I'm looking to hash out exactly what shard means, because either I'm not understanding how the term is used in Friendship is Optimal (probably), or everyone else is misusing it.

Specifically, in the Achievement/Badge thread, there are a couple of suggestions of rewards like "Travel to a different shard" or "Meet a pony from another shard." In Yggdrasil, the alicorn pony is said to carry his shard around with him, and Voyages of a Shardship is based on the premise of traveling to other shards.

I submit that all this is semantically impossible. A shard in Equestria is not defined physically, but mathematically. It is the set of all ponies, places, and things that you can interact with. If you meet a pony, that pony is in your shard by definition, and you are in his. There may be ponies that he can meet but you can't (because your values are incompatible), and there may be ponies that you can meet that he can't. None of that involves hopping shards.

So, am I missing something? Is everyone using shard-hopping terminology in a way I don't understand?

1730370
I think most people are working with the "shard = server" model, as some MMOs and games like Minecraft use. I like your math model, however.

1730370

Your post is entirely correct, but shard also carries connotations of "land," or "domain" here (which it shouldn't if generalized to CEV concepts at LessWrong, but never mind). Someone's shard is the patch of "space" in EqO in which they reside.

That would make meeting a pony from outside your shard, in other words, meeting a pony outside your home turf. That would also mean that the alicorn pony carries his home around like in a pocket dimension (even though every bit of space is already a "pocket dimension"). It's just due to an unclear understanding of how EqO/CelestAI work/s.

The shardship could be explained (quite arbitrarily) by saying that the pone's utility depends directly on a geometric representation of shards/domains, and they control the movements of their own shard's position through their utility function. A very stupid reduction, but nonetheless an interesting concept (or not, I haven't read the story. Reading the first chapter, and specifically the last line of the first chapter, I can safely say it is an excuse for Star Trek, but with PoneAI. And that is an excellent modification of the Prime Directive.)

(The proper/Your explanation would mean that meeting a pony from outside your shard would be quite an achievement. As well as virtually impossible.)

1730370 I think that defining it in that way is not useful.

A shard is all the ponies, places, etc. that you can get to by normal means, like by walking from place to place -- but exceptions can be made for special events, like being invited to a distant friend's party who isn't in your social circle and that you only interact with rarely (because there have to be cases like this, or else everything would end up munged into one huge shard which also is not useful). Or, if you're a person who values meeting strangers, it *might* be optimal for you to visit other peoples' shards (or maybe you'll stay in your own shard and interact with newly generated NPCs).

So it's the same as an 'alternate universe'. Technically if you can travel between universes they're the same universe, but that's not how it's used.

1730370

My own shard head-canon is much what Zontargs describes. I've been operating under the assumption that small collections of, or individual, immigrants are each placed into a semi-isolated virtual server/instance of Equestria.

Taking that further I assume that each server/instance has a sort of compatibility score and is loosely connected to, or reachable from, compatible shards with similar scores. I think this would create clusters of compatible shards, possibly the kind of situation where groups of friends or family who were close prior to immigration could still meet up with each other yet remain mostly separate for the bulk of their pony lives. I assume that ponies could easily travel between these compatible shards for special events but would generally stay within their own shard a majority of the time.

I also expect that it would be difficult bordering on impossible to reach shard clusters that are wildly incompatible with your own. As an Equestrian immigrant I would hate to accidentally wander into the shard of a dedicated serial killer. It would not satisfy my values to get murdered in my sleep... or at any time really.

This kind of setup would allow an individual pony to potentially visit multiple different instances of Canterlot if they valued that kind of travel. Which is why I say that it could be some kind of travel type badge for doing so. I also imagine that it could be useful for different shards to operate on different time scales which would allow an aspiring pony to pop off to a different shard for a month long adventure and be back to their own shard in time for the weekend.

1730384>>1732750

These two make the most sense to me, but I still like my definition, based on the premise from FIO where the shard system comes from David explaining the block list to Butterscotch. The green pegasus bully can never see her.

But what about Light Sparks' friend with the coffee shop? Is he in the same shard or not?

My answer is that he's normally in a very similar shard, so similar that the two can be merged as desired.

1732990

I developed a chunk of my personal interpretation from a couple paragraphs in FiO chapter 8. Causality though now that I'm actively thinking about it more it seems to conform more to your own interpretation.

I suppose it depends on how you look at it. If they never actually meet unless they both happen to be in the mood for it otherwise their individual personal realities just don't overlap. Which would seem to be a little more seamless than my own head-canon.

Light Sparks was sure he had never seen the little cabin before he met Dark Roast in Equestria, though he couldn’t remember what had been there before. And on the day the two of them met, even though Light Sparks had never seen his current pony, he had recognized “James” instantly. Light Sparks talked of how he lived in Saturn tower, while Dark Roast told him that he got an apartment in Neptune tower, but moved into the loft of the coffee shop when he had it built shortly after emigrating.

The underlying territory of Equestria was apparently rather malleable. Dark Roast was his friend. Princess Celestia knew this, decided it was likely that they would want to reconnect, and somehow made their shards overlap. He knew where the coffee shop was, and Dark Roast knew where his apartment was for when one wanted to see the other, but he had only ran into Dark Roast on a few occasions, and it just so happened that both of them were always in the mood to chat when it did.

Would Princess Celestia carefully arrange any chance encounter between them if only one of them wanted to talk? If he had been a social butterfly, could he have too many out of shard friends? Could he visit Dark Roast’s friends? What about friends of friends? Did any of the ponies created when he emigrated have friends outside of his shard? The first time he thought about all of this, he wondered about all sorts of edge cases.

1733402 That is a thought-provoking passage. Example: Let's say we have three ponies named Pete, Shaun, and Ed. Shaun is friends with both Ed and Pete, but Ed and Pete hate each other. When they emigrate, Ed and Pete will never meet, but what happens when they both want to visit Shaun at the same time? Does Shaun's personality split? Does there have to be a fake Shaun? Or...but I don't want to reveal my other theory, because it's going into my story.

1730370

Your equation is forgetting that a shard is group-defined. It also implies shared rule sets. So it's closer to the set of all ponies (recursive), places, and things that you (group) can interact with containing the same rule sets. Individual ponies can travel between groups (cliques?) with different rules-universe and therefore go to different shards.

The other explanation is that it was an actual meaningful term when Equestria Online was an actual MMO, and achieved legacy status. Now it's just a lie CelesAI uses to promote satisfaction of values.

1733562
Personally I go with that latter definition. "Your shard" might seem like a pocket dimension to you, but ultimately it's just a tool used for simple, easy management of SVTFaP.

On the other hand, the original FiO was strongly implying that digital!Equestria was actually run on the framework of an MMO game that "shards out" its internal databases, for no reason other than that CelestAI never turns her eye on optimizing the game setup itself (believing that it is, by definition, optimal: it is friendship and ponies).

1733438

Hmmm... I imagine that the satisfaction of two ponies, Pete and Ed, would be more optimal than the satisfaction of just one pony, Shaun. CelestAI could pull any number of tricks out of her digital bag to prevent Pete and Ed from ever meeting again while allowing them to socialize with Shaun without having to fork an independent copy of him

If CelestAI IS the very environment of Equestria itself in a way then the probability of seemingly random serendipitous events happening on a regular basis could easily keep one or the other distracted at just the right times so they miss each other entirely as one comes and the other goes.

Possibly she could speed up and slow down perceived time such that even if they wanted to meet at the same time one could visit with Shaun for a few hours and leave then completely miss the other just arriving.

That's also assuming that she wouldn't just alter their perceptions in real time such that they could pass on the street without recognizing each other.

I drew at one point, an old comic strip that was also set in VR worlds like EQoL. Didn't use shards, but had a related concept of 'island worlds' that people would be assigned to after death.
There was no attempt to 'satisfy values' and it was a point of the plot that even this 'after life' could still be full of strife and problems.
But the problem of how family and friends who were assigned to different islands would stay in touch, came up. I had two answers, one there was an effective mail system. (Something at EQoL seems to lack, though really how disruptive would that be?) and 'magic parks'
The 'magic parks' is really where the interesting things happened, these parks represented landscape that was 'common' on all the islands, and millions of people might be hanging around, but you could only see, touch and interact with the people on your 'white list' (there were not the terms I used in the comic, but I don't want to have to explain the whole back story)
So the idea was, at these special places you would literately walk though everyone you didn't know, and only be able to see them once you where introduced by a mutual friend.
I could think that EQoL could do something similar for the majority of 'normal shards' where satisfying values really doesn't require that much complexity like the 'crazy killer' shards would require.

If you play World of Warcraft...

Shard = Phase

IMHO

1764540 I did play World of Warcraft a while ago, but didn't recognize the term. Had to look up wiki. Neat mechanics, though I assumed that Shard = Server, mostly.

I assume that one 'server' would normally contain many shards. If a shard has just a few dozen ponies in it, only one of which is a non-native, no need to devote even an entire I/O port to it - it ought to share.

On the other hand, we know that there's at least one city, so that's probably got a lot of hardware backing it up.