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The Practice War [Complete]

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Baughn said:
It might require unlocking the Tenth Secret, or something, but is there anything fundamental stopping us on principle from creating artificial souls, Reyvateil-style?

Does Vision have a soul, by the way?
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I'm verging on the side of you'll never be able to do it with any degree of certainty, at least not within the scope of the quest as the story I'm wanting to cover here stands.

She couldn't become a Potential, if that's what you're asking. Anything more than that, the answers become hazy.

PrimalShadow said:
If Mars falls we LOSE. We've got all of our assets there - the Orbitals, the fleet, and so on. Why are you trying to preserve research in a scenario where we can't even preserve our civilization?
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Preventing the vast loss of information if they nuke Skylark out of spite if/when the battle starts not going their way.
 
PrimalShadow said:
If Mars falls we LOSE. We've got all of our assets there - the Orbitals, the fleet, and so on. Why are you trying to preserve research in a scenario where we can't even preserve our civilization?
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One highly accelerating Escort ship crashing into the city might be enough, done after it's the clear the SL lost but when they've still got ships.
 
Pyro Hawk said:
Okay guys. Important question, do I either swap out an action, or remove a dice from another action, to put on Ancestral Key so we hopefully unlock the Martian Archive, and ensure that even if Mars falls, we keep the data?
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Swap out Databank Sweep? I don't think that's going to net us anything immediately important anyway.

Also, maybe you and @PrimalShadow might want to swap out Streetwise for the new Infinite Parallel Processing option; a chance at a reroll is too good to pass up at this stage with so many critical rolls happening at once.
Snowfire said:
The issue isn't the resolution here. It's the range limitations inherent in lagless sensor technology. Similar to laglass communications, you can't effectively distribute the base station of any long range sensor or transmitter. And lagless is lagless across a star system. Maybe a little further.
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So the sensors aren't truly lagless, "just" enough FTL that they're effectively lagless within a few dozen AU? That could work: the distance to the closest star is roughly 3,000 time the diameter of the heliopause: if our lagless sensors take 30 s to cross the entire solar system then they'd still take a day to get to Alpha Centari.
 
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Baughn said:
It might require unlocking the Tenth Secret, or something, but is there anything fundamental stopping us on principle from creating artificial souls, Reyvateil-style?
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I'm more interested in finding a way for the 223 to gain an ability similar to Replekia :V
Snowfire said:
I'm verging on the side of you'll never be able to do it with any degree of certainty, at least not within the scope of the quest as the story I'm wanting to cover here stands.
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What about transferring a pre-existing soul into a new, artificially created container, alongside the mind associated with that soul? If the new container is purely mechanical (or something created via Practice), that shouldn't violate the 'no Second Secret' rule, right?
 
justinkal said:
that shouldn't violate the 'no Second Secret' rule, right?
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Just, for a moment, assume that you are the predominant galactic power. You use fledgling races as a self-regulating laboratory to skim off stuff you didn't think about. Every few millenia there's something worthwile. To ensure your superiority you drop some rules, but these are designed for your convenience, not theirs. Then one of these races starts playing with dangerous stuff and tries to argue with your extermination fleet 'we didn't violate your rules'.
What do you think happens next?
 
MTB said:
Just, for a moment, assume that you are the predominant galactic power. You use fledgling races as a self-regulating laboratory to skim off stuff you didn't think about. Every few millenia there's something worthwile. To ensure your superiority you drop some rules, but these are designed for your convenience, not theirs. Then one of these races starts playing with dangerous stuff and tries to argue with your extermination fleet 'we didn't violate your rules'.
What do you think happens next?
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What I described isn't going anywhere close to the Second Secret though, because it's completely non-biological.

It's like the difference between uploading someone's consciousness to a jar full of neurons vs uploading their consciousness to a computer. I was saying to use the computer method.
 
justinkal said:
What I described isn't going anywhere close to the Second Secret though, because it's completely non-biological.

It's like the difference between uploading someone's consciousness to a jar full of neurons vs uploading their consciousness to a computer. I was saying to use the computer method.
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That means you know why the secret is forbidden and what's safe to emulate with technology? I missed that quest post.
 
MTB said:
That means you know why the secret is forbidden and what's safe to emulate with technology? I missed that quest post.
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There's no emulation going on there though. The Second Secret is bioengineering. It's all about creating and modifying lifeforms. That's just a means to an end in this case.

Growing a big vat of neurons designed to have a pre-existing consciousness uploaded to them is something that may or may not violate the ban. That's building a computer out of neurons instead of transistors. The Secret only comes into play for how you design those neurons.

What I'm describing is more a process of "convert a lifeform into an AI".
 
justinkal said:
There's no emulation going on there though. The Second Secret is bioengineering. It's all about creating and modifying lifeforms. That's just a means to an end in this case.

Growing a big vat of neurons designed to have a pre-existing consciousness uploaded to them is something that may or may not violate the ban. That's building a computer out of neurons instead of transistors. The Secret only comes into play for how you design those neurons.

What I'm describing is more a process of "convert a lifeform into an AI".
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Reyvateils are lovely, but what you're describing is uploading. It shouldn't violate the Second Secret ban, because there's no bioengineering involved, but it's unfortunately likely to fail because we don't have an Eleno yet and no-one has any idea how human souls really work. Come to think of it, Eleno didn't know either...

It's (ought to be) relatively easy to build a nanocomputer to the same specifications as the brain, but uploading isn't going to work because the brain is a transceiver.
 
Okay, before I swap out Streetwise, we need a clear answer from Snowfire.

If there is any parts of Skylark that still use the two forbidden secrets, how easy would it be for the Shiplord's Tribute Fleet to detect them, and what would the consequences be, when it's clear that we aren't trying to break those prohibitions, it was just an unexpected, and unwanted, surprise from how the city was repaired. And that if we hadn't been so busy preparing for the Tribute Fleet, we would have removed them ourselves?
 
Further we've got this funny soul-body interaction, where nanomachines couldn't prolong the life of Practice users (if I remember correctly). And we don't know yet what soul is - a symbiotic relationship between body and sth. else, a product of the body, or ???
 
Baughn said:
Reyvateils are lovely, but what you're describing is uploading. It shouldn't violate the Second Secret ban, because there's no bioengineering involved, but it's unfortunately likely to fail because we don't have an Eleno yet and no-one has any idea how human souls really work. Come to think of it, Eleno didn't know either...
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So, I've tried to look them up, but can someone explain what Reyvateils actually are? Please? :p

Baughn said:
It's (ought to be) relatively easy to build a nanocomputer to the same specifications as the brain, but uploading isn't going to work because the brain is a transceiver.
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This is pretty much the answer to any uploading attempts, however. You don't know enough about the soul to actually build that sort of transceiver, and you have no idea what would happen if you succeeded.

Pyro Hawk said:
Okay, before I swap out Streetwise, we need a clear answer from Snowfire.

If there is any parts of Skylark that still use the two forbidden secrets, how easy would it be for the Shiplord's Tribute Fleet to detect them, and what would the consequences be, when it's clear that we aren't trying to break those prohibitions, it was just an unexpected, and unwanted, surprise from how the city was repaired. And that if we hadn't been so busy preparing for the Tribute Fleet, we would have removed them ourselves?
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Given how deeply they're buried under Practice tech? If there is anything there (not telling you either way) then it'll be very hard to detect. To be honest, you can expect the Tribute Fleet to go after Skylark on principle more than anything else.
 
Baughn said:
Reyvateils are lovely, but what you're describing is uploading. It shouldn't violate the Second Secret ban, because there's no bioengineering involved, but it's unfortunately likely to fail because we don't have an Eleno yet and no-one has any idea how human souls really work. Come to think of it, Eleno didn't know either...

It's (ought to be) relatively easy to build a nanocomputer to the same specifications as the brain, but uploading isn't going to work because the brain is a transceiver.
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Fair enough.

Although that doesn't interfere with the possibility of Vega developing a 223-exclusive mini-Trance that serves a similar purpose to Replekia. That sounds like a nice way to take down capital ships :V
 
Snowfire said:
So, I've tried to look them up, but can someone explain what Reyvateils actually are? Please? :p
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Ridiculously humanlike gynoids (have actual emotions and are capable of producing viable offspring together with humans), whose bodies are just a bundle of liquids and mechanical components that maintain their form via 'magic' that's passively used by their artificial souls, which are remote controlling their bodies from inside a space elevator sized 'magic' amplification tower. The artificial souls are basically partitions inside a giant server that has a hardwired connection to all the amplification tech.

The 'magic' in question is actually complicated manipulation of mundane physics, but is called 'magic' because that's what people thought it was before science advanced enough to actually understand it. The 'magic' is used by singing.
Reyvateil
 
Snowfire said:
So, I've tried to look them up, but can someone explain what Reyvateils actually are? Please? :p
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Reyvateils are an artificial species from the Ar Tonelico franchise. I'm obsessed with it, and it's surprisingly compatible with the universe you're describing here, so it pops up a lot. Especially when @justinkal and me start bouncing ideas back and forth.

It's off-topic, so I won't go into too much depth; we have a discussion thread for that sort of thing. To answer your question... there'll unfortunately be a short history lesson.

On Ar Ciel, which is a human-populated planet in that universe, there had been a cold war ongoing between two massive alliances for, oh, at least a few hundred years. Reyvateils were created with two distinct and somewhat incompatible goals in mind: To be a new humanity, a better humanity that wouldn't so easily go to war, that'd be smarter, live longer and be generally nicer to each other -- and to create artillery pieces that could be used to gain an advantage in that same cold war.

You see, they had recently discovered the scientific rules underlying the (not very powerful) magic they'd used throughout all of history, and as a result their civilization was quickly evolving from a near-future high-tech civilization to a high-grade magitech civilization which would probably compare well to Al Hazard.

Attaining powerful magic turned out to require pure souls -- "pure" in the sense of being made of a single element, not a moral evaluation. Reyvateil are, thus, artificial intelligences with artificially created souls. They were also researching the nature of the human soul, but hadn't quite figured it out yet... sadly, the cold war shortly turned hot, and the planet was nearly destroyed.

It turned out that sufficiently powerful, scientifically applied magic was enough to kill the soul of the planet. Which they hadn't previously known existed.

Reyvateils are AIs, but they were built both to act like humans, and to have roughly the same subjective experience as humans. Which is good, as long-term it seems like they'll be outright replacing humans...

But sadly, you kiboshed the idea of building Reyvateils on, I believe, the previous page. :p
 
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Ok, I'm thinking that any plans that are going for The Walls of Mars should also be going for Ancestral Key, since we're putting Mars under a lot more threat than it might have been otherwise.

Plan to win, but always have a back-up!
 
Okay everyone. Done TWO swaps in my plan. I have swapped Stewardship Streetwise to Parallel Processing and Learning Database Sweep to Ancestral Key.

Reasons: Stewardship option wasn't there when I made the plans.
Ancestral Key is basically required if we don't want to lose all the 'good stuff' research in Skylark. And considering even if we win, I wouldn't be surprised if Skylark took a fair bit of damage? Yeah.
 
MTB said:
@PrimalShadow
What are your thoughts on 'Ancestral Key' and preserving the archive?
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I don't think that extra insurance on our Mars knowledge is as valuable as getting an extra military action in. However, I suppose I would be willing to bow to pressure and swap out Databank Sweep if it would get me extra votes.




If you are voting against my plan but would change if I included ancestral key, let me know.
But do it soon, because I'm moving this afternoon and won't have access to the internet until midday Monday...
 
Ancestral Key is required for my vote, but I'd have to double check what the other differences in your plans are before I could confirm or deny whether I'd otherwise prefer your plan. In the meantime...

[X] Plan War's Coming

aka Pyro Hawk
 
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