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Post by hal9000 on May 30, 2011 12:36:20 GMT
Maybe it's some system more powerful than a non-deterministic turing machine.
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Post by zylonbane on May 30, 2011 13:19:56 GMT
Any Turing machine is by definition deterministic.
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Post by hal9000 on May 30, 2011 13:45:14 GMT
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Post by Xan on May 30, 2011 15:19:40 GMT
Depending on your definition of "power", that's blasphemy. P=NP now? [/offtopic]
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percival
Full Member
there's a storm a-brewin'
Posts: 119
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Post by percival on May 30, 2011 15:35:10 GMT
Dude that quote was apropos like one whole thread ago! So Kat can read the robots' source code. You can see their astonishment rippling outward. In short time every 'bot in the Court is going to know. Will they elevate her from angel status to something even more lofty?
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mechagai
New Member
Don't worry. I got this!
Posts: 45
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Post by mechagai on May 30, 2011 15:36:46 GMT
If there is an etheric component to all of these Diego-level robots, then technically speaking, if Annie just let her mind wander through the components, I think she should be able to assemble them just like she did for Robot. I'm pretty sure "left arm goes in left shoulder socket" is pretty straight forward and many kids at that age should be able to do that.
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Post by Max on May 30, 2011 16:10:17 GMT
I swear to God I didn't see your comment before I came up with this thread. As an actual computer programmer, I'm just going to have to grit my teeth and go with the flow on this one. esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Befunge
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Post by hal9000 on May 30, 2011 18:54:01 GMT
Depending on your definition of "power", that's blasphemy. P=NP now? [/offtopic] Well, by 'power', I mean in the sense of being able to compute the same things, though not necessarily in the same number of steps / as efficiently. And since you can encode a NDTM as a DTM, they are equivalent in power, by that definition. I've always liked this xkcd strip, which I think explains the idea rather well, albiet with some questionable assumptions (like that the universe can be perfectly simulated on a turing machine at all).
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vebyast
New Member
Usually I'm the Blue Marble, but this seems more appropriate
Posts: 45
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Post by vebyast on May 30, 2011 19:33:48 GMT
<delurk> Greetings! Finally found a reason to sign up. Also check out Funge-98, which defines Unefunge and Trefunge (as well updating Befunge) and provides guides for creating funges with arbitrary dimensionality and topology. Maybe it's some system more powerful than a non-deterministic turing machine. There is an entire hierarchy of systems that can decide or recognize languages which are not turing-decidable or recognizable. For example, take a normal deterministic turing machine and give it a halting oracle. You'll suddenly be able to solve an entire class of problems that you wouldn't be able to. However, you'll still have a super-halting-problem that you can't solve, which you can give yourself an oracle for, but you'll still have a super-super-halting problem, and so on. This leads me to my personal wild speculation: Kat's family all have etheric oracle machines stuck inside their brains. Maybe some etheric being has taken up residence in Kat's family and provides them with extra "processing power", so to speak. For example, it helped Anja set up her and Donald's spell macros, and now Kat's using it to instantly understand and use that source code.
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Post by Amethyst on May 30, 2011 19:58:08 GMT
Am I the only person who thought of this when looking at panel 5?
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Post by Refugee on May 30, 2011 21:10:15 GMT
Call me petty, but I love Kat's thrown together micromanipulator with the four tiny led lights. Doesn't just chuck the thing on a microscope stage, oh no, actually builds a precision instrument out of scrap parts.
She is a spark, an angel, possibly a goddess.
And she's showing Annie that Annie's not the only one of them with eldritch powers. (Although this probably not one of her conscious goals.)
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Post by smjjames on May 30, 2011 21:30:08 GMT
Call me petty, but I love Kat's thrown together micromanipulator with the four tiny led lights. Doesn't just chuck the thing on a microscope stage, oh no, actually builds a precision instrument out of scrap parts. She is a spark, an angel, possibly a goddess. And she's showing Annie that Annie's not the only one of them with eldritch powers. (Although this probably not one of her conscious goals.) I did say about her being a spark earlier, although she lacks the mad scientist behavior. Still, thats the GirlGenius universe, Kat could very well be GCs version of a spark, what with the antigrav device (and later, a hovercraft), so she certainly is up on their level. Edit: Heck, theres several people on the page comments that mention sparks and Girl Genius. I wonder if Tom reads that comic as Kat is definetly going the Sparky route, minus the mad scientist mania.
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wlerin
Junior Member
Posts: 62
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Post by wlerin on May 30, 2011 21:33:30 GMT
If there is an etheric component to all of these Diego-level robots, then technically speaking, if Annie just let her mind wander through the components, I think she should be able to assemble them just like she did for Robot. No, intuitive comprehension of machines (and bird bones...) seems to be Kat's (possibly etheric?) forte. Yes, Kat has a power.
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Post by TBeholder on May 31, 2011 0:11:43 GMT
Given that Kat can read it, and it wasn't meant to be readable by humans Neither are punchcards... Eh, there's also Jones. And given what we know about her body density now, the conclusion is foregone. Now it's only a matter of time before the government takes her aside and turns her into a super weapon. Oh, come on. We all know that's how the final arc will end. Oh, come on. That's never the final part, don't you know? As an actual computer programmer, I'm just going to have to grit my teeth and go with the flow on this one. Why gritting teeth? Aren't you happy you usually don't have to deal with things like state-space, neural nets and quasiholographic functions? Kat is the descendent of a human and a machine code interpreter! What an interesting first union it must have been! I just spilled a can of perfectly good brain bleach. And blame you for this. And here we were talking about Z86 instruction set invoking strange thoughts... Vector IP? Good, good. I shudder from thinking what's going to happen when Funge eventually will be combined with this, however. ;D
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Post by smjjames on May 31, 2011 0:31:50 GMT
Given that Kat can read it, and it wasn't meant to be readable by humans Neither are punchcards... Same for DNA, at least not in the normal, physical sense of reading. I propose that the code is like DNA in the sense that they are using set units and symbols, but the complexity is far higher.
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Post by blulink on May 31, 2011 6:13:10 GMT
My quick two cents... Her mother's eyes are either not shown or in black, so Kat might not be entirely human.
Both of her parents have an unusual affinity for Ethertech (both parents use it easily and without fear, in the past and present.) Not to say Kat's mother is unselfconscious about her affinity.
This to me means that, her understanding of the cube is a natural offshoot of her lineage.
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Post by Stately Buff-Cookie on May 31, 2011 8:42:31 GMT
As pointed out, there are things not designed to be read by people that people can learn to read fine. The robots would still have every right to be impressed. I'm sure any code that is written for bots of their sophistication has to be very complex indeed. Not to mention Kat starts to put something together IMMEDIATELY. You'd expect she'd have to at least think over it all first.
Of course, the biggest puzzle piece is something we just don't know yet. How much of Diego's work is etheric in nature? That's never been answered. We never really found out quite what the heart is. They haven't shown it to anyone with more etheric experience(like kat's mother). Until we know that, we can't determine if Kat's ability has some etheric connection. I guess someone could pop out in comic and helpfully point out if Kat has etheric ability.. but what is the fun in that? We need at least three more months of speculation. Then four months of bloodthirsty horrific battles over the subject.
Only slightly related: I wonder what the bots would have thought of early comic Kat? They weren't really around to witness her wizardry with antigravity proteins or building her own craft from nothing. Annie is probably used to this kind of thing by now, but this is the first time the robots get to see Kat strut her stuff in full.
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Post by Eversist on May 31, 2011 9:35:43 GMT
As an actual computer programmer, I'm just going to have to grit my teeth and go with the flow on this one. Hey man join the club. I'm a biology major working in a metals lab, basically everything in this comic makes me go "wait, what?" but I roll along regardless. Do the words "magic" and "fictional" mean anything to you guys?
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Post by goldenknots on May 31, 2011 11:48:56 GMT
... Not to mention Kat starts to put something together IMMEDIATELY. You'd expect she'd have to at least think over it all first. Well, what she put together was just a motorized mount to allow her to reposition the cube with greater precision while she read it. It was done with great flair, of course. :)
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Post by ethanblack on May 31, 2011 11:49:49 GMT
Etheric science!
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Post by smjjames on May 31, 2011 14:04:29 GMT
My quick two cents... Her mother's eyes are either not shown or in black, so Kat might not be entirely human. Both of her parents have an unusual affinity for Ethertech (both parents use it easily and without fear, in the past and present.) Not to say Kat's mother is unselfconscious about her affinity. This to me means that, her understanding of the cube is a natural offshoot of her lineage. I thought her eyes look like that because they are an almond shape and its pretty common for people to draw that (although its sort of stereotypical).
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myzelf
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by myzelf on May 31, 2011 17:19:56 GMT
Since Diego presumably designed the code in the first place, it's not inconceivable that Kat could read it. Though one would expect her to need a primer for the codons first.
What I don't get is how you can get a hologram out of an apparently opaque cube by putting it under a microscope.
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Post by legion on May 31, 2011 17:48:13 GMT
What I don't get is how you can get a hologram out of an apparently opaque cube by putting it under a microscope. Some manner of optical fiber, maybe?
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Post by King Mir on May 31, 2011 19:08:38 GMT
It is possible for a language to be in 3D, but that's not the only issue. How can Kat know a language she hasn't encountered before? is it similar to other languages?
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Post by smjjames on May 31, 2011 19:40:13 GMT
It is possible for a language to be in 3D, but that's not the only issue. How can Kat know a language she hasn't encountered before? is it similar to other languages? I'm pretty sure she has been exposed to programming code. You could call DNA a 'language' in the sense that its a code. The way the symbols look is similar to hebrew script, but one could say the same thing for Roman script and Cyrillic.
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Post by King Mir on May 31, 2011 19:48:02 GMT
It doesn't look anything like cyrillic.
Being exposed to programming code won't make her instantly pick up an unknown language.
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Post by smjjames on May 31, 2011 19:56:38 GMT
It doesn't look anything like cyrillic. I said the shapes used resemble hebrew script. The cyrillic bit was just me saying that the Roman script (Roman alphabet actually) looks similar to cyrillic and knowing one script doesn't make you a reader of the other. Being exposed to programming code won't make her instantly pick up an unknown language. I never said that, and I was just sort of musing.
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Post by goldenknots on May 31, 2011 20:52:19 GMT
What I don't get is how you can get a hologram out of an apparently opaque cube by putting it under a microscope. Well, she's got several LEDs positioned around it, perhaps they are angled in a way that expresses the pattern properly, or at least intelligibly for Kat.
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Post by paxjax123 on May 31, 2011 21:12:13 GMT
Being exposed to programming code won't make her instantly pick up an unknown language. Perhaps this is Kat's gift? She knows EVERY programming language. And every language associated with such :I
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Sadie
Full Member
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Posts: 146
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Post by Sadie on May 31, 2011 21:50:34 GMT
It is possible for a language to be in 3D, but that's not the only issue. How can Kat know a language she hasn't encountered before? is it similar to other languages? To hazard a guess; the same way Annie can set things on fire with her mind. Okay, if I'm not being trite, I wanna say that there are different qualifications of "reading". Her dialog in the comic sounds like she's seeing the programing pattern more than understanding what it's saying -- the syntax may be similar enough to other programing languages she's familiar with for her to at least parse how it functions, if not what it's supposed to do. ...but no, really, I'm just going to go with the "setting things on fire with your mind" explanation.
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