I'm going to have to read the proof of the hydra game, because I pretty quickly got over 2.8k nodes and still in increasing...

I'm going to have to read the proof of the hydra game, because I pretty quickly got over 2.8k nodes and still in increasing...

While I'd be happy to take a look, I have to honestly predict that you won't hear anything you haven't heard before, and you are unlikely to change your mind.

There can be several ways to get enjoyement out of a roleplaying game:

• The sheer intellectual challenge of the game (which you can also get from storyless boardgames)

• Telling or enjoying an interesting story, with interesting situations

• Escapism - living as someone else, in a different world

These are usually called Gamist, narrativist, Simulationist.

They are not mutually incompatible, and you can indeed have different people around the same table with different tastes / goals. There can be problem when one ruins the story or the believability in order to get a game advantage, and other players were caring about the story etc. - this is when people claim about munchkinry.

But you can still have good game sessions where everybody is a munchkin, or when the rules and DM are good enough so that the player's don't get to choose between a game advantage and an interesting story (for example, I think in most versions of D&D you basically have some points you can only spend on combat-useful stuff (opicking feats or powers), and some points you can only spend on combat-useless stuff (skill points)).

Why do LWers believe in global warming? The community's belief has changed my posterior odds significantly, but it's the only argument I have for global warming at the moment. I saw the CO2 vs temperature graphs, and that seemed to sell it for me... Then I heard that the temperature increases preceded the CO2 emissions by about 800 years...

So why does the community at large believe in it?

Thanks!

Book Recommendation; Fiction; AI; While this might be the kind of scifi book to merely annoy experts, I found it enjoyable. It surrounds military use of potentially FOOM AI's which are wiped periodically to prevent the foom. Soiler: vg snvyf. It is also part of a series, in which some overlapping events are told from different perspectives, which I also found enjoyable. http://www.amazon.com/Insidious-Michael-McCloskey/dp/1440192529

I'm afraid that I'm entirely failing to grok what you mean with the "sex-tax" thing.

I think he's considering getting married or something, and having his wife do “boring” things “as cleaning the house” in exchange of sex -- though if I'm right, IMO that's an extremely bizarre way to put it.

Guarini and Bello continue, “A system without emotion … could not predict the emotions or action of others based on its own states because it has no emotional states.

(source, it's from page 138 of Robot Ethics)

.... so it could predict them using another system! To do arithmetics, Humans use their fingers, or memorize multiplications tables, but a computer doesn't need either of those. I don't see why it would need emotions to predict emotions either.

As a side note, we are getting better at software recognition of emotions.

Frankly, I am surprised you have even Facebook friends who would recommend drinking bleach.

That video has been taken down, but you can skip to around 5 minutes into this video to watch the astrology bit.