Chronos

Karma: 149

Chronos Jan 11, 2010, 4:53 AM
2 points
in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: New Year’s Predictions Thread
I wasn’t even considering the possibility of static images in video games, because static images aren’t generally considered to count in modern video games. The world doesn’t want another Myst game, and I can only imagine one other instance in a game where photorealistic, non-uncanny static images constitute the bulk of the gameplay: some sort of a dialog tree / disguised puzzle game where one or more still characters’ faces changed in reaction to your dialog choices (i.e. something along the lines of a Japanese-style dating sim).

Chronos Jan 1, 2010, 9:33 PM
0 points
in reply to: dfranke’s comment on: New Year’s Predictions Thread
The obvious answer would be “offline rendering”.

Even if the non-interactivity of pre-rendered video weren’t an issue, games as a category can’t afford to pre-render more than the occasional cutscene here or there: a typical modern game is much longer than a typical modern movie—typically by at least one order of magnitude, i.e. 15 to 20 hours of gameplay, and the storyline often branches as well. In terms of dollars grossed per hours rendered, games simply can’t afford to keep up. Thus, the rise of real-time hardware 3D rendering in both PC gaming and console gaming.

Chronos Dec 2, 2009, 6:05 AM
1 point
in reply to: Chronos’s comment on: The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies
And, since I can’t let that stand without tangling myself up in Yudkowsky’s “Outlawing Anthropics” post, I’ll present my conclusion on that as well:

To recapitulate the scenario: Suppose 20 copies of me are created and go to sleep, and a fair coin is tossed. If heads, 18 go to green rooms and 2 go to red rooms; if tails, vice versa. Upon waking, each of the copies in green rooms will be asked “Give $1 to each copy in a green room, while taking $3 from each copy in a red room”? (All must agree or something sufficiently horrible happens.)

The correct answer is “no”. Because I have copies and I am interacting with them, it is not proper for me to infer from my green room that I live in heads-world with 90% probability. Rather, there is 100% certainty that at least 2 of me are living in a green room, and if I am one of them, then the odds are 50-50 whether I have 1 companion or 17. I must not change my answer if I value my 18 potential copies in red rooms.

However, suppose there were only one of me instead. There is still a coin flip, and there are still 20 rooms (18 green/red and 2 red/green, depending on the flip), but I am placed into one of the rooms at random. Now, I wake in a green room, and I am asked a slightly different question: “Would you bet the coin was heads? Win +$1, or lose -$3”. My answer is now “yes”: I am no longer interacting with copies, the expected utility is +$0.60, so I take the bet.

The stuff about Boltzmann brains is a false dilemma. There’s no point in valuing the Boltzmann brain scenario over any of the other “trapped in the Matrix” / “brain in a jar” scenarios, of which there is a limitless supply. See, for instance, this lecture from Lawrence Krauss -- the relevant bits are from 0:24:00 to 0:41:00 -- which gives a much simpler explanation for why the universe began with low entropy, and doesn’t tie itself into loops by supposing Boltzmann pocket universes embedded in a high-entropy background universe.

Chronos Dec 2, 2009, 4:51 AM
1 point
in reply to: Chronos’s comment on: The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies
Ruminating further, I think I’ve narrowed down the region where the fallacious step occurs.

Suppose there are 100 simulacra, and suppose for each simulacrum you flip a coin biased 9:1 in favor of heads. You choose one of two actions for each simulacrum, depending on whether the coin shows heads or tails, but the two actions have equal net utility for the simulacra so there are no moral conundra. Now, even though the combination of 90 heads and 10 tails is the most common, the permutations comprising it are nonetheless vastly outnumbered by all the remaining permutations. Suppose that after flipping 100 biased coins, the actual result is 85 heads and 15 tails.

What is the subjective probability? The coin flips are independent events, so the subjective probability of each coin flip must be 9:1 favoring heads. The fact that only 85 simulacra actually experienced heads is completely irrelevant.

Subjective probability arises from knowledge, so in practice none of the simulacra experience a subjective probability after a single coin flip. If the coin flip is repeated multiple times for all simulacra, then as each simulacrum experiences more coin flips while iterating through its state function, it will gradually converge on the objective probability of 90%. The first coin flip merely biases the experience of each simulacrum, determining the direction from which each will converge on the limit.

That said, take what I say with a grain of salt, because I seriously doubt this can be extended from the classical realm to cover quantum simulacra and the Born rule.

Chronos Dec 1, 2009, 6:54 AM
3 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies
Reading the post you linked to, it feels like some sort of fallacy is at work in the thought experiment as the results are tallied up.

Specifically: suppose we live in copies-matter world, and furthermore suppose we create a multiverse of 100 copies, 90 of which get the good outcome and 10 of which get the bad outcome (using the aforementioned biased quantum coin, which through sheer luck gives us an exact 90:10 split across 100 uncorrelated flips). Since copies matter, we can conclude it’s a moral good to post hoc shut down 9 of the 10 bad-outcome copies and replace those simulacra with 9 duplicates of existing good-outcome copies. While we’ve done a moral wrong by discontinuing 9 bad-outcome copies, we do a greater moral right by creating 9 new good-outcome copies, and thus we paperclip-maximize our way toward greater net utility.

Moreover, still living in copies-matter world, it’s a net win to shut down the final bad-outcome copy (i.e. “murder”, for lack of a better term, the last of the bad-outcome copies) and replace that final copy with one more good-outcome copy, thus guaranteeing that the outcome for all copies is good with 100% odds. Even supposing the delta between the good outcome and the bad outcome was merely one speck of dust in the eye, and furthermore supposing that the final bad-outcome copy was content with the bad outcome and would have preferred to continue existing.

At this point, the overall multiverse outcome is identical to the quantum coin having double heads, so we might as well have not involved quantum pocket change in the first place. Instead, knowing that one outcome was better than the other, we should have just forced the known-good outcome on all copies in the first place. With that, copies-matter world and copies-don’t-matter world are now reunified.

Returning to copies-don’t-matter world (and our intuition that that’s where we live), it feels like there’s an almost-but-not-quite-obvious analogy with Shannon entropy and/or Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity lurking just under the surface.

Chronos Oct 25, 2009, 3:22 AM
9 points
in reply to: dclayh’s comment on: The continued misuse of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
I’m reminded of a real-world similar example: World of Warcraft loot ninjas.

Background: when a good item drops in a dungeon, each group member is presented with two buttons, a die icon (“need”) and a pile-of-gold icon (“greed”). If one or more people click “need”, the server rolls a random 100-sided die for each player who clicked “need”, and the player with the highest roll wins the item. If no one in the group clicked “need”, then the server rolls dice for everyone in the group. Usually players enter dungeons in the hopes of obtaining items that directly improve their combat effectiveness, but many items can also be sold at the in-game auction house, sometimes for a substantial amount of gold, so that a character can still benefit indirectly even if the item itself has no immediate worth.

As you can imagine, “pick-up groups” (i.e. four random strangers you might never party with again) often suffer from loot ninjas: people who intentionally click on the “need” button to vastly improve their odds of obtaining items, even when the item holds no direct value for themselves but does hold direct value for another party member.

And, indeed, a common loot ninja strategy is to feign ignorance of the “need versus greed” loot roll system (which, to be fair, has legitimately confusing icons) and to use every other possible trick to elicit sympathy, such as feigning bad spelling and grammar, for as long as possible before being booted from the party and forcibly expelled from the dungeon.

Chronos Sep 30, 2009, 3:49 AM
0 points
on: Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree

It’s not a question of having different evidence: theoretically, you might both even have exactly the same evidence, but gathered in a different order. The question is one of differing interpretations, not raw data as such.

Disappointing, but true. If humans were perfect Bayesians the order of presentation wouldn’t matter, but instead our biases kick in and skew the evidence as it arrives.

Edit: Ah, I see you already mentioned confirmation bias versus competent updating.