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Oblivion4568238 posted:The alternative use key was mentioned earlier in the thread. Also, the playing Matt is using a controller, and I don't know what all would have to be overwritten to get those buttons mapped and comfortable to use. That works out quite fine, if you use the L3 and R3 buttons. Also I'm pretty sure the standard layout uses two different buttons to do the same thing. An Xbox 360 controler has 11 mapable buttons. And maybe you could also use the dpad. By the way, what does secondary fire do? I can't remember ever using that one.
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Aug 5, 2015 20:30
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Air is lava! posted:By the way, what does secondary fire do? I can't remember ever using that one. It's identical to "use".
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Aug 7, 2015 15:12
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Couple of things: I will be out of the country with only periodic Internet access for the next 10 days. However, Matt will continue to post updates during that time, which should mean that by the time I get back we'll be caught up with our backlog. This will mean longer times between new videos past that point, but we'll also be able to respond faster to advice and discussion in the thread. Speaking of advice from the thread, the assigning of buttons to functions like Alternate Use will finally be implemented... in video 9. I apologize for the delay, but I don't think it would have saved more than a few seconds here and there prior to that point. Thanks as always for watching the LP, and I hope you enjoy the next few episodes! Btw I am pretty sure I mangle Egyptian mythology pretty badly, so go ahead and correct whatever I get wrong; if we don't have literature from an ancient culture, I'm way less familiar with it.
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Aug 7, 2015 15:23
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Just caught up with the LP, fun times. I watched most of the CannibalK9 LP too, but your dynamic from your previous LPs has always been fun. IIRC the "hardest" possible (and original? Not entirely sure) way of stating the Turing Test is to have not two but three participants: a judge (A) and two candidates, one human (B), the other an AI (C). Both B and C are trying to convince A that they're the human and the other is the AI. Which perhaps stacks the odds unfairly high against the poor AI. quote:Btw I am pretty sure I mangle Egyptian mythology pretty badly, so go ahead and correct whatever I get wrong; if we don't have literature from an ancient culture, I'm way less familiar with it. 1. Ancient Egypt lasted a really long time, over 3000 years, perhaps nearer to 4000, and unsurprisingly their beliefs and customs changed a fair bit over that time: perhaps not as much as they might between 3000 years ago and today, or between today and 3000 years in the future, but still a notable amount. Probably the largest scale example would be how the Old Kingdom Egyptians who built the Pyramids were different from the New Kingdom and later Egyptians with their really complex mummification rituals and coffin designs. You even, amusingly, get retro periods as later Ancient Egyptians are inspired by ideas from their own already ancient history. This also applies to their gods and mythology - different cities had their own patron deities, and if a particular city became important (because, say, the current dynasty of Pharaohs was from there) then hey, myths and legends get slowly evolved and distorted so that God X is the hero, Goddess Y is his wife/mother/both??, God Z is the creator who set the whole business rolling. Or heck, sometimes they'd even combine deities and end up with things like Amun-Re or Ptah-Sokar-Osiris because they wanted something that combined elements of all those things. Which leads on to: 2. The Ancient Egyptians were, ultimately, very practical people. It sounds weird in hindsight, because you look at all the artwork and the ridiculous overflowing pantheon and the crazy rituals, but pretty much everything they did they did with a purpose. If you believe that words have power and that what's written or drawn about you in the afterlife is what will actually happen, then you go to great lengths to pay scribes and artisans to do a good job of it, even if you're not expecting anyone to ever see all of this stuff - having it written down in the first place is enough. None of their art was art for art's sake, and there's even an argument that it isn't art at all because of this. From the Ancient Egyptian point of view, those highly ornate coffins and so on were machines, doing something useful. Similar logic goes for mummification - if you believe you need your body intact for the various parts of your soul in the afterlife to function correctly, then you're going to invest as much as you can into preserving it. You can argue that their conclusions were based on faulty beliefs, but from those beliefs they were as practical and logical as they could be. Which again leads on to: 3. The Ancient Egyptians were intelligent. I mean, it makes sense, they still had the same three-pound pile of dreams in their heads that we do, 6000 years is nowhere near enough to make a big difference in evolutionary terms. Of course, we have a much higher baseline of accumulated knowledge and critical thinking than they did, but they were still humans doing what humans do: solving problems with the tools they have available, and where possible using those tools to make better tools to solve more and bigger problems. This is what really gets me about "aliens built the Pyramids/Stonehenge/etc. because how could ancient people have done it?" It's doing humanity down! Granted, plenty of this can then be fed back into the "what is intelligence/what is a person" themes of this game, but hey, consider that a bonus. Sorry to go on about something the LP hasn't properly encountered yet, but hopefully it's general enough to not get in the way of anything - it's mostly about ways of thinking about Ancient Egypt. Paul.Power fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 22:13
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Paul.Power posted:IIRC the "hardest" possible (and original? Not entirely sure) way of stating the Turing Test is to have not two but three participants: a judge (A) and two candidates, one human (B), the other an AI (C). Both B and C are trying to convince A that they're the human and the other is the AI. Which perhaps stacks the odds unfairly high against the poor AI. Now that's just plain unfair. Even if your "AI" is a human there would be a 50% chance to fail anyway. By that logic, you could match up two people against each other and only one of them is actually a person.
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Aug 8, 2015 17:26
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Air is lava! posted:Now that's just plain unfair. Even if your "AI" is a human there would be a 50% chance to fail anyway. By that logic, you could match up two people against each other and only one of them is actually a person. Isn't that issue fixed by simply letting the judge know that both of the participants can potentially be human or AI? Like make the participants try to reveal each other to not be human, but it's possible that they're both human, or that neither of them are.
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Aug 8, 2015 18:26
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But that would mean that there is no reason to claim that the other one is a bot. Since that wouldn't strenghten your point. That test is pretty much equivalent to running the standard test twice.
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Aug 8, 2015 18:53
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I'd never heard of this game, but I'm intrigued enough to buy it based on watching the first few videos. (I've enjoyed your previous LPs quite a bit!) A slight correction on the definition of Peripatetic philosophy, though - the Peripatetic school were specifically the followers of Plato's student Aristotle, who rejected many of his teacher's more metaphysical doctrines in favor of something more like a scientific approach to the world. You're right about the general principles; the word comes from the ancient Greek for walking, and Aristotle was known for walking around as he taught his students. Aristotle was from Stegeira, the same city as the philosopher described in the terminal. It's also possible that "peripatetic" was also a knock against Aristotle, as he was known for leaving his home city and going to Athens (as many did, because Athens was the place to be in the Greece of his lifetime), but also prudently getting out of Athens when the mood happened to turn against foreigners or philosophers. So the "walking around" thing could refer to both the "walking around" lecture style and the "walking around" of skipping town when expedient. (A significant part of medieval Catholic and Jewish philosophy, as reflected in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas for the Catholics and Maimonides for the Jews, involved trying to integrate Aristotle's physics and metaphysics with revealed religion. I don't know if that's particularly relevant to the themes of the game, since I haven't played it, but it seems possible!) e: also, the "values" questions you pointed out during the quiz are, I think, possible references to the ideas of Aristotle on the one hand ("virtues" exist external to human opinion and the challenge of ethics is to live in proper relationships with them) and Nietzsche (individuals create their own "values" and the challenge of ethics is to devise ways to order or rank these values in a way which is most beneficial to human life). This quiz is, at the very least, definitely trying to feel you out on some of the big questions that philosophers have dealt with. e2: also also, Aristophanes' play about Socrates (The Clouds) accuses him of something more sinister than just being a buffoon - he's portrayed as a con artist who speaks in platitudes about these very abstract things like the life of the mind, the nobility of learning, etc; but in reality is just extracting money from stupid but impressionable rich kids and then either teaching them trivial nonsense (like how to measure how far a flea can jump) or immoral sophistry (like how to convince people that it's morally right for children to abuse their parents). According to Plato, this play was such a successful smear that it was cited years later at Socrates' trial in support of the charges against him. (I spent a long time as a prisoner of a classical education, so I can't help myself.) fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Aug 9, 2015 |
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Aug 9, 2015 02:57
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Tao Jones posted:(I spent a long time as a prisoner of a classical education, so I can't help myself.) That must be like being a prisoner in a cave and only seeing shadows. What did it feel like when you finally got out and saw the world for what it was? 
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Aug 9, 2015 08:33
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Okay so I don't know what happened to Matt but my hotel has Internet so here is a video:
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Aug 11, 2015 20:38
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Video is private.
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Aug 11, 2015 20:39
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Bruceski posted:Video is private. Fixed. Dunno what happened, it was showing a "public" label for me when I posted it.
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Aug 11, 2015 21:05
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"Something About a Star" was probably intended to make sure the player knows how to angle lasers past blockers. If the connector was placed a little further to the left, the laser would go through the center of the blocker's path and the blocker would have interrupted the connection more regularly. Matt was just too smart for the puzzle and put it in the right place immediately.
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Aug 12, 2015 01:28
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Still watching the video, but the Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a real thing and archaeologists did actually find a whole bunch of ancient papers in an ancient garbage dump. Tons of government/legal type papers, but quite a bit of Christian and literary fragments, as well. (The metaphor I've used for what an archive like this is like in the classics ask/tell thread is something like, imagine a bomb went off in a civic library and then the library was buried for two thousand years. Tons of papers everywhere, no categorization because the bomb blast caused things to be strewn about randomly, and everything's in a dead language. I wouldn't be surprised if there were still uncategorized/untranslated fragments from Oxyrhynchus today.)
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Aug 12, 2015 02:26
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Movac posted:"Something About a Star" was probably intended to make sure the player knows how to angle lasers past blockers. If the connector was placed a little further to the left, the laser would go through the center of the blocker's path and the blocker would have interrupted the connection more regularly. Matt was just too smart for the puzzle and put it in the right place immediately. Also it served as the first time you would really consider taking a laser from the outside, since the star is right there and there is obviously no blue laser in that room.
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Aug 12, 2015 07:50
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My initial Play through of the game which I just restarted I solved "Road of Death" the exact same way. I never got to a puzzle where putting a box ontop of a mine was needed - but playing through it again I have and I don't know if I would of known the solution if I hadn't watched the video.
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Aug 13, 2015 18:23
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Having seen the other LP, the most interesting new parts about this one is seeing how someone reacts to the game on their first playthrough, the nice literature/history facts, and how the Library Assistant reacts to the different answers Matt gives it. I do have one minor complaint and that's that I find 50 min episodes a bit long to watch in one go.
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Aug 13, 2015 20:12
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Enjoying this LP so far, glad to see you guys are back after a long hiatus
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Aug 14, 2015 04:34
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Next video's here! This was a fun one. Love a good easter egg hunt. Part 7:  Thanks for watching the LP and for teaching me even more history with your comments. It's been a fun journey so far.
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Aug 15, 2015 03:15
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Mott514 posted:Next video's here! This was a fun one. Love a good easter egg hunt. Just wanted to note that if you find the telescope first without figuring out the other easter egg, you can use it to see the connector on the moon.
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Aug 15, 2015 21:16
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I didn't need to slam my head against Higher Ground much, just that once I figured it out there was a lot of working my way to the end only to discover I'd forgotten a step.
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Aug 16, 2015 01:37
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Just wanted to say that this LP is excellent. Also the DLC is hard as balls. And awesome.
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Aug 16, 2015 04:07
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Just FYI, this game is on sale right now on Steam through the weekend for $13.59.
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Aug 16, 2015 06:20
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Have an update! Almost caught up with the backlog now...
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Aug 22, 2015 00:15
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That other connector is on a fan?! Augh! The only thing I ever did was angle the connector on the room's box just exactly right and stood on the switch to open the gate, since the beam doesn't need to remain for the wall to stay down. And, something I'm not totally sure Playing Matt is doing, is paying close attention to who's saying what in the QR codes, and particularly which new personalities are created when one of them "dies" according to the epitaphs. Like here, "@", who mostly just explores the worlds and talks about the scenery rather than the puzzles, is succeeded by "D0G" who has largely been a curmudgeon to other AIs who theorycraft, and also about the world itself and the several voices who all want something different from him. If you pay attention, you can trace some interesting lineages through the supporting cast.
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Aug 22, 2015 20:37
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As far as information being preserved, there are things like the Dead Sea Scrolls and other instances of books and inscriptions surviving for thousands of years. I agree that most computers in normal conditions would deteriorate relatively quickly, but some would be in the right conditions to be preserved, even by accident. E: and the recording puzzles are my least favorite not because of difficulty but because if I mess something up I usually need to reset the whole puzzle. Bruceski fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 00:14
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Bruceski posted:As far as information being preserved, there are things like the Dead Sea Scrolls and other instances of books and inscriptions surviving for thousands of years. I agree that most computers in normal conditions would deteriorate relatively quickly, but some would be in the right conditions to be preserved, even by accident.
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Aug 23, 2015 00:20
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FlamingLiberal posted:I know there is some kind of arctic facility that is basically an 'end of the world' seed bank that holds DNA samples and seeds of various plants, I don't know what it's called but I think it's in like northern Norway or Sweden somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault  It's funny that when it comes to information we're digitizing everything. Stone tablets would survive longer in an apocalyptic scenario.
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Aug 23, 2015 12:07
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omeg posted:
Oh, don't worry! In case of apocalypse, who-or-what ever comes next will learn aaaaaaall about Xenu
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Aug 23, 2015 14:45
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omeg posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_zoo
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Aug 23, 2015 16:10
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omeg posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
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Aug 23, 2015 17:49
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Bruceski posted:E: and the recording puzzles are my least favorite not because of difficulty but because if I mess something up I usually need to reset the whole puzzle. I don't remember 100%, but I think for some of the more complex ones they're pretty good about giving you ladders back out of places you can get stuck like that. Anyway, have another video! This time, Matt starts getting the hang of finding these dang Stars, and we talk at length about various mythological afterlives (I having finally done my drat research on ancient Egypt): 
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Aug 28, 2015 01:07
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You were kind of right with both Maat and Anubis. It's Maat's feather (ostrich) that is being weighed, but it is usually Anubis who oversees the proceedings (if not then Osiris).
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Aug 28, 2015 13:50
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Now I'm kinda curious how that Legacy of Time playthrough you mentioned went. Did you record it?
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Aug 28, 2015 20:33
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More like The Tiber Septim Principle.
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Aug 28, 2015 20:48
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whitehelm posted:Now I'm kinda curious how that Legacy of Time playthrough you mentioned went. Did you record it? No no, this was from like waaaay back when the game first came out, when we were in high school. loving amazing game, though, and its treatment of Buddhist cosmology in particular was just stellar -- I remember it (at least) as a perfect balance between respectful authenticity and gamey-ness. One of those games I will probably never go back to, though, because a) if it doesn't hold up, I don't want to know, and b) I think I still remember literally every single puzzle from the whole drat thing. The Saurus posted:More like The Tiber Septim Principle.
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Aug 28, 2015 20:52
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i thought this was an elder scrolls spinoff game because that's the only place I've ever heard "Talos" before
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Aug 29, 2015 00:53
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So while Matt's working on getting the next video up, I've been doing some digging into the game's writers. I discovered that, although Jonas Kyratzes is best known for his full-length game The Sea Will Claim Everything, the reason Tom Jubert tapped him to work on The Talos Principle (after Croteam tapped Tom) is his much earlier game The Infinite Ocean... about the world's first AI. The Infinite Ocean is also free -- it's a flash game. It took me about 30 minutes to play through. If you like the writing in TTP and want to see some of its primordial DNA, I highly recommend you go check it out:  And even if you don't want to play it... you should at least check out the opening menu with sound turned on.
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Sep 1, 2015 01:17
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Personally I do not believe that September is a month that exists. Therefore, this update is only a couple of days late. This is actually a super-special update, featuring an amazing special guest: Kevin Gold, real-life expert in artificial intelligence and author of the reputedly phenomenal game Choice of Robots:  After 9 episodes of my authoritative-sounding but ultimately amateur pronouncements on AI and related topics, Kevin comes in to chat with us about the actual history of and current work being done in the field. Matt and I found it an absolutely fascinating hour of conversation, and I hope you do too!
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Oct 10, 2015 03:13
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I was already wondering where this LP went. These couple of days sure felt long. Edit: Now that I actually had a chance to listen to this, it was really great. YOu guys have great teaching voices. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Oct 11, 2015 |
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Oct 10, 2015 21:02
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