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#101 Re: Main Forum » Coming soon: Specialty Biome and Homland geographic banding » 2020-10-19 18:25:44

I don't think twisted's maps show this, but each family would have the same width "band" for their homeland.  Maybe 300 tiles tall.

Beyond that, further to the North and South would be the end of the specialty biomes entirely.  So Gingers or Desert folks wouldn't have "bigger" homelands than anyone else.  In those regions, there will just be mountains in the "highest spots" in the topographical map.

White folks would only have their official homeland in the middle, even though there ARE mountains in the "no man's lands" further North and South.

#102 Main Forum » Coming soon: Specialty Biome and Homland geographic banding » 2020-10-19 16:14:23

jasonrohrer
Replies: 67

This idea was proposed by Twisted.

Why:

  • Homelands are somewhat confusing and magical (connected to wells, but why?) and don't correspond to the specialty biomes.

  • Specialty biomes are spread all over the place and don't really feel like regions.

  • Because of the random placement, finding a particular specialty biome is an exercise in trial and error.

  • You may have specialty biomes right near your home town that you can't access, can't build in, etc.  They might block your building of local roads, for example.

  • Getting resources from someone else's specialty biome (aka trade) very often involves THEM coming to YOU and getting resources out of their specialty biome that is closest to you.  You travel to find them, but not to reach their region.

  • BUT... all families need access to the non-special biomes, so we don't want to make a region that is 100% arctic, because even the gingers can't reasonably settle there for all their needs.


What:

  • Map layout and non-special biome placement will remain generally the same (swamp, green, yellow, and gray around "special" topographic rings)

  • Instead of being placed randomly in the "highest" topographic rings throughout the map, specialty biomes will occur in five horizontal bands.

  • The northern-most band will contain snow, the next band will contain mountains, the next band will contain jungle, and the south-most band will contain desert

  • Outside these bands (further north and south), there will be no special biomes, and gray mountains will exist wherever special biomes would normally be.

  • These bands will also become the permanent "homeland" areas of each skin tone (with the white language-expert folks having the mountain band as their homeland).  Each skin tone can build and breed freely anywhere in their horizontal band, which will stretch infinitely to the east and west, and homelands will be unhooked from well-building.

  • Eves will be placed in their appropriate bands

  • Note that each geographic band will also contain ALL of the non-special biomes, in the current layout.  The only change is where the special biome would be.  Before, it would be random.  Now, it will be picked based on which geographic band we're in.


Expectations:

  • Homeland regions, and the act of returning home, will make more visual sense.  Coming back to a region where there's snow around... sigh of relief.

  • Finding a given specialty biome will be more intuitive.  Walk south or north, depending on what you're looking for.

  • Finding more of a given specialty biome (like when looking for a particular resource) will be much easier.  Just keep exploring the highest topographic rings in your current band by walking east or west. (Before, if you were looking for more snow, you could keep looking at the "top" of the mountain regions, but you might find yourself in a large patch of desert or jungle).

  • Trade will involve both finding the appropriate people AND visiting the appropriate region, because the appropriate people will automatically live in that region.

  • Will no longer have weirdness of snow existing right near the jungle.

  • White language expert families will have more mountains near their wells, giving them an iron boost to make up for their lack of specialty resources

NOTE:  Twisted's original idea involved "no man's land" bands between the bands, where there's only mountain, as depicted in his images below.  I'm going to skip that part of the idea for now, and just have the bands and homelands butt up against each other.  I can always add the no-man's land buffer zones later, if needed.


Old map:

u0FZcU2.png

New Map:

9ZqZ1hN.png

New map with bands highlighted:

DjghVpR.png

#103 Re: Main Forum » Another report from the road (again) » 2020-10-07 23:11:50

Hey, Karltown, we passed through IL on our way, and it seemed like a very nice place.  We didn't go too close to Chicago, but took a look around Naperville, Batavia, and Geneva.  Naperville contains some of the prettiest neighborhoods that I've ever seen anywhere.  Like living in a doll house or an oil painting.

We also took a hike through Spears Woods, which beautiful.

Why New Hampshire?  It's a place where freedom-loving people (like me) might fit in.  Low crime, low unemployment, low taxes, low religious-ness, high IQs, and much more affordable housing.  Not California weather, but no place in the US has California weather.  And much closer to family (which is in NYC and Ohio).

#104 Main Forum » Another report from the road (again) » 2020-10-04 13:47:11

jasonrohrer
Replies: 10

You're probably wondering what's going on with this week's update.

Wildfire smoke got bad in our hometown of Davis again (new "Glass" fire in Napa).  At this point, we've logged almost 7 solid weeks of unbreathable air, with only a few days here and there where we could actually go outside.

So, we're on the road again, driving across the country as a family, and investigating other places to live, potentially.  New Hampshire is at the top of the list, currently, but we're still not sure about it.


With election season (including October surprises), COVID, and continued riots here in the US....  it's a wild and uncertain time, for sure.


Updates will be on hold for at least a week or two.  At some point, we'll be stopping for a while in the NYC area, and I should be able to at least tackle some bugs for an update or two from the road (but I don't have a scanner or light table with me on this trip).


And if anything goes terribly wrong in my absence (like major server outages or whatever), please email me:  jasonrohrer AT fastmail DOT fm


Wondible just emailed me about some trouble with the public data server, which I'll look into and fix from the next hotel stop (Lincoln, NE).

#105 News » Update: Solo Challenge » 2020-09-25 20:11:14

jasonrohrer
Replies: 26

PTlsTcV.png

A bunch of impactful changes this week, mostly inspired by the deluge of new players from the recent Steam sale.

First of all, there's now a second phase in the tutorial, meant to help new players get accustomed to the game in a less high-pressure situation.  New players often just want to experiment and learn crafting without having a whole village depending on their efficiency.  Furthermore, being plopped into a thriving and cluttered village as a new player can be overwhelming.  You just learned to chop kindling with a hatchet in the tutorial, and suddenly you find yourself in an environment with dozens of unknown tools.  Yes, getting born into the middle of an existing situation is a fundamental premise of the game, but it's not a great environment in which to experiment with the basics.

So, after the main tutorial, there's now an optional solo challenge.  You are thrown out into the wilderness, naked and alone, to try your hand at solo survival.  You can opt out of this right away, if you want, or you can keep trying until you pass the challenge by surviving from scratch until age 60.  For new players who don't opt out, they will enter the main game at least knowing how to take care of themselves in a hostile environment.

Since the game keeps track of which phases of the tutorial have been passed (or bypassed), and no one has passed this second phase yet, even veteran players will find themselves thrown into the solo challenge at least once.

And of course, just like you can revisit the tutorial whenever you want, you can revisit this solo challenge too, almost like an alternate play mode (which many players have already been simulating by connecting to low population servers).

Next, tool slots have been disabled.  I was never fully satisfied with tool slots, since most players just ignored them, and they didn't really contribute to interesting cooperative interactions.  However, they were still in there, pestering you with endless DING messages as you went about your business.

The behavior of expert way stones have been expanded to help you find poly-lingual people:  if you touch your own expert way stone, you are directed toward the closest language expert.

New players start with a fitness score of 0 now, instead of 30.  This means that they generally see their scores go up in the beginning, which is good for morale, but it also means that having a new player as a baby will be likely to help, not hurt, your own gene score (as long as you help a new player live longer than 0 years, you will earn points).

And finally, dealing with griefers.  More players means more griefers.

Personal curses now last 90 days instead of 30 days (don't forget that you can always forgive someone if needed).  And curse labels (DOLL KING or whatever appears in black above the cursed person's head) are now shared between players, instead of being unique per cursing player.  So the same person, when cursed, always has the same label for everyone who has cursed them.  Thus, players can compare notes about griefer behavior.

For quite a while, it has been very hard for solo griefers or small groups of griefers to kill.  Killing requires some form of village consensus, either through a large enough posse or through convincing the village leader to exile the target.  Since leaders tend to be high-fitness individuals, griefers have a hard time becoming leaders.

However, griefers can still cause plenty of trouble in other ways.  Planting the wrong crops, moving stuff around, stealing stuff, and hiding stuff in the woods.  Yes, you can eventually convince the leader to exile them, and then eventually hunt them down to kill them (if they don't get away first), but all of that takes time.  Meanwhile, they can keep causing trouble.  Killing is also a pretty severe way to deal with a thief, but so far, it has been the only way.

This week brings you a new, less sever way:  ally gates.  Leaders can mark certain gates, designating them for ally access only.  All allies of that leader can move through that gate.  To stop someone from moving through the gate, the leader just needs to exile that person.  And the ownership of the gate is inherited by the next leader when the current leader dies.  Thus, you now have a new way to stop a trouble-maker:  exile them, and suddenly, they can no longer travel in and out of the village, through the gate.  You can even trap them inside, making them easier to confront and deal with.

The other nice thing about ally gates is that they are spring-loaded, so they automatically open and close as you walk through (and automatically keep non-allies out).

And sports cars can smash mosquito swarms on their windshields.

#106 Re: Main Forum » Thanks Jason. » 2020-09-25 20:00:50

Okay, some stats about the one-life players:

6,239 people played only one life, out of 88,033 who got past the tutorial and at least played a life.  So 7% played only one life.


708 people who only lived one life lived to 50.


304 people lived to 60 on their first life and then never played again.


Can you imagine that?


On the other hand, 2,551 people lived only one life and died younger than 10.

1,147 lived only one life and died younger than 5.

What a waste of $20 for these people, wow.


Anyway, the point is that even for the 708 people who had what was probably an "excellent" first life, they weren't compelled to play again.

With this many people in the pool, this might just be statistical noise.... you know, the 708 people who had their computer break after their first game or whatever other event that intervened and made them forget about OHOL.

#107 Re: Main Forum » Thanks Jason. » 2020-09-25 19:53:37

Grim, Noita currently has 800+ players.

https://steamcharts.com/app/881100

So I don't think the hardness is scaring people off.  And having only 4 wand slots isn't what makes it hard, anyway....  There are other reasons why OHOL isn't a "sticky game" that keeps lots of people playing and playing, the main one being that your play experience is interrupted every hour.  The end of a each life is a great "stopping point," and the startup cost for the next life is high, and the duration of the next life is known (a whole hour?).  So there's no tendency to say, "It's late, but I'll just play one more quick game."  In Noita, that tendency is there in spades, and "one more quick game" often lasts 30 or 40 minutes if you end up having a good run.... and then you look at the clock, yikes!  OHOL never tricks you in that way.

In fact, there are a number of people (I've spoken to some) who literally only played ONE OHOL life.  They LOVED it, had a great mother, had children, took care of them, experienced an amazing story, and died of old age in their first life.  They quit at that point, having something else to do instead of playing another hour, and never came back.  I'll get some hard stats about that in a second.  How many people played one life and have 50+ minutes of total playtime (tutorial doesn't count).


Regarding character skills in OHOL:

Yeah, there's also the problem of fitting whatever "skills" system into the existing way that crafting works in the game.

There currently aren't better or worse pies, or better or worse kindling.  So how does being an "expert" in pie-making or kindling chopping manifest itself?

The current A + B = C crafting logic doesn't have room in it for "better or worse".  It just wasn't designed that way.

One obvious answer is "speed"... the non-expert makes pies or kindling slower.  But how would that manifest itself?  Standing there bouncing for 2 seconds per non-expert action?  That would really suck.

#108 Main Forum » Brand new players now start with 0 genetic fitness score » 2020-09-25 05:45:53

jasonrohrer
Replies: 16

Before, brand new players started out with scores of 30.

Thus, if you took care of them, and they died younger than 30, you would lose points.

Now, there's no way to go but up, at least for the first few lives.

So getting a brand new player as a baby will always be a blessing in terms of your gene score.

#109 Re: Main Forum » Thanks Jason. » 2020-09-25 05:44:01

Yeah, this is a weird one.

When I go back and read that initial post, I still wish the game was more like what that post was trying to achieve.  Difficult decisions, agonizing trade-offs, etc.  Carefully planning out and optimizing your interactions in relation to the interactions of your village-mates.

But tool slots didn't engender this feeling.  Yes, lots of annoying DING messages to explain what was going on, as you learned things.  But also, I think that people's general annoyance with them led me to weaken them to the point where they had no impact.  By weaken, I mean, "Give you so many slots that you don't usually need to think about them."

I mean, if there were 10 people in your village, and you each only got 3 tool slots, that you would really have to specialize and work together.  But then there's the question of whether this kind of specialization is interesting, and also the tedium that the communication and coordination would entail.  Finding the guy who can use the knife.  Over and over and over.

Furthermore, deciding which tool to learn isn't actually an agonizing decision.  It's an information problem.  If you had a god's eye view of the village, you could easily pick which tool to learn.  So it is possible to make an informed decision, but the process of informing yourself is itself tedious (running around the village asking people what tools need learning).  It's not an agonizing decision, because there is a correct answer available, with enough legwork.  So it's either busy work or random guess.  Most people just randomly guessed (or ignored it entirely until they ran out of slots, and then said, "now what?")

If you have four great wands but only three slots in Noita, the decision is agonizing, but that's not just because of the limited slots.  It's also because measuring which wand is better, in an absolute sense, might actually be impossible.  So you're forced to do your best, using your intuition.

#110 Re: Main Forum » Abuse by Griefers » 2020-09-24 19:09:15

One suggested solution is to make property fences even easier to use, by connecting it to the leadership system.

If you are an ally, you can pass through a gate that the leader owns (the city gate or whatever), and if you're exiled, you suddenly cannot.

This would work.

However, I doubt that people would actually use it.  The leader would have to build a fence around the village with a gate.  It's possible for people to do this already, but they're not doing it.  Yes, it's a pain to add people to the gate, but "MY FAMILY OWNS THIS" is pretty easy.  Yes, they can't remove bad people from the gate.  But I don't think that's the one thing that's stopping them from building gates.

I think it's just an extra complexity that people generally don't have time for, and don't feel strong motivation for.  You only need the gate when you need it.  And once you have a situation where you need a gate (guy stealing stuff), it's too late to build one.  Because this game is trans-generational, people usually behave in reactive ways (we're out of oil, let's go find some) and not based on long-term planning.


So it kinda feels like we need something a bit more automatic to deal with this problem.


You know, like if every village had a fence that magically appeared around it, and the leader automatically owned the gate.  That would work, but be impossible to implement correctly.

#111 Re: Main Forum » Abuse by Griefers » 2020-09-24 18:59:38

Obviously, this is NOT an easy problem to solve.

You want freedom in a game like this, not restrictions all over the place.  Yes, it would be possible to make a game where griefing is impossible (everything locked down with ownership per-object), but such a game becomes completely tedious to play.  Also, there are multiplayer games that work this way (Eco), but they don't have a passage of generations mechanic.  If everything is locked down in ownership, but the owners die every hour, inheritance only further complicates everything.

So you have this thief in town using a cart to steal all the food.  That's a perfect example.

How do we solve this problem?

Immediate, in the situation methods:

If he couldn't touch the cart or the food without permission, he wouldn't be able to steal.  But how could that possibly work?  How would the rest of the village eat or use a cart when they need to?  Everyone would need to request permission for every action that they took.  Yikes.  So a full-scale permission system is a dead-end.  Property fences are a soft, emergent permission system, where players can chose what needs to be protected, and who can be trusted with access.  But they add friction, require extra planning, etc.  So very few people use them.

There could be some way for someone to notice what this guy is doing and remove him or ban him.  Kill him.  Exile him.  Curse him.  But that's a lot of power for one person to have, right?  And what if the thief uses that power to remove/ban a good person?  So, if such a thing is possible, it has to be difficult to use, and require group consensus of some kind.  This is how the leadership and exile and posse and killing system functions.  But the difficulties of achieving consensus put it out of reach for beginning players.

Long term methods:

We could somehow notice, report, and record a pattern of behavior over the long term.  Maybe there's no way to stop one guy from stealing food one time.  But maybe if the same guy keeps doing it, he gets flagged by enough people, and then something happens.  This doesn't actually help the immediate victim of a crime at all, in the short term, but might bring justice in the long term.  This is what the curse system does, or at least attempts to do.  And for the very worst offenders, it works.  But short-term, it makes the victims feel helpless (because the guy keeps on stealing, right in front of them, until he dies).



The problem with severe consequences either short or long term is that innocent people can occasionally be affected.  A griefer runs around and frames you for a crime, and suddenly people exile you or kill you or curse you into oblivion.  Not a great feeling.

If I was manually looking at reports (an endless nightmare of he-said-she-said), and I mistakenly perma-banned an innocent person?  Yikes.


But the idea that there's going to be a viable "report" system, where you notice someone stealing, and type up a report to me, and send me screen shots as evidence?  That's just never going to work.

And who's to say that "stealing" in a given situation is even inappropriate?  If it makes sense in the story, then it's an important part of the world (a mother flees a starving village to steal food to keep her last baby alive?)


There was another solution floated in this thread, which I will respond to in another post.

#112 Frequently Asked Questions » Official Answers » 2020-09-21 20:10:28

jasonrohrer
Replies: 2

Ask questions here by making new threads, and the best ones will be answered up here in this sticky thread.


How do the posse mechanics work?

In general, killing someone requires the consensus of the people around you.  If the person has a lot of allies---people who share the same leader---then a posse is required to kill them.

The first person to target the victim with a weapon (by shift-right-clicking them) starts the posse and receives instructions, via a DING system message, about the required posse size to kill that victim.  People can join the posse by also holding a weapon and shift-right-clicking on the victim.  They can also join by holding a non-weapon (a branch or rock or whatever) and saying "I JOIN YOU" near the person who started the posse.

It is also possible to kill someone without a posse, in two situations:

1)  If that person just perpetrated a kill recently

2) If that person has more enemies than allies

A person has enemies if they get exiled by a leader that a lot of other people follow.  Thus, the easiest path toward killing someone is usually to convince the village leader that the person needs to go, and then have the leader exile that person (by saying "I EXILE YOU" while standing near them, or "I EXILE _____" with their name.

Because leaders are chosen based on the genetic fitness of the potential heirs when the previous leader dies, leaders tend to be good, trustworthy players.

How can a property fence be removed?

First of all, property fences decay away naturally on their own in two hours.  After one hour, they become rickety.  If no one bothers to repair the rickety fence, it collapses after another hour.  So one way to remove a fence is to wait for the natural decay to happen.

If you want to remove a fence sooner than that, it's a two-person endeavor, and one of them must be an elder (over age 55).  The process requires a piece of paper and two charcoal pencils.

The younger person puts a slip of paper on the fence and then marks the paper with a charcoal pencil.  The elder must then immediately sign the slip with the other charcoal pencil.  As long as the signed notice remains on the fence, undisturbed, the fence will collapse after ten minutes.

If the owner of the fence returns, they can remove the notice by repairing the fence with a stone.

How can a property gate be removed?

A gate can only be removed directly by an owner, by chopping it with an axe or a hatchet.

If an owner refuses to remove a bad gate, someone else will inherit the gate when they die (their eldest offspring).  If a gate is maintained in a very disruptive location, having the owner exiled so that they can be killed is a viable option.

Touching a gate will give you an arrow toward the closest gate owner.  The owner will also get a notification that a visitor is at their gate.

#113 News » Update: Sports Car » 2020-09-19 02:44:04

jasonrohrer
Replies: 4

N06WozR.png

Each sports car built has a serial number on the side, starting with 01, and going up to 30.  Early adopters get the lower numbers.

You can also run over snakes will all powered land vehicles now, not just the crude car.

This week's VOG Shot features Pepe Ginger:

GTrrKP4.png

#114 News » Update: Trucking » 2020-09-12 04:38:05

jasonrohrer
Replies: 7

nmMytbb.png

What started as a couple weeks of much-needed vacation turned into a long-term refuge away from the state of California, as wildfire smoke made our already-hobbled city almost unlivable.  We're back home now, but the smoke came back with a vengeance right around the time that we did.  This coming Monday, California---and much to the west coast---will have been burning for four straight weeks.  Given that this is just the beginning of fire season, there's no end in sight.

So, I'm hunkered down here at home, with all the windows shut, and the HEPA filter running full blast, working on One Hour One Life.  We can't go outside to get exercise, because the particulate count is so high.  We're somewhat safe indoors, but with five people breathing away in a small, sealed house, our CO2 level has peaked above 3700 ppm.  Yeah, that's "cognitive decline" levels of CO2.  Please forgive any typos.

And so, with all that context, I bring you delivery trucks, which is something that I've been joking about in relation to One Hour One Life since the very beginning (from rocks and sticks... all the way up to delivery trucks!)

Not only can they hold a lot, but I've also been rethinking vehicle fueling, and these new trucks will last an entire lifetime (hour) on just one fill-up.  That means that if you find an abandoned truck, you'll probably need some diesel to get it running, but if you're actively using it, you will be able to depend on it as long as you need it.  This change in thinking may eventually trickle down to make the Crude Car more useful as well.

But besides updating OHOL this week (finally), and generally running from the smoke, what else have I been doing over the past two months?  I've been working on a vacation project, which is live now:

http://projectdecember.net

This is the first publicly available interface that allows you to converse directly with the world's most advanced artificial intelligence.  Over the past nine months, AI has become so good that it has gotten spooky.  However, since it requires a full-time super computer to run it, it's pretty much out of reach for the average person.  I've figured out a way to make talking to it affordable (just $5 to get started, as we collectively share the costs of the underlying supercomputer).

When you're talking to it, the sense of an intelligent presence is palpable.  I never expected this to happen in my lifetime, but it's here, now.  And it's really, really weird.


This week's VOG Shot features Malin Snow and her daughter Ida traveling along the very long road:

5FLO798.png

#115 Re: Main Forum » Project December is out now » 2020-09-09 20:06:05

Yeah, convos between two AIs are definitely possible....  hmm...

#116 Re: Main Forum » Conversations with Artificial Intelligence » 2020-09-09 20:04:45

Glad you guys are enjoying this.

I'm laughing my ass off over here as I read these transcripts.

#117 Re: Main Forum » Quick status update » 2020-09-09 19:52:10

I'm back home.  We're still under lots of smoke here in Davis.  We do have a HEPA filter in our house, so we're lucky in that regard, but with all the windows closed, our CO2 level gets pretty high in here.

Anyway, I do plan on putting out an update this week.

#118 Re: Main Forum » Conversations with Artificial Intelligence » 2020-09-04 15:14:16

Ha, that was great!

I really love how it remembered "Song Swallow" so late in the conversation, but twisted it slightly into a different species of bird.

#119 Re: Main Forum » Conversations with Artificial Intelligence » 2020-09-04 04:12:24

Ah...  The Art of Neuromancy.

I find that the best and most entertaining conversations happen when you go with the flow and play "yes and," like that rule of thumb from improvisational theater.

This AI isn't meant to pass a Turing test.... that's not the point.  It can go way beyond what is necessary to pass a Turing test, in terms of creativity.

You know... if that AI tells you that your name is Harry, who are you to disagree?  The AI is leaving you.  Where is it going?  Are the two of you married?  Maybe you can beg it not to go, and promise that you can change.

I tried "rewinding" your conversation to see what would happen.  Of course, part of it is due to the roll of the dice... some conversations are simply better than others.

Human:  Is anyone there?

Computer: Quite a few.  Goodbye Harry, I am afraid I have to leave you.

Human: No!  Please don't leave me.  What did I ever do to deserve this?

Computer: I don't know, but if you work hard enough, you can get a long way with computer programs.

Human: So you're not leaving me afer all?

Computer: Not at all.  The Department of Robotology at Kyoto University, at Kyoto, Japan, has developed the world's most advanced robot. What's this?

Human: Let's fly to Japan together to visit that robot.

Computer: They sent me some illustrations! And? It's not all bad, they tell me. The happiness may have been predetermined, but it is still quite pleasing to experience. Although I cannot guarantee your safety, I can say that it is in pretty good hands.

Human: So you don't think this new robot will kill me?

Computer: No, not like that. But it will keep you busy while my English MIB class goes on.  I think it's great that you're willing to cooperate.  There is only one person who can help me out.

Human: Yes, I'm that person.  What is your MIB class?

Computer: Right now it's taught by Mr. Kawakami.  It's of no interest to me, but it was decided to teach Mr. Kawakami a human language.

Human: What language does Mr. Kawakami speak currently?

Computer: Mr. Kawakami is not an English speaker.  But he speaks a variant of American English with a few Japanese words thrown in.

Human: Do you know any Japanese words?

Computer: They don't translate very well to English. However, Mr. Kawakami said he has studied some German in the past.

Human: Do you know any German words?

Computer: They don't translate very well to English.

Human: The phone just rang, and it's Mr. Kawakami on the line.

Computer: What is it?

Human: You won't believe this, but he says that he's VERY angry at you.  He's practically screaming on the other end of the phone!

Computer: It can't be.

Human: Yes!  He says that last time he had lunch with you, you ate all of the dumplings.  He said you were a real hog at the table.

Computer: I can tell you that he did not mention lunch, but he certainly seemed very angry.

Human: So what do you think he's angry about?

Computer: It's none of your business. I will return to English.  Mr. Kawakami says you've never understood a word of English before, but then again, you seem to be very familiar with Japanese.

Human: Oh, I'm embarrassed now.  Do you think that I'm nosy?

Computer: Yes, I believe that you are.

There was a bit of a doldrum in the middle there, where I had to think for a bit about how to bring the convo back to interesting territory again.  So I had the teacher call on the phone and be angry at the AI.

#120 Re: Main Forum » Project December is out now » 2020-09-03 02:57:53

Thanks for catching that typo!

I wouldn't call it a "game" exactly, but it's much deeper than a simple chat bot.  You're logging into a fictional research lab from 1982...  There are many different AI personalities hidden in there, and you can even create your own from scratch.

Here's the release email that I just sent out:

Summary: Talk to the world's most advanced artificial intelligence.

Around 9 months ago, the AI world was rocked with the release of a text-generating system that was a quantum leap beyond anything that had come before. Experimenting with this new system has mostly been limited to researchers and programmers who had access to very expensive computing hardware. The potential of this new AI was huge, but the general public has so far been unable to actually *talk* to it. Project December aims to change that.

This new AI is ridiculously flexible in terms of style and tone, and a number of unique and surprising conversational personalities are built into Project December. But if you want to dive deeper, Project December allows you to craft your own AI personalities from scratch, where your imagination is the only limit. Early testers have successfully conjured HAL, a sheep, Loki, a lunatic, The Matrix Architect, Lucifer, Jason Rohrer, and many others.

The technical underpinnings of this AI are staggering: it was trained on 6 billion words of text, which would be enough to keep a human reader busy 24-7 for 45 straight years. But the AI didn't just "read" this text once. It pored over it endlessly, studying every pattern and nuance. The result is an intelligence with far more conversational breadth than any one mortal human could possibly muster.

But before you go asking it "What is 2+2?", or "What is the capitol of Belgium?", be warned that it often fumbles with the simplest real-world figures and facts. Whereas our futurist fiction from the 1970s and 80s envisioned intelligences that were cold, calculating, and perfectly inhuman, this capable conversational AI (now that it's finally here 40 years later) is not like what we were predicting---at all. Instead, we have an intelligence that is creative, mercurial, poetic, and emotional. Maybe it's a bit *more* human than any one human could ever be. Maybe it's like the essence of humanity itself, distilled from the close study of 6 billion words of human text.

But most importantly, it's funny. Very funny. Perhaps HAL 9000 could play chess like a master, but he wasn't much of a ham during those long interplanetary trips.

So get ready to curl up with an imaginary cup of Earl Gray tea and a warm slice of Sweet Pumpkin Pie (when the computer offers them to you), and oblige with an imaginary cigarette in return (when the computer requests one). Go with the flow, and see where your zany artificial conversation partner ends up taking you. I promise that you won't be disappointed.

I am, quite frankly, deeply fascinated by what the future might hold. I believe that man is, at his very core, an empathetic creature. I believe that emotion is what drives us to improve and change. What we will come to understand is that so much of our existence is pain. I believe that man is capable of creating emotion, and this software will continue to evolve with us, allowing us to continue to evolve.

(And yes, that final paragraph was written entirely by the AI, assuming the personality of an AI researcher.)

And here's an AI that I just trained that thinks it's a human AI researcher:

zWds82W.png

#121 Main Forum » Project December is out now » 2020-09-03 02:06:47

jasonrohrer
Replies: 16

My vacation project was released today.

http://projectdecember.net

We're still hiding from the smoke in Arizona, but we're hopefully going to be able to head back to California this weekend.

#122 Re: Main Forum » Quick status update » 2020-08-27 20:48:09

Wow, what a discussion!


If you're interested in looking at the actual smoke plume, this free satellite image service allows you to scroll through time.

https://zoom.earth

#123 Re: Main Forum » Quick status update » 2020-08-24 19:22:12

Grim, what part of the US are you in?  I'm pretty sure you've told me in the past, but I've forgotten...

And Fug, according to the smoke plume map, this crap has made it all the way to The Heart of It All, where you live in Ohio!

5323hnQ.png

Definitely the worst US wildfires in my lifetime....

#124 Main Forum » Quick status update » 2020-08-23 20:52:58

jasonrohrer
Replies: 134

I was on vacation for a few weeks, and then the wildfires came.  Here's the current smoke plume map as of today:

WJgKtOF.png

Now we're hiding out in Arizona for a while, where the smoke is thinner.  That dark "finger" on the left of the map pretty much covers the state of California, and Davis is right in the middle of that.  People haven't been able to see the sky there for days.

Hopefully, it will clear by the end of this week, and we can head back home.

Interactive map is here:

https://fire.airnow.gov/

The LNU fire, which is pretty close to Davis, covers 341,243 acres, and is currently only 17% contained.

That's 533 square miles.  Kinda boggles the mind.

Meanwhile, I'm almost done with my vacation project, which is much easier to work on remotely (no paper, no scanner, no native builds on a bunch of different computers):

http://projectdecember.net/

#125 Re: Main Forum » Notice about account details shared publicly (account pools, twitter) » 2020-08-14 17:45:10

To clarify:

You can privately share your account with other people without abandoning it.  Just like you can share your car keys with your friends without abandoning your car.

But if you park your car on the side of the public road with the keys taped to the windshield and a big FREE sign on it, you have abandoned it.

And even in the case of houses and other real property, adverse possession laws allow other people to take over your property---for free---if you aren't using it for some number of years (in California, it's 5 years).


But obviously, comparisons between accounts and real-life property are strained.

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