[Link] Marek Rosa: Announcing GoodAI
Eliezer commented on FB about a post Announcing GoodAI (by Marek Rosa GoodAIs CEO). I think this deserves some discussion as it has a quite effective approach to harness the crowd to improve the AI:
As part of GoodAI’s development, our team created a visual tool called Brain Simulator where users can design their own artificial brain architectures. We released Brain Simulator to the public today for free under and open-source, non-commercial license– anyone who’s interested can access Brain Simulator and start building their own artificial brain. [...]
By integrating Brain Simulator into Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers [a game], players will have the option to design their own AI brains for the games and implement it, for example, as a peasant character. Players will also be able to share these brains with each other or take an AI brain designed by us and train it to do things they want it to do (work, obey its master, and so on). The game AIs will learn from the player who trains them (by receiving reward/punishment signals; or by imitating player's behavior), and will have the ability to compete with each other. The AI will be also able to learn by imitating other AIs.This integration will make playing Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers more fun, and at the same time our AI technology will gain access to millions of new teachers and a new environment. This integration into our games will be done by GoodAI developers. We are giving AI to players, and we are bringing players to our AI researchers.
LessWrong Diplomacy Game 2015
Related: Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory by Yvain.
I've been floating this idea around for a while, and there was enough interest to organize it.
Diplomacy is a board game of making and breaking alliances. It is a semi-iterative prisoner's dilemma with 7 prisoners. The rules are very simple, there is no luck factor and any tactical tricks can be learned quickly. You play as one of the great powers in pre-WW1 Europe, and your goal is to dominate over half of the board. To do this, you must negotiate alliances with the other players, and then stab them at the most opportune moment. But beware, if you are too stabby, no one will trust you. And if you are too trusting, you will get stabbed yourself.
If you have never played the game, don't worry. It is really quick to pick up. I explain the rules in detail here.
The game will (most likely) be played at webdiplomacy.net. You need an account, which requires a valid email. To play the game, you will need to spend at least 10 minutes every phase (3 days) to enter your orders. In the meantime, you will be negotiating with other players. That takes as much as you want it to, but I recommend setting away at least 30 minutes per day (in 5-minute quantums). A game usually lasts about 10 in-game years, which comes down to 30-something phases (60-90 days). A phase can progress early if everyone agrees. Likewise, the game can be paused indefinitely if everyone agrees (e.g. if a player will not have Internet access).
Joining a game is Serious Business, as missing a deadline can spoil it for the other 6 players. Please apply iff:
- You will be able to access the game for 10 minutes every 3 days (90% certainty required)
- If 1) changes, you will be able to let the others know at least 1 day in advance (95% certainty required)
- You will be able to spend an average of 30 minutes per day (standard normal distribution)
- You will not hold an out-of-game grudge against a player who stabbed you (adjusting for stabbyness in potential future games is okay)
If you still wish to play, please sign up in the comments. Please specify the earliest time it would suit you for the game to start. If we somehow get more than 7 players, we'll discuss our options (play a variant with more players, multiple games, etc).
See also: First game of LW Diplomacy
Well, the interest is there, so I've set up two games.
Game 1: http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=164863 (started!)
Game 2: http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=164912 (started! First phase will be extended to end on the 4th of August)
Password: clippy
Please note a couple important rules of the webdiplomacy.net website:
- You can only have one account. If you are caught with multiple accounts, they will all be banned.
- You may not blame your moves on the website bugs as a diplomacy tactic. This gives the site's mods extra work to do when someone actually reports the bug.
- Should go without saying, but you are not allowed to illegally access another player's account (i.e. hacking).
Two Zendo-inspired games
LW has often discussed the inductive logic game Zendo, as a possible way of training rationality. But I couldn't find any computer implementations of Zendo online.
So I built two (fairly similar) games inspired by Zendo; they generate rules and play as sensei. The code is on GitHub, along with some more explanation. To run the games you'll need to install Python 3, and Scikit-Learn for the second game; see the readme.
All bugfixes and improvements are welcome. For instance, more rule classes or features would improve the game and be pretty easy to code. Also, if anyone has a website and wants to host this playable online (with CGI, say), that would be awesome.
Parsimony as a side dish - a game to play on meetups?
Tl;dr: we seem to (naively?) compound parsimony with other heuristics.
There was a quote from R. Burton, provided by JQuinton, offering an amusing exercise. The reader had to guess if an excerpt of text was nonsense or merely a rambling presentation of something, and what that could be. Upon learning a single word of explanation, it became difficult to read it as anything than the object's description, even if the reader was told there were other possible answers (beyond 'ridiculous.')
Here's an example:
> Reconstruction probably won't even account for all that escaped the initial search. Of course it doesn't have as much lead as the stained variety. Please don't follow 'old traditions' again, it's a cultural thing anyway. The little ones are easily lost in water. The dog won't know how to find them, but the problem is rather that it won't know how to avoid them. The high singing note I will miss. Be careful not to step on it. It was to harmony what it is to ruin. A different brand is used in electron microscopy, to make 'em smooth and even. There's plenty under the bench in the park. I had cherished it since my wedding.
(I'm not a writer, so that was rather clumsy. Please post better examples in comments.)
But what if we are offered to brainstorm before answering, and to try viewing the excerpt as a collection of true facts, just not necessarily a coherent story? Here are some of our possible approaches (heuristics):
- it's a picture;
- it's an instruction;
-it's paraphyletic (e.g., it is about a single thing which has more than one cause);
- it's alive!
- it's dangerous!
- it's an advertisement;
- it's a single thing better described by more than one word, though still recognizable from the best match;
- it's a compilation of distant phenomena related to whatsitname, the everyday thing;
- it's all true, BUT there are qualifiers (which could make it more plausible-sounding);
- it's just not a physical body;
- it's an extreme case etc.
...and then we try to guess again.
The number of hypotheses now should be more than one, but why? What changed?
I think we start out with expectations nearest to 'picture' and most removed from 'qualifiers', and maybe it was useful in ancestral environment, but I would not expect them to be most fruitful. Maybe if enough people played such scenarios out, we would experimentally obtain a set of more useful ones?
Is there a way to prove that one and only one interpretation is true (allows for all statements to be true)? What would you expect such excerpts (sets?) have in common?
And more importantly: is there any way to weaken priming's hold on us?
(I am not a native speaker, so if there are any mistakes, please point them out to me. Thank you.)
Bayes Academy Development Report 2 - improved data visualization
See here for the previous update if you missed / forgot it.
In this update, no new game content, but new graphics.
I wasn’t terribly happy about the graphical representation of the various nodes in the last update. Especially in the first two networks, if you didn’t read the descriptions of the nodes carefully, it was very easy to just click your way through them without really having a clue of what the network was actually doing. Needless to say, for a game that’s supposed to teach how the networks function, this is highly non-optimal.
Here’s the representation that I’m now experimenting with: the truth table of the nodes is represented graphically inside the node. The prior variable at the top doesn’t really have a truth table, it’s just true or false. The “is” variable at the bottom is true if its parent is true, and false if its parent is false.

You may remember that in the previous update, unobservable nodes were represented in grayscale. I ended up dropping that, because that would have been confusing in this representation: if the parent is unobservable, should the blobs representing its truth values in the child node be in grayscale as well? Both “yes” and “no” answers felt confusing.
Instead the observational state of a node is now represented by its border color. Black for unobservable, gray for observable, no border for observed. The metaphor is supposed to be something like, a border is a veil of ignorance blocking us from seeing the node directly, but if the veil is gray it’s weak enough to be broken, whereas a black veil is strong enough to resist a direct assault. Or something.

When you observe a node, not only does its border disappear, but the truth table entries that get reduced to a zero probability disappear, to be replaced by white boxes. I experimented with having the eliminated entries still show up in grayscale, so you could e.g. see that the “is” node used to contain the entry for (false -> false), but felt that this looked clearer.

The “or” node at the bottom is getting a little crowded, but hopefully not too crowded. Since we know that its value is “true”, the truth table entry showing (false, false -> false) shows up in all whites. It’s also already been observed, so it starts without a border.

After we observe that there’s no monster behind us, the “or” node loses its entries for (monster, !waiting -> looks) and (monster, waiting -> looks), leaving only (!monster, waiting -> looks): meaning that the boy must be waiting for us to answer.
This could still be made clearer: currently the network updates instantly. I’m thinking about adding a brief animation where the “monster” variable would first be revealed as false, which would then propagate an update to the values of “looks at you” (with e.g. the red tile in “monster” blinking at the same time as the now-invalid truth table entries, and when the tiles stopped blinking, those now-invalid entries would have disappeared), and that would in turn propagate the update to the “waiting” node, deleting the red color from it. But I haven’t yet implemented this.

The third network is where things get a little tricky. The “attacking” node is of type “majority vote” - i.e. it’s true if at least two of its parents are true, and false otherwise. That would make for a truth table with eight entries, each holding four blobs each, and we could already see the “or” node in the previous screen being crowded. I’m not quite sure of what to do here. At this moment I’m thinking of just leaving the node as is, and displaying more detailed information in the sidebar.

Here’s another possible problem. Just having the truth table entries works fine to make it obvious where the overall probability of the node comes from… for as long as the valid values of the entries are restricted to “possible” and “impossible”. Then you can see at a glance that, say, of the three possible entries, two would make this node true and one would make this false, so there’s a ⅔ chance of it being true.
But in this screen, that has ceased to be the case. The “attacking” node has a 75% chance of being true, meaning that, for instance, the “is / block” node’s “true -> true” entry also has a 75% chance of being the right one. This isn’t reflected in the truth table visualization. I thought of adding small probability bars under each truth table entry, or having the size of the truth table blobs reflect their probability, but then I’d have to make the nodes even bigger, and it feels like it would easily start looking cluttered again. But maybe it’d be the right choice anyway? Or maybe just put the more detailed information in the sidebar? I’m not sure of the best thing to do here.
If anyone has good suggestions, I would be grateful to get advice from people who have more of a visual designer gene than I do!
Bayes Academy: Development report 1
Some of you may remember me proposing a game idea that went by the name of The Fundamental Question. Some of you may also remember me talking a lot about developing an educational game about Bayesian Networks for my MSc thesis, but not actually showing you much in the way of results.
Insert the usual excuses here. But thanks to SSRIs and mytomatoes.com and all kinds of other stuff, I'm now finally on track towards actually accomplishing something. Here's a report on a very early prototype.
This game has basically two goals: to teach its players something about Bayesian networks and probabilistic reasoning, and to be fun. (And third, to let me graduate by giving me material for my Master's thesis.)
We start with the main character stating that she is nervous. Hitting any key, the player proceeds through a number of lines of internal monologue:
I am nervous.
I’m standing at the gates of the Academy, the school where my brother Opin was studying when he disappeared. When we asked the school to investigate, they were oddly reluctant, and told us to drop the issue.
The police were more helpful at first, until they got in contact with the school. Then they actually started threatening us, and told us that we would get thrown in prison if we didn’t forget about Opin.
That was three years ago. Ever since it happened, I’ve been studying hard to make sure that I could join the Academy once I was old enough, to find out what exactly happened to Opin. The answer lies somewhere inside the Academy gates, I’m sure of it.
Now I’m finally 16, and facing the Academy entrance exams. I have to do everything I can to pass them, and I have to keep my relation to Opin a secret, too.
???: “Hey there.”
Eep! Someone is talking to me! Is he another applicant, or a staff member? Wait, let me think… I’m guessing that applicant would look a lot younger than staff members! So, to find that out… I should look at him!
[You are trying to figure out whether the voice you heard is a staff member or another applicant. While you can't directly observe his staff-nature, you believe that he'll look young if he's an applicant, and like an adult if he's a staff member. You can look at him, and therefore reveal his staff-nature, by right-clicking on the node representing his apperance.]
Here is our very first Bayesian Network! Well, it's not really much of a network: I'm starting with the simplest possible case in order to provide an easy start for the player. We have one node that cannot be observed ("Student", its hidden nature represented by showing it in greyscale), and an observable node ("Young-looking") whose truth value is equal to that of the Student node. All nodes are binary random variables, either true or false.
According to our current model of the world, "Student" has a 50% chance of being true, so it's half-colored in white (representing the probability of it being true) and half-colored in black (representing the probability of it being false). "Young-looking" inherits its probability directly. The player can get a bit of information about the two nodes by left-clicking on them.
The game also offers alternate color schemes for colorblind people who may have difficulties distinguishing red and green.
Now we want to examine the person who spoke to us. Let's look at him, by right-clicking on the "Young-looking" node.
Not too many options here, because we're just getting started. Let's click on "Look at him", and find out that he is indeed young, and thus a student.
This was the simplest type of minigame offered within the game. You are given a set of hidden nodes whose values you're tasked with discovering by choosing which observable nodes to observe. Here the player had no way to fail, but later on, the minigames will involve a time limit and too many observable nodes to inspect within that time limit. It then becomes crucial to understand how probability flows within a Bayesian network, and which nodes will actually let you know the values of the hidden nodes.
The story continues!
Short for an adult, face has boyish look, teenagerish clothes... yeah, he looks young!
He's a student!
...I feel like I’m overthinking things now.
...he’s looking at me.
I’m guessing he’s either waiting for me to respond, or there’s something to see behind me, and he’s actually looking past me. If there isn’t anything behind me, then I know that he must be waiting for me to respond.
Maybe there's a monster behind me, and he's paralyzed with fear! I should check that possibility before it eats me!
[You want to find out whether the boy is waiting for your reply or staring at a monster behind you. You know that he's looking at you, and your model of the world suggests that he will only look in your direction if he's waiting for you to reply, or if there's a monster behind you. So if there's no monster behind you, you know that he's waiting for you to reply!]
Slightly more complicated network, but still, there's only one option here. Oops, apparently the "Looks at you" node says it's an observable variable that you can right-click to observe, despite the fact that it's already been observed. I need to fix that.
Anyway, right-clicking on "Attacking monster" brings up a "Look behind you" option, which we'll choose.
You see nothing there. Besides trees, that is.
Boy: “Um, are you okay?”
“Yeah, sorry. I just… you were looking in my direction, and I wasn’t sure of whether you were expecting me to reply, or whether there was a monster behind me.”
He blinks.
Boy: “You thought that there was a reasonable chance for a monster to be behind you?”
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I’m not really sure of what the probability of a monster having snuck up behind me really should have been.
My studies have entirely focused on getting into this school, and Monsterology isn’t one of the subjects on the entrance exam!
I just went with a 50-50 chance since I didn’t know any better.
'Okay, look. Monsterology is my favorite subject. Monsters avoid the Academy, since it’s surrounded by a mystical protective field. There’s no chance of them getting even near! 0 percent chance.'
'Oh. Okay.'
[Your model of the world has been updated! The prior of the variable 'Monster Near The Academy' is now 0%.]
Then stuff happens and they go stand in line for the entrance exam or something. I haven't written this part. Anyway, then things get more exciting, for a wild monster appears!
Stuff happens
AAAAAAH! A MONSTER BEHIND ME!
Huh, the monster is carrying a sword.
Well, I may not have studied Monsterology, but I sure did study fencing!
[You draw your sword. Seeing this, the monster rushes at you.]
He looks like he's going to strike. But is it really a strike, or is it a feint?
If it's a strike, I want to block and counter-attack. But if it's a feint, that leaves him vulnerable to my attack.
I have to choose wisely. If I make the wrong choice, I may be dead.
What did my master say? If the opponent has at least two of dancing legs, an accelerating midbody, and ferocious eyes, then it's an attack!
Otherwise it's a feint! Quick, I need to read his body language before it's too late!
Now get to the second type of minigame! Here, you again need to discover the values of some number of hidden variables within a time limit, but here it is in order to find out the consequences of your decision. In this one, the consequence is simple - either you live or you die. I'll let the screenshot and tutorial text speak for themselves:
[Now for some actual decision-making! The node in the middle represents the monster's intention to attack (or to feint, if it's false). Again, you cannot directly observe his intention, but on the top row, there are things about his body language that signal his intention. If at least two of them are true, then he intends to attack.]
[Your possible actions are on the bottom row. If he intends to attack, then you want to block, and if he intends to feint, you want to attack. You need to inspect his body language and then choose an action based on his intentions. But hurry up! Your third decision must be an action, or he'll slice you in two!]
In reality, the top three variables are not really independent of each other. We want to make sure that the player can always win this battle despite only having three actions. That's two actions for inspecting variables, and one action for actually making a decision. So this battle is rigged: either the top three variables are all true, or they're all false.
...actually, now that I think of it, the order of the variables is wrong. Logically, the body language should be caused by the intention to attack, and not vice versa, so the arrows should point from the intention to body language. I'll need to change that. I got these mixed up because the prototypical exemplar of a decision minigame is one where you need to predict someone's reaction from their personality traits, and there the personality traits do cause the reaction. Anyway, I want to get this post written before I go to bed, so I won't change that now.
Right-clicking "Dancing legs", we now see two options besides "Never mind"!
We can find out the dancingness of the enemy's legs by thinking about our own legs - we are well-trained, so our legs are instinctively mirroring our opponent's actions to prevent them from getting an advantage over us - or by just instinctively feeling where they are, without the need to think about them! Feeling them would allow us to observe this node without spending an action.
Unfortunately, feeling them has "Fencing 2" as a prerequisite skill, and we don't have that. Neither could we have them, in this point of the game. The option is just there to let the player know that there are skills to be gained in this game, and make them look forward to the moment when they can actually gain that skill. As well as giving them an idea of how the skill can be used.
Anyway, we take a moment to think of our legs, and even though our opponent gets closer to us in that time, we realize that our legs our dancing! So his legs must be dancing as well!
With our insider knowledge, we now know that he's attacking, and we could pick "Block" right away. But let's play this through. The network has automatically recalculated the probabilities to reflect our increased knowledge, and is now predicting a 75% chance for our enemy to be attacking, and for "Blocking" to thus be the right decision to make.
Next we decide to find out what his eyes say, by matching our gaze with his. Again, there would be a special option that cost us no time - this time around, one enabled by Empathy 1 - but we again don't have that option.
Except that his gaze is so ferocious that we are forced to look away! While we are momentarily distracted, he closes the distance, ready to make his move. But now we know what to do... block!
Success!
Now the only thing that remains to do is to ask our new-found friend for an explanation.
"You told me there was a 0% chance of a monster near the academy!"
Boy: “Ehh… yeah. I guess I misremembered. I only read like half of our course book anyway, it was really boring.”
“Didn’t you say that Monsterology was your favorite subject?”
Boy: “Hey, that only means that all the other subjects were even more boring!”
“. . .”
I guess I shouldn’t put too much faith on what he says.
[Your model of the world has been updated! The prior of the variable 'Monster Near The Academy' is now 50%.]
[Your model of the world has been updated! You have a new conditional probability variable: 'True Given That The Boy Says It's True', 25%]
And that's all for now. Now that the basic building blocks are in place, future progress ought to be much faster.
Notes:
As you might have noticed, my "graphics" suck. A few of my friends have promised to draw art, but besides that, the whole generic Java look could go. This is where I was originally planning to put in the sentence "and if you're a Java graphics whiz and want to help fix that, the current source code is conveniently available at GitHub", but then getting things to his point took longer than I expected and I didn't have the time to actually figure out how the whole Eclipse-GitHub integration works. I'll get to that soon. Github link here!
I also want to make the nodes more informative - right now they only show their marginal probability. Ideally, clicking on them would expand them to a representation where you could visually see what components their probability composed of. I've got some scribbled sketches of what this should look like for various node types, but none of that is implemented yet.
I expect some of you to also note that the actual Bayes theorem hasn't shown up yet, at least in no form resembling the classic mammography problem. (It is used implicitly in the network belief updates, though.) That's intentional - there will be a third minigame involving that form of the theorem, but somehow it felt more natural to start this way, to give the player a rough feeling of how probability flows through Bayesian networks. Admittedly I'm not sure of how well that's happening so far, but hopefully more minigames should help the player figure it out better.
What's next? Once the main character (who needs a name) manages to get into the Academy, there will be a lot of social scheming, and many mysteries to solve in order for her to find out just what did happen to her brother... also, I don't mind people suggesting things, such as what could happen next, and what kinds of network configurations the character might face in different minigames.
(Also, everything that you've seen might get thrown out and rewritten if I decide it's no good. Let me know what you think of the stuff so far!)
[question] What edutainment apps do you recommend?
Follow up to: Rationality Games Apps
In the spirit of: Games for rationalists
Obvious candidates are
There are lots of low profile apps filed under learning in the app stores but most of this is crap and it takes lots of time to explore these.
I also found some recommendation for learning with Android apps and will point my son to these.
I'd like to hear what apps do you or yours children use. Which apps and esp. games do you recommend for future rationalists?
Estimation as a game
Developing rational patterns of thought in children is very important and I'm glad Gunnar brought that issue up.
I wanted to share with you some thoughts I have regarding estimation games.
From an early age I've been constantly calculating various kinds of estimates - e.g. "how many people live in this building", "how long will it take to cross the US on foot", "what's the height of that tower", "how many BMWs are manufactured annually" and so on.
I believe that practising this technique is not only fun but also helpful. Sometimes one has no way or time to acquire accurate information regarding something and even a rough estimate can be very valuable.
People are often surprised when they see me do it whereas for me it is completely natural. I think the reason is that I do it from a very early age.
I think it's easy and natural for children to grasp if this method is introduced through everyday experiences. By making this into a game children can gain intuitive understanding of quantitative techniques. I suspect many children can enjoy this kind of games.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject.
Do you remember yourself doing something like this? From what age? Do you practice anything similar with your children?
Games for Rationalists
Follow-up to: Fun and Games with Cognitive Biases
Related to: Rationality Games & Apps Brainstorming, Rationality and Video Games
Answering: Designing serious games - a request for help
Games on Lesswrong
Rational games or game ideas have been discussed or mentioned on lesswrong a few times:
Designing serious games - a request for help proposes to apply games for the rational cause. Fun and Games with Cognitive Biases plays (on a meta level) with concepts. Rationality Games & Apps Brainstorming urges for such games. Rationality and Video Games provides an example. Taboo is explicitly mentioned in http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/. Doing this with scientific concepts could make for a nice casual game at a LW meetup. http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ generallly urges for community building mechanism – and (social) games address this. A game that has been discussed extensively on lesswrong is Diplomacy
Introduction
I like to play games that are challenging and intellectually demanding. But I don't like to learn games that will gain nothing except the fun of learning and playing the game.
Games for rationalists should not only be fun. They should also train or teach something beyond the game. Games that don't are parasitic memes.
This post describe areas of rational thought addressed by games. By rationality I mean the LW view.
I list games suitable for getting acquainted with rational thinking. I list areas underrepresented by games and I give an elaborate example of a game suitable to such an area. I propose trying to invent games for these areas and sketch possible strategies.
To repeat I don't mean games that are just played frequently by rationalists or usually considered entertaining by rationalists (though they may). I mean games to train rationalists. Serious Games. To make it easy and fun to become a rationalist (or at least support such a cause).
Games supporting the acquisition of literacy and numeracy are out of scope here even though these are preconditions for more demanding concepts (and games). Also mostly out of scope are social and activity games (though these are be relevant to efficient group building) and games with a focus on motor ability (though such may make spatial or dynamical concepts more clear).
Outline
- I motivate the use of specifically designed games for (rational) education.
- I illustrate educational game theory with concrete examples.
- I argue for the applicability of games to some areas of rationality.
- I present a real game I invented and tested to address the overconfidence bias in particular.
Using and Abusing Curiosity
To use natural curiosity and to direct it to 'worthy' objectives has got the newfangled name edutainment. Well known examples from TV are Sesame Street and Mammutland (which is based on The Way Things Work. Examples of educational games are given below.
The opposite, where natural curiosity is diverted into cognitive dead ends and where attention is collected in trademarked walled gardens is called Marketing. An example is Pokemon where the cute animals engage the curiosity of children which learn lots of names and attributes – but none of these have any lasting cognitive use and all the accumulated knowledge can primarily be used for status and thus directing attention to the trademark owner in the end.
Rational parents have to counter marketing when educating their children. Competing with media is hard because it is omnipresent and not in the best interest of education. Possibly we should lobby against maleducation but that will not help now. Instead we have to turn to games competetive with Pokemon.
Educational Game Theory
Educational Game Theory names three approaches to educational games:
-
creation from scratch by educators
-
integrating off-the-shelf games
-
creating from scratch by the players (e.g. children)
An example of the first is Ökolopoly (English Ecopolicy) which has a strong focus on grand picture of complex systems. I'd really recommend it for children grade 6 and up (but use the card board version as the simple 'game mechanics' (connected lookup-tables) are inspectable there).
I will provide an example which I invented and tested myself later.
Examples of the second kind are e.g. playing Taboo with math words or playing Liar's Dice and calculating expected values. Much more will be listed below with a focus on specific concepts.
That children invent games all the time is no surprise. Because one natural aspect of games is that they support or stimulate learning most games invented by children are educational by nature.
To illustrate this I'd like to describe a game my oldest son (9 years) invented:
He calls it 3D-computer and it consists of a 'user interface' made of paper and plastics, a number of 'input devices' and a large playing area made of taped together sheets of paper with a plan of a city. The player (usually one of his younger brothers) sits at the 'controls' and e.g. steers a car on a racing track thru the city. He has to press left and right (and say so loud) and my oldest son will act out the operation of the 3D-computer by moving the cars accordingly.
Obviously this is modeled after real computer games but it requires significantly more abstraction and cooperation of the players. To build the 'game' he had to plan it and build corresponding pieces. He created a 'user interface' consisting of menues and sub menues (drawn on paper) for the possible games and options that can be played with the 3D-computer. It makes the logic of the game – its concepts – clear both in the planning and realization and in the acting too.
Concepts in Games
Concepts in Games
Any normal game requires some rational thinking, but there are some areas of rational thought that are less covered by games than others.
Game Theory
This lends itself naturally to games with clear concepts. The simplified games analysed in game theory can be easily readapted to playable games or parts thereof. Some of these are directly playable for school children. I played lots of these in a math course.
Game theoy obviously applies to most games, but the basic min-max principle is very clearly present in games that have a measurable of advantage; I identify the following kinds
- Distance of pieces from a finish on a game board (e.g. in the simple childrens games above
- Some in-game currency (examples: Monopoly)
- A winning criteria that includes a tally (example: Siedler von Catan)
In these cases there may be strategic effects that outweigh the measurable but in the long run 'more is better' and a higher value predicts a win well.
Probability Theory
Classical games with dice or shuffled cards surely build some intuition for probability theory which is present in most games in so far as some most games need some controlled random variables (aka dice or shuffled cards) to support the game semantics.
It is also present when simulating (or testing) games; the game state changes due to the game rules are implied stochastic processes.
Probability theory is relevant as games with numerous regular random events satisfy criteria of theorems of large number.
Examples for dice games with simple rules and clear concepts are Cross And Circle, Snake and Ladders. These illustrate basic concepts and reflection about strategies using solid terminology can teach children a lot about probability.
Intuition about different distributions resulting from superposition and their likelihood is fairly clearly present in Yahtzee.
Intuition about the law of large numbers (and updating due to new information) can be found in an entertaining way in Liar's dice.
Anecdote: As a child I was a sore loser. Seems that at least one board flew through the room. Not that I'd lose that often, quite the contrary, but if...
I couldn't deal with chance playing tricks on me. Later I always tried to limit the effect of the dice. Both by hedging or by just changing the game rules beforehand. Once I printed an 'improved' list dice throws that were overly regular.
Decision theory
Games that are not based on skill necessarily involve decisions by the players. These fall into three categories
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Decisions under certainty – games are seldom certain, but in some cases decisions can be modeled as if the game environment were fixed and then maximizing over multidimensional ratings of the game state (some measurables like win points)
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Decisions under risk – when some decisions involve probabilistic losses or gains
- Decisions under uncertainty – if some decisions have uncertain consequences either due to unknown probabilities of game events or due to the other players.
Clear decision strategies or concepts are not so easy come by. Most games imply lots of decisions but effective strategies are seldom obvious.
Games where subjective valuations are rampant are trading cards (e.g. Pokemon or currently Star Wars) these are no simple trades but often involve a risk (gaining certain cards vs. losing some other cards due to a random or skill based process). What is unclear is whether there are any lessons learned from doing these games as the decisions are mostly individual and the conditions of the transactions vary from trade to trade so general insights are unlikely.
Cognitive Science
Cognitive biases can be harvested for game aspects worth to address. I will demonstrate this with the Overconfidence Effect and with miscalibration of probabilities particular which is the main focus of the 'estimation game' presented below. I will cover other biases in more detail in a separate post.
Humans are very good at detecting cheaters this is well known since the work of Cosmides and Tooby.This applies to real life as well as games. It would be interesting to develop games that try to move smoothly from obvious rules to abstract rules and try to train to perceive this as cheating.
Math and Logic
Math in general plays a role in most games. Correct logical inferences (even if done by intuition) train propositional logic (though a game which involves using modus ponens on unusual conditions would surely be a good idea).
A very nice and pure example using Set Theory even in its name is Set.
Looneylabs has a lot of games (or game material) suitable for logic. A very nice game building on this is Zendo.
Estimation Game 'Who guesses best'
Now I'd like to present an example of a game which was created to explicitly addresses a cognitive bias – the overconfidence bias – which is hard to overcome even for scientifically schooled persons explicitly briefed in this bias.
When I read chapter 21 by M. Alpertand H. Raiffa in Judgement under uncertainty - heuristics and biases 1982 by Kahneman et al (pages 294 – 305) see this Google Books link and this less wrong review.
I couldn't believe that it could be that hard to calibrate well and I decided to test this on myself and on others in a comparable setting (kind of privately reproducing the study). This developed into a game that was since played about 5 times with a total of about 20 person and 30 questions (thus much less than in the cited study). The results were as expected – basically. A significant trend was visible in the test games and also in the main game rounds during a large birthday party. I had improved the 'game chart' and scoring rules and this made the effect clearer and the calibration of most players improved quickly. The game is simple enough to be played by a smart eight year old.
The game chart can be downloaded here (on page 2 in english).
Estimation Game Rules
This is basically an estimation game – but with some extensions.
The Questions
First a number of questions about quantities to guess are needed.
Each quantity should have an exact value that has a believable source but is somewhat unusual such that most players will not know the value.
In a scholarly context the question should name a study or method and date of determination of the quantity. E.g. for the question “How many residents live in Hamburg, Germany?” the context could be: “from wikipedia: official census of 2012 determined via population register”. And for the trivial question “How many lentils are in this jar?” the context could be: “This morning I filled the jar with green lentils, weight the content, counted and weighed a sample and calculated the total number.”
Example questions:
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Number of steps to the next underground station.
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Number of lentils in a jar.
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Amount of rain per square meter per year in Jerusalem in 2001.
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Number of files on my PC as reported by ls -R this morning.
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How long (days) was the first voyage of James cook into the south seas?
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Total egg production in th U.S. In 1965. (this is from the Alpert Study)
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Toll collections of the Panama Canal in 1967. (dito)
The questions can be provided by the host (which has the disadvantage that host cannot take part in the game for most questions). The better idea is to have each player provide one to three questions.
Guesstimation
Each question is now dealt with as follows:
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The question is read out loud. If needed, detail questions about the context of the question are answered.
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All players individually guesstimate the true value of the quantity in question. The number is written into the field in the middle below the green area. If the number is from one of the players he/she writes the correct number as his 'guess'.
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Each player now considers what the other players might estimate. Values deemed to be definitely out of the range become the min/max values and written below the red/yellow border. Values deemed to be typical form the majority range and are written below the yellow/green border.
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Points are awarded as follows:
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For the best guess you get N points, for the next-best N/2, then N/4 (rounding down).... If multiple players are equally near, points are added and split. Numbers supplied by a players are excluded from scoring.
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For the green area you get N/2 points if it contains exactly N/2 numbers (including your own) for each more or less you get one point less (rounding up).
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For the yellow area the player with the smallest range which still contains all guesses gets N+1 points, the next-best N/2+1 (and so on, rounding down).
Numbers falling on a boundary are scored to the players advantage.
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Example:
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For the number of lentils in the jar you estimate 1300. And you guess that half of the guesses fall within 500 and 2000. You also assume that nobody will believe less then 100 or more than 10000.
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It turns out that the other 6 players guessed 750, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2820, 4000.
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You write 750, 1000, 1500 and 2000 into your green area. You write 2800 and 4000 into the right yellow area. Congratulations: No numbers fell into a red area.
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The correct answer is revealed: 2800. You can circle it in the green area.
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The player guessing 2000 (distance 820) gets 7 points, the player guessing 4000 (distance 1180) gets 3 points floor(7/2), the player guessing 1500 (distance 1320) gets 1 point floor(7/4). For your 1300 you and the remaining players get nothing (7/8<1).
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You have got 4 numbers in your green area (you decide to include 2000). 4=ceil(7/2) is the optimum number of entries so you get 4 points. Had you excluded 2000 you'd got 3 points. If only your own number or if all 7 numbers were included you'd got 1 booby point.
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All the numbers are in your min-max-range, so you get at least 1 point. Lets assume that your range of 9900 is the second smallest of those containing all numbers. This nets you an additional floor(7/2)=3 points.
May sound complicated. A summary of these rules is part of the game chart. The chart is mostly self-explanatory and even school children can fill-out the chart after one round of explanation.
Gaming the Rules
It is possible to game the rules by e.g. using absurd guesses to bomb the max-range of the other players. The scoring is chosen to make this a losing strategy. Good guesses and good majority bounds score higher than the points reaped from being the only one with a valid max-range. And players can hedge against bombing nonetheless (in a way these are black swan events and thus interesting in their own right).
Not quite Overconfidence
This game doesn't directly address the Overconfidence Bias. To do so the players would have to guess the range of their own guesses. Getting the range of ones own guesses via this kind of game takes much longer (times the number of players). The game works so well because it forces you to take the outside view. You have to consider what the other players might not know and then getting immediate feedback about ones own performance via
a) Distance from the truth of your own guess.
b) In extreme cases exclamation from the other players whose ranges were shredded.
It is critical to make the leap that your own guesses are as (over)confident as those of the others.
Variants
It is quite possible to play a stricter version where you guess your own ranges with the same game chart. The following differences are necessary:
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Instead of the majority range you have to guess the range into which the true value will fall mostly. Mostly meaning on half of all questions this range should actually contain the value.
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Instead of the maximum range you have to guess the range into which the true value will always fall.
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Don't write the numbers of the other players into the colored area.
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Use a singe color strip for all of your own guesses. Just make a mark in the area where the actual value lay in the end.
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Points are awarded only at the end of the game.
This has the disadvantages of taking much longer and with the above simple rules it is too easy to game the rules (e.g. by using absurdly large or small ranges at the end of the game to ensure the required counts).
But this can be used after a few games to test whether you can make the leap to take the outside view on your own guesses. It can be done alone. Just think of a few arbitrary quantities and then research them later (on danger of choosing only quantities you can provide sensible estimates for).
Anchoring
Obviously your ranges are anchored to your guess. It is possible to add a small tweak to change the anchoring (disclaimer: I didn't try this): Allow the person knowing the correct answer to supply any example number and say it out load beforehand. This will provide another anchor (obviously anchored to the correct number somehow).
Motivation
The test-games were fun. OK. The game may not be fun for everybody. My acquaintances are mostly smart and well-educated. But even my 8 year old son liked it (and scored in the middle range of 10 players). It is fun especially if people come with their own individual questions. The resulting discussions about individual (mis)reasoning is also often insightful and a nice ice-breaker.
The performance of the players definitely improved.
Friends who are teachers asked me for the material and used it in highschool.
I hope this is is step into the right direction.
I'd like to close with an anecdote: I still try to win any game that I play and my friends know it. Sometimes, especially after I play unusual or when explaining tricks and then losing anyway I get remarks about it obviously not helping. To that my reply mostly is: I maximize my chances on infinitely many runs. So in the end I learned to lose.
The Up-Goer Five Game: Explaining hard ideas with simple words
xkcd's Up-Goer Five comic gave technical specifications for the Saturn V rocket using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language.
This seemed to me and Briénne to be a really fun exercise, both for tabooing one's words and for communicating difficult concepts to laypeople. So why not make a game out of it? Pick any tough, important, or interesting argument or idea, and use this text editor to try to describe what you have in mind with extremely common words only.
This is challenging, so if you almost succeed and want to share your results, you can mark words where you had to cheat in *italics*. Bonus points if your explanation is actually useful for gaining a deeper understanding of the idea, or for teaching it, in the spirit of Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable.
As an example, here's my attempt to capture the five theses using only top-thousand words:
- Intelligence explosion: If we make a computer that is good at doing hard things in lots of different situations without using much stuff up, it may be able to help us build better computers. Since computers are faster than humans, pretty soon the computer would probably be doing most of the work of making new and better computers. We would have a hard time controlling or understanding what was happening as the new computers got faster and grew more and more parts. By the time these computers ran out of ways to quickly and easily make better computers, the best computers would have already become much much better than humans at controlling what happens.
- Orthogonality: Different computers, and different minds as a whole, can want very different things. They can want things that are very good for humans, or very bad, or anything in between. We can be pretty sure that strong computers won't think like humans, and most possible computers won't try to change the world in the way a human would.
- Convergent instrumental goals: Although most possible minds want different things, they need a lot of the same things to get what they want. A computer and a human might want things that in the long run have nothing to do with each other, but have to fight for the same share of stuff first to get those different things.
- Complexity of value: It would take a huge number of parts, all put together in just the right way, to build a computer that does all the things humans want it to (and none of the things humans don't want it to).
- Fragility of value: If we get a few of those parts a little bit wrong, the computer will probably make only bad things happen from then on. We need almost everything we want to happen, or we won't have any fun.
If you make a really strong computer and it is not very nice, you will not go to space today.
Other ideas to start with: agent, akrasia, Bayes' theorem, Bayesianism, CFAR, cognitive bias, consequentialism, deontology, effective altruism, Everett-style ('Many Worlds') interpretations of quantum mechanics, entropy, evolution, the Great Reductionist Thesis, halting problem, humanism, law of nature, LessWrong, logic, mathematics, the measurement problem, MIRI, Newcomb's problem, Newton's laws of motion, optimization, Pascal's wager, philosophy, preference, proof, rationality, religion, science, Shannon information, signaling, the simulation argument, singularity, sociopathy, the supernatural, superposition, time, timeless decision theory, transfinite numbers, Turing machine, utilitarianism, validity and soundness, virtue ethics, VNM-utility
240 questions for your utility function
A game comparing intrinsic values can approximate a person's utility function.
The Fundamental Question - Rationality computer game design
I sometimes go around saying that the fundamental question of rationality is Why do you believe what you believe?
I was much impressed when they finally came out with a PC version of DragonBox, and I got around to testing it on some children I knew. Two kids, one of them four and the other eight years old, ended up blazing through several levels of solving first-degree equations while having a lot of fun doing so, even though they didn't know what it was that they were doing. That made me think that there has to be some way of making a computer game that would similarly teach rationality skills at the 5-second level. Some game where you would actually be forced to learn useful skills if you wanted to make progress.
After playing around with some ideas, I hit upon the notion of making a game centered around the Fundamental Question. I'm not sure whether this can be made to work, but it seems to have promise. The basic idea: you are required to figure out the solution to various mysteries by collecting various kinds of evidence. Some of the sources of evidence will be more reliable than others. In order to hit upon the correct solution, you need to consider where each piece of evidence came from, and whether you can rely on it.
Gameplay example
Now, let's go into a little more detail. Let's suppose that the game has a character called Bob. Bob tells you that tomorrow, eight o'clock, there will be an assassination attempt on Market Square. The fact that Bob has told you this is evidence for the claim being true, so the game automatically records the fact that you have such a piece of evidence, and that it came from Bob.
(Click on the pictures in case you don't see them properly.)
But how does Bob know that? You ask, and it turns out that Alice told him. So next, you go and ask Alice. Alice is confused and says that she never said anything about any assassination attempt: she just said that something big is going to be happen at the Market Square at that time, she heard it from the Mayor. The game records two new pieces of evidence: Alice's claim of something big happening at the Market Square tomorrow (which she heard from the Mayor), and her story of what she actually told Bob. Guess that Bob isn't a very reliable source of evidence: he has a tendency to come up with fancy invented details.
Or is he? After all, your sole knowledge about Bob being unreliable is that Alice claims she never said what Bob says she said. But maybe Alice has a grudge against Bob, and is intentionally out to make everyone disbelieve him. Maybe it's Alice who's unreliable. The evidence that you have is compatible with both hypotheses. At this point, you don't have enough information to decide between them, but the game lets you experiment with setting either of them as "true" and seeing the implications of this on your belief network. Or maybe they're both true - Bob is generally unreliable, and Alice is out to discredit him. That's another possibility that you might want to consider. In any case, the claim that there will be an assassination tomorrow isn't looking very likely at the moment.
Actually, having the possibility for somebody lying should probably be a pretty late-game thing, as it makes your belief network a lot more complicated, and I'm not sure whether this thing should display numerical probabilities at all. Instead of having to juggle the hypotheses of "Alice lied" and "Bob exaggerates things", the game should probably just record the fact that "Bob exaggerates things". But I spent a bunch of time making these pictures, and they do illustrate some of the general principles involved, so I'll just use them for now.
Game basics
So, to repeat the basic premise of the game, in slightly more words this time around: your task is to figure out something, and in order to do so, you need to collect different pieces of evidence. As you do so, the game generates a belief network showing the origin and history of the various pieces of evidence that you've gathered. That much is done automatically. But often, the evidence that you've gathered is compatible with many different hypotheses. In those situations, you can experiment with different ways of various hypotheses being true or false, and the game will automatically propagate the consequences of that hypothetical through your belief network, helping you decide what angle you should explore next.
Of course, people don't always remember the source of their knowledge, or they might just appeal to personal experiences. Or they might lie about the sources, though that will only happen at the more advanced levels.
As you proceed in the game, you will also be given access to more advanced tools that you can use for making hypothetical manipulations to the belief network. For example, it may happen that many different characters say that armies of vampire bats tend to move about at full moon. Since you hear that information from many different sources, it seems reliable. But then you find out that they all heard it from a nature documentary on TV that aired a few weeks back. This is reflected in your belief graph, as the game modifies it to show that all of those supposedly independent sources can actually be tracked back to a single one. That considerably reduces the reliability of the information.
But maybe you were already suspecting that the sources might not be independent? In that case, it would have been nice if the belief graph interface would let you postulate this beforehand, and see how big of an effect it would make on the plausibility of the different hypotheses if they were in fact reliant on each other. Once your character learns the right skills, it becomes possible to also add new hypothetical connections to the belief graph, and see how this would influence your beliefs. That will further help you decide what possibilities to explore and verify.
Because you can't explore every possible eventuality. There's a time limit: after a certain amount of moves, a bomb will go off, the aliens will invade, or whatever.
The various characters are also more nuanced than just "reliable" or "not reliable". As you collect information about the various characters, you'll figure out their mindware, motivations, and biases. Somebody might be really reliable most of the time, but have strong biases when it comes to politics, for example. Others are out to defame others, or invent fancy details to all the stories. If you talk to somebody you don't have any knowledge about yet, you can set a prior on the extent that you rely on their information, based on your experiences with other people.
You also have another source of evidence: your own intuitions and experience. As you get into various situations, a source of evidence that's labeled simply "your brain" will provide various gut feelings and impressions about things. The claim that Alice presented doesn't seem to make sense. Bob feels reliable. You could persuade Carol to help you if you just said this one thing. But in what situations, and for what things, can you rely on your own brain? What are your own biases and problems? If you have a strong sense of having heard something at some point, but can't remember where it was, are you any more reliable than anyone else who can't remember the source of their information? You'll need to figure all of that out.
As the game progresses to higher levels, your own efforts will prove insufficient for analyzing all the necessary information. You'll have to recruit a group of reliable allies, who you can trust to analyze some of the information on their own and report the results to you accurately. Of course, in order to make better decisions, they'll need you to tell them your conclusions as well. Be sure not to report as true things that you aren't really sure about, or they will end up drawing the wrong conclusions and focusing on the wrong possibilities. But you do need to condense your report somewhat: you can't just communicate your entire belief network to them.
Hopefully, all of this should lead to player learning on a gut level things like:
- Consider the origin of your knowledge: Obvious.
- Visualizing degrees of uncertainty: In addition to giving you a numerical estimate about the probability of something, the game also color-codes the various probabilities and shows the amount of probability mass associated with your various beliefs.
- Considering whether different sources really are independent: Some sources which seem independent won't actually be that, and some which seem dependent on each other won't be.
- Value of information: Given all the evidence you have so far, if you found out X, exactly how much would it change your currently existing beliefs? You can test this and find out, and then decide whether it's worth finding out.
- Seek disconfirmation: A lot of things that seem true really aren't, and acting on flawed information can cost you.
- Prefer simpler theories: Complex, detailed hypotheses are more likely to be wrong in this game as well.
- Common biases: Ideally, the list of biases that various characters have is derived from existing psychological research on the topic. Some biases are really common, others are more rare.
- Epistemic hygiene: Pass off wrong information to your allies, and it'll cost you.
- Seek to update your beliefs: The game will automatically update your belief network... to some extent. But it's still possible for you to assign mutually exclusive events probabilities that sum to more than 1, or otherwise have conflicting or incoherent beliefs. The game will mark these with a warning sign, and it's up to you to decide whether this particular inconsistency needs to be resolved or not.
- Etc etc.
Design considerations
It's not enough for the game to be educational: if somebody downloads the game because it teaches rationality skills, that's great, but we want people to also play it because it's fun. Some principles that help ensure that, as well as its general utility as an educational aid, include:
- Provide both short- and medium-term feedback: Ideally, there should be plenty of hints for how to find out the truth about something by investigating just one more thing: then the player can find out whether your guess was correct. It's no fun if the player has to work through fifty decisions before finding out whether they made the right move: they should get constant immediate feedback. At the same time, the player's decisions should be building up to a larger goal, with uncertainty about the overall goal keeping them interested.
- Don't overwhelm the player: In a game like this, it would be easy to throw a million contradictory pieces of evidence at the player, forcing them to go through countless of sources of evidence and possible interactions and have no clue of what they should be doing. But the game should be manageable. Even if it looks like there is a huge messy network of countless pieces of contradictory evidence, it should be possible to find the connections which reveal the network to be relatively simple after all. (This is not strictly realistic, but necessary for making the game playable.)
- Introduce new gameplay concepts gradually: Closely related to the previous item. Don't start out with making the player deal with every single gameplay concept at once. Instead, start them out in a trusted and safe environment where everyone is basically reliable, and then begin gradually introducing new things that they need to take into account.
- No tedium: A game is a series of interesting decisions. The game should never force the player to do anything uninteresting or tedious. Did Alice tell Bob something? No need to write that down, the game keeps automatic track of it. From the evidence that has been gathered so far, is it completely obvious what hypothesis is going to be right? Let the player mark that as something that will be taken for granted and move on.
- No glued-on tasks: A sign of a bad educational game is that the educational component is glued on to the game (or vice versa). Answer this exam question correctly, and you'll get to play a fun action level! There should be none of that - the educational component should be an indistinguishable part of the game play.
- Achievement, not fake achievement: Related to the previous point. It would be easy to make a game that wore the attire of rationality, and which used concepts like "probability theory", and then when your character leveled up he would get better probability attacks or whatever. And you'd feel great about your character learning cool stuff, while you yourself learned nothing. The game must genuinely require the player to actually learn new skills in order to get further.
- Emotionally compelling: The game should not be just an abstract intellectual exercise, but have an emotionally compelling story as well. Your choices should feel like they matter, and characters should be in risk of dying if you make the wrong decisions.
- Teach true things: Hopefully, the players should take the things that they've learned from the game and apply them to their daily lives. That means that we have a responsibility not to teach them things which aren't actually true.
- Replayable: Practice makes perfect. At least part of the game world needs to be randomly generated, so that the game can be replayed without a risk of it becoming boring because the player has memorized the whole belief network.
What next?
What you've just read is a very high-level design, and a quite incomplete one at that: I've spoken on the need to have "an emotionally compelling story", but said nothing about the story or the setting. This should probably be something like a spy or detective story, because that's thematically appropriate for a game which is about managing information; and it might be best to have it in a fantasy setting, so that you can question the widely-accepted truths of that setting without needing to get on anyone's toes by questioning widely-accepted truths of our society.
But there's still a lot of work that remains to be done with regard to things like what exactly does the belief network look like, what kinds of evidence can there be, how does one make all of this actually be fun, and so on. I mentioned the need to have both short- and medium-term feedback, but I'm not sure of how that could be achieved, or whether this design lets you achieve it at all. And I don't even know whether the game should show explicit probabilities.
And having a design isn't enough: the whole thing needs to be implemented as well, preferably while it's still being designed in order to take advantage of agile development techniques. Make a prototype, find some unsuspecting testers, spring it on them, revise. And then there are the graphics and music, things for which I have no competence for working on.
I'll probably be working on this in my spare time - I've been playing with the idea of going to the field of educational games at some point, and want the design and programming experience. If anyone feels like they could and would want to contribute to the project, let me know.
EDIT: Great to see that there's interest! I've created a mailing list for discussing the game. It's probably easiest to have the initial discussion here, and then shift the discussion to the list.
Rationality Games & Apps Brainstorming
Last month, mobile gaming superstar Angry Birds was out-sold in some countries by DragonBox, a kids game in which players solve alegbra equations.
How does the game work? Jonathan Liu explains:
There are five “worlds,” each with twenty levels, and as you progress through the levels the “dragons” hatch and grow into their full-sized versions. While this in itself has nothing to do with algebra, I mention this because my kids love this. It’s a very tiny incentive (along with earning stars) but they really want to beat the next level to watch the dragon grow into its next form. I was told that the dragons were all drawn by a fourteen-year-old girl, and they’re a lot of fun. (They aren’t all typical dragons — One starts off more like a fish, one looks like a squid, and so on.)
You are presented with a big screen with two trays, each containing a number of “cards” with different images on it. Somewhere on the screen there will be a little box with a star on it, sparkling and glowing. The app gives very minimal instructions in a hand-written font with arrows pointing to relevant spots on the screen, but it tells you to get the box by itself. At first you do this simply by tapping the green spirally cards, which vanish when you tap them. Then, you’ll start to get some “night” versions of cards — drag these onto the “day” versions and they become green swirls, which you already know how to handle.
After you’ve gotten past several levels of moving cards around and tapping on swirls, you’ll get a few cards down at the bottom which you can drag onto the trays — but whenever you drag a card onto one side, you have to also drag a copy to the other side as well. (This, of course, simulates adding the same number to both sides.) And then, a few levels on, you learn that you can flip these extra cards from day to night (and vice versa) before dragging them onto the trays.
As the game progresses, you’ll start seeing cards that are above and below each other, with a bar in the middle — and you’ll learn to cancel these out by dragging one onto the other, which then turns into a one-dot. And you’ll learn that a one-dot vanishes when you drag it onto a card it’s attached to (with a little grey dot between them). These, of course, are fractions — multiplication and division — but you don’t need to know that to play the game, either.

The key to DragonBox's success is not that it's the best algebra tutorial available, but rather that it's actually fun for its target audience to play.
Others have noticed the potential of "computer-assisted education" before. Aubrey Daniels writes:
When you analyze [video games], you will see that the player is clear about what is expected of him, that [the] player's behavior is continually measured, and [that] the player is provided with feedback so he knows what the measurements reveal about his performance. Finally, and most importantly, as he plays the game, the player receives high rates of reinforcement which motivate him to play the game over and over again. In fact, reinforcement occurs up to 100 times a minute.
Remember what works in reinforcement: Small reinforcements are fine, but the reinforcer should immediately follow the target behavior, and it should be conditional on the specific behavior you want to strengthen.
Video games are perfect for that! Little hits of reinforcement can be given many times a minute, conditional on exactly the kind of behavior your want to reinforce, and conditional on exactly the behavior you want to reinforce.
DragonBox is just a particularly successful implementation of this insight.
One of the goals for the Center for Applied Rationality is to develop rationality games and apps. But it's tricky to think of how to make addictive games that actually teach rationality skills. So I'd like to provide a place for people to brainstorm ideas about what would make an addictive and instructive rationality game.
See also: Rationality and Video Games, Gamification and Rationality Training, Raytheon to Develop Rationality-Training Games.
Euclidean - Computer Graphics Breakthrough
A 9-person Australian company called Euclidean has a new software technology that blows all the previously-believed limitations of real-time rendering right out the window.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVB1ayT6Fdc
It really makes you appreciate the phrase "efficient use of resources." Their tech demo is mind-bogglingly impressive all by itself, but the further implications of what is actually possible with current computer hardware are reality shaking.
It really makes me wonder where else (besides AI) current technology is vastly undershooting its potential in a similar way, using brute force (successfully or unsuccessfully) to accomplish something when there's a vastly more efficient way to do it that nobody's thought of yet.
Hofstadter's Superrationality
Possibly the main and original inspiration for Yudkowsky's various musings on what advanced game theories should do (eg. cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma) is a set of essays penned by Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach) 1983. Unfortunately, they were not online and only available as part of a dead-tree collection. This is unfortunate. Fortunately the collection is available through the usual pirates as a scan, and I took the liberty of transcribing by hand the relevant essays with images, correcting errors, annotating with links, etc: http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter
The 3 essays:
- discuss the Prisoner's dilemma, the misfortune of defection, what sort of cooperative reasoning would maximize returns in a souped-up Prisoner's dilemma, and then offers a public contest
- then we learn the results of the contest, and a discussion of ecology and the tragedy of the commons
- finally, Hofstadter gives an extended parable about cooperation in the face of nuclear warfare; it is fortunate for us that it applies to most existential threats as well
I hope you find them educational. I am not 100% confident of the math transcriptions since the original ebook messed some of them up; if you find any apparent mistakes or typos, please leave comments.
King Under The Mountain: Adventure Log + Soundtrack
With the help of many dedicated Less Wrongers (players muflax, Karl, Charlie, and Emile; musicians Mike Blume and Alicorn, technical support Ari Rahikkala) we have successfully completed what is, as far as I know, the first actual Dungeons and Discourse adventure anywhere. Except we're not calling it that, because I don't have the rights to use that name. Though it's not precisely rationality related, I hope it is all right if I post a summary of the adventure by popular demand.
Also, at some point it turned into a musical. The first half of the songs are only available as lyrics at the moment, but Alicorn and MBlume very kindly produced the second half as real music, which I've uploaded to YouTube and linked at the bottom of this post (skip to it now).
THE ADVENTURE
BACKGROUND
The known world has many sects and religions, but all contain shadowy legends of two primeval deities: Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom; and Aleithos, God of Truth. When Sophia announced her plan to create thinking, rational beings, Aleithos objected, declaring that they would fall into error and produce endless falsehoods. Sophia ignored her brother's objections and created humankind, who named the world after their goddess-mother. But Aleithos' fears proved well-founded: humankind fell into error and produced endless falsehoods, and their clamor drove the God of Truth insane.
The once mighty Aleithos fell from heaven, and all of his angelic servants turned into Paradox Beasts, arachnoid monstrosities that sought and devoured those who challenged the laws of logic. Over centuries, most of the Paradox Beasts were banished, but Aleithos himself remained missing. And though thousands of seekers set off to all the corners of the world in search of Truth, the Mad God keeps his own counsel, if He still even exists at all.
The Truth God's madness had one other effect; the laws of physics, once inviolable, turned fluid, and those sufficiently advanced in the study of Truth gained apparently magical abilities. With knowledge literally being power, great philosophers and scientists built mighty cities and empires.
In the middle of the Cartesian Plain at the confluence of the rivers Ordinate and Abcissa stands the mightiest of all, the imperial city of Origin. At the very center of the city stands the infinitely tall Z-Axis Tower, on whose bottom floor lives the all-seeing Wizard of 0=Z. Surrounding the Tower are a host of colleges and universities that attract the greatest scholars from all over Origin, all gathered in service to the great project to find Truth.
Into the city comes Lady Cerune Russell, an exotic noblewoman from far-off parts seeking great thinkers to join her on a dangerous adventure. Four scholars flock to her banner. Nomophilos the Elder the Younger (Emile) is a political scientist studying the central role of laws in creating a just society. Phaidros (muflax) is a zealous Protestant theologian trying to meld strains of thought as disparate as Calvinism, Gnosticism, and W.L. Craig's apologetics. Ephraim (Charlie) is a Darwinian biologist with strong leftist sympathies and an experimental streak that sometimes gets him in trouble. And Macx (Karl) is a quiet but very precise logician with a talent for puzzles.
Cerune explains to the Original scholars that she is the last living descendant of Good King Bertrand, historic ruler of the land of Russellia far to the west. Russellia was the greatest nation in the world until two hundred years ago, when a cataclysm destroyed the entire kingdom in a single day and night. Now the skies above Russellia are dark and filled with choking ash, monsters roam its plains, and the Good King is said to be locked in a magical undying sleep deep beneath the Golden Mountain in the kingdom's center. Though many have traveled to Russellia in search of answers, none have returned alive; Cerune, armed with secret information from the Turing Oracle which she refuses to share, thinks she can do better. The four Originals agree to protect her as she makes the dangerous journey to the Golden Mountain to investigate the mysterious disaster and perhaps lift the curse. Cerune gives them a day in Origin to prepare for the journey.
CHAPTER ONE: ORIGIN
The party skip the city's major attractions, including the Z-Axis Tower and the Hagia Sophia, in favor of more academic preparations: a visit to the library to conduct research, and a shopping trip to Barnes & Aristoi Booksellers, where they purchase reading material for the journey ahead. Here, they find a map of the lands on the road to Russellia, including the unpleasant-sounding Slough of Despotism and the Shadow City of Xar-Morgoloth, whose very name inexplicably chills the air when spoken aloud. After a long discussion on how this thermodynamic-defying effect could probably be used to produce unlimited free energy, they return to more immediate matters and head to the armory to pick up some weapons - a trusty isoceles triangle for Nomophilos, a bow for Macx - before the stores close for the evening. After a final night in Origin, they meet Cerune at the city gates and set off.
They originally intend to stick to the course of the Abcissa, but it is flooding its banks and Cerune recommends crossing the river into Platonia at the Pons Asinorum. After being attacked by a Euclidean Elemental charged with letting no one enter who does not know geometry, they reach the other bank and find a strange old man, raving incomprehensibly. His turns of phrase start to make sense only after the party realizes that he is speaking as if he - and all objects - have no consistent identity.
In his roundabout way, he identifies himself as Heraclitus, the Fire Mage, one of the four great Elemental Mages of Platonia. Many years ago, he crossed into Origin on some errand, only to be ambushed by his arch-enemy, the Water Mage Thales. Thales placed a curse on Heraclitus that he could never cross the same river twice, trapping him on the wrong side of the Abcissa and preventing his return to Platonia. In order to dispel the curse, Heraclitus finds a loophole in the curse: he convinces himself that objects have no permanent identity, and so he can never cross the same river twice since it is not the same river and he is not the same man. Accepting this thesis, he crosses the Abcissa without incident - only to find that his new metaphysics of identity prevents him from forming goals, executing long-term plans, or doing anything more complicated than sitting by the riverbank and eating the fish that swim by.
This sets off a storm of conversation, as each member of the party tries to set Heraclitus right in their own way; Phaidros by appealing to God as a final arbiter of identity, Macx and Nomophilos by arguing that duty is independent of identity and that Heraclitus has a duty to his family and followers. Unfortunately, they make a logical misstep and end out convincing Heraclitus that it is illogical from his perspective to hold conversation; this ends the debate. And as the five philosophers stand around discussing what to do, they are ambushed by a party of assassins, who shoot poisoned arrows at them from a nearby knoll.
Outnumbered and outflanked, the situation seems hopeless, until Macx notices several of the attackers confused and unwilling to attack. With this clue, he identifies them as Buridan's Assassins, who in the presence of two equally good targets will hesitate forever, unable to choose: he yells to his friends to stand with two or more adventurers equidistant from each assassin, and sure enough, this paralyzes the archers and allows the party some breathing space.
But when a second group of assassins arrives to join the first, the end seems near - until Heraclitus, after much pondering, decides to accept his interlocutors' arguments for object permanence and joins in the battle. His fire magic makes short work of the remaining assassins, and when the battle is over, he thanks them and gives a powerful magic item as a gift to each. Then he disappears in a burst of flame after warning his new friends to beware the dangers ahead.
The party searches the corpses of the assassins - who all carry obsidian coins marked PLXM - and then camp for the night on the fringe of the Slough of Despotism.
CHAPTER TWO: THE SLOUGH OF DESPOTISM
The Slough of Despotism is a swamp unfortunately filled with allegators, giant reptiles who thrive on moral superiority and on casting blame. They accuse our heroes of trespassing on their property; our heroes counter that the allegators, who do not have a state to enforce property rights, cannot have a meaningful concept of property. The allegators threaten to form a state, but before they can do so the party manages to turn them against each other by pointing out where their property rights conflict; while the allegators argue, the adventurers sneak off.
They continue through the swamp, braving dense vegetation, giant snakes, and more allegators (who are working on the whole state thing; the party tells them that they're too small and disorganized to be a real state, and that they would have to unite the entire allegator nation under a mutually agreed system of laws) before arriving at an old barrow tomb. Though four of the five adventurers want to leave well enough alone, Ephraim's experimental spirits gets the better of him, and he enters the mound. Its local Barrow Wight has long since departed, but he has left behind a suit of Dead Wight Mail, which confers powerful bonuses on Conservatives and followers of the Right-Hand Path. Nomophilos, the party's Conservative, is all set to take the Mail when Phaidros objects that it is morally wrong to steal from the dead; this sparks a fight that almost becomes violent before Nomo finally backs down; with a sigh of remorse, he leaves the magic item where he found it.
Beyond the barrow tomb lies the domain of the Hobbesgoblins, the mirror image of the Allegators in that they have a strong - some might say dictatorial - state under the rule of their unseen god-king, Lord-Over-All. They are hostile to any foreigners who refuse to swear allegiance to their ruler, but after seeing an idol of the god-king - a tentacled monstrosity bearing more than a passing resemblance to Cthulhu - our heroes are understandably reluctant to do so. As a result, the Hobbesgoblins try to refuse them passage through their capital city of Malmesbury on the grounds that, without being subordinated to Lord-Over-All or any other common ruler, the adventurers are in a state of nature relative to the Hobbesgoblins and may rob, murder, or otherwise exploit them. The Hobbesgoblins don't trust mere oaths or protestations of morality - but Nomophilos finally comes up with a compromise that satisfies them. He offers them a hostage in return for their good behavior, handing them his pet tortoise Xeno. This satisfies the Hobbesgoblins as assurance of their good behavior, and the party passes through Malmesbury without incident.
On the far side of Malmesbury they come to a great lake, around which the miasmas of the swamp seem to swirl expectantly. On the shore of the lake lives Theseus with his two ships. Theseus tells his story: when he came of age, he set off on a trading expedition upon his father's favorite ship. His father made him swear to return the ship intact, but after many years of travel, Theseus realized that every part of the ship had been replaced and repaired, so that there was not a single piece of the ship that was the same as when it had left port. Mindful of his oath, he hunted down the old pieces he had replaced, and joined them together into a second ship. But now he is confused: is it the first or the second ship which he must return to his father?
The five philosophers tell Theseus that it is the first ship: the ship's identity is linked to its causal history, not to the matter that composes it. Delighted with this answer, he offers the second ship to the adventurers, who sail toward the far shore.
Halfway across the lake, they meet an old man sitting upon a small island. He introduces himself as Thomas Hobbes, and says that his spies and secret police have told him everything about the adventurers since they entered the Slough. Their plan to save Russellia is a direct threat to his own scheme to subordinate the entire world under one ruler, and so he will destroy them. When the party expresses skepticism, his "island" rises out of the water and reveals itself to be the back of the monstrous sea creature, Leviathan, the true identity of the Hobbesgoblins' Lord-Over-All. After explaining his theory of government ("Let's Hear It For Leviathan", lyrics only) Hobbes and the monster attack for the game's first boss battle. The fight is immediately plagued by mishaps, including one incident where Phaidros's "Calvin's Predestined Hellfire" spell causes Hobbes to briefly turn into a Dire Tiger. When one of Leviathan's tentacles grab Cerune, she manifests a battle-axe of magic fire called the Axe of Separation and hacks the creature's arm off. She refuses to explain this power, but inspired by the small victory the party defeat Hobbes and reduce Leviathan into a state of Cartesian doubt; the confused monster vanishes into the depths, and the adventurers hurry to the other side and out of the Slough.
CHAPTER THREE: THE SHADOW CITY
Although our heroes make good time, they soon spot a detachment of Hobbesgoblins pursuing them. Afraid the goblins will be angry at the defeat of their god, the party hides; this turns out to be unnecessary, as the goblins only want Ephraim - the one who actually dealt the final blow against Leviathan - to be their new Lord-Over-All. Ephraim rejects the positions, and the party responds to the goblins' desperate pleading by suggesting a few pointers for creating a new society - punishing violence, promoting stability, reinforcing social behavior. The Hobbesgoblins grumble, but eventually depart - just in time for the party to be attacked by more of Buridan's Assassins. These killers' PLXM coins seem to suggest an origin in Xar-Morgoloth, the Shadow City, and indeed its jet-black walls now loom before them. But the city sits upon the only pass through the Central Mountains, so the party reluctantly enters.
Xar-Morgoloth turns out to be a pleasant town of white-washed fences and laughing children. In search of an explanation for the incongruity the five seek out the town's spiritual leader, the Priest of Lies. The Priest explains that although Xar-Morgoloth is superficially a nice place, the town is evil by definition. He argues that all moral explanations must be grounded in base moral facts that cannot be explained, whether these be respect for others, preference of pleasure over pain, or simple convictions that murder and theft are wrong. One of these base level moral facts, he says, is that Xar-Morgoloth is evil. It is so evil, in fact, that it is a moral imperative to keep people out of the city - which is why he sent assassins to scare them off.
Doubtful, the party seeks the mysterious visiting philosopher whom the Priest claimed originated these ideas: they find Immanuel Kant living alone on the outskirts of the city. Kant tells his story: he came from a parallel universe, but one day a glowing portal appeared in the sky, flinging him into the caves beyond Xar-Morgoloth. Wandering into Xar-Morgoloth, he tried to convince the citizens of his meta-ethical theories, but they insisted they could ground good and evil in basic moral intuitions instead. Kant proposed that Xar-Morgoloth was evil as a thought experiment to disprove them, but it got out of hand.
When our heroes challenge Kant's story and blame him for the current state of the city, Kant gets angry and casts Parmenides' Stasis Hex, freezing them in place. Then he announces his intention to torture and kill them all. For although in this world Immanuel Kant is a moral philosopher, in his own world (he explains) Immanuel Kant is a legendary villain and figure of depravity ("I'm Evil Immanuel Kant", lyrics only). Cerune manifests a second magic weapon, the Axe of Choice, to break the Stasis Hex, and the party have their second boss battle, which ends in defeat for Evil Kant. Searching his home, they find an enchanted Parchment of Natural Law that causes the chill in the air whenever the city's name is spoken.
Armed with this evidence, they return to the Priest of Lies and convince him that his moral theory is flawed. The Priest dispels the shadow over the city, recalls his assassins, and restores the town name to its previous non-evil transliteration of Summerglass. He then offers free passage through the caverns that form the only route through the Central Mountains.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE CAVERNS OF ABCISSA
Inside the caverns, which are nearly flooded by the overflowing Abcissa River, the party encounter an army of Water Elementals, leading them to suspect that they may be nearing the headquarters of Heraclitus' arch-enemy, Thales. The Water Elementals are mostly busy mining the rock for gems and magic artifacts, but one of them is sufficiently spooked by Phaidros to cast a spell on him, temporarily turning him to water. This is not immediately a disaster - Phaidros assumes a new form as a water elemental but keeps his essential personality - except that in an Ephraimesque display of overexperimention, Phaidros wonders what would happen if he temporarily relaxed the morphogenic field that holds him in place - as a result, he loses his left hand, a wound which stays in place when he reverts back to his normal form a few hours later. A resigned Phaidros only quotes the Bible: ("And if your hand offend you, cut it off: it is better for you to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell" - Mark 9:43) and trusts in the Divine plan.
The Caverns of Abcissa are labyrinthine and winding, but eventually the party encounters a trio who will reappear several times in their journey: Ruth (who tells the truth), Guy (who'll always lie) and Clancy (who acts on fancy). These three have a habit of hanging around branching caverns and forks in the road, and Ephraim solves their puzzle thoroughly enough to determine what route to take to the center of the cave system.
Here, in a great cavern, lives a civilization of cave-men whose story sounds a lot like Evil Kant's - from another world, minding their own business until a glowing portal appeared in the sky and sucked them into the caves. The cave-men are currently on the brink of civil war after one of their number, Thag, claims to have visited the mythical "outside" and discovered a world of magic and beauty far more real than the shadows dancing on the walls of their cavern. Most of the other cave-men, led by the very practical Vur, have rejected his tale, saying that the true magic and beauty lies in accepting the real, in-cave world rather than chasing after some outside paradise - but a few of the youth have flocked to Thag's banner, including Antil, a girl with mysterious magic powers.
Only the timely arrival of the adventurers averts a civil war; the party negotiates a truce and offers to solve the dispute empirically - they will escort Vur and Antil with them through the caverns so that representatives of both sides can see whether or not the "outside" really exists. This calms most of the cave-men down, and with Vur and Antil alongside, they head onward to the underground source of the Abcissa - which, according to their research, is the nerve center of Thales' watery empire.
On the way, they encounter several dangers. First, they awake a family of hibernating bears, who are quickly dispatched but who manage to maul the frail Vur so severely that only some divine intervention mediated by Phaidros saves his life. Second, they come across a series of dimensional portals clearly linked to the stories related by Evil Kant and the cave-men. Some link directly to otherworldly seas, pouring their water into the Abcissa and causing the recent floods. Others lead to otherworldly mines and quarries, and are being worked by gangs of Water Elementals. After some discussion of the ethics of stranding the Water Elementals, the five philosophers decide to shut down as many of the portals as possible.
They finally reach the source of the Abcissa, and expecting a battle, deck themselves out in magic armor that grants immunity to water magic. As expected, they encounter Thales, who reveals the full scale of his dastardly plot - to turn the entire world into water. But his exposition is marred by a series of incongruities, including his repeated mispronunciations of his own name ("All is Water", lyrics only). And when the battle finally begins, the party dispatches Thales with minimal difficulty, and the resulting corpse is not that of a Greek philosopher at all, but rather that of Davidson's Swampman, a Metaphysical summon that can take the form of any creature it encounters and imitate them perfectly.
Before anyone has time to consider the implications of their discovery, they are attacked by the real Water Mage, who bombards them with powerful water spells to which their magic armor mysteriously offers no protection. Worse, the Mage is able to create dimensional portals at will, escaping attacks effortlessly. After getting battered by a series of magic Tsunamis that nearly kill several of the weaker party members, the adventurers are in dire straits.
Then the tide begins to turn. Antil manifests the power to go invisible and attack the Water Mage from an unexpected vantage. Cerune manifests another magic weapon, the Axe of Extension, which gives her allies the same powers over space as the Water Mage seems to possess. And with a little prompting from Cerune, Phaidros and Nomophilos realize the Water Mage's true identity. Magic armor doesn't grant protection from his water spells because they are not water at all, but XYZ, a substance physically identical to but chemically different from H2O. And his mastery of dimensional portals arises from his own origin in a different dimension, Twin Earth. He is Hilary Putnam ("All is Water, Reprise", lyrics only) who has crossed dimensions, defeated Thales, and assumed his identity in order to take over his watery empire and complete his world domination plot. With a last push of magic, the party manage to defeat Putnam, who is knocked into the raging Abcissa and drowned in the very element he sought to control.
They tie up the loose ends of the chapter by evacuating the Water Elementals from Twin Earth, leading the cave-men to the promised land of the Outside, and confronting Antil about her mysterious magic. Antil gives them the source of her power to turn invisible: the Ring of Gyges, which she found on the cave floor after an earthquake. She warns them never to use it, as it presents a temptation which their ethics might be unable to overcome.
CHAPTER FIVE: CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE
Now back on the surface, the party finds their way blocked by the towering Mount Improbable, which at first seems too tall to ever climb. But after some exploration, they find there is a gradual path sloping upward, and begin their ascent. They are blocked, however, by a regiment of uniformed apes: cuteness turns to fear when they get closer and find the apes have machine guns. They decide to negotiate, and the apes prove willing to escort them to their fortress atop the peak if they can prove their worth by answering a few questions about their religious beliefs.
Satisfied, the ape army lead them to a great castle at the top of the mountain where Richard Dawkins ("Beware the Believers", credit Michael Edmondson) and his snow leopard daemon plot their war against the gods themselves. Dawkins believes the gods to be instantiated memes - creations of human belief that have taken on a life of their own due to Aleithos' madness - and accuses them of causing disasters, poverty, and ignorance in order to increase humanity's dependence upon them and keep the belief that sustains their existence intact. With the help of his genetically engineered apes and a fleet of flying battleships, he has been waging war against all the major pantheons of polytheism simultaneously. Dawkins is now gearing up to attack his most implacable foe, Jehovah Himself, although he admits He has so far managed to elude him.
Hoping the adventurers will join his forces, he takes them on a tour of the castle, showing them the towering battlements, the flotilla of flying battleships, and finally, the dungeons. In these last are imprisoned Fujin, Japanese god of storms; Meretseger, Egyptian goddess of the flood, and even Ares, the Greek god of war (whom Dawkins intends to try for war crimes: not any specific war crime, just war crimes in general). When the party reject Dawkins' offer to join his forces (most vocally Phaidros, most reluctantly Ephraim) Dawkins locks them in the dungeons themselves.
They are rescued late at night by their old friend Theseus. Theseus lost his ship in a storm (caused by the Japanese storm god, Fujin) and joined Dawkins' forces to get revenge; he is now captain of the aerial battleships. Theseus loads the adventurers onto a flying battleship and deposits them on the far side of the mountain, where Dawkins and his apes will be unlikely to find them.
Their troubles are not yet over, however, for they quickly encounter a three man crusade consisting of Blaise Pascal, Johann Tetzel, and St. Augustine of Hippo (mounted, cavalry-style, upon an actual hippopotamus). The three have come, led by a divine vision, to destroy Dawkins and his simian armies as an abomination unto the Lord, and upon hearing that the adventurers have themselves escaped Dawkins, invite them to come along. But the five, despite their appreciation for Pascal's expository fiddle music ("The Devil and Blaise Pascal") are turned off by Tetzel's repeated attempts to sell them indulgences, and Augustine's bombastic preaching. After Phaidros gets in a heated debate with Augustine over the role of pacifism in Christian thinking, the two parties decide to go their separate ways, despite Augustine's fiery condemnations and Pascal's warning that there is a non-zero chance the adventurers' choice will doom them to Hell.
After another encounter with Ruth, Guy, and Clancy, our heroes reach the base of Mount Improbable and at last find themselves in Russellia.
CHAPTER SIX: THE PALL OVER RUSSELLIA
Russellia is, as the legends say, shrouded in constant darkness. The gloom and the shock of being back in her ancestral homeland are too much for Cerune, who breaks down and reveals her last few secrets. Before beginning the quest, she consulted the Turing Oracle in Cyberia, who told her to seek the aid of a local wizard, Zermelo the Magnificent. Zermelo gave her nine magic axes of holy fire, which he said possessed the power to break the curse over Russellia. But in desperation, she has already used three of the magic axes, and with only six left she is uncertain whether she will have the magic needed.
At that moment, Heraclitus appears in a burst of flame, seeking a debriefing on the death of his old enemy Thales. After recounting the events of the past few weeks, our heroes ask Heraclitus whether, as a Fire Mage, he can reforge the axes of holy fire. Heraclitus admits the possibility, but says he would need to know more about the axes, their true purpose, and the enemy they were meant to fight. He gives the party an enchanted matchbook, telling them to summon him by striking a match when they gather the information he needs.
Things continue going wrong when, in the midst of a discussion about large numbers, Phaidros makes a self-contradictory statement that summons a Paradox Beast. Our heroes stand their ground and manage to destroy the abomination, despite its habit of summoning more Paradox Beasts to its aid through its Principle of Explosion spell. Bruised and battered, they limp into the nearest Russellian city on their map, the town of Ravenscroft.
The people of Ravenscroft tell their story: in addition to the eternal darkness, Russellia is plagued by vampire attacks and by a zombie apocalypse, which has turned the population of the entire country, save Ravenscroft, into ravenous brain-eating zombies. Despite the burghers claiming the zombie apocalypse had been confirmed by no less a figure than Thomas Nagel, who passed through the area a century ago, our heroes are unconvinced: for one thing, the Ravenscrofters are unable to present any evidence that the other Russellians are zombies except for their frequent attacks on Ravenscroft - and the Ravenscrofters themselves attack the other towns as a "pre-emptive measure". But the Ravenscrofters remain convinced, and even boast of their plan to launch a surprise attack on neighboring Brixton the next day.
Suspicious, our heroes head to the encampment of the Ravenscroft army, where they are just in time to see Commander David Chalmers give a rousing oration against the zombie menace ("Flee! A History of Zombieism In Western Thought", credit Emerald Rain). They decide to latch on to Chalmers' army, both because it is heading the same direction they are and because they hope they may be able to resolve the conflict between Ravenscroft and Brixton before it turns violent.
They camp with the army in some crumbling ruins from the golden age of the Russellian Empire. Entering a ruined temple, they disarm a series of traps to enter a vault containing a legendary artifact, the Morningstar of Frege. They also encounter a series of statues and bas-reliefs of the Good King, in which he demonstrates his chivalry by swearing an oath to Aleithos that he will defend all those who cannot defend themselves. Before they can puzzle out the meaning of all they have seen, they are attacked by vampires, confirming the Ravenscrofters' tales; they manage to chase them away with their magic and a hare-brained idea of Phaidros' to bless their body water, turning it into holy water and burning them up from the inside.
The next morning, they sneak into Brixton before the main army, and find their fears confirmed: the Brixtonites are normal people, no different from the Russellians, and they claim that Thomas Nagel told them that they were the only survivors of the zombie apocalypse. They manage to forge a truce between Ravenscroft and Brixton, but to their annoyance, the two towns make peace only to attack a third town, Mountainside, which they claim is definitely populated by zombies this time. In fact, they say, the people of Mountainside openly admit to being zombies and don't even claim to have souls.
Once again, our heroes rush to beat the main army to Mountainside. There they find the town's leader, Daniel Dennett, who explains the theory of eliminative materialism ("The Zombies' Secret"). The party tries to explain the subtleties of Dennett's position to a bloodthirsty Chalmers, and finally all sides agree to drop loaded terms like "human" and "zombie" and replace them with a common word that suggests a fundamental humanity but without an internal Cartesian theater (one of our heroes suggests "NPC", and it sticks). The armies of the three towns agree to ally against their true common enemy - the vampires who live upon the Golden Mountain and kidnap their friends and families in their nighttime raids.
Before the attack, Nomophilos and Ephraim announce their intention to build an anti-vampire death ray. The theory is that places on the fringe of Russellia receive some sunlight, while places in the center are shrouded in endless darkness. If the towns of Russellia can set up a system of mirrors from their highest towers, they can reflect the sunlight from the borderlands into a central collecting mirror in Mountainside, which can be aimed at the vampires' hideout to flood it with daylight, turning them to ashes. Ephraim, who invested most of his skill points into techne, comes up with schematics for the mirror, and after constructing a successful prototype, Chalmers and Dennett sound the attack order.
The death ray takes out many of the vampires standing guard, but within their castle they are protected from its light: our heroes volunteer to infiltrate the stronghold, but are almost immediately captured and imprisoned - the vampires intend to sacrifice Cerune in a ritual to use her royal blood to increase their power. But the adventurers make a daring escape: arch-conservative Nomophilos uses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steal the keys out of the jailer's pocket, and Phaidros summons a five hundred pound carnivorous Christ metaphor to maul the guards. Before the party can escape the castle, they are confronted by the vampire lord himself, who is revealed to be none other than Thomas Nagel ("What Is It Like To Be A Bat?"). In the resulting battle, Nagel is turned to ashes and the three allied cities make short work of the remaining vampires, capturing the castle.
The next morning finds our heroes poring over the vampire lord's library. Inside, they find an enchanted copy of Godel Escher Bach (with the power to summon an identical enchanted copy of Godel Escher Bach) and a slew of books on Russellian history. Over discussion of these latter, they finally work out what curse has fallen over the land, and what role the magic axes play in its removal.
[spoiler alert; stop here if you want to figure it out for yourself]
The Good King's oath to defend those who could not defend themselves was actually more complicated than that: he swore an oath to the god Aleithos to defend those and only those who could not defend themselves. His enemies, realizing the inherent contradiction, attacked him, trapping Russell in a contradiction - if he defended himself, he was prohibited from doing so; if he did not defend himself, he was obligated to do so. Trapped, he was forced to break his oath, and the Mad God punished him by casting his empire into eternal darkness and himself into an endless sleep.
The nine axes of Zermelo the Magnificent embody the nine axioms of ZFC. If applied to the problem, they will allow set theory to be reformulated in a way that makes the paradox impossible, lifting the curse and waking the Good King.
Upon figuring out the mystery, the party strike the enchanted match and summon Heraclitus, who uses fire magic to reforge the Axes of Choice, Separation, and Extension. Thus armed, the party leave the Vampire Lord's castle and enter the system of caverns leading into the Golden Mountain.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE KING UNDER THE MOUNTAIN
The party's travels through the cavern are quickly blocked by a chasm too deep to cross. Nomophilos saves the day by realizing that the enchanted copy of Godel Escher Bach creates the possibility of infinite recursion; he uses each copy of GEB to create another copy, and eventually fills the entire chasm with books, allowing the party to walk through to the other side.
There they meet Ruth, Clancy, and Guy one last time; the three are standing in front of a Logic Gate, and to open it the five philosophers must solve the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever. In an epic feat that the bards will no doubt sing for years to come, Macx comes up with a solution to the puzzle, identifies each of the three successfully, and opens the Logic Gate.
Inside the gate is the Good King, still asleep after two centuries. His resting place is guarded by the monster he unleashed, a fallen archangel who has become a Queen Paradox Beast. The Queen summons a small army of Paradox Beast servants with Principle of Explosion, and the battle begins in earnest. Cerune stands in a corner, trying to manifest her nine magic axes, but Nomophilos uses his Conservative spell "Morning in America" to summon a Raygun capable of piercing the Queen Paradox Beast's armored exoskeleton. Macx summons a Universal Quantifier and attaches it to his Banish Paradox Beast spell to decimate the Queen's armies. Ephraim desperately tries to wake the Good King, while Phaidros simply prays.
After an intense battle, Cerune manifests all nine axes and casts them at the Queen Paradox Beast, dissolving the paradox and destroying the beast's magical defenses. The four others redouble their efforts, and finally manage to banish the Queen. When the Queen Paradox Beast is destroyed, Good King Bertrand awakens.
Bertrand is temporarily discombobulated, but eventually regains his bearings and listens to the entire adventure. Then he tells his story. The attack that triggered the curse upon him, he says, was no coincidence, but rather a plot by a sinister organization against whom he had been waging a shadow war: the Bayesian Conspiracy. He first encountered the conspiracy when their espionage arm, the Bayes Network, tried to steal a magic emerald of unknown origin from his treasury. Since then, he worked tirelessly to unravel the conspiracy, and had reached the verge of success - learning that their aim was in some way linked to a plan to gain the shattered power of the Mad God Aleithos for themselves - when the Conspiracy took advantage of his oath and managed to put him out of action permanently.
He is horrified to hear that two centuries have passed, and worries that the Bayesians' mysterious plan may be close to fruition. He begs the party to help him re-establish contact with the Conspiracy and continue figuring out their plans, which may be a dire peril to the entire world. But he expresses doubt that such a thing is even possible at this stage.
In a burst of flame, Heraclitus appears, announcing that all is struggle and that he has come to join in theirs. He admits that the situation is grim, but declares it is not as hopeless as it seems, because they do not fight alone. He invokes the entire Western canon as the inspiration they follow and the giants upon whose shoulders they stand ("Grand Finale").
Heraclitus, Good King Bertrand, and the five scholars end the adventure by agreeing to seek out the Bayesian Conspiracy and discover whether Russell's old adversaries are still active. There are nebulous plans to continue the campaign (subject to logistical issues) in a second adventure, Fermat's Last Stand.
MUSIC
LYRICS ONLY
Hobbes' Song: Let's Hear It For Leviathan
Kant's Song: I'm Evil Immanuel Kant
Thales' Song: All Is Water
Putnam's Song: All Is Water, Reprise
GOOD ARTISTS BORROW, GREAT ARTISTS STEAL
Dawkins' Song: Beware The Believers (credit: Michael Edmondson)
Chalmers' Song: Flee: A History of Zombieism In Western Thought (credit: Emerald Rain)
ORIGINAL ADAPTATIONS
Pascal's Song: The Devil and Blaise Pascal
Dennett's Song: The Zombies' Secret
Vampire Nagel's Song: What Is It Like To Be A Bat?
Heraclitus' Song: Grand Finale
Gameplay Art
This post is about the development of our game based on Eliezer Yudkowsky's "The Twelve Virtues of Rationality".
Are games art?
It's an interesting question, but it seems that most people who answer that question in the affirmative are--intentionally or not--subscribing to the "hybrid art" view. That is, that games are art because they combine story-telling, music, and visual style; interaction with the system of the game is in service to the storyline, music, and visual style.
I don't like that. Here is why:
"Art" in general is creative expression through a medium. The hybrid-art view treats gameplay as the icing on the narrative-musical-visual cake. When it should be that gameplay is the cake, and everything else is the icing.
Gameplay, or interaction with the system of the game, is a medium for artistic expression, just like paint is for paintings. I don't think anyone can deny that interaction with a gun during a hostile situation reeks havoc on our emotions, or that interaction with a loved one can run the emotional gamut. Interaction is powerful.
Games can take advantage of the power of interaction to be expressive. The art of the storyline, music, and visuals ought to be secondary to the art of the gameplay.
Twelve Virtues
I believe that gameplay is a very powerful way to learn, and so the single most important design principle for our current project is expression through gameplay. We want to convey the meaning of each virtue through gameplay. The player should be able examine the method by which they interact with the game to learn the meaning behind the virtue.
For example:
In our Curiosity level which is where the game starts, the player must follow a mysterious cat that appears. Very early in the level, the player is faced with a "point of no return". If they jump down to the ground, they can't ever go back to the starting area. They must choose to follow the cat, or stay in their "comfort zone" so to speak. They must embrace their curiosity, or ignore it. If they choose to follow the cat, they will eventually discover a much larger area full of mysteries to be solved.
Rationality and Video Games
There are two points which I want to cover here. First is about my own game, and second is about raising the sanity waterline through games.
Point one: "Girl with a Heart of"
It's been over a year since I found LW community, and as soon as I finished the Sequences I realized I want to dedicate my life to making games that raise the sanity waterline. I've started working on a game to do just that in January 2011. The game is called "Girl with a Heart of", and it's very close to being done. In this game I wanted to present the idea of recursive self-improvement in a way that's intuitively accessible to an average person. I don't think I've succeeded, but I'll leave the discussion of reasons behind that for postmortem. Suffice to say, presenting ideas in text, even if they are part of a game, doesn't make them more intuitive. In fact, the player might as well just read the original article/post.
You can see screenshots of the game here: http://bentspoongames.imgur.com/girl_with_a_heart_of
For the most part, the game is just a choose-your-own adventure game. There is a lot of dialog. There are many various ideas, which I took from LW posts, and you'll probably recognize most of them when you play the game.
I've also started a Kickstarter project to help me finish the game: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bentspoongames/girl-with-a-heart-of
This is a nice way to preorder the game if you are interested. However, no money will be charged unless the fund goal is met. (If people object to this link, I can remove it.)
I am not asking you for donations, since most people on LW donate to causes that are a lot more important, but I will ask for support. If you have friends that like adventure games, or you have friends that like reading, then let them know about this game. Follow the game - and myself - on Facebook and Twitter. That's where I'll be posting updates about the next game I'll be working on.
Point two: Using games to raise the sanity waterline.
My first game was/will be a bust in terms of this, but the idea itself is not without merit, but I don't want to start discussing game design in this post. What I am looking for are people who are interested in making this happen, whether by doing art, programming, design, PR, or contributing resources: connections, expertise, and/or funding. For me, this will be a full time job (if I can get funding/money) and my primary goal for the near - and I hope far - future.
I'll be moving to the Bay Area in the next month, so I would love to meet up with anyone who is sincerely interested in working on this. And even if you don't live in the area, let me know either way, and we can work together remotely.
Not everyone likes reading, and not everyone can learn the ideas from the way they are presented in the Sequences. I want to take those very basic ideas, and present them in a different format, which I hope will be more accessible, fun, and, in the end, more fruitful. Think HP:MoR, but in game form. My goal is to build a community of people who are interested in building games that leave the player with tangible, useful knowledge and skills. My goal is to create lots of games that people can play for fun, while receiving measurable benefits (in my case: rationality training). These games might even be used for training basic skills in rationality camps. During this year's mini-camp a lot of people, including myself, praised poker for its lessons in rationality, but we can easily create a game that focuses a lot more on those skills.
I am very curious to hear your thoughts on this, whatever they might be.
How to detonate a technology singularity using only parrot level intelligence - new meetup.com group in Silicon Valley to design and create it
http://www.meetup.com/technology-singularity-detonator
9 people joined in the last 5 hours and the first meetup hasn't even happened yet. This is the meetup description, including technical designs and how it leads to singularity:
The plan is to detonate an intelligence explosion (leading to a technology-singularity) starting with an open-source Java artificial intelligence (AI) software which networks peoples' minds together through the internet using realtime interactive psychology of feedback loops between mouse movements and generated audio. "Technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than human intelligence through technological means." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity Computer programming is not required to join the group, but some kind of technical or abstract thinking skill is. We are going to make this happen, not talk about it endlessly like so many other AI groups do. Audivolv 0.1.7 is a very early and version of the user-interface. The final version will be a massively multiplayer audio game unlike any existing game. It will learn based on mouse movements in realtime instead of requiring good/bad buttons to train it. The core AI systems have not been created yet. Audivolv is just the user-interface for that. http://sourceforge.net/projects/audivolv The whole system will be 1 file you double-click to run and it works immediately on Windows, Mac, or Linux. This does not include Audivolv yet and has some parts that may be removed: http://sourceforge.net/projects/humanainet It must be a "Friendly AI", which means it will be designed not to happen like in the Terminator movies or similar science fiction. It will work toward more productive goals and help the Human species. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence My plan to make that happen is for it to be made of many peoples' minds and many computers, so it is us. It becomes smarter when we become smarter. One of the effects of that will be to extremely increase Dunbar's Number, which is the number of people or organizations that a person can intelligently interact with before forgetting others. Dunbar's number is estimated around 150 today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
This only requires the AI be as smart as a parrot, since the people using the program do most of the thinking and the AI only organizes their thoughts statistically enough to decide who should connect to who else, in the way evolved code is traded (and verified to use only math so its safe) between computers automatically, in this massively multiplayer audio game. We will detonate a technology singularity using only the intelligence of a parrot plus the intelligence of people using the program. This is very surprising to most people who think huge grids of computers and experts are required to build Human intelligence in a machine. This is a shortcut, and will have much better results because it is us so it has no reason to act against us, like an AI made only of software may do.
Infrastructure
Communication between these programs through the internet will be done as a Distributed Hash Table. The most important part of that is each key (hash of some file bytes) has a well-defined distance to each other key, a distance(hash1,hash2) function, which proves the correct direction to search the network to find the bytes of any hash, or to statistically verify (but not certainly) that its not in the network. There may be a way to do it certainly, but for my purposes approximate searching will work.
In the same Distributed Hash Table, there will be public-keys, used like filenames or identities, whose content can be modified only by whoever has the private-key. If code evolves to include calculations based on your mouse movements and the mouse movements of 5 other people in realtime, then the numbers from those other mouse movements (between -1 and 1 for each of 2 dimensions, for each of 5 people) will be digitally-signed so everyone who uses the evolved code will know it is using the same people's continuing mouse movements instead of is a modified code. The code can be modified, but that would have a different hash and would be considered on its own merits instead of knowledge about the previous code and its specific connections to specific people. This will be done in realtime, not something to be saved and loaded later from a hard-drive. Each new mouse position (or a few of them sent at once) will be digitally-signed and broadcast to the network, the same as any other data broadcast to the network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
Similarly, but more fuzzy, the psychology of feedback loops between mouse movements and automatically evolving Java code, will be used as a distance function, and a second network organized that way, so you can search the network in the direction of other people whose psychology is more similar to your current state of mind and how you're using the program. This decentralized network will be searchable by your subconscious thoughts, because subconscious thoughts are expressed in how your mouse movements cause the code to evolve.
As you search this network automatically by moving your mouse, you will trade evolved code with those computers, always automatically verifying the code only uses math and no file-access or java.lang.System class or anything else not provably safe. You will experience the downloaded code as it gradually connects to the code evolved for your mouse movements, code which generates audio as 44100 audio amplitudes (number between -1 and 1) per second per speaker.
Some of the variables in the evolved code will be the hash of other evolved code. Each evolved code will have a hash, probably from the SHA-256 algorithm, so it could be a length 64 hex string written in the code. Each variable will be a number beween -1 and 1. No computer will have all the codes for all its variables, but for those it doesn't have, it will use them simply as a variable. If it has those codes, then there is an extra behavior of giving that code an amount of influence proportional to the value of the variable, or deleting the code if the variable becomes negative for too long. In that way, evolved code will decide which other evolved code to download and how much influence each evolved code should have on the array of floating point numbers in the local computer.
Since the decentralized network will be searched by psychology (instead of text or pixels in an image or other things search-engines know how to do today), and since its connected to each person's subconscious mind through mouse/music feedback loops, the effect will be a collective mind made of many people and computers. We are Human AI Net, do you want to be temporarily assimilated?
Alternative To Brain Implants
Statistically inputs and outputs to neurons subconsciously without extra hardware.
A neuron is a brain cell that connects to thousands of other neurons and slowly adjusts its electricity and chemical patterns as it learns.
An incorrect assumption has extremely delayed the creation of technology that transfers thoughts between 2 brains. That assumption is, to quickly transfer large amounts of information between a brain and a computer, you need hardware that connects directly to neurons.
Eyes and ears transfer a lot of information to a brain, but the other part of that assumption is eyes and ears are only useful for pictures and sounds that make sense and do not appear as complete randomness or whitenoise. People assume anything that sounds like radio static (a typical random sound) can't be used to transfer useful information into a brain.
Most of us remember what a dial-up-modem sounds like. It sounds like information is in it but its too fast for Humans to understand. That's true of the dial-up-modem sound only because its digital and is designed for a modem instead of for Human ears which can hear around 1500 tones and simultaneously a volume for each. The dial-up-modem can only hear 1 tone that oscillates between 1 and 0, and no volume, just 1 or 0. It gets 56000 of those 1s and 0s per second. Human ears are analog so they have no such limits, but brains can think at most at 100 changes per second.
If volume can have 20 different values per tone, then Human ears can hear up to 1500*100*log_base_2(20)=650000 bits of information per second. If you could take full advantage of that speed, you could transfer a book every few seconds into your brain, but the next bottleneck is your ability to think that fast.
If you use ears the same way dial-up-modems use a phone line, but in a way designed for Human ears and Human brains instead of computers, then your ears are much faster data transfer devices than brain implants, and the same is true for transferring information as random-appearing grids of changing colors through your eyes. We have computer speakers and screens for input to brains. We still have some work to do on the output speeds of mouse and keyboard, but there are electricity devices you can wear on your head for the output direction. For the input direction, eyes and ears are currently far ahead of the most advanced technology in their data speeds to your brain.
So why do businesses and governments keep throwing huge amounts of money at connecting computer chips directly to neurons? They should learn to use eyes and ears to their full potential before putting so much resources into higher bandwidth connections to brains. They're not nearly using the bandwidth they already have to brains.
Intuitively most people know how music can affect their subconscious thoughts. Music is a low bandwidth example. It has mostly predictable and repeated sounds. The same voices. The same instruments. What I'm talking about would sound more like radio static or whitenoise. You wouldn't know what information is in it from its sound. You would only understand it after it echoed around your neuron electricity patterns in subconscious ways.
Most people have only a normal computer available, so the brain-to-computer direction of information flow has to be low bandwidth. It can be mouse movements, gyroscope based game controllers, video camera detecting motion, or devices like that. The computer-to-brain direction can be high bandwidth, able to transfer information faster than you can think about it.
Why hasn't this been tried? Because science proceeds in small steps. This is a big step from existing technology but a small step in the way most people already have the hardware (screen, speakers, mouse, etc). The big step is going from patterns of random-appearing sounds or video to subconscious thoughts to mouse movements to software to interpret it statistically, and around that loop many times as the Human and computer learn to predict each other. Compared to that, connecting a chip directly to neurons is a small step.
Its a feedback loop: computer, random-appearing sound or video, ears or eyes, brain, mouse movements, and back to computer. Its very indirect but uses hardware that has evolved for millions of years, compared to low-bandwidth hardware they implant in brains. Eyes and ears are much higher bandwidth, and we should be using them in feedback loops for brain-to-brain and brain-to-computer communication.
What would it feel like? You would move the mouse and instantly hear the sounds change based on how you moved it. You would feel around the sound space for abstract patterns of information you're looking for, and you would learn to find it. When many people are connected this way through the internet, using only mouse movements and abstract random-like sounds instead of words and pictures, thoughts will flow between the brains of different people, thoughts that they don't know how to put into words. They would gradually learn to think more as 1 mind. Brains naturally learn to communicate with any system connected to them. Brains dont care how they're connected. They grow into a larger mind. It happens between the parts of your brain, and it will happen between people using this system through the internet.
Artificial intelligence software does not have to replace us or compete with us. The best way to use it is to connect our minds together. It can be done through brain implants, but why wait for that technology to advance and become cheap and safe enough? All you need is a normal computer and the software to connect our subconscious thoughts and statistical patterns of interaction with the computer.
Dial-up-modem sounds were designed for computers. These interactive sounds/videos would be designed for Human ears/eyes and the slower but much bigger and parallel way the data goes into brains. For years I've been carefully designing a free open-source software http://HumanAI.net - Human and Artificial Intelligence Network, or Human AI Net - to make this work. It will be a software that does for Human brains what dial-up-modems do for computers, and it will sound a little like a dial-up-modem at first but start to sound like music when you learn how to use it. I don't need brain implants to flow subconscious thoughts between your brains over internet wires.
Intelligence is the most powerful thing we know of. The brain implants are simply overkill, even if they become advanced enough to do what I'll use software and psychology to do. We can network our minds together and amplify intelligence and share thoughts without extra hardware. After thats working, we can go straight to quantum devices for accessing brains without implants. Lets do this through software and skip the brain implant paradigm. If it works just a little, it will be enough that our combined minds will figure out how to make it work a lot more. Thats how I prefer to start a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity We don't need businesses and militaries to do it first. We have the hardware on our desks. We're only missing the software. It doesn't have to be smarter than Human software. It just has to be smart enough to connect our subconscious thoughts together. The authorities have their own ideas about how we should communicate and how our minds should be allowed to think together, but their technology was obsolete before it was created. We can do everything they can do without brain implants, using only software and subconscious psychology. We don't need a smarter-than-Human software, or anything nearly that advanced, to create a technology singularity. Who wants to help me change the direction of Human evolution using an open-source (GNU GPL) software? Really, you can create a technology singularity starting from a software with the intelligence of a parrot, as long as you use it to connect Human minds together.
Dungeons and Discourse implementation
I've been working on an unauthorized implementation of Dresden Codak's Dungeons and Discourse, a fictional role-playing game that combines philosophy and high fantasy. You can find a very error-ridden, but possibly usable, rough draft of it at http://www.raikoth.net/Stuff/ddisplayer.pdf. Yes, obviously this is crazy and I have no life. There is no need to point that out further.
I'd like to try to run a campaign. It would be maybe an hour or two a week on IRC, and subject to my schedule, which is terrible and can include disappearing for months at a time (in particular I probably won't have internet access in August). Still, I would like to at least gauge interest and start some preliminaries now. And if anyone wants to run a campaign IRL at a meetup group or something, I can send them the file with the campaign walkthrough, though I'm not sure how much I would recommend it at this point.
Anyone who's interested in participating please let me know (especially if you have philosophical beliefs wildly different from the standard Less Wrong hive mind, or if you know any interested parties who do, since the game would be dreadfully boring if everyone agreed on everything or for that matter anything). Also, I suppose if people want to record the errors and contradictions and non sequiturs and exploits in the manual you might as well post them here so I can fix them.
Is it possible to prevent the torture of ems?
When I was reading The Seven Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Gaming, I was struck by the number of people who are strongly motivated to cause misery to others [1], apparently for its own sake. I think the default assumption here is that the primary risk to ems is from errors in programming an AI, but cruelty from other ems, from silicon minds closely based on humans but not ems (is there a convenient term for this?) and from just plain organic humans strikes me as extremely likely.
We're talking about a species where a significant number of people feel better when they torture Sims. I don't think torturing Sims is of any moral importance, but it serves as an indicator about what people like to do. I also wonder how good a simulation has to be before torturing it does matter.
I find it hard to imagine a system where it's easy to upload people which has security so good that torturing copies wouldn't be feasible, but maybe I'm missing something.
[1] The article was also very funny. I point this out only because I feel a possibly excessive need to reassure readers that I have normal reactions.
Designing serious games - a request for help
We need some ideas for serious games. Games that will help us be better. Games that reward us for improving ourselves (even if just by the satisfaction of seeing our scores improve). Games that will help us in our quest of Tsoyoku Naritai
We've got an upcoming hackday in London - where we'll have a (small) bunch of people able to code up any good ideas into something usable... but we need **you** to help us come up with a whole bunch of good ideas.
To start with, they should be simple ideas - not as complex as Rationalist Clue (which is an awesome idea... but we all have dayjobs too). I've got in mind something like the kinds of games you see at luminosity
The ideas should address individual biases - a way of training us to: a) recognise when we've accidentally engaged a bias b) reward us when we find a way to get the "right answer" in an unbiased manner.
We can do the programming (more help would of course be welcome), we can even come up with some ideas of our own...
but we are few, and you are many... and the more ideas we get, the better we can choose between them... so let's roll.
Rationalist Diplomacy, Game Two Post-game Discussion
(A full list of game moves and commentary is available here; the game maps are available here.)
Since I was GM, I had a distinctly limited access to private communications, so I've relatively little analysis.
A brief review of the game:
Austria was the first player to get eliminated; in contrast to the sort of min-maxing I've usually seen in Diplomacy, they took a lot of big risks in the beginning, in particular leaving Trieste open to Italian attack, in favor of quick expansion to the east. Although they did manage to take Warsaw and Serbia, the Austrian forces wound up overextended and unable to hold onto their gains, and in a weak position diplomatically; the fall of Trieste didn't help matters. Nobody was willing to help Austria, and so Italy seized all of Austria, with Turkey taking the Balkans and Russia taking Rumania. After that, there was a long period of stalemate in the Balkans, as neither of the three powers was willing to divert enough troops to one front to make any offensive progress.
In the west, Germany initially faced a combined Franco-British attack; they held out surprisingly well, aided by cracks in the alliance and occasional Russian attacks on Norway. Britain was actually the first Power to fall in the West, when France piled on after the fall of Norway; the British player was forced to stop participating in the game at around that time. France wound up with all of the British Isles, and Germany was squeezed between it and Russia until it cracked. (The brief Italian occupation of Munich didn't help.) Germany did manage to hold out for most of the rest of the game; there were only a few months of inconclusive war between France and Russia before the draw proposal.
Meanwhile, in the east, Italy gradually fell back before a combined Russian-Turkish attack. After Russia seized Vienna and Budapest, and Turkey seized Trieste, Russia mostly concentrated on attacking England and Germany, leaving Turkey and Italy in a period of stalemate, broken by the advance of Turkish fleets into the Ionian Sea. Soon after, Italy's player had to drop out, and Turkey soon seized control of Italy. Then the game ended.
One thing I'm curious about is how much communication there was between the eastern and western powers. (In-game, beyond Russia fighting on both fronts and a single, chance retreat by Italy, there was little direct interaction.)
The Volunteer's Dilemma
This has been bothering me ever since I started trying to use rationalist techniques to make better decisions (like anti-akrasia ones). The only field related to rationality I knew much about was game theory, but to my disappointment basic game theory has only increased my problems due to a certain formulation I can't abandon.
The Volunteer's Dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer's_dilemma) is in essence the Prisoner's Dilemma with more players - which means that defection is an even more dominant strategy. The problem is that the decision whether to do unpleasant tasks becomes a Volunteer's Dilemma with multiple future selves as my competition - 4:00 tenshiko, 4:15 tenshiko, 4:30 tenshiko, and so on. Although the incentive to defect should decrease as time goes on, there's the problem of how 9:00 tenshiko can easily defect in an even more effective fashion and bring in 11:00 tenshiko and 11:15 tenshiko to further level the playing field. There is the further problem that, given how many of my current hobbies convert time to reward in an approximately cubic function, the incentive is high for 6:00 tenshiko, 7:00 tenshiko, and 8:00 tenshiko to form coalitions.
I guess what I'm really asking for is a more advanced matrix that represents the diminishing returns of bringing in other future selves, such as went-to-bed-at-1:00 tenshiko and completely-bombed-that-test-at-10:00 tenshiko, or at least the diminishing probability over time that "it doesn't matter, 9:45 tenshiko can take care of it".
If this goes well, I will probably try to flesh out the material received in responses with what I already know and produce a post in main discussing time management and its relation to game theory.
Games People Play
Game theory is great if you know what game you're playing. All this talk of Diplomacy reminds me of this memory of Adam Cadre:
I remember that in my ninth grade history class, the teacher had us play a game that was supposed to demonstrate how shifting alliances work. He divided the class into seven groups — dubbed Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Austria and Russia — and, every few minutes, declared a "battle" between two of the countries. Then there was a negotiation period, during which we all were supposed to walk around the room making deals. Whichever warring country collected the most allies would win the battle and a certain number of points to divvy up with its allies. The idea, I think, was that countries in a battle would try to win over the wavering countries by promising them extra points to jump aboard.
That's not how it worked in practice. Three or four guys — the same ones who had gotten themselves elected to ASB, the student government — decided among themselves during the first negotiation period what the outcome would be, and told people whom to vote for. And the others just shrugged and did as they were told. The ASB guys had decided that Germany would win, followed by France, Britain, Belgium, Austria, Italy and Russia. The first battle was France vs. Russia. Germany and Britain both signed up on the French side. Austria and Italy, realizing that if they just went along with the ASB plan they'd come in 5th and 6th, joined up with Russia. That left it up to Belgium. I was on team Belgium. I voted to give our vote to the Russian side, because that way at least we weren't doomed to come in 4th. And no one else on my team went along. They meekly gave their points to the French side. (As I recall, Josh Lorton was particularly adamant about this. I guess he thought it would make the ASB guys like him.) After that, there was no contest. Britain vs. Austria? 6-1, Britain. Germany vs. Belgium? 6-1, Germany. (And we could have beaten them if we'd just formed a bloc with the other three losers!) The teacher noticed that Germany and France were always on the same side and declared Germany vs. France. Outcome: 6-1, Germany.
The ASB guys were able to just impose their will on a class of 40 students. No carrots, no sticks, just "here's what will happen" and everyone else nodding. I have no idea how that works. I do recall that because they were in student government, for fourth period they had to take a class called Leadership. From what I could tell they just spent the class playing volleyball out in the quad. But I guess they were learning something!
What happened? Why did Italy and Russia fall into line and abandon Austria in the second battle?
This utterly failed to demonstrate the "shifting alliances" that Adam thought the teacher wanted. Does this happen every year?
Yes, the students were coerced into "playing" this game, but elsewhere he describes the same thing happen in games that people choose to play. Moreover, he tells the first story to illustrate his perception of politics.
Rationalist Diplomacy, Game 2, Game Over
Note: The title refers to the upcoming turn.
OK, here's the promised second game of diplomacy. The game name is 'Rationalist Diplomacy Game 2.'
Kevin was Prime Minister of Great Britain
AlexMennen is President of France
tenshiko is Kaiser of Germany
Alexandros was King of Italy until his retirement
WrongBot is Emperor of Austria
Thausler is Czar of Russia
Hugh Ristik is Sultan of Turkey
Randaly is the GM, and can be reached at nojustnoperson@gmail.com
Peace For Our Time!
The leaders of the three surviving nations, France, Russia, and Turkey, agreed to a peace treaty in late August, bringing an end to this destructive conflict. Crowds across Europe broke out into spontaneous celebration, as national leaders began to account for the vast costs- human and monetary- of the wars.
All orders should be sent to nojustnoperson@gmail.com with an easy-to-read title like "Rationalist Diplomacy Game 2: Russian Orders Spring 1901". Only the LAST set of orders sent will be counted, so feel free to change your mind or to do something sneaky like sending in a fake set of orders cc your ally, and then sending in your real orders later. I'm not going to be too picky on exactly how you phrase your orders, but I prefer standard Diplomacy terminology like "F kie -> hel". New players - remember that if you send two units to the same space, you MUST specify which is attacking and which is supporting. If you make a mistake there or anywhere else, I will probably email you and ask you which you meant, but if I don't have time you'll just be out of luck.
ETA: HughRistik would like to underscore that, under the standard house rules, all draws are unranked.
Past maps can be viewed here; the game history can be viewed here.
Spring 1912: A New Heaven And A New Earth

And so it came to pass that on Christmas Day 1911, the three Great Powers of Europe signed a treaty to divide the continent between them peacefully, ending what future historians would call the Great War.
The sun truly never sets on King Jack's British Empire, which stretches from Spain to Stockholm, from Casablanca to Copenhagen, from the fringes of the Sahara to the coast of the Arctic Ocean. They rule fourteen major world capitals, and innumerable smaller towns and cities, the greatest power of the age and the unquestioned master of Western Europe.
From the steppes of Siberia to the minarets of Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire is no longer the Sick Man of Europe but stands healthy and renewed, a colossus every bit the equal of the Christian powers to its west. Its Sultan calls himself the Caliph, for the entire Islamic world basks in his glory, and his Grand Vizier has been rewarded with a reputation as one of the most brilliant and devious politicians of the age. At his feet grovel representatives of twelve great cities, and even far-flung Tunis has not escaped his sway.
And in between, the Austro-Hungarian Empire straddles the Alps and ancient Italy. Its lack of natural borders presented no difficulty for its wily Emperor, who successfully staved off the surrounding powers and played his enemies off against one another while building alliances that stood the test of time. Eight great cities pay homage to his double-crown, and he is what his predecessors could only dream of being - a true Holy Roman Emperor.
And hidden beneath the tricolor map every student learns in grammar school are echoes of subtler hues. In Germany, people still talk of the mighty Kajser Sotala I, who conquered the ancient French enemy and extended German rule all the way to the Mediterranean, and they still seeth and curse at his dastardly betrayal by his English friends. In Russia, Princess Anastasia claims to be the daughter of Czar Perplexed, and recounts to everyone who will listen the story of her stoic father, who remained brave until the very end; at her side travels a strange bearded man who many say looks like Rasputin, the Czar's long-missing adviser. The French remember President Andreassen, who held off the combined armies of England and Germany for half a decade, and many still go on pilgrimage to Liverpool, the site of their last great victory. And in Italy, Duke Carinthium has gone down in history beside Tiberius and Cesare Borgia as one of their land's most colorful and fascinating leaders.
And the priests say that the same moment the peace treaty was signed, the blood changed back to water, and the famines ended, and rain fell in the lands parched by drought. Charles Taze Russell, who had been locked in his room awaiting the Apocalypse, suddenly ran forth into the midwinter sun, shouting "Our doom has been lifted! God has granted us a second chance!" And the mysterious rectangular wall of force separating Europe from the rest of the world blinked out of existence.
Pope Franz I, the new Austrian-supported Pontiff in Rome, declares a month of thanksgiving and celebration. For, he says, God has tested the Europeans for their warlike ways, isolating them from the rest of the earth lest their sprawling empires plunge the entire planet into a world war that might kill millions. Now, the nobility of Europe finally realizing the value of peace, the curse has been lifted, and the empires of Europe can once more interact upon the world stage.
Chastened by their brush with doom, yet humbled by the lesson they had been given, the powers of Europe send missionaries through the dimensional portal, to convince other worlds to abandon their warlike ways and seek universal brotherhood. And so history ends, with three great powers living together side by side and striving together for a better future and a positive singularity.
...
On to the more practical parts. If you think you've learned lessons this game worth telling the rest of Less Wrong, you should send them to either myself or Jack. I say either myself or Jack because Jack had the most supply centers and therefore deserves some karma which he could most easily get by posting the thread which the other two winners then comment on, or if you insist that three way tie means three way tie, I'll post the thread and the three winners can all comment and get up-voted. We'll talk about it in the comments.



Thanks to everyone who played in this game. I was very impressed - it's one of the rare games I have moderated that hasn't been ruined by people constantly forgetting to send orders, or people ragequitting when things don't go their way, or people being totally incompetent and throwing the game to the first person to declare war on them, or any of the other ways a Diplomacy game can go wrong. Everyone fought hard and well and honorably (for definitions of honor compatible with playing Diplomacy). It was a pleasure to serve as your General Secretary.
All previous posts and maps from this game are archived. See this comment for an explanation of how to access the archives.
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