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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • You are misrepresenting a lot of stuff here.

    it’s behavior is unpredictable

    This entirely depends on the quality of the AI and the task at hand. A well made AI can be relatively predictable. However, most tasks that AI excels at are tasks which themselves do not have a predictable solution. For instance, handwriting recognition can be solved by a neural network with much better than human accuracy. That task does not have a perfect solution, and there is not an ideal answer for each possible input (one person’s ‘a’ could look exactly the same as another’s ‘o’). The same can be said for almost all games, especially those involving a human player.

    and therefore cannot be tested

    Unpredictable things can be tested. That’s pretty much what the entire field of statistics and probability is about. Also, testability is a fundamental requirement for any kind of machine learning. It isn’t just a good practice kind of thing; if you can’t test your model, you don’t even have a model in the first place. The whole point is to create many candidate models and test them to find the best one.

    It would cheat and find ways to know things about the game state that it’s not supposed to know

    A neural network only knows what you tell it. If you don’t tell it where the player is, it’s not going to magically deduce it from nothing. Also, it’s output has to be interpreted to even be used. The raw output is a vector of numbers. How this is transformed into usable actions is entirely up to the developer. If that transformation allows violating the rules, that’s the developers fault, not the networks. The same can be said of human input; it is the developers responsibility to transform that into permissable actions in game.

    it would hide in a corner as far away from the player as possible because it’s parameters is to avoid death

    That is possible. Which is why you should make a performance metric that reflects what you actually want it to try to do. This is a very common issue and is just part of the process of making an AI. It is not an insurmountable problem.

    Neural networks have been used to play countless games before. It’s probably one of the most studied use cases simply because it is so easy to do.


  • That’s not how copyright works (at least not in the US). when a corporation creates a copyrighted work (by way of paying the person(s) that actually made it), the duration is set as 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication. The lifetime of any employee is not taken into account. When a copyright is made by a person, it lasts until 70 years after that person dies. You cannot swap out that person for someone else, even if the owner of the copyright changes.

    You are probably thinking of a method that is used to make private agreements last basically forever. A private contract technically isn’t allowed to last forever, there has to be some point of expiration. To make a contract last forever anyway, they pick some condition that probably won’t happen for a ridiculous amount of time, such as when the last descendant of the king of England dies (I assume they use this because the royal family keeps good genealogy records). If a currently living person is required, they might pick some infant relative to make it last as long as possible.



  • I got it working by using a difference in head lift. Build a series of liquid storages, one on top of the other; hook them up in series. Connect fresh water to the bottom of the tower. Make sure that the fresh water line doesn’t have enough head lift to fill the highest container (you can move your pumps back or make the tower taller to do this). Connect waste water to the tower, with plenty of head lift. When the water level is below the limit of the fresh pump, both fresh water and waste water can enter the tower, and it gradually increases. When the water level is above the limit, fresh water stalls but waste water can still enter, and the water level decreases. As a result, the water level hovers around the limit, and your machines can keep running.

    A simpler method with just limiting fresh input with a valve will stop working if the machines aren’t producing constantly, since the pumps will keep bringing in fresh water and fill the pipe when the machines are idle.


  • I think the fan edit is way better. First of all, the red lips add some much needed contrast to her face. The original makes her all green except for her eyes, which are mostly white and black. The red helps make the green appear more significant and distinct. I think they should change the background too for the same reason.

    Hiding the eyes does dehumanize her, but that’s a good thing here. It makes her look sinister, and ascribes some character to her. The smile also helps. Her expression is so blank in the original that you can’t get any idea of what this character is. The fan edit tells a story, where the original is just a person.













  • That’s assuming printing money is the default solution. Taxes have existed for longer than that. The earliest taxes were literally a portion of a farmers harvest. You can’t just print more food, or gold, or whatever else. Printing money to fund government was never really an option, so positioning taxes as a solution to inflation just doesn’t make sense. It’s like saying that instead of eating at a restaurant, you could eat roadkill, which you aren’t going to do because of disease, and therefore restaurants are a way of reducing disease rather than providing food.