Remove ads

You Needed Opponents With Gravitas (Redux)

Reader mode
Great to see this!

Do put a note on the old SB story that it's reviving here - I was only lucky enough to spot it here.

Also, should the title be "You Needed An Opponent"?
 
Last edited:
T.R.E.A.M. said:
"Very much so. And yet, not governed by a human intellect, let alone a Mind, and the erratic nature of the parasitic powers is significant evidence of such. This is not science,"
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
T.R.E.A.M. said:
"At my most generous, I will call it an approximation of science by a crude machine mimicking consciousness, lacking any legitimate processes. At my most repulsed? This is torture. The abuse of supposed subjects of testing for no valid purpose."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Properly arrogant for a Mind. The Entities actually are significantly beyond them in the field of modeling - as "The State of the Art" points out, they have trouble perfectly modeling seconds into the future. They have good enough theory of mind to manipulate human level intelligence into most anything they want them to do, but that's nothing on the level of computation and modeling the Entities are capable of .

On the other hand, it's also a moral stance, as appropriate for a Mind. "Nothing this cruel and capacious can be useful." Though to be fair, I doubt the Minds have truly comprehended how much baseline data the Entities have, or the timescale. If they did, they're response wouldn't be so restrained.
 
TheLastOne said:
Properly arrogant for a Mind. The Entities actually are significantly beyond them in the field of modeling - as "The State of the Art" points out, they have trouble perfectly modeling seconds into the future. They have good enough theory of mind to manipulate human level intelligence into most anything they want them to do, but that's nothing on the level of computation and modeling the Entities are capable of .

On the other hand, it's also a moral stance, as appropriate for a Mind. "Nothing this cruel and capacious can be useful." Though to be fair, I doubt the Minds have truly comprehended how much baseline data the Entities have, or the timescale. If they did, they're response wouldn't be so restrained.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If they are so beyond minds in intelligence why they need to torture people to learn something ? Can't they do that in a more efficient way with their infinite intellect? They are nothing more than a glorified YouTube algorithm.
 
very fast pickle said:
If they are so beyond minds in intelligence why they need to torture people to learn something ? Can't they do that in a more efficient way with their infinite intellect? They are nothing more than a glorified YouTube algorithm.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Because they LIKE torturing people. They are a sadistic violent species trying to avoid violence against themselves/each other. They're enjoying experiencing the violence vicariously, as a replacement to the violence they visited on each other/in competition.

They're also doing everything at the same time and seeing what's sticking, which is a wasteful way of building experiments, but it's obviously also worked quite well for them so far. But the violence and destruction is a feature, not a bug. Removing it wouldn't improve their experiments, for their value-set.

Hell, they're not even the first race the Culture has dealt with that feel that way. Observe the Affront.
 
So very excited to see this, thank you so much for reviving it :)

Edit: @T.R.E.A.M., the wacky line spacing on 1.1 is kind of visually distracting. Might be worth tidying up? It is people's first introduction to the story, and all.
 
Last edited:
Just A Dude said:
"Kill it with Gridfire," tends to solve most problems not fast enough to dodge.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The Culture does have the advantage of energy weapons - if the entities had access to the Grid, had Grid technology, they wouldn't have to be frugal on any level with their energy use.

You have to be in the right universe though. The Culture lacks the means to reach Scion's real body.
 
TheLastOne said:
The Culture does have the advantage of energy weapons - if the entities had access to the Grid, had Grid technology, they wouldn't have to be frugal on any level with their energy use.

You have to be in the right universe though. The Culture lacks the means to reach Scion's real body.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
But they can cut it in half help use the the existing link to get to its main body
 
very fast pickle said:
But they can cut it in half help use the the existing link to get to its main body
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The "existing link" got attacked plenty, and it only opened up the other way so that they could attack it after they used the Sting, which is exactly the kind of dimensionally transendent techlogy the Entities have, and the Culture doesn't.

They both have OCP technologies that make it difficult to impossible for one side to actually attack the other. The Culture ships can hide in their FTL "Above" or "Below" normal space, and the Entities can hide in alternate dimensions.
 
very fast pickle said:
If they are so beyond minds in intelligence why they need to torture people to learn something ? Can't they do that in a more efficient way with their infinite intellect? They are nothing more than a glorified YouTube algorithm.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Because they are inflexible and stupid. Their Thinker Shards are computationally very powerful, but all that computational horsepower is hooked up to something that by all appearances is basically not much more than a bundle of instincts and emotion.

A paraphrased line from another series (The Hunted Earth) describes it pretty well I think; "They can think very well about how to do something, but have almost no ability to think about what they should do." The Entities act the way they do because that's how they evolved to act, and they demonstrate almost no ability to consider whether that is a good idea or not.

T.R.E.A.M. said:
It is in fact this. I have asked for mod adjustment.
E: and I see it was done. Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
For future reference, as the thread creator you can change the title yourself; it's under "Thread Tools" in the upper right.
 
very fast pickle said:
If they are so beyond minds in intelligence why they need to torture people to learn something ? Can't they do that in a more efficient way with their infinite intellect? They are nothing more than a glorified YouTube algorithm.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Avernus said:
Because they are inflexible and stupid. Their Thinker Shards are computationally very powerful, but all that computational horsepower is hooked up to something that by all appearances is basically not much more than a bundle of instincts and emotion.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
One of the several significant changes I wanted to make with the rewrite was to re-examine the shards vs Minds in the context of existing real world AI - especially given that "the massive potential and even larger flaws of machine learning algorithms" have been a recurring tech news story over the last few years. This will be something I get into! More once I have a Mind interlude or the subject comes up in character discussions.

TheLastOne said:
The "existing link" got attacked plenty, and it only opened up the other way so that they could attack it after they used the Sting, which is exactly the kind of dimensionally transendent techlogy the Entities have, and the Culture doesn't.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Reconciling the flatly different universal physics of Worm and the Cultureverse will also be addressed.

I love the speculation and debates, though!
 
TheLastOne said:
The Culture does have the advantage of energy weapons - if the entities had access to the Grid, had Grid technology, they wouldn't have to be frugal on any level with their energy use.

You have to be in the right universe though. The Culture lacks the means to reach Scion's real body.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It seems entirely plausible that the entities
(a) have access to Grid technology, or the biological equivalent, but
(b) have found that it is not in fact infinite, merely very large.

As a general rule, perpetual motion machines do not work. That's not just some contingent fact of our universe, it's implied by time translation symmetry -- it'd be true for a very, very large range of possible universes, and the ones for which it isn't true wouldn't* look much like our own.

*: It, er, is not true for our universe, at the largest scales, as dark energy flatly violates conservation of energy (as well as time translation symmetry). That probably just means we're missing something, i.e. the source of all that energy. However, while exploiting dark energy as a power source is certainly possible, it'd require machines built to galactic-cluster size scales.

At every scale smaller than a galaxy, conservation of energy holds.
 
Monitor said:
Ah, thanks. From the context I thought you meant a Worm fanfic, which explains why my googling did not work...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Heh. Funny thing is now that I think about it, they'd actually be safe from Scion and the Shards; those are both based on alternate Earths and have a limited range, and so that version of Earth is safe because it's been taken away.

Makes me wonder if some high end tinkertech device like String Theory's G-Driver could have been used to push Earth Bet into a new orbit out of range of Scion & the Shards*. The Culture could do that I'm sure if they wanted to brute-force a solution and knew it would work.


* Band name!
 
Avernus said:
Heh. Funny thing is now that I think about it, they'd actually be safe from Scion and the Shards; those are both based on alternate Earths and have a limited range, and so that version of Earth is safe because it's been taken away.

Makes me wonder if some high end tinkertech device like String Theory's G-Driver could have been used to push Earth Bet into a new orbit out of range of Scion & the Shards*. The Culture could do that I'm sure if they wanted to brute-force a solution and knew it would work.


* Band name!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Easier to just remove the people and move them. On the other hand, removing a single planets worth of people isn't going to meaningfully change the scale of the atrocity. It's a rounding error.

edit:

Baughn said:
It seems entirely plausible that the entities
(a) have access to Grid technology, or the biological equivalent, but
(b) have found that it is not in fact infinite, merely very large.

As a general rule, perpetual motion machines do not work. That's not just some contingent fact of our universe, it's implied by time translation symmetry -- it'd be true for a very, very large range of possible universes, and the ones for which it isn't true wouldn't* look much like our own.

*: It, er, is not true for our universe, at the largest scales, as dark energy flatly violates conservation of energy (as well as time translation symmetry). That probably just means we're missing something, i.e. the source of all that energy. However, while exploiting dark energy as a power source is certainly possible, it'd require machines built to galactic-cluster size scales.

At every scale smaller than a galaxy, conservation of energy holds.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

While the Grid isn't actually infinite, it's enough energy that it's effectively so from the perspective of someone in-universe - Scion worries about using his high-energy processes because they represent an investment of energy he can't get back within the cycle, and so move him closer to death.

And with enough command of the grid, you could 'pass through it' to the other side, to a younger universe. We actually see this in Excession, and the ""Groups"" who have this technology are implied to be functionally eternal, because they can keep moving to younger universes, each with their own functionally infinite Grid.
It solves the 'finite' energy and material problem the Entities are struggling with.

Though admittedly the technology to do that is beyond the Culture to the point it might as well be magic to them. And I would say the Entities are peers of the culture who went down a very different technological path, not their superiors, so achieving that is beyond both of them.
 
Last edited:
TheLastOne said:
Easier to just remove the people and move them. On the other hand, removing a single planets worth of people isn't going to meaningfully change the scale of the atrocity. It's a rounding error.

edit:



While the Grid isn't actually infinite, it's enough energy that it's effectively so from the perspective of someone in-universe - Scion worries about using his high-energy processes because they represent an investment of energy he can't get back within the cycle, and so move him closer to death.

And with enough command of the grid, you could 'pass through it' to the other side, to a younger universe. We actually see this in Excession, and the ""Groups"" who have this technology are implied to be functionally eternal, because they can keep moving to younger universes, each with their own functionally infinite Grid.
It solves the 'finite' energy and material problem the Entities are struggling with.

Though admittedly the technology to do that is beyond the Culture to the point it might as well be magic to them. And I would say the Entities are peers of the culture who went down a very different technological path, not their superiors, so achieving that is beyond both of them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's more the matter of heat death of the universe than grid decay
 
very fast pickle said:
That's more the matter of heat death of the universe than grid decay
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah, but the reason you can't just ignore the Heat Death of the Universe is that, eventually, you will run out.

I mean, the rest of the universe will die first - the Grid represents more energy than is in the universe. But even with a Grid Tap, you'll eventually have nothing left.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top