Comic for Monday, September 24, 2018
Pages like this are why we can’t have nice things like buffers. I just lacked the heart to split it into two pages as it would mess with my (dubious) sense of aesthetic in having the transition panel. And we have to have somewhere to put all dubiously legible spoilers.
The next page is half a page, but it has 13 panels, so that isn’t helping too much.
I did play around a bit with how F-10 looks in the last panel, as its something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, exactly how it would look, in the end, the changes are pretty minor, but it is probably enough. I’m not that tied to the exact details of appearance vs artistic license (as evidence by hair and scarf length everywhere) but also wanted to do as much as I could with just with style and expression.
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My question is: when he said he didn’t have the resources, was that a statement that was only true when he said it?
By which I mean, he said he could not do what ILA asked without shutting down autonomous distributed processes. But he also didn’t have the “friends-and-family override” triggered by a personal request from his sister at that point.
Has that override been well and truly triggered sufficiently that he can decide to ignore certain restrictions that would have prevented him from…commandeering…resources he normally is forbidden?
Alternatively, if he wasn’t stating technically-true-at-the-moment limitations that are lifted by her request, I wonder how badly inconvenienced the others in Peter’s circle will be by MYM’s temporary inactivity at their locations. I mean, it won’t last more than a couple of minutes, but…
I was impressed by the cold eyes so clearly matching to Mium’s expressions while the final panel otherwise is so clearly Ila.
> as its something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, exactly how it would look, in the end, the changes are pretty minor, but it is probably enough.
I’d say you nailed it. Well done.
i hope Kardus understands exactly what he is going up against. Because I want him to understand how SCREWED he is before this is over.
My first thought was – you just pressed the “magic win the battle” button and things obviously got exponentially worse for you. Do you press it again, or not? 🙂
I’m not certain things have obviously gotten exponentially worse for him.
If Rovak gave him much more than a physical description and a magic button, then he understands he went from “Have no chance to survive” to “Have no chance to survive.”
I mean, technically, I think the button took him from a 0% survival chance to an “it depends on himself” chance, because I think Mium would let him run away, but Ila would not have, once she learned he was the one about to kill Arkady. If, on the other hand, Kardus’ next action is lightning to the face, PastUtopia’s kill score goes up from something like 1/50 to 2/50 (I mean, I understand that Atter killed *several* people, but only one of them was a named.)
“V.Y.M.A”? Hard to see if there’s other stuff there that I don’t immediately recognize, but that’s one. (Ah, but I do see the A.A. system’s running again.)
Curious to what all is getting paused for this, and what longer repercussions happen from this. (Like, Mium can presumably get back into his cloud-distributed state afterwards, but…also, will the F-10 be in proper condition still after running Mium on it? Will Mium still act the same, or will the bizarre processing architecture affect his way of thinking? If so, is it just while he’s on F-10, or will it carry back when he’s off of it?)
VYMA? AA System? Hmm. Probably mean nothing. I wouldn’t worry about them.
Not sure if Sarcasm Mode, or just Blatant Lies…. ;P
Since nobody is mentioned it as of yet, love the coat tails blowing in the not-wind after the character power-up/reboot.
Also I 100% agree with Glider’s comment above splitting this page would have caused no complaint from most, if not all of the community.
The buffer is of high preference for all of the readers I think. It means regular continuity which goes a long way to addressing any concerns and it makes you happier and that makes us happier. For me anyways, a regular update outweighs a massive update on a completely irregular schedule. I read comics in the second category but I find it much harder to stay in the story. It generally only starts happening for Comics that are barely making it. The content is high quality but you always wonder if this update is going to be the last and if the Story will be cut off in the middle.
I acknowledge I should have prioritized buffer especially as it’s pretty low, but as noted, poor restraint – I dunno, I decided I wanted to do the transition panel, and it only really works vertically.
I at least appreciate how awesome this page looks, and like the transition panel. If I were to break it up into smaller pieces, I might actually break it up into three pieces, not two, so the transition can get a full page itself.
While I anticipated the outcome, I did not anticipate the reasoning. The reasoning makes this potentially a much bigger event than I had expected.
A) This is probably the first time Ila has expressed a proper desire for something other than tasty food.
B) Ila’s request was sufficient to tilt the balance of Mium’s priorities.
C) Mium is investing a significant amount of resources into this task. (shutting down most of his distributed processes to do it)
D) According to Rovak, Ila is an artificial human. For Mium to be capable of running on Ila’s F10 body, implies that it may be possible for Mium to run on a properly modified human body.
Edit: Rovak’s conclusion here:
http://pastutopia.com/?comic=comic-for-friday-august-14th
B) She is his “sister” and made a direct request. That seems to have a fairly high priority to Mium. Note he went out of his way to protect Arkady even though Naomi did not ask him to just because of the implication. By being directly asked to by Ila the priority skyrockets.
C) is tied to B. Similarly to how Mium will shut down everything to protect Miko, when given a high-priority order to save someone he will do so at the expense of his other operations.
D) Indeed. And notice he put the AA system in human simulation mode when he did so. I suspect he’s treating Ila’s body the same as he treated Miko, during the assassination attempt.
I like how Mym always nails the ghost-in-the-machine look. First the pale hoded avatar then the wary seasoned warrior look in that last panel.
Mium probably spends whole milliseconds working nailing his aesthetic for each appearance… 😉
In all seriousness, I am glad that it works out; MYM is one of the harder people to decide how to draw.
Wow. Awesome.
Thank you.
I’ll tell you this though. If you’d made us wait until Thursday to see those last 9 panels, I’m pretty sure the forgiveness rate would be 100%.
Heck, story-rhythm wise, I’d have been happy with Thursday being those middle three-ish “as you wish” panels and _Monday_ being the third group. a bit bare exposition-wise, maybe, but really solid buildup is good for a webcomic sometimes.
Run.
It won’t save you, but run.
I doubt this was Mium’s favorite plan, but it is likely within the range of plans he originally formulated.
I wonder if Mium admits to have favorite plans. I guess he admits to favorite ways of shooting things, so probably.
Has preferred strategies too – such as shooting things, and in particular, shooting them in the back. By extension then, plans that involve shooting things, particularly in the back, and particularly with things that aren’t /technically/ military hardware…. 🙂
I am just a simple reader. I see that last panel, I get hyped. Seriously, I almost WOL’d at that last panel (whooped out loud).
I will leave the clue finding and the theory crafting to the specialists, but why do I get the feeling this might ALL still be going according Mium’s plan? He put someone whose request he couldn’t refuse in the position of making a request he couldn’t refuse to bypass who knows how many of his restrictions??
Definitely not going to sell Kardus life insurance here. Can I short sell Kardus Lifespan? Any takers?
And your avatar is so appropriate for this comment
Well yes, Mium does like to plan ahead… but of course one of the confounding things is free will… which I think we see Ila displaying an incredible amount here! Ironically it probably falls within the high-probability outcomes… however a prediction is exactly that: it still might not occur.
I would think the BIG tell here is “Launch new prototype driver process”. Yes Mium did expect this outcome, and has a driver process at the ready to try! For me, the bigger question is did Mium engineer this entire situation so he could have a go at running on the F10?????
Yeah that whole last third (after the transfer) looks like this is gonna be good. Wind of Badass for the cloak, sparks around the eyes, the guy who just knocked Ila out without a second thought even gets an “Oh crap!” in.
Even if the whole plan fails horribly on the very next panel, it will have looked super awesome.
You are missing the details that matter. Lots of charters in this comic have billowy cloaks and i’m sure the sparks around the eyes are an artifact of the excess pisions being generated, that is only mildly concerning to Kardus. Illia has a voluble naive personality her eyes and head shift around constantly. She also has flashy magical attacks.
Kardus has been talking to Rovak and has compared notes. He has also heard about Miko being shot at without effect. When F10 raises its arm before looking up. Bullets disintegrate before striking their target. And F10 looks strait up at him eye to eye with a minimal calculating expression. Kardus has to know something has gone off the rails and that he might soon be fighting the one entity that has nearly perma killed Rovak in one on one combat.
You know, fireworks don’t really matter. They’re mostly just small colored bursts of explosions with silly packaging. There’s no intelligence inside that, there’s no intelligence needed to watch them, they don’t always work, and they’re a puff of smoke in seconds.
But they’re fun to watch.
Why are you trying to ruin the fireworks show 🙁
Odd. Realized I forgot to say something else, but it was a minute before the comment even showed up…and there was no edit button. (o_O)
Anyway, forgot to mention that I’m not saying those details are unimportant.
I just didn’t realize them, and was giddy enough about it just looking cool. And you just want to bring a bucket of ice water. >.>
In general, I don’t think people sell warmages busy meddling with wars life insurance plans. Or at least it’d have to be subsidized by his employer.
I think some would sell Rovak life insurance. Then again that seems more like a scam than anything else until recently because of the whole not dying properly thing.
It’s brilliant!
DITTO!
I never know how to reply to comments like this, but I feel I should reply in the sense that “I’ve seen you comment an I appreciate it’s sentiment” but that seems like the sort of reply that fails the turing test…
So… thanks? 😉
LOL. Well at the severe risk of releasing a can-o-worms (I’m going to blame you for bringing it up)… the Turing test cannot apply to single (or even multiple) responses… it applys (in it’s purest form) to a conversation of indeterminate length with each subject: basically until the interrogator is satisfied they have identified a machine or cannot.
From a scientific standpoint it is a pretty bad test at determining if a machine can exhibit intelligent behaviour like a human (the supposed goal of the test) because of the way the experiment is framed: really what you’re testing for is if a machine can MIMIC a human’s ability to have natural language conversations. The biggest problem with this experiment is providing a control… you would need to do the test with two machines & two humans as well… which then raises the ugly question of reproducibility.
From a philosophical standpoint, its a can-o-worms. Mostly, I believe, because humans have a huge variation in everything to do with “intelligent behaviour”. Don’t forget there at least two humans in the test: the human, and the interrogator! The interrogator is going to have preconceived ideas on what constitutes “human” and “machine”… and (as a human) is prone to jumping to conclusions.
The whole philosophy behind this (i.e. “can machines think”) is really interesting… but mostly a distraction until we actually pin down exactly what we mean when we say “think”: thus the need to compare things to humans… because we like to think that we can think!
I must note that it always strikes me as odd to try to compare “machine intelligence” to “human intelligence”. The two are MOST CERTAINLY NOT the same. A good analogy for this is how to solve sudoku puzzles using a computer: the most common way is to write a program to do it by brute force (the “dumb machine”), but you can write a program it to solve it using math (the “intelligent machine”) (probably requires an “intelligent human” to write the program: the math for it was definitely not covered in standard University math). The fun one is to write a program to solve it using HUMAN strategies (the “inefficient machine”?). All 3 “machines” can solve sudoku puzzles… but only one provides any insight to a human on how they should be solving it: and this is only because the machine was intentionally designed to mimic a human’s intelligence (rather than utilising the machine’s “intelligence” (i.e. brute force or pure math)).
There was a funny article about a “Minimal Turing Test” by MIT (I think, just saw it around the internet tech news sites); basically they tried to determine what word – with a single word – would convince people the someone was a human and not a robot. Obviously the premise is silly, but not quite as silly as the result, which was, of course, “poop”. Humans…
It wasn’t a particularly good test for a lot of reasons, just mentioning it because it was silly.
On the broader subject, it has sort of become a running joke for me in moderation called “The Spam Turing Test” where I make an internal assessment if a piece spam is done by bots or human-bots; this can be a lot harder to tell than you might think, as the humans are basically imitating bots. You can also play this game with some of the more advanced Help line chat bots – not because the bot helper is particularly human (though they are closer) but because the human is a lot more bot like, since they try to follow a script no matter what.
As you note the, the Turing test quickly becomes meaningless when an AI has enough data to mimic a human.
I think the AI in the comic are partially a response to the in comic lack of an answer to epistemology (though fictionalized via the connection to Eidos); the researchers in the comic don’t know how humans associate to Eidos, so when trying to make an AI that can, they make an AI that operates as close to human as they can in various ways, despite that not being an efficient way for AI to operate. Obviously this is sort of an abstraction, as digressing on “what is thinking” or even “what is consciousness” is less interesting than being able to shoot lasers and flip cars with your mind (though mileage may vary on this).
I don’t think the Turing test was meant to be a scientific test. Rather, it’s an attempt to tell a scientific bunch of people, “Let’s be practical here: we’re trying to accomplish something that we all agree we don’t even know what it means, and to the extent that we do individually know, we can’t all agree. How much can we agree on? Let’s test that bit.”