THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)

  • 28 Mar 2024, 09:54
  • Welcome, Guest
Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Poll

Poll poll poll poll POLL:

Reconciliation and Relocation!
More Claire Floof!
Hanners Floof!
DORA Floof!
Steve eats Cereal!
Spathe Ham, Waffles, and Specials!
Something Completely Different!

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5   Go Down

Author Topic: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)  (Read 48335 times)

Nunavuter

  • Notorious N.U.R.R.
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #100 on: 19 Apr 2017, 12:42 »

 :laugh:

It was good to see Jeph add a reference to Canadian Tire money in the strip. Just to clarify, the classic way Canadian Tire money worked was that it was included in your change when you bought things at a Canadian Tire store. It was not a complex 'rewards' system or a data-tracking scheme. The rate used to be 3% of the value of your purchases. So if you bought something that cost $10, you'd get 30 cents worth of Canadian Tire money along with your change. You could pay for your purchase entirely in Canadian Tire money, and get *more* Canadian Tire money in your change. The rate at which it is calculated now is 0.5%, so it isn't quite the deal it once was. Every junk drawer and car glove box in Canada has Canadian Tire money in it.

Fun fact: Canadian Tire money was accepted at some other stores --even a few bars -- back in its heyday.  It even showed up in Africa and other places, where it had been passed off by dishonest persons as actual Canadian money. The notes are quite professional looking, although the most common denomination is 5 cents they do go up to $1.
Logged

Is it cold in here?

  • Administrator
  • Awakened
  • ******
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 25,163
  • He/him/his pronouns
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #101 on: 19 Apr 2017, 16:00 »

Welcome, informative new person!
Logged
Thank you, Dr. Karikó.

Akima

  • WoW gold miner on break
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 6,523
  • ** 妇女能顶半边天 **
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #102 on: 19 Apr 2017, 16:54 »

For what it's worth, that picture isn't of an advancing cold front, but of a derecho (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho). The characteristic wall cloud of an approaching derecho looks very different from the typical horizontal bands carried by an advancing cold front.
It appears that term is specific to North America, and I have never heard it used here. The Wikipedia article you link describes the derecho specifically as only occurring over land, whereas our walls of cloud extend well out to sea. The colloquial term here is "Southerly Buster", and we certainly get the weather conditions you ascribe to a derecho, but the Bureau of Meteorology describes the phenomenon we experience as being caused by a cold front sweeping up the coast from the south.

I'll defer to people with greater knowledge of physics on the effect of EMP weapons, and whether it would be possible, or useful, to tune them to specific targets. The question that occurred to me was more strategic/political. Who deployed Bubbles, and against what enemy? Bubbles tells us that the enemy deployed EMP weapons and artillery, as well as small-arms, which argues for a fairly sophisticated force, or at least one that is supplied with the products of a fairly sophisticated armaments industry, like the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, for example, with their Soviet-made artillery.

I think we can assume that Bubbles was deployed as part of a US Army unit (I suppose Marine Corps might be possible but Bubbles says "soldier", and Marines are sensitive about being called anything but Marines), or she wouldn't be at liberty in Northampton in the first place, so we know who put her into the field. Nothing in the comic has ever suggested that the QCverse USA is engaged in a war at all until Bubbles came along, never mind a major one against an industrial power, or even a proxy-conflict with the ally of a major power creating the social impact of the Korean or Vietnam Wars, for example, but Bubbles's experience doesn't suggest an irregular enemy like IS or the Taliban either. I suppose Creepybot and her associates might have provided a simply-operated EMP equivalent of an IED to a guerrilla force ("Put it over there and press this button when the enemy reaches that spot"), but I don't see them mass-producing artillery pieces.

Methinks the hard part would then be to isolate those leads from her insides, if necessary, or design the leads such that they burn through on their own in case of a current surge.
Optical isolation would work, I think. That is, have the antennae outside the protective cage connected to some circuitry to convert the electrical signal into a modulated light-beam that is fed into a fibre-optic passed through the cage, and then convert the light-signal back into electrical inside.
Logged
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered, than answers that can't be questioned." Richard Feynman

brasca

  • Scrabble hacker
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1,358
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #103 on: 19 Apr 2017, 17:43 »

More than likely Bubbles knows what happened after reading the reports, but I have to wonder how incapacitated she was when the EMP hit her.  Maybe she was immobilized, but conscious which made the experience of watching her comrades get slaughtered and being powerless to do anything all the more traumatizing.  Such a thing would compel many to take the same drastic actions to remove those memories. 
Logged

Kugai

  • CIA Handler of Miss Melody Powers
  • Awakened
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 11,493
  • Crazy Kiwi Shoujo-Ai Fan
    • My Homepage
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #104 on: 19 Apr 2017, 18:03 »

They look cute together
Logged
James The Kugai 

You can never have too much Coffee.

Case

  • comeback tour!
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5,580
  • Putting the 'mental' into judgemental
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #105 on: 19 Apr 2017, 18:25 »

I'll defer to people with greater knowledge of physics on the effect of EMP weapons, and whether it would be possible, or useful, to tune them to specific targets.

Yeah, so I dug a bit farther into typical EMP pulse-shapes, and the most common (according to the non-classified literature on EMP-weapons, or shielding) is apparently neither the Gaussian (cf. my post), nor the rectangle-function (cf. Pauls), but the so called 'double-exponential pulse-shape':

(click to show/hide)

Methinks the hard part would then be to isolate those leads from her insides, if necessary, or design the leads such that they burn through on their own in case of a current surge.
Optical isolation would work, I think. That is, have the antennae outside the protective cage connected to some circuitry to convert the electrical signal into a modulated light-beam that is fed into a fibre-optic passed through the cage, and then convert the light-signal back into electrical inside.

:slowclap:
« Last Edit: 19 Apr 2017, 19:01 by Case »
Logged
"Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter" - Rosa Luxemburg
"The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you're a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that." - David Dunning
"Brains are assholes" - SitnSpin

snufflebottoms

  • Furry furrier
  • **
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 172
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #106 on: 19 Apr 2017, 19:40 »

Have we passed the point where it is now reasonable to say that Faye and Bubbles would make a lovely couple? Claire obviously ships it. Dora seems to have picked up on it too. I can't recall but I think Tai said something as well.
Logged

blt

  • Bizarre cantaloupe phobia
  • **
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 203
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #107 on: 19 Apr 2017, 19:46 »

I suppose Creepybot and her associates might have provided a simply-operated EMP equivalent of an IED to a guerrilla force ("Put it over there and press this button when the enemy reaches that spot"), but I don't see them mass-producing artillery pieces.

We can't really discount an asymmetrical force though. Artillery could just be mortars.

I'm curious about whatever Bubbles may have been deployed against too, especially since we know that it must have been at least somewhat covert by her inclusion.  To me that points to an irregular enemy.
Logged
"I hate Fayelhotehp, She Who Smites the Morning, she's a bully and a monster."

shanejayell

  • Duck attack survivor
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1,524
    • Church of Yuri
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #108 on: 19 Apr 2017, 20:01 »

Have we passed the point where it is now reasonable to say that Faye and Bubbles would make a lovely couple? Claire obviously ships it. Dora seems to have picked up on it too. I can't recall but I think Tai said something as well.

They certainly are adorable.  :-D

Case

  • comeback tour!
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5,580
  • Putting the 'mental' into judgemental
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #109 on: 19 Apr 2017, 20:08 »

Wrapping folk up like a burrito is lurve:venonat:
Logged
"Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter" - Rosa Luxemburg
"The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you're a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that." - David Dunning
"Brains are assholes" - SitnSpin

TheEvilDog

  • Guest
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #110 on: 19 Apr 2017, 20:12 »

Wrapping folk up like a burrito is lurve:venonat:
Or an excellent prank the play on friends. Its funny watching them go crazy trying get out of the really tight blanket burrito the next morning.
Logged

jheartney

  • Cthulhu f'tagn
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 537
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #111 on: 19 Apr 2017, 20:20 »

Have we passed the point where it is now reasonable to say that Faye and Bubbles would make a lovely couple? Claire obviously ships it. Dora seems to have picked up on it too. I can't recall but I think Tai said something as well.

May has wished them productive procreation.

Personally, I don't see how it goes past snuggles (and even then, only with some padding upgrades).
Logged

jwhouk

  • Awakened
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 11,022
  • The Valley of the Sun
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #112 on: 19 Apr 2017, 20:24 »

:laugh:

It was good to see Jeph add a reference to Canadian Tire money in the strip.

Some even suggest the Ottawa Senators accept it for season tickets...

(waves "hi" to the Far North)
Logged
"Character is what you are in the Dark." - D.L. Moody
There is no joke that can be made online without someone being offended by it.
Life's too short to be ashamed of how you were born.
Just another Joe like 46

snufflebottoms

  • Furry furrier
  • **
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 172
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #113 on: 19 Apr 2017, 20:47 »


Personally, I don't see how it goes past snuggles (and even then, only with some padding upgrades).


Uhh well it would be pretty easy for Bubbles to have a sexual relationship with Faye. I am not sure how Faye could reciprocate though and I am not sure that getting into the details here would be a good idea (genitals and stuffs). That said, Robots can feel pleasure right? I mean non-sexually, there must be some sort of contact that would be equivalent to feel good cuddles, hugging and/or kissing.  I am sure Bubbles could get some softer casing for snuggles. 


They certainly are adorable.  :-D

omg new comic. I never thought I would be shipping this combination but I so am.
Logged

Case

  • comeback tour!
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5,580
  • Putting the 'mental' into judgemental
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #114 on: 19 Apr 2017, 20:49 »

Wrapping folk up like a burrito is lurve:venonat:
Or an excellent prank the play on friends. Its funny watching them go crazy trying get out of the really tight blanket burrito the next morning.

Why can't it be both?  8-)
Logged
"Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter" - Rosa Luxemburg
"The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you're a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that." - David Dunning
"Brains are assholes" - SitnSpin

TheEvilDog

  • Guest
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #115 on: 19 Apr 2017, 20:52 »

Have we passed the point where it is now reasonable to say that Faye and Bubbles would make a lovely couple? Claire obviously ships it. Dora seems to have picked up on it too. I can't recall but I think Tai said something as well.

Honestly, I can't see Bubbles and Faye working as a couple. Not in the sense of some comment that Jeph made about AI/Human relations years back. I mean in the sense that both Faye and Bubbles are in their own ways, to be rather blunt, very broken people.

People have this strange fixation on the idea that romance fixes everything, that love fixes all, as if people can be equated to the Japanese art of kintsugi. And that doesn't happen. Two broken people don't just magically fix each other. To get from that point, that pit, it takes time, support from others and that own desire to heal, because no one else can make you do that, love can't do that. It can only offer support.

But for all that I have said though, I can see Bubbles and Faye having a very deep and close friendship, a bond that goes passed the idea of romance but rather a bond built upon their own struggles and realising they aren't alone in their pain. Because sometimes, friendship can mean more to someone than love, that is philia love rather than eros love.
Logged

sitnspin

  • Born in a Nalgene bottle
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3,199
  • Amoral lust machine
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #116 on: 19 Apr 2017, 20:56 »

Because sometimes, friendship can mean more to someone than love, that is philia love rather than eros love.

The two are not mutually exclusive. I married my best friend.
Logged
I'm a simple girl, all I want from life is to drink the blood of my enemies from their bleached hollowed skulls.
@syleegrrl

SubaruStephen

  • Scrabble hacker
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1,319
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #117 on: 19 Apr 2017, 21:04 »

As much as I like Bubbles, I wouldn't want to share a bed with her, it would be like sleeping with a Harley Davidson.

A Harley Davidson that could roll around in it's sleep, snore, and hog the covers.
Logged
A "buttload" is an actual measurement, next time someone tells you that they need a buttload of something, tell them 126 gallons might be a bit too much.

TheEvilDog

  • Guest
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #118 on: 19 Apr 2017, 21:05 »

Because sometimes, friendship can mean more to someone than love, that is philia love rather than eros love.

The two are not mutually exclusive. I married my best friend.
That's the best kind of love and the best expression of it.

Some people just get really confused about the different kinds of love, mainly shippers.
Logged

cesium133

  • Preventing third impact
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 6,148
  • Has a fucked-up browser history
    • Cesium Comics
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #119 on: 19 Apr 2017, 21:10 »

As much as I like Bubbles, I wouldn't want to share a bed with her, it would be like sleeping with a Harley Davidson.

A Harley Davidson that could roll around in it's sleep, snore, and hog the covers.
Does Bubbles even sleep? I seem to recall Momo not needing to sleep.
Logged
The nerdy comic I update sometimes: Cesium Comics

Unofficial character tag thingy for QC

Sullivan

  • Furry furrier
  • **
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 164
  • Speaker-to- ... um... hm.
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #120 on: 19 Apr 2017, 21:20 »

Faye's sleepy soft relaxed face  :-) 
Logged

Carl-E

  • Awakened
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 10,346
  • The distilled essence of Mr. James Beam himself.
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #121 on: 19 Apr 2017, 21:30 »

A Harley Davidson that could ... hog the covers.

I see what you did there. 


As for the deployment of Bubbles' squad, while the US may not be at war, they could well have been part of a UN or NATO (or other cooperative QC-verse equivalent) security force that came under attack. 

And her memories?  Well,

Quote
Daylight - I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new life
And I mustn't give in
When the dawn comes
Tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin


Edit:  My post number is 21 in binary.  :P
Logged
When people try to speak a gut reaction, they end up talking out their ass.

Gyrre

  • Born in a Nalgene bottle
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3,288
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #122 on: 19 Apr 2017, 23:15 »

The opposing squad not only had the appropriate EMP weapon, they knew precisely which tuning it needed to knock out Bubbles. How did they get this doubtless top secret information, which both ended the AI soidier program as well as only temporarily incapacitating Bubbles?

Can you spell C.R.E.E.P.Y.B.O.T? I knew you could!

Note how this little manipulation gets AIs out of human wars, while not hurting any AI physically. Also note that the psychological damage to Bubbles was the thing that made Creepybot break cover; guilt perhaps?
So, is that Creepybot Intelligence Agency?
Logged
Quote
a real-ass gaddam sword
Quote
"Broken swords and dragon bones scattered on the way back home."

Too stubborn to die, just like the rest of my family.

de_la_Nae

  • Methuselah's mentor
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5,161
  • but will you understand
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #123 on: 19 Apr 2017, 23:16 »

I've sat here for longer than I really should have to, trying to figure out how to put this without being intensely insulting. I'm not certain I'm gonna manage it as well as I'd like, but here goes.

Some of you have some...er, blind spots. I mean we all do, but I guess yours just happen to be in a place where mine aren't.

So, to try to keep things at a relatively surface-level analysis...

  • Bubbles and Faye are already a couple.
  • This doesn't mean what you are probably assuming it means.
  • Some of you are already annoyed, but stop thinking about your reply to me and start thinking about what couples actually are.
  • No, I get it, I had and have some of those assumptions too, but reality doesn't conform to them.
  • Back to the couple at hand, they haven't chosen it.
  • Eventually they'll have to actively notice and think about it, and choose what they want to try to do.
  • But they are a couple. Jeph is playing with it. In their body language, in their faces, in a hand and hand and a blush and a look...
  • And y'know they have all sorts of kinds of couple they can choose to be, with time.

Also as for sex, since some of you have brought it up... I mean do you now know any disabled people? Kinky people? Autistic people? Trans people? Traumatized people? Queer people? Long-distance relationship people? Hell, have you ever masturbated? (don't answer that)

Don't worry about the sex, the kids will figure that out with some time, if they choose to go that route.

Is it cold in here?

  • Administrator
  • Awakened
  • ******
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 25,163
  • He/him/his pronouns
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #124 on: 19 Apr 2017, 23:18 »

Notice how much progress it is for Faye to make a respectful friendship with an AI.

The way she treated Momo in the chibi chassis was contemptible.

She's been overcoming some bad attitudes.
Logged
Thank you, Dr. Karikó.

Gyrre

  • Born in a Nalgene bottle
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3,288
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #125 on: 19 Apr 2017, 23:27 »

Our memories are not recordings of what we experienced. They are the constantly evolving stories we tell ourselves about what we experienced.
The more frequently a memory is recalled, the stronger it becomes. However, should the neurons involved in a memory pathway ever be damaged or destroyed, that memory is also damaged or destroyed.
Yes, even if the individual can regenerate neurons. Deadpool should have worse amnesia than Logan.
Logged
Quote
a real-ass gaddam sword
Quote
"Broken swords and dragon bones scattered on the way back home."

Too stubborn to die, just like the rest of my family.

BenRG

  • coprophage
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 7,861
  • Boldly Going From The Back Seat!
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #126 on: 19 Apr 2017, 23:38 »

In my eyes, today's strip is a direct sequel to the last panel in the previous strip in more than one way. Bubbles was talking about the hole in her heart and how she's only ever been able to disguise it for a little time. She's possibly not ready to admit this to herself but she's slowly coming to the realisation that she's found something with which to fill it. She's not only talking about Faye but the whole new circle of friends and associates that she's made through her.

That said, I maintain that Bubbles is attracted to Faye but I don't think that she's willing to act on it for a variety of reasons, "too soon" being the primary one but I'm pretty sure "too different in species terms" is in there too.

However, that's all in the future; right now, she's so very, very grateful for what she has already found with her friend. She's got a very sweet element to her nature that comes out occasionally.
Logged
~~~~

They call me BenRG... But I don't know why!

Akima

  • WoW gold miner on break
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 6,523
  • ** 妇女能顶半边天 **
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #127 on: 19 Apr 2017, 23:52 »

We can't really discount an asymmetrical force though. Artillery could just be mortars.
Possibly, but Bubbles called it "artillery", and she is an ex-soldier. Do soldiers refer to the sort of light tube mortars that insurgents might employ as artillery? I'd have expected her to call it "mortar-fire", if that is what it was.

Bubbles is way too sleek to be compared to a Harley Davidson, but sleeping on any motorcycle would not be pleasant. Props to Bubbles for thinking of Faye's comfort. Incidentally, doesn't Faye look younger without her glasses?
Logged
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered, than answers that can't be questioned." Richard Feynman

Case

  • comeback tour!
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5,580
  • Putting the 'mental' into judgemental
Logged
"Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter" - Rosa Luxemburg
"The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you're a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that." - David Dunning
"Brains are assholes" - SitnSpin

pwhodges

  • Admin emeritus
  • Awakened
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 17,241
  • I'll only say this once...
    • My home page
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #129 on: 20 Apr 2017, 00:12 »

Methinks the hard part would then be to isolate those leads from her insides, if necessary, or design the leads such that they burn through on their own in case of a current surge.
Optical isolation would work, I think. That is, have the antennae outside the protective cage connected to some circuitry to convert the electrical signal into a modulated light-beam that is fed into a fibre-optic passed through the cage, and then convert the light-signal back into electrical inside.

Even an optical link goes through a (small) flaw in the shielding, though.  And it would also be necessary to have the electronics powered by a long-life internal battery so that there are no power leads going through the shielding either.
Logged
"Being human, having your health; that's what's important."  (from: Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi )
"As long as we're all living, and as long as we're all having fun, that should do it, right?"  (from: The Eccentric Family )

BenRG

  • coprophage
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 7,861
  • Boldly Going From The Back Seat!
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #130 on: 20 Apr 2017, 00:18 »

It occurs to me that the most obvious way for Bubbles to have communications EMP shielding (although one that loses most of the presumed communication & control advantages of an AI soldier) is to use the simplest of them all: It's hooked into her through a radio earpiece and an augmented reality monocle mounted on her helmet. Even if she has to physically listen to messages and reply verbally and also operate her AR system the same way as her biological comrades, she will still have a faster reaction time to incoming information and orders.
Logged
~~~~

They call me BenRG... But I don't know why!

JoeCovenant

  • Duck attack survivor
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1,863
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #131 on: 20 Apr 2017, 02:33 »

Hang on though....

How can Bubbles remember the incident... but not remember what her colleagues looked like?
Her memories are files (as has been discussed) and said files were apparently wiped?

So how can Bubbles have a selective memory of what happened without seeing the people involved in that self-same incident?
Or, indeed, memories of them prior to said incident? We can't pretend to know how AIs memories work, but we've been given a brief run down throughout the last few months... and no explanation other than them being data files has been given.

So... How?

How is it that people can remember the sound of a loved one's voice and yet unable to remember details of their face years after they have passed?
How is that we might remember with crystal clarity an embarrassing incident from decades ago, but forget the name of the person we were introduced to last month?
How is it that people can forget some memories after trauma but other obscure ones remain intact?

Memory is a funny and complex thing and though we think them to be the same as files, they aren't. A file can be deleted and later recovered near intact. A memory can be lost and though it's not always possible for it to come back, we are still left with the imprint of that memory, an echo as it were.

Bubbles might not be able to remember the faces of her squad or their time together, but there is still the imprint and echoes of that time.

Yeah but Bubbles memories literally ARE files, as mentioned above, and shown in the strip, cos Bubbles is a computer, not a person.
Files don't imprint on other files.
(However... if they *did* then one would imagine that imprinting might contain such things as visual recognition of Friend or Foe.. which would again entail facial recall)

We might forget memories. but (generally speaking) computer files must be physically wiped to be *forgotten* and from all we've been led to believe only this single incident was wiped by CW.

(I can't understand this "forgetting my father's voice" thing either. My Father died ten years ago. I can recall his voice as easily as I can recall my own name - but I get that might differ for others for whatever reasons)

In short (too late!)
I think trying to compare Human and AI memory systems doesn't work.
Particularly when based on the way we've been led to believe AI memories work in this particular universe.

Memories are not stored locally, they are diffused throughout the brain and are strongly linked to emotions. It is possible to forget the factual content of an experience while retaining the emotional impact it had. Encountering similar events/circumstances can then trigger that emotional reaction without the person knowing the precise source. Memories are weird. My own are either a jumbled, discordant mess or absent all together. A huge chunk of my past is a complete blank due to trauma. Other swaths of memory are completely disjointed, broken free of temporal context.

See first line above.
Cheers!

ETA:
I get why people are arguing against this... But I just think it's too neat a bundle to give Bubbles some existential trauma.
She remembers everything... but not their faces.. A tragic scenario.. just ... hard for me to believe, given that she is a walking computer an ADORABLE walking computer.

And I think my belief, that Bubble has EASILY been the best written character since her introduction, is grumpy at the fact that this particular aspect of her has been handled in what seems to be a slap-dash manner.

Hey-ho.
« Last Edit: 20 Apr 2017, 02:44 by JoeCovenant »
Logged
Covenant
A Man With Far Too Much Time On His Hands

JoeCovenant

  • Duck attack survivor
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1,863
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #132 on: 20 Apr 2017, 02:55 »

Uhh well it would be pretty easy for Bubbles to have a sexual relationship with Faye. I am not sure how Faye could reciprocate though...

Give  it   her a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn  it   her on!
Logged
Covenant
A Man With Far Too Much Time On His Hands

oddtail

  • Bling blang blong blung
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1,200
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #133 on: 20 Apr 2017, 04:20 »

Yeah but Bubbles memories literally ARE files, as mentioned above, and shown in the strip, cos Bubbles is a computer, not a person.

OK, this is nitpicky, I admit, but Bubbles is a computer, not a *human*. It's established very well in QCverse that AI are actually conscious, intelligent and have individuality. They also have rights as citizens.

So Bubbles is very much a person, unambiguously so (in the legal, moral, and mental sense). A non-human person, but still.
Logged

de_la_Nae

  • Methuselah's mentor
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5,161
  • but will you understand
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #134 on: 20 Apr 2017, 05:00 »

Beat me to it.

For what it's worth, while I'm confident Joe wasn't trying to be *that* way (no really, I get you aren't, mate), I'd argue, as someone from one of the minority groups in her culture that have a history of de-person-alization and violence, it is a little more important than 'nitpicky', oddtail.

sitnspin

  • Born in a Nalgene bottle
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3,199
  • Amoral lust machine
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #135 on: 20 Apr 2017, 07:18 »

Our memories are not recordings of what we experienced. They are the constantly evolving stories we tell ourselves about what we experienced.
The more frequently a memory is recalled, the stronger it becomes.
Stronger, but not necessarily more accurate. It shifts as our perspective of it changes, which it inevitably does as new experiences shape our personality and thought patterns.
Logged
I'm a simple girl, all I want from life is to drink the blood of my enemies from their bleached hollowed skulls.
@syleegrrl

Carl-E

  • Awakened
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 10,346
  • The distilled essence of Mr. James Beam himself.
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #136 on: 20 Apr 2017, 07:25 »

We know how computers work. 

We do not know how AI's work.  The evolution of actual intelligence in a machine may well involve a memory system more like our own, where the data of the events are strung together to form a narrative, and even with the data missing the narrative can remain.  Perhaps there's even re-writing of sectors as the narrative is constructed and repeated, ultimately changing the data and even the narrative itself. 

Note that AI's in QC are not like the AI's developed so far in our world.  Our idea of artificial intelligence is a poor approximation at best of what a genuine consciousness would be.  Knowing one does not even give a passing familiarity with the other! 

Basically, to quote a mantra of the recent past, "everything you know is wrong".  This is not addressed to any one person here, but rather to all of us. 

[/endrant]
Logged
When people try to speak a gut reaction, they end up talking out their ass.

oddtail

  • Bling blang blong blung
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1,200
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #137 on: 20 Apr 2017, 07:30 »

Beat me to it.

For what it's worth, while I'm confident Joe wasn't trying to be *that* way (no really, I get you aren't, mate), I'd argue, as someone from one of the minority groups in her culture that have a history of de-person-alization and violence, it is a little more important than 'nitpicky', oddtail.

I qualify this as nitpicky mainly because a) it was clear from context that "person" implied "human", and b) the issue with AI personhood is purely fictional, so I don't think insisting on correct wording is of extreme importance.

In-universe, it would definitely not be a nitpick, certainly. IRL, everyone who qualifies as "person" tends to be human.

EDIT: and I mean, I get the potentially troubling parallels to the real world (which is why I mentioned the whole thing in the first place), but those are still just that, parallels.
« Last Edit: 20 Apr 2017, 07:37 by oddtail »
Logged

Mehre

  • Plantmonster
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 26
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #138 on: 20 Apr 2017, 07:46 »

Well. In QC universe it doesnt seem that AI are based on neural networks, so only what we can apply here are general concepts. One of them is that it is subsymbolic and distributed, which would point to memories more akin to human ones. Hovewer, we know that AI here have their OS, files and whatnot. So i envision that there are two complementary memory systems. One being ordinary files and other being memories in AI itself. Files probably wouldnt be real memories but something more akin to notebook in your mind, but that would be just speculation.

Obviously, CW or government itself would purge file-based memories but as Jeph correctly predicted selective purging of distributed/subsymbolic information would be a lot harder, which was whole theme of creepybot arc.

TL;DR: QCAI could have both file and human-like memories.   

Edit: for scientific accuracy:
narrow AI- single problem solving ai, for example predicting energy load forecast, image classification, music generation...
general AI- more like humans or what sci-fi shows us. Can solve great variety of problems. This division can be a bit fuzzy at times.
animal-like, human-like, superhuman- mostly talks about "power" of AI. In somecases we can build superhuman narrow AIs (chess, go,..). Both narrow and general AIs are ongoing research.
conscious AI- mostly covered by popculture and popular science articles. There are problems with definition of consciousness, religious people("oh, but it doesnt have soul!") and simple problem of how would you prove it.
« Last Edit: 20 Apr 2017, 08:08 by Mehre »
Logged

anahata

  • Pneumatic ratchet pants
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 308
  • Never knowingly understood
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #139 on: 20 Apr 2017, 08:01 »

To get some insight into how AIs might remember things, think of learning machines that we have now, based on neural nets. They don't store facts in what we would call any ordered way; they build up a pattern in memory that is constantly tweaked by feedback in a long process of trial and error with random inputs. We don't even understand what any particular byte of memory contributes to the whole process. It just works, but the effect of altering any part of those memory contents is quite unpredictable.

No wonder low-level tampering with an AI's memory is dangerous.
Logged
It's Okay! I just won't touch any machines!

RuffGruff

  • Not quite a lurker
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 11
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #140 on: 20 Apr 2017, 08:02 »

It's kind of interesting that Jeph either knowingly or unknowingly stepped into the early eddies of the debate on AI personhood. While it seems to be semi-well established within his own (I've not seen anything like a debate over AI personhood within the comic yet) world, in ours we're still coming to grips with how fast technology is advancing. (Much) Sooner rather than later we will have artificial intelligence, though to what degree it will be independent is an important question to ask ourselves.

For those people who have only recently gained protection under the law to freely marry those they love, choosing the correct manner of address -- and one's words in general -- is simply normal. Most normies don't have to go through life second-guessing, so it's hard for them to understand or empathize with something beyond their experience. I'm curious to see where Jeph takes this.

Personally, I think the idea of AI-personhood makes complete sense. We created AI and can no more seek to keep it shackled than previous generations did to the African-American population in the United States. How we, as Humanity, come to evolve alongside our own creation (AI) will be important. Starting off on the right foot is important -- and potentially life as we know it important.

That said, if we get to laugh at the idea of Raj on the The Big Bang Theory having the hots for Siri (a non-AI bit of technology), not to mention the obsession some have with 2-D characters, then we should be just as ready to accept something like Fae and Bubbles becoming an item. I'd like to see that, see Jeph explore it: the development of "heart" within an AI and love for something other than human (from Fae).
Logged
"Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?"

"If at first you don’t succeed . . . so much for skydiving."

Case

  • comeback tour!
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5,580
  • Putting the 'mental' into judgemental
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #141 on: 20 Apr 2017, 08:24 »

Our memories are not recordings of what we experienced. They are the constantly evolving stories we tell ourselves about what we experienced.
The more frequently a memory is recalled, the stronger it becomes.
Stronger, but not necessarily more accurate. It shifts as our perspective of it changes, which it inevitably does as new experiences shape our personality and thought patterns.

Methinks there might also be a difference between normal-, and traumatic memory formation, and 'memory-evolution' - A while back, I've read about  a new approach to trauma-treatment where people are given medication that inhibits formation of new memories (but leaves already formed memories unaffected), and are then encouraged to recall a traumatic one. IIRC, the results were very encouraging, where a widely varying group - people with PTSD, patients with BPS that had traumatic memories, etc. - reported significant improvements (flashbacks become rarer, or less distressing) in a mere handful of sessions (*).

One thing to take away from that might be that the difference between traumatic and normal memories is that the latter evolve over time as you laid out above - i.e. that over time, they become more and more a record of the narrative of events that we've created for ourselves to make sense of events in the world and our lives, rather than a record of the actual events - while traumatic memories, because they are 'recorded' differently, with a higher information density, do not.

In that picture, the traumatic memories would be like 'rocks' in the stream of our narrative -> while the narratives of our 'normal' memories adapt to conform with the evolution of our personalities, to make sense to the person we are now, rather the person we were back then, the traumatic memories resist that process, and part of the pain of recalling them is that during the recalling, we (partially) revert again to a person we no longer are?

Does that make some sense? (I admit that that I have no traumatic memories (that I know of), and am wildly speculating here)



(*) Edit: I found the article I referred to above: "Ending the nightmares: How drug treatment could finally stop PTSD", as well as one of Dr. Brunet's clinical studies: "Trauma Reactivation Plus Propranolol Is Associated With Durably Low Physiological Responding During Subsequent Script-Driven Traumatic Imagery". This sounds like it may be interesting for some of our forumites[/i]
« Last Edit: 20 Apr 2017, 08:50 by Case »
Logged
"Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter" - Rosa Luxemburg
"The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you're a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that." - David Dunning
"Brains are assholes" - SitnSpin

JoeCovenant

  • Duck attack survivor
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1,863
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #142 on: 20 Apr 2017, 08:32 »

Yeah but Bubbles memories literally ARE files, as mentioned above, and shown in the strip, cos Bubbles is a computer, not a person.

OK, this is nitpicky, I admit, but Bubbles is a computer, not a *human*. It's established very well in QCverse that AI are actually conscious, intelligent and have individuality. They also have rights as citizens.

So Bubbles is very much a person, unambiguously so (in the legal, moral, and mental sense). A non-human person, but still.

Oh I don't disagree with a single word of that!

Luckily it doesn't impinge on my argument! :)
"Person" or not, their memories are handled as a machine's.
Logged
Covenant
A Man With Far Too Much Time On His Hands

sitnspin

  • Born in a Nalgene bottle
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3,199
  • Amoral lust machine
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #143 on: 20 Apr 2017, 08:54 »

Our memories are not recordings of what we experienced. They are the constantly evolving stories we tell ourselves about what we experienced.
The more frequently a memory is recalled, the stronger it becomes.
Stronger, but not necessarily more accurate. It shifts as our perspective of it changes, which it inevitably does as new experiences shape our personality and thought patterns.

Methinks there might also be a difference between normal-, and traumatic memory formation, and 'memory-evolution' - A while back, I've read about  a new approach to trauma-treatment where people are given medication that inhibits formation of new memories (but leaves already formed memories unaffected), and are then encouraged to recall a traumatic one. IIRC, the results were very encouraging, where a widely varying group - people with PTSD, patients with BPS that had traumatic memories, etc. - reported significant improvements (flashbacks become rarer, or less distressing) in a mere handful of sessions.

One thing to take away from that might be that the difference between traumatic and normal memories is that the latter evolve over time as you laid out above - i.e. that over time, they become more and more a record of the narrative of events that we've created for ourselves to make sense of events in the world and our lives, rather than a record of the actual events - while traumatic memories, because they are 'recorded' differently, with a higher information density, do not.

In that picture, the traumatic memories would be like 'rocks' in the stream of our narrative -> while the narratives of our 'normal' memories adapt to conform with the evolution of our personalities, to make sense to the person we are now, rather the person we were back then, the traumatic memories resist that process, and part of the pain of recalling them is that during the recalling, we (partially) revert again to a person we no longer are?

Does that make some sense? (I admit that that I have no traumatic memories (that I know of), and am wildly speculating here)

I do have traumatic memories, some quite vivid. I'm not a neurologist, so I can't speak with authority on the physical processes involved. I can't even speak to how other people experience their memories. I can only say how it works for me. My brain chemistry is, to put it mildly, fucked up.  My memories don't really form a cohesive narrative, they are a jumbled mess of disjointed events that don't fall into any consistent chronological framework. The trauma memories, while far more vivid than the others, are no less subject to revision. Considering the only other people present for those events are the ones that caused them, I can't exactly seek out third party confirmation for how accurate my memories of them are. Do I remember them now the way I remembered them 10 years ago? A year ago? A week ago? I'm not sure. I know that I barely recognize the person I was in the journals I wrote from back then.
Logged
I'm a simple girl, all I want from life is to drink the blood of my enemies from their bleached hollowed skulls.
@syleegrrl

Case

  • comeback tour!
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5,580
  • Putting the 'mental' into judgemental
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #144 on: 20 Apr 2017, 09:02 »

Yeah but Bubbles memories literally ARE files, as mentioned above, and shown in the strip, cos Bubbles is a computer, not a person.

OK, this is nitpicky, I admit, but Bubbles is a computer, not a *human*. It's established very well in QCverse that AI are actually conscious, intelligent and have individuality. They also have rights as citizens.

So Bubbles is very much a person, unambiguously so (in the legal, moral, and mental sense). A non-human person, but still.

Oh I don't disagree with a single word of that!

Luckily it doesn't impinge on my argument! :)
"Person" or not, their memories are handled as a machine's.

Uhmmmh - I don't recall evidence for that. In fact, Bubbles explanation of the functioning of QC-verses AI's suggests that AI memory recording and storage is significantly more complex. Furthermore, I recall a discussion from Jaron Lanier's "You are not a Gadget" where he explains that the entire paradigm of files (and nested folders) that contemporary operating systems utilize was a design-choice that first became popular, and later became 'locked in', as he calls it - but it's in no way necessary to organize even our conventional Turing machine's OS' in that way - so why should it be necessary for something that is on an entirely different level of complexity & capabilities? (*)

For example: Recall those stories about a Savant who is taken on a helicopter trip over the roofs of Paris, and who later on paints stunningly detailed pictures of precisely that aerial view of Paris? No 'normal' human being can do that - not because our brains and senses cannot (they can), but because our memory recording filters for important information (But 'important' is a choice - a choice that can become ... a narrative)
We recall: "Paris from above", "Roofs", "Shingles", "Up in the air", "Loud" (Choppers are loud!), "Anxious" (Fear of falling) -> The things that our brain deemed important (also important for our survival) at the time.

He recalls the position of every fucking window he's seen (no kidding, they actually compared the drawings to photograpy taken during the trip) ... But this guy, for all his amazing abilities, can't tie his own shoelaces (like literally, not metaphorically) - It's no question which mode of memory encoding grants an evolutionary advantage.



(*) With 'lock in' Lanier means design choices that become central to the entire functioning of parts of human activity's infrastructure not necessarily because they are good choices, but because so many subsequent applications crucially rely on them for their operation. Examples include the diameter of tubes in London's Underground that allow only a certain class of tracks, or Dolby's MIDI-protocol - oftentimes, those choices were 'proof of concept'-designs that impose significant limitations later on. Lanier theorizes that this is compounded in computer science because of conventional program's 'brittleness' - a single misplaced digit, or character can make the entire operation impossible, or - if the coder has not implemented good error-handling - even shut down the entire system, including other user's access to services.
« Last Edit: 20 Apr 2017, 09:17 by Case »
Logged
"Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter" - Rosa Luxemburg
"The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you're a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that." - David Dunning
"Brains are assholes" - SitnSpin

Morituri

  • William Gibson's Babydaddy
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2,276
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #145 on: 20 Apr 2017, 10:43 »

After reading today's comic I hesitated to even come to the forums because "OH MY GOD THE SHIPPING!"

But I was pleasantly surprised.  Thanks, most of you, for not going there.  It develops as (and if) it develops, and that's fine.

I work on narrow AI systems for actual paychecks, but my private obsession and code I write on my own is aimed (probably badly, but at least that's where I'm aiming) at conscious/general AI.  I have something to say about memory in AI that might be relevant.

On the question of memory, there are about a hundred different things people are trying.  Most of them are of the form "Here's a way to interface thus-and-such memory construction with control by a neural network - let's see whether we can train a neural network to use it in an appropriate way."

Some examples, spoilered because you don't need the specific examples to get the point :
Anyway, so far what we have when we make a system that needs to keep track of a lot of context and specific information, is a system that has a lot of tiny little pieces of memory we can read, but no individual piece makes much sense by itself. If something is simple, we can usually work out what the system is using each of the memory subsystems for - but if it's complicated, the relationships between all those pieces gets as hard to interpret sensibly as all the topological connections and weights and thresholds.  This is especially true with networks made of LSTM - each node represents a single remembered number, and how they relate to memory of things that are more complicated than that is determined by network structure.

I imagine that memory stored in files - literal recordings of the sensory inputs - is a handy and useful thing that future AIs will probably have available to them, the same way footage of every minute of human lives is going to be on surveillance video or social media or both.  But I also expect that the memory that actually gets used from moment to moment, the subjectively experienced memories and formative experiences, are likely to be chaotically structured and difficult to make actual sense of from an objective POV. 

Eventually we're going to solve strong AI.  And then it's going to solve us.
« Last Edit: 25 Apr 2017, 16:27 by Morituri »
Logged

pwhodges

  • Admin emeritus
  • Awakened
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 17,241
  • I'll only say this once...
    • My home page
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #146 on: 20 Apr 2017, 12:12 »

(I've not seen anything like a debate over AI personhood within the comic yet)

Are you aware of Freefall?  Note that it's been going for a really long time, so it may take a while to reach where it starts to get interesting.
Logged
"Being human, having your health; that's what's important."  (from: Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi )
"As long as we're all living, and as long as we're all having fun, that should do it, right?"  (from: The Eccentric Family )

Case

  • comeback tour!
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5,580
  • Putting the 'mental' into judgemental
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #147 on: 20 Apr 2017, 12:35 »

Well ...

Hi new-ish person! Very interesting post, and it leaves me with a few questions (Also: Do you have a CS-background? Would you be willing to expand a bit on the terms you used for us laypeople, like 'neural networks'?)

Well. In QC universe it doesnt seem that AI are based on neural networks, so only what we can apply here are general concepts.

What makes you think that QC-verse AI don't incorporate building blocks that function like neural networks? We know of at least two realizations of the concept - the ones in our heads, and the ones simulated in our Turing-machine class computers. While the physical realisations of the concept are completely different, the operating principle is the same - so why should QC verses AI's not use the concept? It does appear to have it's uses.

What Jeph said (3376) was (*):
Quote
"The AI mind, as those of organic beings, is self-constructing and self-organizing. It is an emergent system. Just as we do not fully comprehend the organic mind, the AI mind remains mysterious. However, we do have a better understanding of the building blocks. Quantum spin states in foamed nanocrystal lattices can be manipulated, and with a greater degree than possible with organic matter"

I see nothing here that would preclude those spin-states from simulating neural networks? Did I miss something? :-\

(click to show/hide)




One of them is that it is subsymbolic and distributed, which would point to memories more akin to human ones.

Could you elaborate on the meaning of those two terms? And how they relate to memory? From what I've found, the term 'subsymbolic' relates to processing, not necessary storage (though the latter is a part of the former, to some degree):

Quote
‘Symbolic’ and ‘subsymbolic’ characterize two different approaches to modeling cognition. Traditionally, as I understand it, this dichotomy pitted anything easily understandable as a symbol manipulation system (logic and symbol string rewrite systems and associated abstract computing machines that classify or generate strings of symbols - e.g. Turing machines, finite state machines) as fundamentally different in some meaningful way from basically just neural networks (the biological ones and the biologically-inspired but simplistic artificial models of them) and things like them. Crucially, representations and algorithms in the second approach don’t feature things you can point to that easily look like crisp, discrete, categorical symbols.

This divide coincided with other divides in AI and related philosophy; some of the associated buzzwords (for further exploration of your own) are "neats and scruffies", "embodied cognition" and "the symbol grounding problem" (see "the Chinese room argument" against the possibility of "strong AI"). The divide has become less consequential as time has gone on: for starters, the two flavors of cognition are not really at odds with each other - IIRC, there's a proof of the equivalence of some form of neural network and Turing machines (meaning that for any Turing machine, there exists at least one corresponding neural network that behaves the same and vice versa), and people have (probably always?) implemented subsymbolic models on/in very symbol system-y hardware and programming languages.

("What's the difference between symbolic and subsymbolic processing?")

I'm pretty sure my squishy matter can handle both symbolic and subsymbolic processing. The former is what I earn my croissants with, the latter enables me to prefer croissants over some healthy fruit-salad (and hands me a bad conscience to go along with the bakery, entirely for free ... :laugh:).  But my copy of Mathematica is much better than I am at handling certain parts of symbolic manipulations (It's still a crap physicist, though. Even a bad 'symbolic computer' - For starters, it doesn't know what to do with its abilities)

So I'm not sure whether 'symbolic' and 'subsymbolic' is analogous to the 'human/machine'-divide. Mostly because nearly all humans can do both.




Hovewer, we know that AI here have their OS, files and whatnot. So i envision that there are two complementary memory systems. One being ordinary files and other being memories in AI itself. Files probably wouldnt be real memories but something more akin to notebook in your mind, but that would be just speculation.

I'm definitely able to memorize a small notebook - just not very reliably, or quickly. And unlike other memories - smells for example - I'd be able to access those 'data memories' nearly at will. Just like opening a file in my mind ... By contrast: Right now, I cannot recall the smell of weed to my mind - but I know I'd instantly recognize it if I smelled it. So it seems I also have two different, complementary memory systems that look pretty similar to what you describe. Soooooooh ... would your hypothetical "QC-verse AI Mod 2.1 by Mehre" really be that different from a human mind? Or from a machine?

I can do anything your QC-AI can - maybe not as fast, or as reliable, but I have the ability. But I can also do what a standard computer can do.





Even an optical link goes through a (small) flaw in the shielding, though. 

If the EMP mostly sticks to the microwave-part of the spectrum, you'd probably be fine with apertures smaller than 1mm. From the pulse-shapes I've seen, it looks like only EMP's from nukes are really delta-distribution-like, and therefore cover large parts of the whole EM-spectrum. The other, non-nuclear EMP pulse-shapes were significantly broader (and therefore more restricted in their 'Fourier-space support', or bandwidth)
« Last Edit: 20 Apr 2017, 13:09 by Case »
Logged
"Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter" - Rosa Luxemburg
"The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you're a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that." - David Dunning
"Brains are assholes" - SitnSpin

Is it cold in here?

  • Administrator
  • Awakened
  • ******
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 25,163
  • He/him/his pronouns
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #148 on: 20 Apr 2017, 13:03 »

Quote from: Bubbles
You cannot modify individual memories

Her memory is known to work differently from one of today's file systems, then.
Logged
Thank you, Dr. Karikó.

JimC

  • Beyond Thunderdome
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 571
  • Alice liked fluffy toys...
Re: WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)
« Reply #149 on: 20 Apr 2017, 13:09 »

More shipping than the Panama canal here at the moment...
Logged
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5   Go Up