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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!) » The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!): Puzzles
[PUZZLE SOLVE!] Melissa's memories
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Extrasonic
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Joined: 03 Aug 2004
Posts: 233
Location: Suburban Chicago

 		Re: been a while, but here's my piece...
sfsdfd wrote:
One of the many great strengths of computers is that all data is digital - it's a 0 or a 1. If you copy any data and the copy isn't bit-for-bit identical, then you have a serious hardware failure.


It would be reasonable to assume that in the future, there are computers based on quantum mechanics, and as a result, have multiple, simultaneous states, not just two (0 and 1). (A good, short reference on quantum computing can be found here.)

Due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the mere observation (let alone copying) of quantum-encoded data could lead to corruption, so the idea of creating imperfect copies (based on the state the quantum data was in at the precise moment it was replicated) is not totally crazy.

Of course, this is all pointless to the ARG, but it's just so darn fun to argue with you, sfsdfd. Smile

PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 11:50 am
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SixByNine
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Joined: 17 Aug 2004
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 		You ever coppied a CD and it's not been perfect? Digital things don't always turn out 100% accurate, Copying an AI which is essencialy alive, always changing, and probabaly huge is not exactly easy. Especialy as it's not totaly understood how it works
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 11:53 am
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thebruce
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Joined: 16 Aug 2004
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 		the difference for cd's is that you are copying digital media via a physical device, so 'jitter' is an analogue problem...

it's not like copying a file from one directory to another... yes, it's still reeading and writing to a physical hard drive, but it's far more steady than copying from one physical source to another.

as for quantum computing, it's definitely an interesting theory... but you'd think that if in the future they've moved to quantum computing as the norm, by that time they'd have found a way to stabilize their data integrity, otherwise what's the benefit of quantum computing if at any point during any data's life it could be corrupted? ESPECIALLY with something as significant as an AI (which BTW, could be corrupted at any time since running the application would be just as prone to corruption as reading the data and writing it since both access the source data)

interesting topic though Smile
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 12:33 pm
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sfsdfd
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Joined: 25 Jul 2004
Posts: 112

 		Re: been a while, but here's my piece...
improvius wrote:
You can have jitter when making digital copies of audio material. You can always have jitter problems, even with correction processes.

SixByNine wrote:
You ever coppied a CD and it's not been perfect?

Those are hardware errors, guys. A CD copy fails because (a) you had a hardware buffer underrun (which only occurs these days if you're playing Quake 3 while trying to burn a CD on a *very* slow computer) or (b) the CD-R was bad.

Try copying a file on your hard drive, like, a million times. As long as you have space, every single copy will be identical to every other copy. If even a single copy is not perfectly identical to the rest, then you should consider backing up all of your data immediately, because your drive is about to crash.

It frustrates me that people don't understand this about digital storage. A hard drive is not a souped-up Xerox machine, guys.

- David Stein

PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 2:14 pm
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sfsdfd
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Joined: 25 Jul 2004
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 		Re: been a while, but here's my piece...
Extrasonic wrote:
Due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the mere observation (let alone copying) of quantum-encoded data could lead to corruption, so the idea of creating imperfect copies (based on the state the quantum data was in at the precise moment it was replicated) is not totally crazy.

Any machine that exhibits this phenomenon would be completely useless as a data storage mechanism.

Consider: Microsoft Windows XP has an install base of over 1 gigabyte. That's one billion bytes - or eight billion bits. Some of that is media, like bitmaps, but most of it is operative code. Just to be conservative, call it four billion bits of data that gets executed.

The spontaneous change of any single bit in this base would probably lead to catastrophic, irreversible OS failure. Yet, millions of people and machines run Windows XP every day, and OS reinstalls are remarkably low. That means 4,000,000,000 bits will remain exactly the way you set them, until the hard drive fails.

Better still: I regularly back up a 400 gigabyte hard drive onto two other 400 gigabyte hard drives. Miraculously, the files on the two destination drives remain identical to those on the source drive. That's 800 gigabytes, or 6,400,000,000,000 bits, of identical copies, without a single bit of error.

Of course, this has to be incredibly primitive technology by Melissa's standards, so we can expect reliability to increase in the future.
Extrasonic wrote:
Of course, this is all pointless to the ARG, but it's just so darn fun to argue with you, sfsdfd. Smile

Laughing Too many of my acquaintance say the same thing. So I spend a whole lot of my personal time arguing over minutiae!

- David Stein

PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 2:23 pm
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clamatius
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Joined: 24 Jul 2004
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 		It's kind of a pointless speculation since you don't know what technology they use to implement the AIs. But, anyway.

Here's an example of a reason it wouldn't be possible to copy the AI. Let's say the AI has to run all the time (like a shark Smile). Shutting it down even briefly kills it. Now, you can't make an instantaneous copy of the whole thing, it takes some time. So your copy isn't synchronized all the way - some bits of it were slightly in the past compared with others. That may be enough corruption for it to not work quite right.

But at the end of the day, having an actual AI is sufficiently advanced for us that it's effectively magic, so you may as well just say "the magic doesn't work if you copy it" and you're done. You can make up whatever you like about quantum computing or dilithium crystals if you want but it's going to boil down to that.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 2:33 pm
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sfsdfd
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clamatius wrote:
Let's say the AI has to run all the time (like a shark Smile). Shutting it down even briefly kills it. Now, you can't make an instantaneous copy of the whole thing, it takes some time. So your copy isn't synchronized all the way - some bits of it were slightly in the past compared with others.

Interesting. The task of backing up a large, heavily-used database works the same way. (Consider backing up eBay's data store!)

I have two responses.

First: One straightforward solution is to maintain a changelog that puts the whole data set in a consistent state. It works like this: At some point, you start recording all of the changes in the data set - i.e., you create a sequential changelog ("Address 1,234,567 is now 0x0001") - and you simultaneously start copying the data.

When you finish, you will have an entire copy of the dataset. It may not be internally consistent, but it should be very close. So you incrementally adopt the forward-going changes in the changelog, testing the data set after every alteration to see if it's now internally consistent. At some point, the data set has to reach a consistent state.

And if you can do it once, then you can immediately copy that dataset a million more times to create a million more identical copies.

Second: Keep in mind that Cortana deactivates herself for transmission to Master Chief in the opening level of Halo. Wink And that doesn't appear to have had any deleterious effects on Cortana.
clamatius wrote:
But at the end of the day, having an actual AI is sufficiently advanced for us that it's effectively magic, so you may as well just say "the magic doesn't work if you copy it" and you're done.

Again, I have two responses.

First: AIs like Cortana are probably not that far out of our grasp. The research is difficult - this is one of the hardest problems humanity has ever tackled, no joking - but progress is steady. We've made great progress on machine learning. We just need to refine these techniques (a lot) and build a large knowledge set to produce a fully-realized AI. Admittedly, emotion is more difficult, but no one ever said thinking intelligence inherently requires emotion.

Second: I'm willing to accept these hand-wave, "it's advanced science, don't worry about it" storytelling techniques - but only if they kind-of make sense with what we know now. I can accept teleportation, faster-than-lightspeed travel, and (maybe) time travel as feasible future tech. But here, the proposed technology is demonstrably less effective than what we have now. That makes no sense, and I can't suspend my tech sk1llz long enough even to accept it as bad storytelling.

- David Stein

PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 2:53 pm
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Shad0
I Have No Life


Joined: 20 Jun 2004
Posts: 2180
Location: Southern California, USA

 		Re: been a while, but here's my piece...
sfsdfd wrote:
Consider: Microsoft Windows XP has an install base of over 1 gigabyte. That's one billion bytes - or eight billion bits. Some of that is media, like bitmaps, but most of it is operative code. Just to be conservative, call it four billion bits of data that gets executed.

The spontaneous change of any single bit in this base would probably lead to catastrophic, irreversible OS failure. Yet, millions of people and machines run Windows XP every day, and OS reinstalls are remarkably low. That means 4,000,000,000 bits will remain exactly the way you set them, until the hard drive fails.

Laughing Good one! Laughing

I have Windows XP, and I have to do a repair install of the entire operating system about twice a month on average.

(Hey, if Microsoft is monitoring this board, maybe they'll do something about it.)
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 3:04 pm
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sfsdfd
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Joined: 25 Jul 2004
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 		Re: been a while, but here's my piece...
Shad0 wrote:
I have Windows XP, and I have to do a repair install of the entire operating system about twice a month on average.

You do? You have very serious hardware issues, then. I've been running Windows XP on four machines, for a collective six years or so, and haven't had to reinstall on any of them for stability reasons. (I did reinstall XP on one, but only because I was turning it into a public webserver and wanted to ensure that all of my private data was completely wiped.)

Trust me, I lived through the days of reinstalling Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and/or ME every two weeks. But I've not encountered the need to reinstall Windows XP on my primary machine for three years. I'd say that's pretty damn stable.

- David Stein

PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 3:20 pm
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GWing_02
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Joined: 18 Aug 2004
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 		A response to the "copying" issue in the context of the haloverse (damn, I didn't want to sound like a halo freak, but oh well):

The AIs in Halo are stored on "memory crystal" and are considered sentient beings. Their core thought functions, as I understand it, are not simple program, but something more physical than digital. Thus, the copying process may not be as simple as it seems. The way the "smart" AIs (like Cortana) are created are by beaming a laser through a brain (which then dies afterwards). Melissa may be a "stupid" AI (one that is programmed) or a "smart" AI (like Cortana).


Also remember that the "copy a file a hundred times on your hard disk" example would be a local thing. That would mean that the AI would be cramping his/herself in on a smaller space on the same memory crystal to accomadated for the second one that they are copying. A more adequate example would be copying a file a hundred times over the internet to another computer. That would be more akin to transferring an AI from one crystal to another. And as we all know, data sometimes becomes garbled and corrupted on its messy path through the internet.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 4:14 pm
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thebruce
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Joined: 16 Aug 2004
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 		even though this is waay OT, OS stability isn't a hardware issue, it's a software, programming issue... if your OS crashes, 99% of the the time it is not physically related in any way, it's simply 'bad coding' for lack of a better term... whatever OS it may be...

now back on topic...
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 4:16 pm
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GWing_02
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thebruce wrote:
even though this is waay OT, OS stability isn't a hardware issue, it's a software, programming issue... if your OS crashes, 99% of the the time it is not physically related in any way, it's simply 'bad coding' for lack of a better term... whatever OS it may be...

now back on topic...


You actually expect to say something like THAT and expect computer nerds to get back on topic!? Rolling EyesWink

Well, basically if your system crashes it's usually memory addressing problems or simply a bug on the root level.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 5:09 pm
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sfsdfd
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GWing_02 wrote:
You actually expect to say something like THAT and expect computer nerds to get back on topic!? Rolling EyesWink

Laughing That was my reaction. It's like:

[offtopic] Linux sucks, Windows rules! [/offtopic]

Yeah, I'm sure the topic tags will dissuade everyone from responding. Laughing
GWing_02 wrote:
Well, basically if your system crashes it's usually memory addressing problems or simply a bug on the root level.

On the former problem: That was true five years ago - it's a whole lot less true now. Thanks to improved programming conventions (pointers going the way of the "GOTO" statement, i.e., heavily discouraged), modern software rarely touches memory addresses - not directly, anyway. The compiler intervenes to head off most errors; those that remain are gracefully caught and handled as exceptions. Crashing your program through a null reference is practically impossible in managed-code languages like C# or Java.

On the latter problem: I think that Windows has developed to the point where system-critical, hard-lockup bugs don't exist in the main body of code - not in the parts of the code that get run on every computer. They do still exist at the device-interface level - specific drivers and faulty or unusual hardware can still cause WinXP/2003 to wig out - but it's more a hardware, or hardware/software interface, issue.

[/offtopic] Wink

- David Stein

PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 5:35 pm
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chaotic_mind
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sfsdfd wrote:
I can swallow the part about flaws in an AI created from a human brain - these can be attributed to scanning inaccuracies, kind of like analog-to-digital signal drop. But whoever came up with this "flawed digital copies" story line needs to be beaten over the head with a copy of Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems.


I got the sense that it wasn't completly understood why the copying program even worked, let alone why it introduced program errors. In this case I think it may a shade of software incompatibility, combined with sheer Forerunner inscrutability.

The copying program was most likely salvaged, and not created, by the Covenant. The Covenant have a history of not really understanding the science behind the technology they use. Indeed, humans easily and drastically improved Covenant weaponry when they were able to get their hands "under the hood" so to speak.

Luke P.

edit- I just realized how utterly out of place this Haloverse info is in this read. Quite a tone change, indeed. Still, I hope it helps.

PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 10:27 pm
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rowan
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Joined: 12 Apr 2004
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 		REQUEST: Source Files Wanted
I am looking for copies of the source files that contain the text from the two shipboard memories (the cylinder artifact and virus) for my own personal reference. No matter how many times I refresh, I still have only managed to get 4 lines total from the memories (meanwhile I have the entire monologue text). Since I am looking for the entire html file, the wiki doesn't help me. So, if you happen to have copies that you are willing to share, please PM me here on the forums.

Thanks!
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 1:49 am
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