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Old 03-21-2008, 01:04 PM   #51
NineDaysDead
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Default Re: Dungeon Fantasy 4: Sages is released!

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Originally Posted by Kromm
Then make sure your cinematic AI has a suitable programming skill at a high enough level to accept the -10 for "instant use" to convert experiences into programs, along with MA (Computer Brain) to run the programs.
Would Enhanced Time Sense negate the -10 penalty?
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Old 03-21-2008, 01:07 PM   #52
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Default Re: Dungeon Fantasy 4: Sages is released!

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Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Would Enhanced Time Sense negate the -10 penalty?
Nope. ETS negates penalties for being rushed by the plot or GM. People with ETS are affected normally by elective uses of Time Spent (p. B346).
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Old 03-21-2008, 01:12 PM   #53
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Originally Posted by Kromm
That's the trait I deem b.s. Converting experiences or readings into skills you can use is called learning. PM has nothing to do with learning, just memorizing. Learning costs points and takes the usual amount of time, even for an AI. I don't buy that an AI needs seconds to learn Physics from a book while a human needs months. That's rubbish.
It seems to me that a "software" AI, given the proper reference materials and code, designed for that kind of AI, could simply incorporate them as fast as they could be written into it's working memory. It doesn't have to work this way, and it's pretty alien, but I don't see how it's necessarily rubber science any more than any software patch is. I'd assume that libraries for civs with lots of AIs would collect such information.

Similarly, it is conceivable that a hardware AI might have plug in modules that more or less do the same thing.

I can also conceive of an entity that can take human-level reference materials and neigh-instantly convert them into AI-compatable useful code. It seems unlikely that such a transhuman entity would have much use beyond curiosity for human level reference materials.

Modular abilities handles this sort of thing fine in GURPS, although sufficiently powerful AIs can be pretty pricey. (For good reason!) Kromm is ofc 100% right that PM is not the right GURPS ability to represent this. It is a literally inhuman way of thinking ("my self is modular").

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Old 03-21-2008, 01:14 PM   #54
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Default Re: Dungeon Fantasy 4: Sages is released!

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Nope. ETS negates penalties for being rushed by the plot or GM. People with ETS are affected normally by elective uses of Time Spent (p. B346).
What's the difference between taking less time because you’re rushed and taking less time because you choose to? Either way you're doing the same work in less time.
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Old 03-21-2008, 01:26 PM   #55
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Well, the AI metatrait has the same PM as some human characters. Computer Brain is okay for programs. But what trait describes someone who can instantly memorize data from any medium if not PM? There isn't a trait that allows conversion of books into programs . . .
I think what's needed is not the combo of Super-Memorization (from books) and PM, necessarily, but rather upgrading the Modular Ability to Computer Mind or Cosmic and combining *that* with Photographic Memory to allow for having hundreds or thousands of 'scanned' titles in your memory; heck, with Cosmic you don't even need PM.

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Sure. That represents the ability to play back experiences. This is fine, but not the same as understanding those experiences.
No, but I can see the argument that if you play back the experience of cramming from a book, however long that may take, it's the same as reading from it directly.

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Converting experiences or readings into skills you can use is called learning. PM has nothing to do with learning, just memorizing.
Sure; all that was being discussed was whether with PM you actually needed the physical book on hand in order to learn from it, so long as you had the text memorized verbatim.

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Learning costs points and takes the usual amount of time, even for an AI. I don't buy that an AI needs seconds to learn Physics from a book while a human needs months.
Unless they have the appropriate ModAB, right?

I think what was essentially being asked was whether the combo of Super-Memorization and a Photographic Memory couldn't let the Modular Ability work a little bit more like Computer Mind, since after all you could have access to any of the books you've 'scanned in'. I'm fine, however, with saying that you need to pay for what you get with Modular Abilities in terms of how easy it is to access different abilities and how long it takes.

That said, I know if we did this with Cosmic MA, we could take some small limitations for getting only skills and languages. Would the additional limitation that you need to have read it in a book *sometime* in the past be worth anything, though? Even -5%?
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Old 03-21-2008, 01:32 PM   #56
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Default Re: Dungeon Fantasy 4: Sages is released!

"Being rushed" in the ETS description wasn't intended as "you're cutting corners on purpose to save time," because then why wouldn't every character with ETS do every task in 1/10 the usual time and ignore the penalties? It was intended as "you feel as though you're under pressure, and don't know how much time you have," which lets you ignore maybe a -1 or -2 for beading sweat and shaky hands. That's the difference.

Edit: The trait of being able to work faster is Altered Time Rate. And yeah, I'd be happy to allow task-specific limits on that. ETS is just Combat Reflexes, Level 2, and like Combat Reflexes, more of a coolness-under-fire trait for combat than anything else. Thus, it gives bonuses for staying cool (or elimnates penalties for not staying cool), but it doesn't really help you move any faster to complete tasks.
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Old 03-21-2008, 03:08 PM   #57
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So only a programmer with 8pts in Piloting can make a vehicular autopilot program of 8pts? That's weird. IIRC the most famous chess program was not made by a chess player of comparable levels
Are you talking about Deep Blue? IIRC, there was a whole team of programmers and chess experts who fiddled with Deep Blue in between matches with Kasparov. You can write a brute-force chess solver if you have computers so fast they can simulate all 10^152 potential branches of the chess tree in 2 minutes. Otherwise, you have to rely on your knowledge of chess to provide "good enough" heuristics for recognizing winning moves/positions in order to prune the tree to something computable, and then if you recognize that Kasparov was beating you with combination X, you then tweak your heuristics to be a little bit stronger vs. X and neglect Y, which he wasn't using. But you have to be good at chess in the first place to even see X and Y happening.

-Max

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Old 03-22-2008, 12:48 AM   #58
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As for true photographic recall . . .

I've seen no research on anyone who could speed-read hundreds of pages of hundreds of books and comprehend and use the knowledge therein indefinitely. There are many well-documented cases of people memorizing vast writings -- like the entire Qur'an -- through painstaking study and repetition. There are many cases of savant syndrome that involve astounding instant memorization and recall without assimilation. But I've yet to hear of even one case where the subject could glance over a large text for a few hours and then systematically use its teachings for practical purposes for days, weeks, and even years afterward.

Thus, I don't think this is an especially useful phenomenon to simulate in games. I think that the system in place for scholars is good enough for dungeon crawls, though. ;)
I'm not saying that Photographic Memory could allow instant learning. I'm saying that it could allow information storage, so that the character doesn't have to carry around the books. Instead, he stores the pages in his head, but he hasn't actually "read" them yet, only "photocopied" them, and therefore he still has to spend the normal time, later on, if he wants to learn from the books, either permanently which costs CPs, or else temporarily to put skills from the books into Modular Abilities.
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