Hey look the wiki’s back. I’m going to hold off on putting it up on the navigation bar until I have in a state that’s somewhat more complete and presentable, but I might as well let you all start playing around with it right now. :)
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Is that another flashback coming on?
Shouldn’t people be more worried that it thinks sentient life is computers?
Honestly, ARIA has at least as good an answer to that question as anybody else does.
Which isn’t to say that it’s a good answer.
Calculating large numbers is fun though. Perhaps ARIA is making a logic error very typical of human beings, that is, confusing the specific with the general. Consider — one can actually win monetary prizes for finding particular really huge numbers. Try a google search on the “Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search”. I haven’t looked myself for a month or so, so someone might have found it already, but there’s a fairly significant prize going for the person or organization that finds the first Mersenne prime a million decimal digits long. That is, find the least p such that p = 2^q – 1, for prime p and q, and for which p >= 10^1000000.
Doesn’t all that stuff sound fun? Don’t you like doing fun things? ARIA must be on to something.
I don’t s’pose that’s a G’krigg Court reference there? :D either way it’s one of the best greetings for an AI or any talking object to give, especially if it’s just doing it to random people. :D
Which is to say that it’s a very bad question. “Motivation of sapient life”? What does that even mean? How does “motivation” even apply to “sapient life”? Why did Napoleon cross the Mississippi?
42. That’s a good answer.
Umm… it thinks sapient life is a computer. Doesn’t that lead to bad things in books and movies and such??
Sounds like the sort of question that’s intended to crash thinking machines, or at least produce an ‘insufficient data’ response. If you ask your computer to divide by zero and it makes a joke you’re doing okay.
Many computer scientists believe that sufficiently large numbers can encode, or even precisely correspond to, such desirable things as a Fluffycore song, or an adequately precise arrangement of large quantities of matter to form a physically plausible utopia, or a battletank that can fart out behind it the scent of violets. Also, instructions for producing same.
Whether you can encode the truth of a human heart is still the subject of rabid controversy.