Quote:
Originally Posted by jbalsle
Oddly enough, my response is 'well, what if he wants it to take weeks to beam an AI? Shouldn't it be his choice as GM?' Where does that fit in this 'hard' vs. 'soft' debate? :)
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The difference is in how you achieve the result. If you're doing it "soft" you just say it's impossible. The difficulty with that is that if you make several rulings like that and they're not consistent with each other, the world can stop making sense to your players.
If you're doing it "hard", you need an explanation of why it's impossible, or impractical, and you need to consider what else that affects, and how that changes the setting. This is more work, but means that the result is internally consistent. That means that when the players want to do something creative, you have strong grounds for deciding how difficult it is.
For this particular case, a "hard" justification for it being impossible to transmit AIs is tricky to achieve. Impractical is easier.
The figures for how fast you can transmit data by laser are reasonably firmly based in simple physics and information science. To use an analogy, saying that it takes a couple of weeks to transmit 100TB in 2100 is like saying that it will take a couple of weeks minimum to travel from New York to San Francisco in 2100. It doesn't seem plausible, because we can do better than that now, and there's nothing about the setting that indicates that travel will get slower.
Another way to restrict travel-by-laser might be to make smart AIs much larger. If that Complexity 8 AI is 1000 times larger, 100PB rather than 100TB, it takes 1000 times as long to transmit, which takes 2-3 months. This is a much less attractive way to travel, so we're looking good so far. However, the much larger AI still has to be able to run on a computer, and your computer needs 1000 times as much storage to hold it. That means that either storage needs to have 1000x the capacity, which is going to have effects that I'd need some time to work out, or the computers that run AIs need to get a lot bigger and more expensive.
That breaks something that
is a THS trope: that AIs can run on computers that fit into human-sized bodies. You can salvage that trope by changing the size progression for program complexity to something like this: no change up to Complexity 4 (still 10GB, the largest programs we have today) then Complexity 5 is 1TB, Complexity 6 is 100TB, Complexity 7 is 10PB, Complexity 8 is 1000PB, and so on getting 100 times larger for each +1 complexity. That allows not-very-smart AIs to be mobile, but smart ones need huge computers. How does that seem?