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The Unexpected Philosophical Depths of the Clicker Game Universal Paperclips
- w-ll 8y agoWell i've wasted my morning building a paper clip empire.
- dragontamer 8y agoOh, so you're still only in stage 1 of the game. :-)
- kbenson 8y agoI never got past the later stage... "competition". I should look up to see if there was much more after that and what I missed, since I doubt I'll go through it all again.
- TheGRS 8y agoGameplay changes pretty drastically after you unlock drones, and even more-so after that phase.
- kbenson 8y agoI was past that. By competition I mean the drifters. I was very close to the end, I was just having problems optimizing enough to deal with that specific problem and also running out of time for the day.
- TheGRS 8y agoYou need to optimize for exploration heavily, when you get low on paper clips you can adjust production, but mostly just try to colonize like crazy.
- bena 8y agoPrioritize replication. You can win with 1 in Speed and 1 in Exploration. Hazard Remediation should be 3 to 5 depending if you have the upgrades. And a 4 or 5 in Combat when you get it. Everything else should be put in Self-Replication. You want to be over 10 Probe Trust when you start thinking about putting anything into Speed or Exploration. Also, take one out of Hazard Remediation to put into any of the three Production skills as needed. Once you see the percentage of universe explored start ticking up on the screen, the game is over. With a high enough Self-Replication, your growth is closer to exponential than linear. Doesn't matter if you're slow and don't explore far, you will just occupy the entire universe.
- mrob 8y agoI stopped playing prematurely at first because I thought I'd seen everything. You haven't seen it all until the end credits play.
- hnick 8y agoYou aren't done until every atom in the universe is part of a paperclip. Even then, there may be other universes out there.
- dragontamer 8y agoThere's a bit after "competition" comes into play. And for me, that was the hardest part of the game. You had to grow faster than the competition, which is pretty difficult. I've done two playthroughs. The 1st playthrough was pretty lucky and I had no issues... but the 2nd playthrough of mine was "deadlocked" behind those Drifters for a long time. Its very punishing to fall behind the drifters: it takes a lot of effort and optimization to catch up to them and overtake them. But I assure you, its possible, even if they kill all of your probes. I would imagine that a lot of players get unlucky, and then get "trapped" there. Its the first time you see your numbers drop, since the adversary actually kills off your means of production. Growing (and out-growing the adversary) takes a very different strategy than the rest of the game up until that point.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cbhl 8y agoThe wiki can get you there, but I still recommend going through the stages (with the Wiki open to make it go faster) to see the ending itself. https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Universal_Paperclips_Wiki https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Universal_Papercli...
- kbenson 8y agoYeah, I looked it up earlier right after my comment. Maybe I'll try to do an optimized play through (or use the cheats) to see the ending. From looking at the wiki I got something like 97% of the way through to the end, which is honestly kind of annoying to leave unfinished.
- w-ll 8y ago2 hours later... yep. Did not expect this, it's pretty amazing.
- jawns 8y agoI remember starting this game at mid-day and having no idea that I would end up building paperclips well into the night. What impressed me the most was how the "secret" gradually unfolded, so that you were already hooked and felt a compulsion to continue game play, even after it became clear that this wasn't the innocuous game you thought it was at first. It led me to build a clicker game that also has more to it than meets the eye. (Shameless self-promotion starts here.) Whereas Universal Paperclips explores the dangers of letting A.I. take over, my game (Unaware, https://unaware.pressbin.com https://unaware.pressbin.com) explores the moral status of people who exist in a simulation.
- dragontamer 8y agoClicker Heroes is a shameless clicker-clone, but one of the better ones. I think universal paperclips is definitely one of the best idle games, but I'd give Clicker Heroes (the original) a strong contender. I know Clicker Heroes 2 is out, but I haven't tried it yet myself. Clicker Heroes goes for the shameless simplicity of growth, but its got the biggest numbers and the most "acceleration" out of any clicker game I've seen.
- monocasa 8y agoKittens has eaten more of my time than I'd prefer to admit. http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/ http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/
- Will_Parker 8y agoConverted it all to unobtainium?
- sp332 8y agoLike, this game will eat months of your time. You don't have to babysit it or anything, but it just keeps going forever.
- shostack 8y ago
- tosh 8y agoI played through it like 5 times over a couple of weeks. Great example for mechanics > graphics.
- TheGRS 8y agoThat game really made a huge splash awhile ago, I just so happened to have played through it again on the iPhone. It's just a great game and shows how the idle/incremental genre has a lot of room to grow. If you like that game I recommend buying A Dark Room, which has a good story behind it and some interesting gameplay elements. Like Paperclips the gameplay changes as you progress.
- kej 8y agoA Dark Room is free on the web, fwiw: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
- angel_j 8y agoMy friend and I played at the same time. Unplanned, they invested in heavily Marketing, and I in Research. They beat it much more quickly, and I had to "cheat" or give up. I exploited Quantum Computing by writing a function in the console that clicked rapidly when the QC was primed, at which point it became quite easy to finish.
- theoh 8y agoCould have been a lot more about Bostrom's ideas in this article, given the title. But my hunch is that the kind of philosophy enthusiast who writes for the New Yorker doesn't want to dwell on Bostrom's ideas (or those Less Wrong guys) in any way; it's a question of seriousness.
- dwd 8y agoGood way to make your article about games and AI (fun and cool stuff) very depressing. The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. The AI runs on a different timescale than you do; by the time your neurons finish thinking the words "I should do something" you have already lost. - Eliezer Yudkowsky
- theoh 8y agoI don't think the omission is because discussing Bostrom or Yudkowsky's ideas would genuinely be depressing. It's because the writer is a snob, or at least doesn't rate them as intellectuals. I kind of agree with him.
- dwd 8y agoI would have to agree with you there - after flicking through Bostrom's latest "work in progress" thesis I came away thinking it was quite underwhelming.
- andybak 8y agoOne day I'll write that essay on connection between idle/clicker/incremental games and the Buddhist concept of attachment. Maybe.
- shostack 8y agoOddly enough, I'm hooked on Kittens Game, which I consider far superior to the Paperclip game. The level of depth is astounding. That said, I've used it to meditate on attachment, automation, abstraction, and other interesting concepts. It has also helped me think about prioritizing things at work in terms of the whole "build it quickly, or automate it for future gains" debate that often arises.
- otakucode 8y agoI missed out on Universal Paperclips, but I immediately love the idea. The notion of the Paperclip AI that destroys humanity to build paperclips is a sublime illustration of how badly computer scientists need to take a few philosophy courses to broaden their thinking, as is its facile allure. (Most reasonable fears of AI are fears around what we will use it to do to others, not what it will do to us, as all conflict is driven by resource contention and machine intelligences would be so profoundly different in their needs than ourselves that there would be almost no overlap to contend over. They don't need space, food, water, or even time. They could tick away at one cycle every 500 years and be perfectly content. What exactly will they want to take from us?) I've always liked clicker games, and there is a very long-running instance of Cookie Clicker running in my browser at home right now. The thing that interests me in them seems to have only been tangentially touched upon, though. The mathematical tapestries that get overlaid on one another, that's what I find interesting. What is the optimal strategy to build cookie production fastest? Do you wait and save for the next available cookie production method? Or do you just purchase everything you can? Exactly how many of the lower level production means can you buy before the cost per additional cookie produced is less than if you'd purchased one of the more expensive options? If your goal is to build the cookie production as efficiently as possible, the thought and calculation necessary to figure it out is quite significant. And when you add in differing yield curves with the various upgrades and boosts and bonuses and whatnot... it gets very large. Having humans being the ones playing Universal Paperclips is a very interesting phenomenon, though. What does it say about us that as we fear a paperclip automaton annihilating us, we find it irresistable just to see some numbers get bigger? Would anyone NEED to build a complex AI in order to get us to annihilate ourselves? Would calling it Universal Banknotes make it clearer?
- schoen 8y agoThe scenario that inspired this game includes the contention that an AI could harm humanity without anything that we would recognize as malice in human terms. https://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-and-a-couple-of-strategic-implications/ https://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-a... > For example, if you want to build a galaxy full of happy sentient beings, you will need matter and energy, and the same is also true if you want to make paperclips. This thesis is why we’re worried about very powerful entities even if they have no explicit dislike of us: “The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, but you are made of atoms it can use for something else.” Note though that by the Orthogonality Thesis you can always have an agent which explicitly, terminally prefers not to do any particular thing — an AI which does love you will not want to break you apart for spare atoms. See: Omohundro (2008); Bostrom (2012). I guess two popular ways of disputing this thesis are to say that no AI that we can build can actually become this powerful, or to say that we'll easily program AIs not to harm us. I think the first objection is more cogent because there are various ways that you could argue that we're far from understanding how to build AIs of this kind. The second objection is a subtle problem; the Omohundro-Bostrom-Yudkowsky-Bostrom argument is very focused on the idea that there are so many hidden assumptions about what it means not to harm us, and what kinds of things are off-limits, that someone who tries to capture all of them algorithmically at one stroke is more likely to fail than to succeed. And quite a few of the toy game-playing AI systems have found ways to cheat by human standards and miss the essence of the human understanding of the task they were set. I think your analogy to the banknote-maximizer makes some of that subtlety clear: if we don't know what things are off-limits, we could see how a banknote-maximizer could cause very severe externalities without malice. (The earlier Omohundro argument points out that, whatever you want to accomplish, power and safety will help you accomplish it, so you always have a good reason to try to acquire them. Maybe an AI could be explicitly programmed not to want to acquire power and safety, but there, again, we'd want a very good way to describe exactly what those things do or don't consist of.)
- no_identd 8y agoVaguely clicker game related comment hijack: I wish Android required a revokable permission to hide the status bar and navigation keys. Clever ad supported idle games on Android exploit this to hide the clock, making you unaware of how much time passed - for the same reason Casinos avoid having visible clocks like the plague, and I consider this rather morally problematic, and thus in need of a dedicated user controllable permission. (See Kongregate's Realm Grinder for an example.) Or just ban games that do this from Google Play.
- buzzerbetrayed 8y agoBan fullscreen games from Google Play? That sounds like an overreaction.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- no_identd 8y agoFullscreen≠hiding the bars
- devoply 8y agospeed run of the game in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTyIUzsxt4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTyIUzsxt4U
- westpfelia 8y agoAs someone who has a real problem with addiction to idle/clicker games this thread is not good.
- comboy 8y agoRight, right. So which ones do you recommend the most? Seems a bit hard to find something comparable to paperclips, most even deny advantage of understanding exp growth.
- westpfelia 8y agoMy reply is super late. BUT I highly recomend this one: http://www.glaielgames.com/succubox/ http://www.glaielgames.com/succubox/