Comic for Monday, April 30th, 2018
Apr30
Ila is still working out some of the finer details when it comes to this whole business of acquiring snacks. All I’ll say is that is one lucky vending machine that someone intervened. I mean, given where she learns things from, I don’t think ‘reading directions’ is something that would ever really occur to Mium, Peter, or Naomi.
I deliberated awhile on if I was going to make brand names for the different vending machine snacks, but decided to go a bit lower effort on that particular aspect. Maybe those just are the brand names, who knows. Plus it, it makes sense that Ila would want something that said Tasty right on it. That is obviously what she would want. 😉
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Ila. Is. The BEST. Fight me.
seconded.
Ila is top five. Naomi is the best though. #fightingtime.
Also congratulations on a spectacular Turing test failure.
Spectacular Turing test failure? I think there is a joke here or something I am too dumb to get.
The classic “Turing test”, from which CAPTCHA takes part of its name, but none of its method, is that you set up an AI such that it can converse with a person, but the person can’t tell whether or not whatever is behind the curtain is human or machine except by its responses. You then have it hold a conversation with a person. If the person can’t distinguish the AI from another person, it passes.
That said, this isn’t a Turing Test failure. Ila comes off as particular, but still within the broad range of human behavior.
I am not even convinced Ila isn’t effectively a human. She is not even trying to pretend to be a human, but still acts like a mostly like a human. This really gets down “what counts as a human?” though. Even if she is artificially constructed (which we are pretty sure she is) her actual mind is implied to be a carbon copy of a human mind with some modifications, as opposed to Mium’s built-from-scratch approach. Naomi seems to think of Mium as a “person” as well, and while I wouldn’t go that far, Ila might really be a “person” even if she is not literally a human. She has an Eidos Key (or so it really seems). Best I can tell that is the best indication of “is a person” we can have in-comic.
For that matter, Mium passes the Turing test 90%+ of the time as no one that talks to him realizes what he is unless they already know or he is not trying to hide it (like with Kally or Arron).
I have limited use of Turing tests. Reverse Turing though? Yes. The number of humans I meet daily, and work with, who fail to convince me that they are not mindless machines reacting to environmental stimuli…. It’s quite disturbing.
Out of curiosity, I’ve done a little reading on neural networks and a fair bit of theorizing how one would build something similar to a human brain out of them. While doing this, I realized that a lot of the ways such a structure would behave and fail at things, matches how humans behave and fail. Specifically: The vast majority of the time, people will simply react to stimuli based on past “training” without thinking about it. I’ve also noticed that human brains appear to prioritize speed (at the cost of making dumb decisions far more often than they would if they spent more time on things).
I would note though: higher order thinking skills are available to humans, and appear to be necessary to disrupting the automatic reaction based behavior patterns most follow. I still have no real idea how to construct that capability with neural nets, even in theory.
One thing I’m really curious about though: How do brains actually correct themselves? The method used by neural networks in software (back propagation) isn’t available to actual brains.
Have you looked into Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART)? That’s one take on how it might work. . . .
I had not heard of that before. After a quick look on wikipedia, it seems like a neat idea for automatically generating categories from data. Thanks for the tip!
Edit: “It has been noted that results of Fuzzy ART and ART 1 depend critically upon the order in which the training data are processed. The effect can be reduced to some extent by using a slower learning rate, but is present regardless of the size of the input data set. Hence Fuzzy ART and ART 1 estimates do not possess the statistical property of consistency.”
I’m petty sure this is true of people too.
I completely agree that Illa is basically human.
And to me, Muim is exactly the sort of thing Turing was thinking of when he proposed the test. A machine that works completely differently than us, but never the less is intelligent enough to understand human concepts, and communicate them at a human’s level.
Also, anyone who hasn’t read Turing’s original paper on the test is missing out. It is a gem.
Coming up against enough evidence that he is convinced of the existence of a teleporter probably required months of frustrated scenarios and guesswork as to what he was missing.
Mindreading should be an easier guess for him, as the augmented insufficient senses thing would seem somewhat analogous to hacking Miko’s implant and the Query module he left with his dad hacked his dad’s implants to catch bullets.
It’s really more of a question of if he (or Mium or Miko) have had sufficient opportunity to observe and figure out that innate ability or not. That or if the school put it in their computers, he’d obviously know then.
We still don’t know exactly how Magnolia’s abilities work. Does she see pictures from other minds (helpful for walking), feel emotions (telempathy), glean intentions….
I tend to take her at her word that she can’t read minds, I’m also putting a lot of weight behind the fact that Maia Ethi (her green hair and eyed friend with the massive twin ponytails) likes and apparently trusts her. However, it’s pretty obvious that she’s got something going there.
She’s one of the (many) lesser characters I’d like to learn a little more about. 🙂
Peter gave each of the students a different false address, to see what info leaked. That is a classic counterintelligence move.
As for how Magnolia showed up at the correct address. She “sees” in a different magical spectrum, usually keeping her eyes closed to reduce distractions. This allows her to act as a sort of polygraph machine with the same type of limitations as a polygraph. Another downside is that with her eyes closed she probably doesn’t read signs, addresses, and other important navigation clues. Thus she sometimes has difficulty getting around unfamiliar places. She showed up at the right place because she was accustomed to going to that hospital and ignored the false address.
I was assuming the thoughts we saw in the hospital room were roughly what Magnolia could perceive.
I also thought I recalled something with other characters or her old cast page entry talking about her ability and mentioning that it’s believed that she has somehow learned to associate eidos data to some degree of thought patterns (though I don’t recall anything specific as to if it was pictures, words, feelings, or what).
I’m unwilling to believe it was simply that she was familiar with that hospital. I might believe that she was familiar with Tyler, and was able to read his location data from Eidos even though he was remote from her.
More likely IMO, she read the Eidos data from Peter, and didn’t notice that it differed from the words he spoke.
I’m curious as to why. These are school kids so that implies that Weber is hospitalized in the same city as students don’t typically take time out off school to visit hospitalized friends in another city. Most cities will only have only 1 or 2 Top Tier trauma centers that would treat wounded mage with magically complicated wounds. Magnolia has been there several times and is on first name basis with the desk clerk despite basically being a foreign born exchange student that implies at least 3 or 4 visits in as many years. I suspect that she goes their to consult with a magical disorder specialist about excessive magical sensitiveness. She might not even know the name of the medical center, and instead thinks of it as 5 transit stops east, 2 blocks south, and the hospital building on the right. Of course that would only get her to the building to find the room, she might have had to chat up the desk clerk or simply recognized the big balls of manna and data on the west side of the 5th floor had to be very powerful mages. Then walked by hospital security on the basis of being an returning patient.
Considering that the conflict was taking place through the whole country, there might’ve been other sufficiently good hospitals closer to where Tyler was injured, so the field of hospitals to eliminate from might not have been as small as what’s near the school. If it were than Magnolia likely wouldn’t have been the only one to find him.
She didn’t just find the hospital, she found Tyler. This was a significant enough feat that Mium/Peter considered it statistically unlikely.
That would mean that either the area to be covered was large, the hospitals were many or that the hospital was very large.
Beyond that, there is the question of whether it is even a public hospital. It seems likely to me that this would be a private or military hospital.
-G-
Peter’s the type to “find ways around” doing paperwork for a house. We’ll be lucky if he bothers using instruction booklets as coasters. (Probably lucky if anything he gets comes with instructions….)
Guessing it’s Consul’s guard meets Peter’s guard? (Ila looks way different here. Especially that last panel. Guessing just art shift, but throwing me off…) Unless Amy’s supposed to count as the “guard”…? (Eh. Whatever. Still, considering the last time something according to Peter was “odd”, Weber ended up in that condition, doesn’t seem a good sign that there’s already something else getting that description….)
Still, her sense of economics is hilarious. Probably just paid, like, 50 times what that actually costs.
(Check it! First again! Only this time I actually was looking if there was a comic….still surprised to see myself as first again. Hour and a half ago! (With post timestamp and my computer having a difference of four hours, heh….)
I can assure you that instruction books aren’t for placing sweating beverages on.
They’re for stabilizing wobbly furniture.
Instructions?
I’d like to see someone stabilize a piece of furniture with the manual that came with my Sizzlesaurus Saute Pan.
I’m not joking about the manual, which is kind of sad, because everything about the manual is hilarious. Or maybe it’s just that the mere existence of a manual for a pan is so hilarious it makes everything about it seem hilarious. Or maybe I just don’t know what “everything” means.
Or maybe stuff *should* come with manuals?
“When pan is in use, it may be hot. Do not burn yourself on it. Keep out of reach of children. Wash after use.”
Common sense should not need a manual! (But it does which just makes me sad…)
You think that’s funny the manual for some Chinese hand exercise balls that I picked up is even better.
There is also a famous instruction sheet that went with a knife set — “Keep out of children.”
In the American lawsuit leary corporate responce has taken to so many lows…pop bottles warn to point away from face when opening.
Other countries don’t have that problem because somebody would not admit to something stupid, where as in this country people try to sue people when they do something stupid
I like the casual nods without printing a manual. I don’t know if they’re still there, but I seem to remember a lot of the bags on Dell computer components (I definitely remember a keyboard, and I think an LCD monitor too) had a picture of a block-ish baby crawling inside a bag with a big circle with a strike through on it.
I also like that going to the grocery to buy a bag of baby carrots, the bag helpfully lists on the back “Ingredients: Carrots” or the allergy info telling me that peanuts might just contain peanuts.
The carrots bag might be listing just the one ingredient of just carrots to indicate that there are no other ingredients (preservatives, etc).
But “these nuts contain an allergen: nuts”…your own dumb fault for that one, and you deserve it.