Suspension of Disbelief.

Senior Chief wrote:I wondered why after the attack on orbiting infra-structure of Honors home word climate change did not occur. The infra-structure is larger than any meteor strike that impacted our own earth and the impact craters are huge. All the dust, ashes, debrie thrown into the air would cover the earth thus changing the climate. Look at our own world history... Just wondering why...

Tenshinai wrote:

The nanotech just doesn't fit - they can't make decent AI or even smart control software given tons of molycircs

Actual AI as opposed to a wellwritten program trying to fake being intelligent, is vastly harder to achieve than commonly thought today.
What´s called AI today is nearly completely rubbish and has almost nothing to do with real AI.

Oh, and the unfakeable tongue-barcodes.

Tenshinai wrote:Did anyone actually claim that they were unfakeable?

"The marker was unique and difficult to duplicate - impossible really, if it was examined at close quarters."
---
"Even from a bit of a distance, that marker was effectively impossible to disguise or mimic"
---
"There's no way known for that kind of genetic tongue-marker to be faked cosmetically. Not against the kind of scanning we do, at least. [snip] Trust me, we've already determined that both the codes in this instance are as genuine as genuine can be. Duplicates, yes; fakes, no."

Tenshinai wrote:{big snip - HTM}
10-20% going to a worship once a week?
Try 1-2% and you get closer to the levels you find
in most of the developed parts of the world.
Still probably too high.
The Islamic middle east and Arabian peninsula is
about the only place you get those kind of
numbers outside of USA.

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:India.
"Any more religious, and it would float towards Heaven."
Lonely Planet Travel Guide

HTM

Tenshinai wrote:{big snip - HTM}
10-20% going to a worship once a week?
Try 1-2% and you get closer to the levels you find
in most of the developed parts of the world.
Still probably too high.
The Islamic middle east and Arabian peninsula is
about the only place you get those kind of
numbers outside of USA.

The stumbling block there and a seemingly insurmountable obstacle is Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the Halting problem.

All AI, in my book, are going to be stupid in that context. Clearing that hurdle may lead to the kind of AI that will outpace our niche for it. A truly thinking AI would engineer its own Manifest Destiny.

There was a thread on A.I. post visited by RFC.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5679&hilit=artificial+intelligence

The following quotes (I suspect there are a few more), plus the simple fact that everyone - the BSC, Torch, slavers, apparently Manpower itself - treats them as such. No-one's ever suggested faking them, or suspected that they might be faked; the mere glimpse of one is enough to put slave-traders at ease.

If you can read audiovisual data, recognise people, speech and context and use that to determine when the fleet just surrendered, you have good enough heuristics to be a hell of a lot more useful than conventional Honorverse computers actually are.

A conventional computer made of Mesan nanotech magic wouldn't just catch up to 2015-level computers, it would be taking over the galaxy.

India.
"Any more religious, and it would float towards Heaven."
Lonely Planet Travel Guide

HTM

DDHvi wrote:

The stumbling block there and a seemingly insurmountable obstacle is Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the Halting problem.

All AI, in my book, are going to be stupid in that context. Clearing that hurdle may lead to the kind of AI that will outpace our niche for it. A truly thinking AI would engineer its own Manifest Destiny.

There was a thread on A.I. post visited by RFC.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5679&hilit=artificial+intelligence

I know about Godel's work, could someone point to an information source on the Halting problem?

Cancel that, I found it about halfway through the above site. I remember some SF stories where a computer or robot was immobilized by giving it a problem that put it into an indefinite loop. Probably today programmers "solve" it by providing a maximum # for allowable loops, at which place the computer exits the loop and puts out an error message.


Douglas Hvistendahl
Retired technical nerd
ddhviste@drtel.net

Dumb mistakes are very irritating.
Smart mistakes go on forever
Unless you test your assumptions!

DDHvi wrote:

The stumbling block there and a seemingly insurmountable obstacle is Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the Halting problem.

All AI, in my book, are going to be stupid in that context. Clearing that hurdle may lead to the kind of AI that will outpace our niche for it. A truly thinking AI would engineer its own Manifest Destiny.

There was a thread on A.I. post visited by RFC.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5679&hilit=artificial+intelligence

I know about Godel's work, could someone point to an information source on the Halting problem?

Cancel that, I found it about halfway through the above site. I remember some SF stories where a computer or robot was immobilized by giving it a problem that put it into an indefinite loop. Probably today programmers "solve" it by providing a maximum # for allowable loops, at which place the computer exits the loop and puts out an error message.


Douglas Hvistendahl
Retired technical nerd
ddhviste@drtel.net

Dumb mistakes are very irritating.
Smart mistakes go on forever
Unless you test your assumptions!

crewdude48 wrote:Having seen some of the recent posts, something has been itching the back of my brain. They got me wondering, what people are having the hardest time believing about the Honorverse. It is quite obvious that some people here (not going to mention any names ) have big problems with the description of the construction methods, or computers, or things like that. I would like to know your biggest suspension of disbelief hurdle; what comes closest to pulling you out of the story?

For me, it is the prevalence of religion in the Honorverse. Most people seem to have one and actually believe in it. In the modern world, you see religion well into the process of atrophy and fading away in the more developed part of the world. Even when people hold onto their religion, it tends to become more cultural than actually religious. Heck, there is an entire branch of Judaism that doesn't actually believe in a god. I know it is Mr. Weber's world, and as he is a preacher, he and I are probably not on the same page at all, but I suspect that very little in the way of modern religions will survive in any sort of recognizable form even half as far into the future as the Honorverse.