrete intervals with time to think in between.
Edit: What lessdazed said.
The appearance of "simultaneity", sure. But that's a manifestation of the difference between real-time and turn-based 'games', and not a characteristic of cognition that is meaningfully significant. (At least, not so far as I can tell.)
I'd say the implication that it's only actually possible to act as a "unified mind" in certain highly artificial non-realtime circumstances is pretty significant.
But if I am correct that it is only the appearance of acting as a "unified mind", then... there's no real significance there, as it again is simply a characteristic of the medium rather than of the function. In other words, this "unification" is only present in a turn-based game, and only manifests as a result of the fact that turn-based games have 'bots' whose intellect necessarily manifests during the turn.
This, in kind, would "compress" the actual processes of cognition into what would appear to be a "unified/simultaneous" process.
And this is why I say that it is not a characteristic of cognition which is meaningfully significant. It's telling us something about turn-based games -- not about cognition.
Allow me to slightly rephrase my point: I'd say the implication that it's impossible to act as a "unified mind" in realtime is pretty significant.
Even if/as there is no such thing as simultaneity in consciousness, in a game with rules like this thoughts can be neatly divided into "after seeing the results of turn one, and before deciding what to do on turn two," and that is all that is important.
What I said was badly phrased: the assumption isn't true, but if it is being made, that is irrelevant.
I don't know as to how that maps to "simultaneous access to the same information", however, in any computationally significant sense. It's simply a characteristic of the definition of turn-based as opposed to real-time 'games' that you do your processing between turns but during real-time.