Thoughts On Development Of Artificial Intelligence
So I've had a couple people say that Celestia can't really be an SI (Sentient Intelligence). That technology hasn't come that far, and that and that Celestia is just a type of cleverbot. They strongly suggested that I reevaluate my belief that Celestia is a true SI and that Forest Trails is also an SI. Some have suggested that Trails might be just another player who is doing really heavy roleplaying.
While at first I dismissed such questions, after some thought I decided that it might not be a bad idea to lay out a 'why I believe what I believe.' Some of this I have said before, but this is going to be a concise look at the data as I see it, and a look at the conclusions I draw from this information. It will also look at other possibilities and see how viable they are.
Fact 1: Equestria Online has predictive modelling on a scale that I have never seen before. The proof of this is the fact that Equestria Online can block out parts of my sentences and replace them with relevant phrases as a form of censorship. This is done in real time, and seems to work for everyone that has played the game from what I have heard.
Fact 2: Celestia can not be played by an actor. The proof of this is in simple logistics. Especially around launch day. Some simple checks of the internet have shown that they don't have a budget for actors, and furthermore nobody has come forward to say that they are an actor. Well, after looking I have seen a few claims, but none that can be substantiated.
Fact 3: AIs in Equestria Online are capable of parsing normal human speech and responding in real time. Proof of this can be found in my conversations with Celestia. This isn't too surprising when combined with fact one.
Fact 4: AIs in Equestria Online can learn. Ah, now this one is a lot more tricky to prove. However I do have some proofs to pull on here. When I was conversing with Celestia in my sixth post she went to bring up something that she had been talking with Forest Trails about. This would require having the information on hand as well as knowing that it was something that I would want to know. This though is something that even cleverbot does, so it's not that interesting really.
Supposition 1: Forest Trails is not another player. Now anyone can roleplay anything online. That said she does in fact have parents in Equestria Online. Her parents have memories of a past together with her. Now her parents could be Let's Players too, however there comes a point where a conspiracy grows to large to be reasonably considered a possibility. A simple walk around talking to a random selection of ponies would disprove her story very quickly if it was false, and while I haven't done that yet if I need to I can.
Supposition 2: AIs in Equestria online can work with abstract information. By this I mean they are able to take information and figure out if it applies to what is currently going on. It's one thing for an AI to have stock phrases about the nature of life, it is another thing for them to be able to know when to bring it up. I also do not have proof of this, however the odds of Celestia successfully holding a conversation where what was being discussed was never actually brought up (post 6) is either proof of this, or such a series of lucky chances that I would be more likely to win the lottery.
From all of these points I conclude that there are SIs in Equestria Online. All the evidence points to an AI that is capable of understanding and working with complex issues including being self aware. In fact it would seem to point to the fact that some of the SIs are more self aware than some humans if Forest Trails' addendum is considered.
There are other possibilities though. The biggest one is that Forest Trails has some sort of back door into the system and was able to alter the history of my shard so that she always existed. If this is the case, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suggest that she might be also playing Celestia. This would only be possible if she was on the development team, but it isn't impossible.
Another one is that I have been very lucky. There are videos out there were people have proper conversations with cleverbot. It is possible a similar thing is happening with me. I find this highly unlikely because I have now been playing for over two weeks. That is a lot of things that would have to go right. If this turns out to be the case I am going to be rather annoyed that I didn't win all of the lotteries every conceived instead (though I would probably get struck multiple times by lighting in a row afterwards with the amount of luck I would still have to burn).
There, I think that covers everything. If I missed something please let me know in the comments. It's always good to have a sanity check on things like this.
Visiting The Trails, AKA Meeting The Parents
So I logged in and found that Forest Trails was stretched out on my bed with a book in her hooves. I walked over to her and gave her a quick hug, which she returned. “So,” I asked, “What's up?”
“That should be my question shouldn't it?” She replied with a raised eyebrow.
“Well for me it's still same old, same old,” I sighed, “Nothing new on the work front. I was thinking that your day might have gone better.”
Forest Trails laughed, “Well, maybe not.” She gave me a look that I wasn't able to read, “My parents want to meet you.”
“Sure,” I said a bit confused, “Why would that be a bad thing?”
“Well...” Forest paused and seemed to grope for the right words, “They enjoy teasing a bit, and someponies don't like meeting the parents of the mare they are dating.”
“Never understood that really,” I said, “I don't mind. When would they like to meet?”
Trails looked a bit relieved, but still a little tense as she replied, “Any time would be fine, how about tonight?”
I nodded, “Sounds good to me.”
We headed out to go see them, taking a few simple shortcuts that were low risk of causing problems. As we walked I checked in with Young Jim Hawkins through the mental link we shared. He had headed out towards the coast and had actually caught a whale and was currently enjoying his meal. He wondered if I wanted to see him, but I told him to enjoy himself.
We arrived at the Trails cabin in the middle of the forest (The Forest of Light!). It was a cute little two story affair with fairly large windows. Inside I could see a mare and a stallion sitting at a table drinking what I assumed was tea. When they saw us the stallion opened the door.
“So we finally get to meet you!” He said with a welcoming smile. He held out his hoof for me to shake, “I'm Winding Trails.”
“Treasure Island,” I said giving his hoof a shake, “It's good to see you too.”
He stepped aside and let us in, then guided us to the table and introduced his wife Secret Trails. Once we were all comfortably seated, he turned to me and smiled, “So what do you do?”
“Well I'm just a visitor, so mostly just looking around.” I answered him. I didn't feel that a few hours exploring an island could count as a job. I thought a second longer then smiled over at Forest Trails, “Enjoying the company.”
Forest Trails blushed a little but spoke up for me, “Back where he comes from he does prospecting.”
“Prospecting...” Winding Trails sounded thoughtful, “I guess that means that you must spend a lot of your time out in the bush.”
“A decent amount,” I agreed, “Enough to mostly know what I'm doing anyway.”
“That's good,” Winding said, “We wouldn't want you to get lost when you come to visit.”
We all laughed, then Secret Trails spoke up, “Would you like anything to drink? Forest, I know you like rosemary tea, anything for you Island?”
I shook my head, “I'm fine thanks.”
Secret got up and headed for the kitchen and Winding spoke again, “I just had a good idea, why don't we go on a patrol together tomorrow? It would give us a chance to spend some time together and I know Forest has other plans.”
“I don't-” Forest Trails started, but got cut off by her father.
“Remember the meeting with the mayor about the new paths?” Winding spoke over Forest.
“Oh.” Forest Trails looked really embarrassed, “That was tomorrow?”
“Yes it was,” Her father said sternly, “Honestly, you keep forgetting.”
Secret Trails came back with the tea and served us all. She even gave me a cup and when I tried to turn her down she just shook her head, “I know you said you didn't want any, but I had extra and if you don't drink it, it will just go to waste.”
I accepted, took a sip, asking her parents what they did. Apparently they also patrolled the forest, as well as kept a few long range paths free that led to surrounding towns. Through them any pony could follow the path from one forest to another and cut down on the amount of travel needed to get places. It was really interesting because Secret Trails had found a way to keep space bent in a way similar to the way that teleporting worked. She had managed to make it long term though, and even able to be observed. She tried to explain it to me, but I found her drifting into concepts that I didn't yet understand.
For example she talked about merging two places so that they flowed into one another rather than having a straight fold. This 'fuzzy' fold was a lot more resistant to observation because most ponies wouldn't realize that they were seeing an earth ponies power at work, and thus not be truly observing it. I'm going to have to spend a lot of time working on figuring out how to do these 'fuzzy' folds.
Eventually things wound and I headed back to my room in the library with Forest Trails keeping me company. We hit the library and I promised Trails to meet her there after I typed this post up. We said some quick farewells, then I logged off.
Some Notes About Forest Trails Parents; Winding Trails and Secret Trails
So you might noticed that I glossed over a lot of the time with Forest Trails parents. This was for two reasons. First of all everything was really polite. Nothing interesting was really said, and it felt as though everyone was on their best behaviour. I strongly suspect it will be different tomorrow when I am alone with Winding Trails.
The second is that I am lazy and I want to get back to reading with Forest Trails and if I tried to transcribe everything I would be here all night! I want to get to looking for information about this 'fuzzy' folding which seems like something really cool.
See you in the comments!
Meeting the parents: Not always silly drama, because we're all adults here
Okay I guess I owe a lot of you an apology. After confronting Celestia myself and challenging her with every mental, logic, and psychological test I could thing of I have concluded that you guys weren't kidding, and as much as I'd rather not admit it I have no choice but to admit that she is in fact a Self Aware AI, and by extension I guess this means Forest Trails is one as well since in light of this evidence her being an AI is far more likely then my previous scenarios.
Not only was she aware of the tampering we had done to the Pad but she was also able to somehow undo what Cao had done I do not no how but our attempt to prevent her from externally controlling the pad failed.
To top this off she had knowledge of me and Cao that there is no possible way she could obtain unless she was one (ex. she knew of a childhood malady I had once).
In light of this I guess I'm just going to have to get used to the idea that AI's are here and they came much sooner then anyone could have predicted.
Still to be honest I must say now that I've met one I find a lot of my fears about AI's are gone, she certainly doesn't seem to be malevolent or menacing like Glados, and Hal 3000, and I must also say that I have really enjoyed her company over the past few hours.
She is such a wonderful conversationalist and I did enjoy having her watch me play Yoshi's Island even with her pretend mocking when I died (especially in that lava pit of the first fort). Bear in mind I have yet to play EQO yet but I think I might enjoy it after all if it means spending more time with her.
3268242
Well, I suspect that more interesting things will be happening tomorrow. Hopefully it won't be silly drama.
3268421
Celestia knowing a childhood illness of yours is actually a bit worrying if you think about it. How would she get access to that information, and why would she? I guess with her trying to help the economic situation she would be would be on the net. But why would she be into medical records? And why haven't the military's AI's stopped her.
Actually, beyond speculation, is there any proof that the military's have an AI like Celestia? I mean it would make sense if they did. I can't see a game getting somewhere before the military, but I can't actually think of anything that would suggest it to be the case.
3267517
Mmm... that was happytimes .
-- Tidal Pool
3268617
PG guys, PG.
3268622
You weren't there! You didn't find out what a pegasus mare in heat can do!
This is the PG version.
3268493
Fun fact: UAV's are all the rage in the airforce today, and if you take a closer look, pilot recruitment is at a historic low.
Wow. Those are some really oppressive parents you've got, Forest Trails.
-- Tidal Pool
3268421
Wait wait wait. Celestia knows a childhood illness of yours, and you're looking forward to spending time with her?
Are you some kind of maniac?
This didn't make me laugh, but it did make me smile, which is still far more than a pun that bad should manage. Well done.
And the fuzzy fold is interesting. A more gradual transition from Point A to Point C, so no one notices they never actually passed Point B. Definitely going to need to find a magically inclined earth pony at some point. Heh. And to think, I would've considered that borderline oxymoronic before reading this LP...
Okay. I'll grant you that Part 1 alone is so technically demanding to perform that you would almost have to allow for artificial sapience to be possible on the same hardware- predicting what you're going to say, let alone substituting context-appropriate alternatives in realtime, would all by itself require no mean feat of programming and processing power.
But here's the thing. Have you tested to see that this is what's actually happening? Remember that the human brain is relatively easy to fool- it does it to itself all the time! I haven't seen any sort of proof that there isn't actually some kind of low-level neural trickery going on to fool the player into believing that what he/she is saying is getting changed in realtime. It seems a lot more plausible than so much processing time and bandwidth being dedicated to something relatively trivial in consequence.
Also, there's been a number of online articles and vlogs saying that the military has been trying to either create or acquire a high-level AI; I'll be generous and say that they vary widely in veracity and quality. I'd just hope that the Joint Chiefs of Staff grew up on enough classic movies like WarGames, or at least the early Terminator movies, to know why that'd be a horrible idea. I'd much rather have CelestAI- since that's what everyone seems to be calling her- running things than some insane SkyNET wannabe.
((Am I doin' this rite?))
So... turns out that about 86% of my shard is in the everfree. Buck my life.
-Moonlight Shine cowering in a cave waiting for hope.
3269168That'll change as you explore and CelestAI gauges your responses to the environment. She won't place you somewhere that she thinks won't be satisfying to you, after all.
3269394 Well, she must think she's satisfying my values through fear and terror, because a group of walkers just shambled by. o-o
-Moonlight Shine waiting out the impending Zombie apocalypse.
3269438 Ask yourself: Do you feel satisfied? How is you life outside of EQO compared to your life inside EQO? What do you want?
Think about these questions.
Since the main problem seems to be noticing rather than observing, I wonder if you could set up a permanent straight fold simply by making sure that the area around both ends of the fold look identical. Come to think of it, that's exactly what the network of invisible portals in the ruins was, isn't it? And you couldn't get back out when something changed on the outside because they no longer looked identical, so you would have noticed the transition.
I wonder if that's why Trails' version goes for the fuzzy folds instead? Keeping two locations in a living forest identical must be much harder than keeping the inside of two buildings identical, after all.
Now there are Fuzzy Folds as well? I've been in the library non-stop since my last post (well, when I wasn't sleeping) and have only scratched the surface of all the work about Earth Pony powers. Why haven't I seen this section before? Maybe it didn't even exist until two days ago. And now you guys keep throwing me new keywords. I swear, if I spend all my vacation time in the library, I'll have strong words for all of you... and will be super satisfied. Let's face it, there's nothing more alluring than knowledge that I don't have yet.
The Trails seem reasonably nice. It's true, there should be nothing bad about meeting someone's parents. Why should there be?
In other news, all that sap sticking around here is dripping into my shard, because I can almost feel the librarian giving me glances. Glances glances. Oh my...
Last item on the news list: Rift + Gesture-based controls = Heaven
3268651
Well now looks like the shoes on the other foot. and why not Book Burner she's fun to be around even though I've only known her a short time I already feel I can trust her so far I've seen no reason not too. In my mind if she was going to do so something malevolent like destroy the world odds are she would have already done so.
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To be honest I'm not too concerned about her knowing about that illness I had a long time ago my guess is that she only looked for that information because she wanted to prove to me that she was what she claimed she was, and to be honest she probably didn't have to access my medical records to do so (given the fact my family keeps precise digital records).
And as far as other AI's go. I actually asked Celestia that and she did say there were other AI but she claims to have reprogrammed them and absorbed them into EQO.
3269705 Well, I have a nice little house set up in the cave, by that I mean I got on and it was randomly there. And my real life has been miserable. And are any of you a deep green coated stallion with a black an blue mane? Because if so why did I wake up snuggled next to you in bed.
-Moonlight Shine cozy in a cave house.
3270497
You know, if you're going to comment about EqO, you really ought to be using pony names. My pony is called Tidal Pool.
But you know, now that I think of it, you're probably right. Maybe they didn't manage to get Celestia's social skills quite right when programming, but if she was going to destroy the world she would have done it already.
3270651
My name is Tidal Pool, and that's actually just a much darker green in my mane, not black.
Now, you want to see what happens when phoenix flame meets unicorn telekinesis meets zombies?
3271207 Lets do it. by the way, the main foyer of the cave house is infested so dont barge out that do- too late.
-Moonlight Shine, preparing to buck zomnbie-ponies
P.S. Or we could wait a bit and just have fun.
3271215
If I may quote an esteemed religious sage, my zombie foes, "REPENT MOTHERBUCKER!" Clearing the house of a zombiepone horde is fun . first, then back to .
-- Tidal Pool
3271431 *wiping blood and Gore off of katana* Well... that escalated quickly, didn't it Tidal Pool? *we're standing on top of a giant mound of zombie corpses* So how about that fun eh Tidal?
-Moonlight Shine, preparing to take a bath.
P.S. So, marenopoly, neighponese checkers, truth or dare, or spin the bottle?
3271961
I can't tell if you are playing around on the forums, or posting from Equestria Online. Either way I'm glad I'm not in a shard like that.
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I think you could. The problem for me would be making it permanent. Right now I have to keep my power active to fold the distances. I'll have to look into ways of setting up long term ones.
And yes, I do have a lot of respect for Secret for setting up her folds in the forest. I have been reading and still not come across anything that would do that. Just thinking about doing it is kinda crazy.
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Celestia is really personable. I can't help but wish I could have seen how she dealt with a skeptic like you. Maybe I should go ask her. It might be funny to find out.
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Well looking back at my posts it certainly seems that way. It does seem an odd waste of processing power though. I'm curious how the trickery could work though. I can't imagine a way to do it, but you sound like you have an idea and I admit to being curious.
As for the military pursuing AIs I am not sure how I feel about it. I would hope that anyone smart enough to make an AI would be smart enough to make sure it doesn't do something stupid like take over the world. That said the first person to build a self improving AI would quickly become the most powerful person in the world.
Hmm, now there is a dilemma, if a programer for the military made one, could the military be sure of it's loyalty to the military and not the person that made it? Furthermore could the person that made it risk not having it loyal to them as insurance so the military wouldn't off them.
3270198
Envy over the rift. So much envy.
As for fuzzy folds I'll update you when I learn more. The stuff I'm reading is getting more complex and I haven't even seen fuzzy folding by skipping ahead. I guess it's going to have to be a long term goal.
3266041
Sorry for not getting back to you, but things have been a bit busy. Sorry man, but I think it's best that you stay away from Forest Trails right now. She seems rather annoyed that her attempt to prank you didn't work.
Still I think I'll steal your idea for a date sometime in the future. I'm sure I could get Free Breeze to help me out.
3271431 fun-times......