TNM in the media

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bobby 55
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by bobby 55 »

justanotherfan wrote:An all new OTP adventure, starring Trospuzk! Fight the evil PDZ, and try to befriend the DXOH before the meltdown at IXD or face the minions of CorpsCore on your way to the shadowy Core Industry Corps. Will you be able to save Princess Trohzbizk in time? Fly your ship, the Rusty Hyperion, into CorpsCore Headquarters on Saturn before Trohzbizk rejects Trospuzk forever! Yet how will you know if Trohzbizk is a real person?
Hah, reality test: How did you like the space suit I sent you?

If the reponse is: Fine but now I have to buy a pair of space boots to match. Then there's a 98.75% chance she's real. :mrgreen:


Edit: OMG another hijacking in progress.
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Boltersdriveer
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by Boltersdriveer »

bobby 55 wrote:
justanotherfan wrote:An all new OTP adventure, starring Trospuzk! Fight the evil PDZ, and try to befriend the DXOH before the meltdown at IXD or face the minions of CorpsCore on your way to the shadowy Core Industry Corps. Will you be able to save Princess Trohzbizk in time? Fly your ship, the Rusty Hyperion, into CorpsCore Headquarters on Saturn before Trohzbizk rejects Trospuzk forever! Yet how will you know if Trohzbizk is a real person?
Hah, reality test: How did you like the space suit I sent you?

If the reponse is: Fine but now I have to buy a pair of space boots to match. Then there's a 98.75% chance she's real. :mrgreen:


Edit: OMG another hijacking in progress.
ONOES! That mean Trestkon will be hijacking Worldcorp by now!
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OiNutter
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by OiNutter »

justanotherfan wrote:She's very old. She's been with us since the beginning. The beginning of the Internet. She would say she knows enough.

That conversation is from one of the google results for Alice, one of the demos. There's a many different versions, since Eliza is from the 60's or thereabouts. Hyperpsych was surprisingly lucid, and it would remember & learn details from previous conversations, working them into the present in shockingly cunning ways. As a psychiatrist (the intent of the demo, since a psychiatrist can be silent and goad for info), it could have moments of accuracy and inspiration. In a room with Tribes and PIIs and Voodoo # cards, somehow a LAN party would be captivated by Hyperpsych, an index card presentation on a 25mhz processor.

I'm not sure how advanced ALICE is. Years ago, Inventions That Changed the World (The Computer) displayed Ella, like ALICE but with facial emotions (http://www.ellaz.com/EllaASP8/Direct.aspx), and it had some incoherent responses as well as some prescient ones. AI hasn't really been doing anything new in the past decades, just the same old things with far more detail and information, but ALICE should at least approach ye olde Turing test. I studied AI for a short time, and didn't find it too interesting, like it's still missing something completely necessary. I'm sure Jonas spends his days inputting inane data into an AI "knowledge starting" database for Project Hyperion. I bet that ship has an AI run amok, and you're the only person that can set its crazy environment right.
GNU Emacs (the text editor extraordinaire and all-around computer scientist multitool) has, for at least a decade, had a mode called "The Emacs Psychotherapist", which performed quite similarly to the sample conversation you posted.
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.

I have problems, yo.

Why do you say you have problems yo?

'Cuz it's true, mang.

Is it because of your plans that you say 'cuz it's true mang?

Word, dawg. My plans are fo' shizzle, but my nizzle keeps shackin' up
with my bizzle!

Is it because your nizzle keeps shackin' up with your bizzle that you
came to me?

Naw, dawg, I got problems like fo' real.

Maybe your life have something to do with this.

Yo man, that's deep. Slow down a bit, yo.

What makes you believe slow down a bit yo?

Huh?

Can you elaborate on that?

Well, it's like... I wanna be all successful and shit and make
somethin' of myself but it's like that ain't the way the chips are
fallin', man.

Does it bother you that it's like that ain't the way the chips are
fallin' man?

Yo, for real. That's it exactly! It's like, how am I gonna look my
kids in the eye if I ever find out I have any?

When did you first know that are you going to look your kids in the
eye if you ever find out you have any?

Well, I don't know, man. I guess I'm, like, at a crossroads and shit.

I would appreciate it if you would watch your tongue!

Yo, I'm sorry, man, I was gettin' a little heated. Sometimes it's
like I just wanna bust a cap in life.

Earlier you said your nizzle keeps shackin' up with your bizzle?

Yo, don't get me started, man. I think my main homie, Chrome, is all
doing this on purpose. That's the fifth ho in a row he took sloppy
seconds on. Something's up and I don't mean his joint.

Is this how you relax?

Relax? You trippin'? This ain't no hottub with jacuzzi mamas, yo.
It ain't like me to be all talkin' about feelings and
sh-... things.... I'd rather be at the players club grindin' on some shorties.

Is it because of the people you hang around with that you are going
through all this?

Man, I never thought like that before. I mean, they ain't like,
robbin' liquor stores or things like that, but they def' ain't no
positive influence. Theo even got his ear pierced last week. Mo'fo
tried to all hide it with some headphones when his old man came up
into is room and all. Man, that's one sinister dude, y'all.

Is it because of problems at school that you say man that's one
sinister dude y'all?

Well, no, I mean... it's like, he's all wholesome and whatever, and
that ain't fly, but, you know, it's coo'. Thing is, like, he's all
spending time all messin' with people. Not, like, in a playful way,
but, like, he's all out to get 'em or whatever.

Is the fact that like he's all out to get 'em or whatever the real
reason?

Man, don't ask me.... Less I know about that crazy brotha', the better.
Ah, brings me back to high school, screwing around with Redhat on a dilapidated Brio salvaged from the district's scrap heap. The thing had no power button, so I had to hit the DIP switch with a straw from a juice box. Good times, big laughs.
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justanotherfan
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by justanotherfan »

Awesome, yeah. Wiki says that's doctor.pl, an Emacs implementation of Eliza from 1985. I don't remember the first time I spoke to Eliza, but I've just now been appalled to find a google search for "hyperpsych hypercard" only gets this thread as a relevant result. I now _need_ to get my old 68k macs up and running. None of the Elizas I see on the internet have a persistent dictionary, and I don't even see hyperpsych on the Info-Mac Hyper Archives.

I think an instant messaging program, or at least an IRC program, had eliza chatbots implemented. It's been a running joke with friends of mine-
"Hey, I just got back from the store!"
"And how do you feel about back from the store?"
"Oh, screw you Eliza."

In my computing textbook, it seemed like the latest thing for AI was compiling a comprehensive database about the world, in the hopes that comprehension and consciousness would miraculously spring forth from the seeding knowledge. Clever, but still something missing. I'll be intrigued with how Project Hyperion will revolutionize the field. Once Jonas creates a computer consciousness, it could evolve quickly enough to complete the rest of the game development.

Simpletext > Pico > Emacs
Here's where I run away, laughing maniacally. Starting as a Mac user may warp minds.
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OiNutter
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by OiNutter »

justanotherfan wrote:Awesome, yeah. Wiki says that's doctor.pl, an Emacs implementation of Eliza from 1985.
Just as an interesting nitpick, that's "doctor.el"--.pl is the standard extension for Perl scripts, while .el stands for Emacs LISP. Much of Emacs' success comes from the fact that it is a platform and interpreter for a slightly modified version of LISP, a language commonly associated with artificial intelligence, coincidentally.
I think an instant messaging program, or at least an IRC program, had eliza chatbots implemented.
I'm pretty sure that all popular chat protocols have had the old AI packages piped into them at some point, but ICQ was the most famous for that sort of thing. As I recall, I made myself an account about 8 or 9 years ago so that I could stay in touch with Phasmatis, and within an hour of logging on, I was barraged with solicitations from a horde of automated bots. Apparently due to the high volume of competition, many of these bots forewent the normal spam modus operandi in favour of attempting to pose as an Internet Female in order to engage awkward nerdlings in brief patter before suggesting the user click a link to "her" "webcam". Of course, the link usually led to something virus or spyware-laden, so I guess it was something like a virtual STD.
In my computing textbook, it seemed like the latest thing for AI was compiling a comprehensive database about the world, in the hopes that comprehension and consciousness would miraculously spring forth from the seeding knowledge. Clever, but still something missing. I'll be intrigued with how Project Hyperion will revolutionize the field. Once Jonas creates a computer consciousness, it could evolve quickly enough to complete the rest of the game development.
Not surprisingly, your textbook appears to be quite out-of-date or misinformed. There is quite a bit of misinformation all over about current AI research and practices, partly due to how rapidly and drastically it has changed, as well as the undying appeal of the AI presented in popular media. This AI which exists as an entity in pop culture is congruent with what the founding fathers called "strong AI". That is, a computer system which believably emulates a typical human in its interactions with a human user. When computer technology was new and exploding with new innovations at an incredible rate, this seemed like the inevitable destination--a bit like the student becoming the master, I suppose.

{In the interests of clarity, I will be using the popular (yet incorrect) term "computer" to refer to a computer program or system cast in the role of an artificial agent}
Of course, what was not even considered was that a computer surpassing the raw intelligence of a human still acts like a computer. Arguably, the defining characteristic of the human mind is irrationality, the unique characteristic that causes one to think or do things which their current knowledge does not indicate (or indicates to be incorrect). While it is definitely not impossible to make a computer irrational, it is entirely another thing to make a computer irrational, yet ensure that its irrational actions are consistent with the actions of another irrational being. In order to do that, not only would the computer need to be rational (making spontaneity effectively infeasible), but it would need to deconstruct human irrationality rationally in order to reproduce it in a way that's rationally irrational (phew). If you want to have dry, user-driven dialogue with a program, that's fine, but it's Natural Language Processing, not strong AI. If you want to have a conversation where you forget you're talking to a computer, you're going to have to wait until we've figured out the mechanics of the human brain.

The reason why this stuck in pop culture is that when the field of artificial intelligence was conceived (with strong AI as its sole goal), it seemed like the pinnacle achievement of mankind (not to mention exciting in fiction), and thus, there was a great deal of excitement and hype surrounding its research. When year after year produced no significant results, funding was pulled, and even Minsky gave up, normal people went back to AI as science fiction mode, which they were pretty much already in.

Of course, AI was revitalized a short time later, but this time with a largely different goal. Instead of trying to act like a human, weak AIs are systems that have the ability to discover information without the run-time assistance of a human. Certainly, there are still a few groups intent on achieving human emulation, but the kind of AI in video games today has less to do with thinking like a human and more with finding the right set of pre-scripted actions to take, paths to follow, and so forth, based on their environment. Many of the popular weak AI algorithms rely on pseudo-random elements in order to provide a starting "guess" solution, introduce variety, or simulate real-world entropy, but some of them use straightforward procedural heuristics, like the famous A-Star (or A*) pathfinding algorithm.

In truth, you probably interact with a wide variety of weak AI every day, such as Google Ads' selection algorithm, many of the standard features of Wordpress and Mediawiki, and even in the embedded systems of household appliances and other devices. While that is quite a bit more practical than having an expensive box that can emulate something that already exists, it's not nearly as exciting or perverse, so, much like do with Freud's contributions to science, we let other people think about the facts while we muse about more entertaining misinterpretations.

The above was an excerpt from my book OiNutter Explains Artificial Intelligence, part of the OiNutter Explains Shit collection. If you enjoyed the above passage, or at the very least, do not feel compelled to liken it to having nails driven into your eyes, make sure you check out the other books in the series, such as OiNutter Explains Computers Vol. 39, OiNutter Explains Freud's Fornication Frustration, and the best-seller OiNutter Explains Consciousness.
Simpletext > Pico > Emacs
I'm not sure where you're coming from with that. While Emacs can indeed be called a text editor, I don't see how it's directly comparable to other text editors, since Emacs is, in essence, a unified workstation interface and platform. Anyone who spends less than 25% of their computing time in a CLI shell or terminal would very likely have no use for it, but for someone like me, who eats code, defecates binary, and sleeps on a stack, it's quite an essential workspace environment. Like Vi, Emacs allows you to execute all commands without your hands ever leaving the home keys, but it also has the ability to split the screen an arbitrary number of time, run a shell in one (or more) of them, edit binary files without corrupting the data, have the same file open at different places in an arbitrary number of screens, support language-specific text-highlighting/colouring/fontlock, turn menial tasks into macros, support modes like `hexl`, which turns a screen into a hex editor, etc., etc., etc.

Not trying to start a nerd-religion war here, I'm just wondering how Emacs ended up as an operand to a comparison operator when I can't even think of another program that occupies a comparable role...
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by justanotherfan »

Right, I do no work in EMACS ;-). Just a joke, since the *NIX editor holy wars never take into account Simpletext. It's the equivalent of saying Notepad.exe > vi, which should be risible, except Simpletext > Notepad.exe ;-)

The most I do coding in is TextWrangler/BBEdit, Idle, and XCode, so I don't do much coding. I know absolutely no perl, so that was a typo (P is next to E on my keyboard).


Weak AI is boring. We know what it's doing, we know what it's going to do, and we can guess that it feels nothing (someone complains here about the Turing test, but still). From the average person's perspective, modern AI just means videogame bots will be more challenging and Google's AdSense will someday know you better than you know yourself ("Buy water molar mass on eBay!"). So it isn't only boring, it's usually annoying. The idea I had read about was that the computer program theoretically did not have enough understanding of the world to be intelligent, and that an expansive seeding database of information could give it the starting point from which to acquire new knowledge on its own. I think the first one was Cyc by Lenat, but I saw something recently about inputting millions of everyday photographs (and probably tagging them) to create a similarly comprehensive system more easily. I've heard very little about that method since, aside from a different pattern recognition program where a program could identify and classify real world objects from video input, or learn them, and use ASIMO type robotics to interact.

I haven't really been paying attention to AI since that class on computing, because it really has been so dull. I have seen some interesting headlines and articles coming from the other direction about attempts to emulate biological brains being successful..."We've created a computer that thinks like a frog!", but I figured there'd have to be an asterisk ("*except that it doesn't, but we assume the specs are similar") and had gotten too sick of those asterisks and wild claims to continue following it. Eliza was of course very basic language processing, and AI is useful now, but it doesn't seem much further. As you say, development on that type of AI stalled.

The major textbook in the class was Out of their Minds. The same teacher taught what I was told was the first university class on computing philosophy, teaching The Cathedral and the Bazaar etc, and I was signed up a year in advance, but ended up not taking the class.
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by Jonas »

New interview with Lawrence and me on the brand new mod blog UserCreated:

http://usercreated.org/2010/01/11/inter ... d-deus-ex/
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Jaedar
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by Jaedar »

You should let Mr.Laxdal speak more Jonas. Otherwise, nice interview.
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Boltersdriveer
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by Boltersdriveer »

No. The point is that, Jonas should answer all the questions. Usually questions are short, while answers are expected to be longer.
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by chris the cynic »

Lawrence: We plan to be millionaires within six months, and own our own islands within the year. That’s how the indie gaming scene works, right?
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by bobby 55 »

That was a nice piece.
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by Trestkon »

Jaedar wrote:You should let Mr.Laxdal speak more Jonas. Otherwise, nice interview.
A wise man speaks little, but means much.

:giggle:
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by Hassat Hunter »

Jonas to the defense of the space station! Was this interview done before you saw the no-items run video's or after?

Also, no attempt at all to pimp Hyperion?
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by AgentSmithereens »

First released ten months ago and reaching its final version in November
I assume before (that may also explain the lack of Hyperion).
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Re: TNM in the media

Post by justanotherfan »

After all this time, it would be a shame to just release the mod and then act like nothing happened. We still have things to do in terms of promoting or supporting the mod while we gear up for new projects.
You have a larger audience for new projects, a fan base now. That kind of thing helps a lot. As well, the cost of "supporting" TNM is just discussing it since it's a stable game having gone through the bugfixing. It is all PR now. TNM makes some of Hyperion's money.
It’s also one of those things where you get so close to the project that it’s hard to see it from the outside. We did try, but it was always hard to be sure.
That reminds me of something IIRC Spector said, responding to an email question. Something like "Thank you for the awesome feedback and praise. From the inside during development, we couldn't tell how the finished product was going to turn out".
I think most Deus Ex modders want to make mods that resemble Deus Ex, otherwise it’s easier to start with a more straight-forward game like Half-Life...(with) bare-bones FPS mechanics. ....(needing) enough programmers (to be like Deus Ex)
Aside from the attempts to import/code Deus Ex content and mechanics into other engines, do you think modern FPS games could be modded into a game that resembles Deus Ex? IIRC DX has mechanics that other games just don't bother with, like the alliances system (eg. everyone in FPS games is "enemy"). I don't follow the programming of new engines, but I'd assume they never saw the light and implemented any complex RPG-type systems. Clearly a development company could, the way DX was done, but since they aren't doing that much anymore...
I would redesign the Downtown and Corporate city hub levels to be significantly smaller.
I hated that about Corporate, that it took forever to get across even with the run mod on. I thought it worked with the story as an excellent setting, since Worldcorp had a large dominating presence in a cold massive environment, but so did PDX. Downtown was good, although a little big when on the way to walk across Corporate. Either Corporate or Downtown could be shrunk, depending on the desired feel. I'd shrink Downtown to make it more dense, to reduce the most common hub large space, and keep the wide open impressive and dominating space of Corporate. Open areas really aren't something I see often in games. Still, shortcuts could be nice. Corporate could have a moving sidewalk ;-)
how the internal logic of the setting works.
What?

SpaceStation seemed to work. Control level, engineering level, living quarters level, the other one...Seems logical, but I think you're talking about something entirely different.
I don’t want to sit here and tell them they should quit because Deus Ex’s time is up. I think we’re approaching the point where it doesn’t really pay off to start a new Deus Ex mod anymore though
DX's time isn't up, but I think that after (or without) TNM and HDTP, it has little appeal to the average gamer...like System Shock I in an emulator. Heck, even to the active Deus Ex fan, since I haven't played it in a long time. Mods that have progressed and will release certainly shouldn't quit, since fans are excited about them. Otherwise I'm more pessimistic. I think people now learning to mod DX are nuts, let alone the raving madmen starting massive "whole new game" mods like TNM. I guess you can't say that politely ;-)
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