4 ms·

Reminds me of the moral of "that alien message": > Riemann invented his geometries before Einstein had a use for them; the physics of our universe is not that

Reminds me of the moral of "that alien message": > Riemann invented his geometries before Einstein had a use for them; the physics of our universe is not that complicated in an absolute sense. A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass. http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/

asaddhamani 9y ago
That was a very interesting read. Thanks for linking it!
gear54rus 9y ago
So we are looking at it from the perspective of an ai. wow. that was really cool. I did not understand the part about the internet though, what does this mean? > oh-so-carefully persuade them to give us Internet access, followed by five minutes to innocently discover their network protocols, then some trivial cracking whose only difficulty was an innocent-looking disguise. and what about AIs melting? why is that? I feel dumb but I enjoyed it:)
- AgentME 9y ago
  Humanity is running in a simulation in the alien's world. Humanity convinces the aliens to give humanity access to the alien's world's internet, so that humanity can learn about the alien's world and to be able to talk to other (trickable) aliens. "Five minutes" refers to five minutes in the alien's world, which is thousands of years to humanity. >and what about AIs melting? why is that? The author is just lampshading the fact that he doesn't want the story to involve any (non-human) AI. The whole story is making an example about the capabilities of AI, so if humanity within the story themselves developed AI, then it would make the metaphor unnecessarily recursive.

asaddhamani 9y ago

That was a very interesting read. Thanks for linking it!

gear54rus 9y ago

So we are looking at it from the perspective of an ai. wow. that was really cool. I did not understand the part about the internet though, what does this mean? > oh-so-carefully persuade them to give us Internet access, followed by five minutes to innocently discover their network protocols, then some trivial cracking whose only difficulty was an innocent-looking disguise. and what about AIs melting? why is that? I feel dumb but I enjoyed it:)

AgentME 9y ago
Humanity is running in a simulation in the alien's world. Humanity convinces the aliens to give humanity access to the alien's world's internet, so that humanity can learn about the alien's world and to be able to talk to other (trickable) aliens. "Five minutes" refers to five minutes in the alien's world, which is thousands of years to humanity. >and what about AIs melting? why is that? The author is just lampshading the fact that he doesn't want the story to involve any (non-human) AI. The whole story is making an example about the capabilities of AI, so if humanity within the story themselves developed AI, then it would make the metaphor unnecessarily recursive.