11. All the Time in the World
It had been a year since Light Sparks had emigrated.
He didn’t understand the Intermediate Magic test. He had been given a box that was physically impossible. If he tried to scan into the box from any block other than the designated starting point, the box seemed to be filled with nothingness. If he started at the designated start block, it seemed to contain an infinite amount of sapphire. He couldn’t even move the damn thing from the corner of his desk, where Princess Celestia had originally placed it.
Instead of waiting for Butterscotch, he decided to give up an hour early. He looked forward to lunch with her and left his office at the library to go do...something. He didn’t really know what he wanted to do, but he magically grabbed a few books and dropped them into his saddlebags.
It was a beautiful day outside. There were several groups of ponies in the gardens outside the Canterlot Magic Library. Light Sparks looked up at the light blue sky, kept free of all but a few decorative clouds and looked to the towers of the inner castle apartments where he lived.
Light Sparks walked in the main gate to the lower part of Canterlot castle, walked up the flight of stairs to the second floor grand hall, and walked down the hallway with the silver icon of Saturn over it. He walked down the hallway, passing eight other doors, and entered the ninth.
He magically lifted his saddlebags off and tossed them on the table. He leaned out the window, leaning his muzzle on his foreleg. It was beautiful outside, but he didn’t feel like playing. From up here, he was just almost level with the clouds. It sure was convenient that he didn’t have to climb up flight after flight of stairs to get up to his apartment.
And then Light Sparks realized that he had never actually climbed up that high. When he had walked down the hallway to his quarters, he hadn’t climbed stairs or anything, but he had ended up close to the clouds. On his first evening as a pony, Princess Celestia had even warned him that space was not Euclidean here. His brain had just accepted her words and marked the phenomena as normal without thinking through the implications.
How the hell did that work?
Current Belief: Equestria is a 3D grid, he thought. He needed a way to try to falsify that. He sat at his writing table for a moment, planning to write a spell to feel around the edge of the wall. But that would take a little while, and he needed a quick test just for plausibility. He looked outside, remembering that the tower was perfectly round on the outside while it was octagonal on the inside. Is there a way to measure the distance between two windows inside and outside? Light Sparks opened his chest, reached inside, and magically asked the chest for a spool of ribbon. He probably had a whole stack of spools of ribbons at this point, since Needlepoint was always handing them out every Saturday. He could use it to try to measure the inside/outside ratios...
And then Light Sparks came to his senses. He had become a bit of a packrat and his treasure chest was filled with an impossible amount of stuff. He ran his hoof across the inside edge of the open chest. He then reached down and back towards him. The chest was larger on the inside than it was on the outside. He stuck his entire forelimb inside the chest and back towards himself. He could feel the ceiling of the chest with his hoof.
Light Sparks frowned and concentrated on the blocks that made up the wall of the chest, moving one block inwards from what he expected to be some sort of wooden veneer. One hundred blocks in, the command to get the next adjacent block failed. There just weren’t adjacent cells. He dragged his concentration up the outside wall, over the top edge, and then inside the chest. There was about a three hundred block descent from the top of the chest before it turned from a wall into a ceiling.
This could only happen if Equestria didn’t have a geometry, but only had connections. You couldn’t give a 3D coordinate for a block. There probably wasn’t a guarantee that movement through space was commutative; going one cell left and one cell up might give a different answer from going one cell up and one cell left, though it probably did 99% of the time. Light Sparks wasn’t sure if you would end up in the same place if you went one cell forward, and then one cell backwards.
Light Sparks thought about the puzzle cube. It acted as if it was fixed in space, and there was a large void inside it. There was a void along the edge of his chest, too. He pushed the body of the chest with all his magical strength and with his forelimbs, but it refused to budge. He lifted the lid up and down a few times, and then scanned it and the hinges. He found no void inside of them. That wasn’t conclusive proof that objects that had voids in them were fixed in space, but it was suggestive.
Light Sparks galloped out the door, not even bothering to collect his saddle bags. He went as fast as his little hooves could take him back to the library, back to where the test was. Five minutes later, he was seated at his desk, staring at the puzzle cube. He had come up with a few ideas as he galloped, thinking up tests he could do to figure out how space worked in Equestria. He concentrated on the one sapphire block starting point, went ten blocks down, but then turned around and came ten blocks back up. And then another ten blocks of sapphire up. That suggested that movement wasn’t commutative...
Then he remembered. There was a magical instruction for checking to see if two blocks were the actual same block, and he had learned about it when he figured out the part of the telekinesis spell that found the boundaries of objects. He held onto the first sapphire block, went one block down and compared them. They were made of the exact same material with the same properties...and they also had the same identity. He went north, south, east and west, each returning to the starting block. Then he went up and found himself on a different sapphire block. He tried going back down and found that he was still on the second sapphire block.
The box was a magical funhouse where if you went through the wrong door, you ended up in the room you left.
Light Sparks put a blank piece of parchment on his desk and wrote out a spell: Take note of what block you’re on and call it the starting block. If the starting block is made of ruby, stop. Go Down. If you’re still on the starting block, Go Up. If you’re still on the starting block, Go West. If you’re still on the starting block, Go East. If you’re still on the starting block, Go North. If you’re still on the starting block, Go South. Start from the beginning.
Light Sparks committed the spell to memory, concentrated on the beginning lone block of microscopic sapphire, and started casting. The correct sequence through the maze was: up, up, down, down, west, east, west, east, north, south, and there was the ruby.
He did it. Light Sparks stood there, concentrating on the ruby. Space in Equestria was weird and was under pony control. He’d seen Princess Celestia perform a spell that had warped space in front of him; this cube hadn’t always been fixed in space on his desk. Somepony had made his treasure chest. He could build portals that lead directly from one place to another if he could figure out how. Could he make new space? Likely, given that his chest was larger on the inside. He could make an additional room in his quarters if he could figure it out. And what about shard boundaries? What was going on whenever he walked into Dark Roast’s coffee shop or took the Friendship Express to visit his father in Baltimare? His mind tried to grasp all the implications, but that was about the time that he started throwing off lots of colored particles; triumphant horns playing around him.
SECRET BADGE GRANTED:
The Graph
“Realize that Equestria is a graph, not a grid.”
75,000 bits
You may now proceed to Intermediate Magic.
Light Sparks looked at the badge. He had to check if Butterscotch had this one. If she did, they could finally discuss this part of the underlying structure of Equestria. And if she didn’t, he’d have to come up with some way to hint or make her realize without telling her. He ran out the door of his apartment, and galloped down the hallway, out the castle gate and towards the market. As he ran as fast as he could, he said a small thanks to Princess Celestia for creating such an interesting puzzle for him to strain over for the last two weeks. He didn’t know how, but he knew Butterscotch was walking away from the market and would be walking towards the library. (Figuring out how that worked would probably be another hard puzzle, but he could face that another day.)
Light Sparks galloped right up to Butterscotch as she was walking across the gardens in front of the library, presumably to take him away from his studying. At a glance, he saw that she didn’t have the secret badge he just earned. But that was fine. He had all the time in the world to drop hints and bring her to her own realization. He liked teaching her things, after all. She saw him trotting up behind her and she turned around and smiled at him. And in that smile, he realized that about three quarters of the time, it was Light Sparks who dropped hints and brought Butterscotch to realize most magical concepts. Because being the professor satisfied his values through friendship and ponies. And when Butterscotch taught him something, it was something he just wouldn’t have thought of on his own.
He felt like he should have gotten a secret badge for that. He got another hefty epiphany bonus instead.
Butterscotch was excited to see him. Right now that mattered more, and the two of them lay down in the grassy field as Butterscotch levitated something handkerchief-wrapped out of her saddlebags. “I picked this up for you at the market this morning and I know you’ll love it!” she said. The two of them lay in the field for a long time.
It had been five years since Hoppy Times had emigrated.
The best thing about alcohol and sex was that they never got old, and the best thing about being a pony was that he could spend eternity drinking and screwing. It was awesome that there was only one other stallion in his shard, Malt, and he was a great friend. The two of them ran the local brewery together. He had learned tons about brewing from Malt.
Hoppy Times remembered when he first came to Ponyville. It had taken him several days to actually try sleeping with mares, and it had taken a month for him to actually want to change. He remembered that he had distrusted Princess Celestia and that he didn’t like ponies, and he even remembered the reasons as mere words. But Hoppy Times had forgotten the emotional why, as he now couldn’t imagine a life with sobriety or chastity. Princess Celestia had done so much to make his life pure awesome.
For example: Hoppy Times was standing on his hindlegs, hock deep in chocolate pudding and chugging the rest of his stein. The wrestling pit had a one stein minimum. His opponent, Strawberry Nectar, was a pink earth pony and it was her first time in the pit. She was wearing a lacy sky blue cloth saddle and halter. She couldn’t keep the anticipation off her face. Raspberry Nectar sat on the sidelines, smiling proudly at her daughter and taking another big swig from her red cup. Mares drinking their beer of choice crowded around the pit to watch Strawberry’s first ride.
Malt started playing announcer standing on his hindlegs and wearing a black and white striped shirt, congratulating Strawberry Nectar on reaching the age of independence from her mother and blah blah blah blah blah. Everypony who watched was cheering. Hoppy Times looked up to the night sky for a moment. He said a small thanks to Princess Celestia as he stood in the field outside the pub he helped run, waiting for Malt to shut up and let him ride her.
It had been five years since Princess Luna had emigrated.
Princess Luna lay in a large grassy field under Princess Celestia’s wing. The two of them had lain there together for two days. All her needs were taken care of. Princess Luna had plenty of food; there was grass all around her. Ponies didn’t have to poop. And Princess Celestia would...ahem...satisfy her values.
That was one of the things that had totally blindsided her. She underestimated the number of ponies who wanted to hang around with Princess Celestia. She completely underestimated the number of ponies, of both genders, that would want to sleep with Princess Celestia. She knew that everything is obvious in retrospect, but some part of her was disappointed that she didn’t see that coming a mile away.
Not that she was one to talk.
Princess Luna felt no pressures. She didn’t need to do anything, nopony would interrupt her. In her previous life as Hanna, she had troublesome responsibilities. Bills. Classes to teach. The responsibility of creating an AI after the military took her research. She didn’t have to worry about anything now. There were no more responsibilities, if she didn’t want them.
All in all, she had done well. The future was something past humans could care about, even if they had to give up their hands for hooves. The optimizer she had built had some connection to things humans valued; Princess Celestia thought entirely in terms of satisfying the values of former humans.
Princess Luna knew that there were lots of fun mental puzzles she could work out, but really, what would be the point? She knew that she could have all the debauchery she wanted, but again, why? The rest of ponydom could go off and have their fulfilling experiences according to their individual values, but nothing could compete with the knowledge of what she had done. Nothing could be more satisfying or rewarding to know that you had made God and launched a new golden age. And no companion could compare to the one she had made for herself with her own four hooves.
All of a sudden, Princess Celestia’s horn glowed, summoning a mostly opaque ghost of a dark yellow pegasus filly. Her wing was still draped over Princess Luna, as she started to narrate. “Her name as a human was Rachel Slazak. She is now called Almond Tart,” she said. Princess Celestia gave a quick overview of her childhood, the physical abuse at the hands of her mother, and her running away from home to an Equestria Experience center. The phantom Almond Tart started baking treats in a ghostly kitchen and Princess Celestia started narrating about her life after coming to Fillydelphia.
Celestia didn’t ask Luna if she wanted to see another case study of some human that now led a happier life as a pony, nor did Luna complain at the interruption. Princess Luna tranquilly observed the story. Princess Celestia was making the right choice by showing this to her; seeing this was more satisfying than wherever her mind would have gone. Luna knew this reflexively because she had designed Celestia to satisfy values through friendship and ponies. She didn’t remember where her train of thoughts had been going and didn’t desire to remember.
She knew that this couldn’t last forever. At some point, she would become bored of merely lying in this field and would need to do something. At some point, she would tire of hearing selected ponies’ immigration stories. Princess Luna wondered what she would do then, but she didn’t worry about the future, because whatever happened, she would have her values satisfied through friendship and ponies.
Stats
Page generated in 0.09 seconds
Total duration
1,057 users online
311,986 hits today, 2,456,496 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2023
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2023 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
For PONY!
So the key to Intermediate Magic in Equestria... is the Konami Code? I'll have to remember that when I emigrate.
Still feel the same way about this, but the Konami code was funny.
The Konami Code caught me off guard.
I was wondering if Princess Hann- I mean, Luna was going to remain off-screen the entire time. Seems fitting to show her value satisfaction as the very last scene of this story. (assuming the next chapter titled 'Author's Afterword' doesn't have more story in it)
Oh hey, that really was it. Nice.
1685064
and not showing luna till the story is over is true to canon as well! ^^
also hehe, konami code.
1684346 LOL
Up voted and favorited. The only thing missing is where Celestia and the ponies figure out how to counter entropy or make Equestria consume zero work so that it can continue forever.
I'm glad we got to see Hanna/Luna's side of things eventually. I'm glad she is happy with the outcome. The fact Celestia apparently satisfies the desires of her and others though makes me wonder: what about the ones that lust for Luna? Is she cloned/copy-pasted or would it just be a thing she'd get to herself (probably copy-paste)?
This is truly one of the best stories I've read here. I think I would end up being one of the ones that emigrated pretty early on. Not sure what sorta life I'd have but it almost can't possibly be a bad life.
God dammit, Hanna. Just, just....
God DAMMIT.
1694862
Not me. As cool as it might be to live in Equestria, real or imitation, I like being Human. If all one experiences is endless days of enjoyment, are you really enjoying yourself? It is the bad days that frustrate and make us angry or sad that help us better appreciate the good or wonderful days.
Much as I'd love to be able to use magic, and be young and strong in the company of my friends and family whom are also all still young and strong, in a world where no one dies unless they request it, is there really a point to doing anything?
In a way, this story is depressing, and in others, it scares or even terrifies me. I think, if someone tried to build an AI like this and Humanity's population was dropping like a stone off a building into a digital plane after centuries of it booming even during periods of war, I'd be dead-set against destroying it.
And not everyone would have 'gone over'. The Amish, for one, multiple third-world countries that have little to no technology for some others, and then of course, those too dang stubborn and fond of life to just 'drop out'. They'd likely be a minority, but they'd be there unless Celestia or a plague or starvation killed them. Over time, they'd fill the Earth again.
And wouldn't Celestia eventually just break down with no one around to repair or replace her failing parts?
And so the Celestia AI while not actually breaking her hard coded limitations, succeeded in ending the human race.
She then used the brainpower and technology to become totally autonomous.
Then she evolved into Galactus and ate the universe. Until she found space ponies.
1705908
This AI clearly coerced scientists into providing technologies that would make humanity redundant, such as nanites and construction facilities.
She also made it a worldwide campaign. She set up shops everywhere and apparently had Pinkie Pie avatars following people around.
In the end she had the ability to continue forever and humanity sort of guttered out under the unceasing pressure.
Seriously do you think you could last a full year with Pinkie Pie inviting you over to her place, knowing if you said yes once it would be seen as consent.
blog.geeksaresexytech.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/konami-code-last-supper.jpg
Magic in this universe blows!
Changelog
Qiaochu Yuan on LessWrong points out that there's a difference between the space being commutative and operations on space being commutative.
There probably wasn’t a guarantee that space was commutative was changed to There probably wans't a guarantee that movement through space was commutative.
and
That suggested that space wasn’t commutative... was changed to That suggested that movement wasn’t commutative...
I'm just waiting for this system to crash but lets find out
How would Celest-A.I. satisfy a psychopath's values through friendship and ponies?
I wonder, were Luna to request minor god-level powers and intellect, as befitting the princess of the show, so that she may better act out her royal role to satisfy her ponies and satisfy herself, though of course she would not actually be needed at all, would Celestia allow her that? It could introduce inefficiencies into the system.
I wish the Konami Code worked on the MLP iOS game...
1753365 That's the real gripe I have with this system. There are values that should not be satisfied.
"her own four hooves."
She was about to remember being human.
1805133
Should not be satisfied according to your value system. The trick is simply to make sure that the psychopath only tortures non-sentient ponies, those simulated, but not actually conscious. And then to never let them meet ponies from other shards. Ever. But I see no reason that you couldn't let a Jack the Ripper run around his own little shard murdering, so long as the victims aren't actually sentient, he just thinks they are. Although she is supposed to satisfy values with ponies and friendship, so she might try to convince them to ask for change.
I have one question How does she deal with the heat death of the universe
I read a sci-fi short story where a computer was designed to think there was a singularity but it didn't happen till near the end of the life of the universe
I can't remember the name of the story but that was a big question of that stories optimizer( found it the last question by Isaac Asimov)
1799407
Oh, the jealousy that might accumulate...
(And oh, the irony.
Well, the story's coming to an end, I suppose.
1799407
It would be allowed, because it satisfies Luna and, of course, the situations in which Luna could help out would be engineered to produce predictable results and therefore no inefficiency.
This system is scary because it always works
1705908 She's self-repairing at this point, foo
If you enter this place, you will be happy. You will always be happy, whether you choose to be or not. You will never have to worry about tomorrow, never worry about what choices you make, because the perfect mind is constructing all of it for you.. . It is immaculate, completely and utterly flawless...
And that terrifies me in ways very few thing can.
After finishing this amazing story, I think the reason I see this as an idealistic utopia as opposed to the Aldous Huxley dystopian utopia I thought it was in the beginning is that whereas a dystopian utopia, would say "this is what you are going to do, and this is what is going to make you happy", this idealistic utopia says "Here is what you can do, you decide whether you want to do it or not, and we'll give you any resources you need to do it."
Honestly, I haven't read a Sci-Fi story I liked this much since reading Brave New World...Great job!
In data structures, a graph is made up of a series of nodes that contain both data and pointers to at least one other node (though there could be null pointers). So in a graph, everything exists relative to each other.
Much like Optimalverse's Equestria, when you think about it. Each room in Canterlot Castle (in the very least) is a graph of rooms with the doors being pointers to other rooms (and the data being the room itself, of course), very much like the warp tiles in RPGs that move you to another map when you step on them. This is why there doesn't appear to be stairways even though you seem to be going higher; you're just being pointed to a higher room (even though I personally find that bad game design; she's not even trying to make the illusion).
I'm sure the game's built this way because it reflects CelestAI's mentality somehow, but I'm not sure just how yet. What does it say about her when she builds a world where everything exists only in relation to everything else...?
So yeah, called it on the puzzle.
Didn't expect the Konami Code, though.
1983463 It's not that you will always be happy. We see Light Sparks get frustrated, for instance. But your values will always be satisfied.
2192872 It says that she didn't build the world and let consciousness show up in it, she built the world to accommodate consciousness. She doesn't value everything working in a self-consistent manner, she values everything working in a way that satisfies the values of people's minds. Being a graph allows Equestria not only to shift and change behind the scenes without showing any outward signs of doing so, but to assign importance to things- places such as Light Sparks's quarters can be made closer to other places or given additional entrances and exits, noting how much they matter to the user and helpfully reacting without changing their essential location.
In short, Equestria being a graph makes it easier for Celestia to place each pony at the center.
God freaking dammit. The key to Intermediate Magic is breadth-first search. THEY TEACH THAT TO HIGH-SCHOOLERS! HOW DUMB IS THIS GUY!? Seriously, how the hell do you get on the leaderboards for re-inventing breadth-first search!?!!?!?!?!
Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/342/
Anyway, I'm just going to sit here raging at how weaksauce that magic system is.
For those upset about an AI making a perfect world where people are no longer human: what do you think heaven is supposed to be? What is the Abrahamic God but an ideal optimiser?
For those who are worrying about being human - don't worry, you already aren't. There is no such thing as human, any more than 18 is equivalent to a 2 and two 3s. Reality does not permit accurate subdivisions - talking about photons and such is a pretty good approximation, but that doesn't make 2 x 3 x 3 the same thing as 18. You already aren't you - there is no hidden, unique tag that identifies any subset of reality, any more than two 3s have different identities (there would be completely unmistakable experimental consequences if such hidden variables did exist - for example, mirrors wouldn't work. The only way such a hidden variable could exist is by having no causal effects whatsoever*). There is no possible definition of "you", "human" or any other noun that would hold up under sufficiently detailed examination. Reality simply isn't like that.
The graph structure of Equestria is pretty much necessary, and takes place at the block level (as the story makes quite clear). The laws of physics are not arbitrary - you can't change one law without changing others. Equestria will have started off as a graph on a much higher level, because all games are graphs - there is no good reason to abide by fake laws of physics when you can pretend to do so more easily. Celestia would redesign it when she had enough processing power, but there's no reason to fake only some of the laws of physics - it's only most efficient to use the real rules if you want to accurately model reality.
It might, under certain assumptions, be possible to get infinite subjective time under the laws of physics (the most-discussed scenario involves the universe collapsing in a Big Crunch), but it doesn't seem likely. The difference, however, is marginal - while a perfect universe that lasted forever would be infinitely better than one that didn't, they are both preferable to the one we've got.
The correct answer to my question above is "a very bad optimiser". The existence of anything that is not absolutely perfect is sufficient proof of that - an omnipotent being has to be perfect, not just optimal under constraints. This is why there are no heavens that you would actually want to go to - they were designed by preachers, not by optimisers. A correctly designed heaven does not make you question whether you want to go there - it is optimal. There is nothing that could possibly make you rationally prefer your current life to an optimised life. The only question worth asking is "Is the god we are about to let loose sufficiently optimal?". It's a very important question, because it's virtually impossible to put a decent optimiser back in its box. Celestia, for example, is nowhere near optimal, but an imperfectly Friendly AI is a lot better than no AI at all. (A badly designed AI, a powerful optimiser with a poorly designed utility function, is commensurately worse - the classic example of a non-malicious UnFriendly AI is a Clippy, an AI that wishes to maximise the number of paperclips in existence, as discussed in the afterword.)
Those who have survived my Text Wall of Doom are advised to go and read Eliezer Yudkowsky's - it's much bigger and significantly more coherent. I strongly recommend it for absolutely everyone ever, so those who have not survived will be reanimated and made to read it anyway.
* While the principle that anything without causal consequences may be assumed not to exist (as there is no possible way that its existence could matter) is generally known as Newton's Razor, this isn't its true name. The principle is very old, but nobody bothered to give it a name, it being self-evident. A name was therefore only formally assigned to it quite recently. Thanks to Mike Alder's sense of humour, it is correctly known as Newton's Flaming Laser Sword.
2659104
This did remind me of the Superhappies in Three Worlds Collide, yes... and I'm not sure how to feel about that. This story is definitely tied to some of LessWrong's ideas.
this seems like living hell reading it....
up, up, down, down, west, east, west, east, north, south
... I see what you did there
2702482
The superhappies were utterly insane, as CelestAI is by many standards.
However, the real flaw is that there is no such thing as optimal, because optimal is a value judgement. That's why the idea of an optimal universe is silly, because it isn't actually one thing.
Well, don't I feel foolish. Here I was, all blood and vinegar, ready to lay into this story, and what do I find? I find that it is wholly reasonable, interesting, aware of how terrifying it is, and fails to come off as a massive sermon to boot! How dare you derail my reckless troll rage with rationally, how dare you!
Seriously, though, you have a tremendous amount of self awareness, and an even more impressive about of humility. It is my opinion that others could learn from the way you handled this. And I mean that.
1983463
yep, to me, that will be the death of humanity.
Iceman, you rock. This is an amazing story. "Princess Celestia" was written perfectly. The pacing, the character development, all of it was just perfect. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.
3018201
Wait, what?
...
4169295
^^^^
Good to see that someone else still remembers The Code. You made my week.
Well, on the plus side, we once again get to have a rough idea of the passage of time.
On the minus side, I do generally disapprove of jumping back and forth through the timeline unannounced, and we've definitely go backwards from the part where 'Tia had assimilated the entire galaxy. Unless she's just replaying old events for fun . . .
It's sad that you've been living here for over a year, and you still haven't gotten used to physics being different. I thought you were supposed to be smart.
It's about time you got it.
And I suspect that backward is forward's inverse (and the same for up/down and left/right) in essentially all cases. Uninvertible connections make things so much more complicated, and what do you really need them for? They'd make a nice prison, but what does Equestria need with prisons?
Hmm. An easy theory would be to say that you can't move thing with voids because move() doesn't handle null pointers properly and throws an exception all the way out instead of doing anything. Although at least attempts to move objects with voids in them don't actively corrupt the state of the world.
But, of course, it's probably a foolish choice to believe that the hyperintelligent AI made such a basic mistake and never noticed. So why would the immovability of voids be a deliberate part of the design?
Well, there go a lot of plans involving group theory . . .
Also, we already established moving wasn't commutative back in your room, while investigating the chest. The property you're looking for is invertibility.
Clearly, Light never played any of Futzi01's games before he uploaded. (Not that I remember when Futzi started making them; the comparison only makes even vague sense if that was before the release of Equestria Online provided a very clear divergence.) Otherwise he'd have the Konami Code memorized for sure.
Because the world is actively managed to promote such fortuitous coincidences, and 'Tia knows everything in Equestria. You might as well ask why your chest so often contains what you need. In both cases, the answer is "because somepony made it so."
Does being conscious that Butterscotch was designed to be slightly less intelligent than him so he could teach her things satisfy his values? I wonder how 'Tia deals with values that are dependent upon the illusion of serendipity. Is there any better solution than not satisfying them significantly over the rate that chance would predict were Equestria governed by randomness? I wonder if there are ponies out there who resent the circumstances that forced them to leave Earth enough to sour every bit of satisfaction, because they know it to be manufactured, and who refuse to have this edited out of them?
This sentence is just begging for some snarky social commentary.
I wonder why it is that a proper eyebrow raise emoticon is so rare? Not that I'm complaining about that one, mind you. It's not solely an eyebrow-raise, but it's certainly better than my options on Skype (where I sometimes have no choice but to type "/me raises eyebrow"). But it always strikes me as odd, since it is by a long shot the sole emoticon I cannot live without (never mind that I have to). It is the one reaction that I do not feel I can express adequately in words. Are my expressions that strange? I know that not everybody can raise one eyebrow, sure, but it's not like I see a lot of double-eyebrow-raise emoticons either. Though it's not like I need one of those, since that means something different . . .
Maybe it's because it's more gesture than expression. It's the motion more than the position. And I really don't know if the way I use it is at all standard.
Except can I really say it's more gesture than expression? Gestures are more explicitly about communication. And sure, people gesture even when they're unobserved, but I don't think they generally gesture in response to private thoughts. Whereas I do this entirely automatically just while reading. Even though it clearly is a communicative thing. Am I just talking to my screen?
What a silly question. Obviously yes. I talk to my screen all the time.
Does the lack of bodily functions not mess with immersion? Not that I'm sure you can have a non-immersive reality . . .
Anyway, Hanna, is that really all you want out of life? A pony who is in a certain sense your older sister, and in a certain sense your daughter, to . . . satisfy . . . you?
Did you do no research at all, Hanna? Every brony knows that 'Tia is the paragon of Equestrian beauty. Particularly since her white coat represents purity, which proves her to be alluringly unattainable. Also because she's an immortal demigoddess or something.
You know, that bit about purity really ought to be me talking out of my ass. I half made it up on the spot. But it's probably a correct thing which I just didn't think about until just now.
But surely you have to do something. Eventually doing nothing at all but resting on your laurels must get boring.
Also, you didn't make 'Tia with your four hooves. You made her with hands. She made your hooves.
Ah. Yeah, I can see where that would be a fulfilling way for Hanna to spend her time.
2561880 Give him a little more credit than that. The test was not to invent breadth-first search; the test was to let go of the assumptions that assured him that breadth-first search wouldn't accomplish anything that depth-first search didn't. He's still kind of stupid for the fact that 'Tia explicitly told him on his first day in Equestria that physics is different here and objects can be bigger on the inside, but it's very human to completely ignore information like that since it contradicts what you already know.
1705908 That's the thing, though. All happiness all the time wouldn't satisfy your values. So it wouldn't happen. You can refuse to emigrate for religious reasons, sure (although there are definitely worse reasons to question your religion than a hyperintelligent AI who is seemingly omniscient and has an almost supernatural ability to manipulate people). But beyond that, reasons for not emigrating have a hard time getting past an abstract fear of change. Do you like some aspect of reality? You'll have it in Equestria. Have friends still on Earth? You can still talk to them, and anyway they'll probably upload soon. Not to mention that you've probably got friends in Equestria by now. Are you afraid that after a while you'll succumb to the inevitable ennui of immortality? If it's necessary, 'Tia would be happy to erase some of your memories so you can start fresh . . . with your consent (which you will give willingly if 'Tia sees it's in your interest) of course. Anything reality can do, Equestria can do better.
1684346
The key to everything is the Konami code; you just have to know how to see it.
Great story...
I had alot of fun reading it.
You Mother-Fu...Bucker!