[2604] "That single number 'one' can hold several ideas."

[imaginaryfriend]

A number can be an unbounded amount of things or nothing at all.

[basser]

Now guess what happens when you take the broad concept of a hand, abstract it further into the concept of a thing that exists, assign it an arbitrary symbol, then use a set of basic logic rules explain how the hand relates to other things-that-exist and the ways they're all allowed to change over time.


Spoiler alert: it's math.

[csj]

Mar 30, 2022 7:28:40 GMT basser said:

Now guess what happens when you take the broad concept of a hand, abstract it further into the concept of a thing that exists, assign it an arbitrary symbol, then use a set of basic logic rules explain how the hand relates to other things-that-exist and the ways they're all allowed to change over time.


Spoiler alert: it's math.

τ = ( x - h )^2 + ( y - k )^2

[pyradonis]

Next page he'll be drawing UML diagrams.

[mochakimono]

This is profoundly more uncomfortable now that we know who Jerrek is. Or at least who Jerrek contains.

[saardvark]

Jerrek with the blushes again... pretending to be an NP is "humanizing" Loup in interesting ways. Is part of Coyote's plan to get Loup to care about the silly ants?

[bicarbonat]

"One can be more than one," as we've seen with:

- the Tic-tocs
- Annie's lineage as a fire elemental
- Coyote becoming multiple beings, and also hiding his self in fragments of himself
- the ether encompassing countless lives
- the seed bismuth
- even Kat's first foray into techno-flesh was c/o of a hand(-wing), breaking down City Face's structure and extrapolating out its meaning to mass applications

[aline]

Waiting to see where Tom is going with this. Abstraction is useful concept but also a very generic one and not aprticularly new, so I wonder how this relates more precisely to the Omega device.

Mar 30, 2022 9:26:57 GMT saardvark said:

Is part of Coyote's plan to get Loup to care about the silly ants?

I think part of the plan was always for Loup to care about Annie because Annie is part of Coyote's plan as well. Not sure any thought was given about the rest of the silly ants.

[Dvandaemon]

Can't help but recall Kat being put on trial for inadvertently violating multiple contracts of ownership. The idea of ownership as explained then could be one kind of abstraction, which makes me wonder about the ether or whatever runs those rules.

Mar 30, 2022 7:28:40 GMT basser said:

Now guess what happens when you take the broad concept of a hand, abstract it further into the concept of a thing that exists, assign it an arbitrary symbol, then use a set of basic logic rules explain how the hand relates to other things-that-exist and the ways they're all allowed to change over time.


Spoiler alert: it's math.

Isn't it a thing in math that there are irrational numbers? Numbers that don't make sense in anything except the context of specific equations where they're the key component that makes it work? Sounds a lot like the ether, or rather beings with etheric abilities. Those numbers aren't inherently more important, they're just more relevant in certain contexts.

[aline]

Mar 30, 2022 13:30:27 GMT Dvandaemon said:

Can't help but recall Kat being put on trial for inadvertently violating multiple contracts of ownership. The idea of ownership as explained then could be one kind of abstraction, which makes me wonder about the ether or whatever runs those rules.

Ownesrship, period, is an abstraction, like freedom or equality.
Abstraction is how humans understand and describe the world. basser mentioned Math but the truth is there isn't a single science out there that doesn't rely on abstraction in one way or another, from physics to History. Language itself is an abstraction. I don't think humans are capable of not thinking in terms of abstract concepts, it's just how we process things.

The ether being born of human thought makes it also a form of abstraction. For example Coyote is the idea of a coyote. He's a bunch of properties associated with coyotes by humans, that then took life. A living idea. A living abstraction.

[drmemory]

You know, I was kidding about Loup heading into OOP (Object Oriented Programming). But, here we are.

What do you think? Three base classes? Humans, gods, robots?

[aline]

Mar 30, 2022 13:30:27 GMT Dvandaemon said:

Isn't it a thing in math that there are irrational numbers? Numbers that don't make sense in anything except the context of specific equations where they're the key component that makes it work? Sounds a lot like the ether, or rather beings with etheric abilities. Those numbers aren't inherently more important, they're just more relevant in certain contexts.

You're probably thinking of imaginary numbers. But I think you misunderstand what they are. Most numbers "don't make sense in anything except the context of specific equations". For example take -1. You can't have -1 apple, it's not a thing. But if you're trying to calculate 4 - 3, then you need -1 to describe the result. In school we first teach kids to count in terms of "you have three strawberries, then remove one strawberry". These are easy to grasp. That's how humanity started doing math. But you can't remove 4 strawberries if you only have 3, right? Doesn't make sense. Yet negative numbers are very important to all kind of math calculations that are more elaborate than counting strawberries. If you need to keep track of income and expenses, and know if you're in debt, sudddenly it makes sense.

It's the same with imaginary numbers. They're an abstract concept that's useful, but they're hard to grasp for people who don't do math for a living, because an imaginary number is not an idea you have to manipulate in daily life. But there is nothing special about it beyond that. And I don't see how it can be compared or linked to the ether in any way.

[drmemory]

Mar 30, 2022 11:51:48 GMT aline said:

Waiting to see where Tom is going with this. Abstraction is useful concept but also a very generic one and not aprticularly new, so I wonder how this relates more precisely to the Omega device.

Mar 30, 2022 9:26:57 GMT saardvark said:

Is part of Coyote's plan to get Loup to care about the silly ants?

I think part of the plan was always for Loup to care about Annie because Annie is part of Coyote's plan as well. Not sure any thought was given about the rest of the silly ants.

I took this as Loup's attempt to understand how Omega could track all of the atoms.  Using Coyote's omniscience, he immediately realized it wouldn't be possible to track them all individually, and that abstractions would be necessary.  I swear he's heading right into OOD/OOP here.

That's Object Oriented Design and Programming for the slightly less geeky. 

I'm not sure if he's right but he could be.  If Omega were a really powerful computer, it would still have to use abstractions and data structures and the like if it wanted to model enough of the details of the world to be predictive.  Otherwise, it would itself have to be large enough, in the sense of memory and processing power, to contain a copy, which as Loup has properly identified, is not possible.

Um, I could go on at some length about this, but Tom is a way better writer and more entertaining to read, so I'll wait and see if anyone has questions about WTF I'm talking about.  I bet many of you understand already.  Very, very high-level view - think about how 3D games work, with people and monsters moving around and the environment and maps and weapons etc.  You don't (really, can't) make something like that by tracking and manipulating individual pixels (tiny rocks^H^H^H^H^Hdots), instead you use abstractions so you can treat things as... clumps at various levels.

[drmemory]

Arrrgh ok just a little more. Sorry, compulsive!

So Loup could use abstractions to model, say, a human. The pieces making up each human would have a lot of similarities, like typically two hands, two feet, one head, etc. So abstract base class "human" would let you model that, then you could use composition to include the pieces, each with any necessary customization (member variables and values). So you only have to track the differences between the instance of human and the base class.

Note - this includes behavior, not just data! If you really wanted to predict behavior, you would not only need to track the physical composition of the human but also how the specific mind works.  Sorry, I'm REALLY trying to not turn this into a lecture about OOD!

I feel like Kat saying this, but what I describe is obviously impossible. At least, in our world.

Entities that diverge too far from any available base class would require specific models of their own, which is a lot more work to set up and loses you all the efficiency you gain from abstraction. Totally custom code. I would have to guess that if Omega is trying to model things in such detail as to be able to predict things in detail, and we've seen a fair amount of evidence of that (think "Slug Sex"), then any special entities that require so much special handling and custom code would probably piss him off royally. Or his handlers, if indeed he is not sentient.

I dunno, I'm still kinda expecting to see Omega manifest a giant floating holographic Diego head in the end.

[rabbit]

The blush in the final panel made me think: You're about to get hit by a smooth animal.
(Annie are you OK?)

[rabbit]

Mar 30, 2022 14:25:44 GMT drmemory said:

I dunno, I'm still kinda expecting to see Omega manifest a giant floating holographic Diego head in the end.

I'm hoping for an epic battle between MechaKat and MechaDiego in which most of downtown Tokyo gets destroyed.

Or Toledo.

[aline]

Mar 30, 2022 14:15:48 GMT drmemory said:

I took this as Loup's attempt to understand how Omega could track all of the atoms.  Using Coyote's omniscience, he immediately realized it wouldn't be possible to track them all individually, and that abstractions would be necessary.  I swear he's heading right into OOD/OOP here.

That's Object Oriented Design and Programming for the slightly less geeky. 

I'm not sure if he's right but he could be.  If Omega were a really powerful computer, it would still have to use abstractions and data structures and the like if it wanted to model enough of the details of the world to be predictive.  Otherwise, it would itself have to be large enough, in the sense of memory and processing power, to contain a copy, which as Loup has properly identified, is not possible.

It's not OOP. It'science. Modelling things to predict what they will do is just science. That's how we can predict how much fuel a plane will need and how fast a ball will fall. We know how objects with those properties behave (abstraction) and we make deductions on how they will behave in situations X, Y, Z ("predicting the future", I guess)
Except they want to do it on the scale of the entire universe, forever, apparently.

OOP just mimicks this idea inside computer programs by making objects with a set of properties and behaviors. Except they're objects we make ourselves and we are sure we know everything about them. There are no surprise properties or behaviors in a Java object to discover, unlike with stars and bird wings and human brains.

[basser]

Mar 30, 2022 14:12:37 GMT aline said:

Mar 30, 2022 13:30:27 GMT Dvandaemon said:

Isn't it a thing in math that there are irrational numbers? Numbers that don't make sense in anything except the context of specific equations where they're the key component that makes it work? Sounds a lot like the ether, or rather beings with etheric abilities. Those numbers aren't inherently more important, they're just more relevant in certain contexts.

You're probably thinking of imaginary numbers. But I think you misunderstand what they are. Most numbers "don't make sense in anything except the context of specific equations". For example take -1. You can't have -1 apple, it's not a thing. But if you're trying to calculate 4 - 3, then you need -1 to describe the result. In school we first teach kids to count in terms of "you have three strawberries, then remove one strawberry". These are easy to grasp. That's how humanity started doing math. But you can't remove 4 strawberries if you only have 3, right? Doesn't make sense. Yet negative numbers are very important to all kind of math calculations that are more elaborate than counting strawberries. If you need to keep track of income and expenses, and know if you're in debt, sudddenly it makes sense.

It's the same with imaginary numbers. They're an abstract concept that's useful, but they're hard to grasp for people who don't do math for a living, because an imaginary number is not an idea you have to manipulate in daily life. But there is nothing special about it beyond that. And I don't see how it can be compared or linked to the ether in any way.

Welllll... we do actually need to use complex numbers (imaginary number plus a friend) to describe experimental outcomes in quantum mechanics. I'm not good enough at theory to really explain why (I do experimental physics, so I only really need math up to the point where I can get my machines to spit out the right kind of wiggly lines) but it's mainly to do with Euler's identity and the need to have solutions in the form of eigenvectors to represent quantum states. People have tried to make quantum mechanics work with no imaginary numbers but it's just vastly more streamlined and "nice" with complex exponentials.

If you felt like it you could spin an analogy to the ether, maybe? Because of its fundamental inability to be reliably predicted (because a small set of viable states makes each just as likely as the next, unlike in macro systems where one macrostate usually stands out) you have to use imaginary numbers to describe it, and that's a bummer for everyone.

Definitely a reach, sure, but the thought of the Court getting all salty about having to use complex exponentials to describe magic dogs is highly amusing.

[Dvandaemon]

I was thinking about variables conventionally represented with a single symbol in equations like pi or i

I'm not big on math but I mostly remember specific equations for things taking conventional symbols and factors just for ease of teaching about them.

[aline]

Mar 30, 2022 15:17:11 GMT basser said:

Mar 30, 2022 14:12:37 GMT aline said:

You're probably thinking of imaginary numbers. But I think you misunderstand what they are. Most numbers "don't make sense in anything except the context of specific equations". For example take -1. You can't have -1 apple, it's not a thing. But if you're trying to calculate 4 - 3, then you need -1 to describe the result. In school we first teach kids to count in terms of "you have three strawberries, then remove one strawberry". These are easy to grasp. That's how humanity started doing math. But you can't remove 4 strawberries if you only have 3, right? Doesn't make sense. Yet negative numbers are very important to all kind of math calculations that are more elaborate than counting strawberries. If you need to keep track of income and expenses, and know if you're in debt, sudddenly it makes sense.

It's the same with imaginary numbers. They're an abstract concept that's useful, but they're hard to grasp for people who don't do math for a living, because an imaginary number is not an idea you have to manipulate in daily life. But there is nothing special about it beyond that. And I don't see how it can be compared or linked to the ether in any way.

Welllll... we do actually need to use complex numbers (imaginary number plus a friend) to describe experimental outcomes in quantum mechanics. I'm not good enough at theory to really explain why (I do experimental physics, so I only really need math up to the point where I can get my machines to spit out the right kind of wiggly lines) but it's mainly to do with Euler's identity and the need to have solutions in the form of eigenvectors to represent quantum states. People have tried to make quantum mechanics work with no imaginary numbers but it's just vastly more streamlined and "nice" with complex exponentials.

If you felt like it you could spin an analogy to the ether, maybe? Because of its fundamental inability to be reliably predicted (because a small set of viable states makes each just as likely as the next, unlike in macro systems where one macrostate usually stands out) you have to use imaginary numbers to describe it, and that's a bummer for everyone.

Definitely a reach, sure, but the thought of the Court getting all salty about having to use complex exponentials to describe magic dogs is highly amusing.

Honestly the entire plan of "predicting the future" by getting rid of the pesky ether and accounting for all the atoms makes me think no one in the Court has heard of quantum physics, and they would have an absolute meltdown if they did.
"All we need to do is know where every single particle is at all times" 

[basser]

Mar 30, 2022 15:23:31 GMT aline said:

Honestly the entire plan of "predicting the future" by getting rid of the pesky ether and accounting for all the atoms makes me think no one in the Court has heard of quantum physics, and they would have an absolute meltdown if they did.
"All we need to do is know where every single particle is at all times" 

Right?? Like sure hoss, y'all do that, meanwhile electrons be like "that's cool fam excuse me while I teleport".

[abbomeister]

QUOTE FROM DRMEMORY So Loup could use abstractions to model, say, a human. The pieces making up each human would have a lot of similarities, like typically two hands, two feet, one head, etc. So abstract base class "human" would let you model that, then you could use composition to include the pieces, each with any necessary customization (member variables and values). So you only have to track the differences between the instance of human and the base class ...

Entities that diverge too far from any available base class would require specific models of their own, which is a lot more work to set up and loses you all the efficiency you gain from abstraction. Totally custom code. I would have to guess that if Omega is trying to model things in such detail as to be able to predict things in detail, and we've seen a fair amount of evidence of that (think "Slug Sex"), then any special entities that require so much special handling and custom code would probably piss him off royally. Or his handlers, if indeed he is not sentient.

Y'know, in "She Gave Us An Ocean," Kat's program for the 'bots is set up in a manner similar to this. The 'bots can choose what features they want for their new bodies while staying within certain parameters. Completely predictable, down to the synthetic neurons and behavior patterns left over from their former lives as robots. Easier to keep track of than humans, who have an ingrained connection to the Ether and are occasionally unpredictable.

When will the Court will realize that Kat and friends are capable of doing 'bot-to-synthetic-brain transfers and ask the question "Well, what about brain-to-synthetic-brain transfers?" Essential immortality and more accurate predictive control sure sounds like an 'endeavor to become God' to me!
(gosh I hate bbcode)

[Gemminie]

Annie's asked Jerrek for his perspective on this Omega thing, as a robot. But we all know he's not a robot, so he's rummaging through Coyote's knowledge for something to say that's at least somewhat insightful, so he doesn't blow his cover. And what he says is actually pretty useful. No machine can keep track of all the atoms in the universe, especially considering that it has to be made out of some of those atoms, so perhaps it represents collections of atoms with abstractions.

In the process he gets Annie's permission to call her Annie for short. Is Annie smiling a bit? Is she warming to Jerrek? Jerrek's blushing a bit, as Loup's playing him as a New Person with a bit of a crush on Annie. But this Coyoteish simulacrum is a mystery: can Jerrek have his own feelings independent of Loup? When Loup gives up this form, does a Jerrek cease to exist? Was there ever a Jerrek to cease to exist?

[warrl]

Mar 30, 2022 13:54:16 GMT aline said:

I don't think humans are capable of not thinking in terms of abstract concepts, it's just how we process things.

I don't think that THINKING is possible without abstraction. You can't manipulate an actual object with your mind, only an abstraction of the object. And if you ignore currently-irrelevant attributes of the object - if you pick up an apple and think of how hard it will hit that guy over there in the head when you throw it, and not its taste and juiciness and crunch - then you are abstracting further.

Numbers, of course, are abstractions - either a measurement or a count, ignoring all other attributes of what is being measured or counted. And there are plenty of animal species where we have good reason to believe that they are able to count up to at least three or four.

[rylfrazier]

We know that at some point Coyote and Ysengrin were separate beings, and Loup is a combination of those beings with a personality derived more from Ysengrin but being manipulated by remnants of Coyote.

I also think he feels generally younger and much more dangerous and less controlled than Ysengrin was. That said he is sort of a brand new creature so there's no reason that he would have to stay so chaotic and uncontrolled. It seems reasonable to think that he is currently evolving and discovering how to interact, have a personality, etc., etc. In a way he's kind of like an amnesiac, he seems to lack the understanding of his prior forms so he's learning how to behave and act via context.

Obviously he has done some really dangerous things, nearly killing Shell, maybe killing other people (though we haven't heard about any casualties) in the massive wood wave and just generally behaving like a tyrant in the wood but with unlimited power and no real understanding of others, I think there's still reason to hope he might find a way to become a good being or a being with empathy, understanding and humanity eventually.

[rylfrazier]

With regard to how the conversation regarding "abstraction" refers to The Omega Device, it's really kind of the opposite concept, that is if the Omega Device is predicting the entire future based on knowledge of the exact position of everything in this exact moment, that is literally the least abstract concept there is, it's the most specific concept that there is.

I guess the question is what is the abstracted version of that extremely specific concept? Being able to mostly predict the future through sufficiently accurate abstractions? We all do that every day...maybe The Omega Device is just a much better "future predicting system" than has ever existed before, but not actually a "position of every atom" machine.

[bedinsis]

Mar 30, 2022 9:50:06 GMT bicarbonat said:

"One can be more than one," as we've seen with:

- the Tic-tocs
- Annie's lineage as a fire elemental
- Coyote becoming multiple beings, and also hiding his self in fragments of himself
- the ether encompassing countless lives
- the seed bismuth
- even Kat's first foray into techno-flesh was c/o of a hand(-wing), breaking down City Face's structure and extrapolating out its meaning to mass applications

Don't forget the time where Annie was two different persons, separated by 6 months' experience.

Mar 30, 2022 13:54:16 GMT aline said:

Mar 30, 2022 13:30:27 GMT Dvandaemon said:

Can't help but recall Kat being put on trial for inadvertently violating multiple contracts of ownership. The idea of ownership as explained then could be one kind of abstraction, which makes me wonder about the ether or whatever runs those rules.

Ownesrship, period, is an abstraction, like freedom or equality.
Abstraction is how humans understand and describe the world. basser mentioned Math but the truth is there isn't a single science out there that doesn't rely on abstraction in one way or another, from physics to History. Language itself is an abstraction. I don't think humans are capable of not thinking in terms of abstract concepts, it's just how we process things.

The ether being born of human thought makes it also a form of abstraction. For example Coyote is the idea of a coyote. He's a bunch of properties associated with coyotes by humans, that then took life. A living idea. A living abstraction.

(Emphasis mine) Honestly, as soon as we must process anything by definition some of the thing we experience will be lost in the process, since we do not observe everything. The details we do not know the full of will require some abstraction even if it is as simple as "and the rest of it is irrelevant/as reality usually is".

Regarding language being an abstraction, I am reminded of this page where the limits of human language is brought up.

[Dvandaemon]

Mar 30, 2022 16:10:07 GMT Gemminie said:

Annie's asked Jerrek for his perspective on this Omega thing, as a robot. But we all know he's not a robot, so he's rummaging through Coyote's knowledge for something to say that's at least somewhat insightful, so he doesn't blow his cover. And what he says is actually pretty useful. No machine can keep track of all the atoms in the universe, especially considering that it has to be made out of some of those atoms, so perhaps it represents collections of atoms with abstractions.

This is making me think about how Coyote's omniscience proves Omega is at least possible if not viable to the Court. It would certainly be a godly endeavor to reverse engineer something like that. My first thought when this conversation started was that the Court would somehow exploit what Loup is doing here to finish up Omega, or set up for the protagonists to have some idea how it works.


I just had another thought while making this that what if the bigger-thing-to-model-everything was the future, or at least present>past? The universe is always expanding, what if you could settle for an absolute model of the past instead of predicting the present or future?

[Gemini Jim]

There's a lot going on here, with the quantum mechanics and all, but I have to say I'm amused that Loup has gone from metaphoric atomic navel gazing to literally contemplating his hand.

Speaking of which, I am curious to know if Loup is overshadowing the real Jerrek. Or if there never was a Jerrek to begin with. Because Jerrek's hand has that "former robot" look to it. Nice attention to detail, Loup.




Also, Jerrek, stop looking at Annie like that in the last panel. We have enough ships in this comic already.

[Igniz]

Mar 30, 2022 8:36:44 GMT pyradonis said:

Next page he'll be drawing UML diagrams.