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It's alive!  Evolutionary algorithms are fun. My master's in CS was about self-emergence in "evolving" code. You start with a made-up virtual CPU capable of running made-up assembly code. Seed the memory with random data or hand-made "ancestor code". Apply genetic algorithms to the code with a specific "fitness function" (in this case, usually some measure of entropy). Run for a long time and see what happens. Something like Avida. I was a scrub programmer at the time and didn't have access to much computing power so it was not that interesting, but I think there were traces of entropy decreasing over time in some cases. I want to believe  Of course the fun is in designing the most successful CPU architecture, instruction set, parameters of evolution... if only I had more free time nowadays 
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Oct 14, 2015 15:52
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Glad to see this LP isn't dead, and it came back with a very interesting guest as well.
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Oct 30, 2015 02:37
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The game is on sale on Steam again this weekend
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Oct 30, 2015 19:44
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Good on you for grabbing an actual machine-learning person to sit in on this. The thing about genetic algorithms is that, for all that genetics is occasionally capable of doing the jimpity jumpity joodle and departing radically from a previous plan, it is still building on what came before, so it's possible for a genetic algorithm to reach a point at which it can get no better - a local maximum - even if that means it falls well short of what it can be. We see this in genetics every now and then, when something like the coelacanth gets to be really really good at being an ocean-dwelling life form and has no obvious path to improvement, and then millions of years later when the species it's pushed to the periphery come back with their new-fangled swim bladders they rocket to the top of the leaderboards and the coelacanth just can't hack it.
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Dec 22, 2015 02:56
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Just wanted to chime in how much I enjoyed this lp.
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Dec 22, 2015 03:24
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spronkles posted:Just wanted to chime in how much I enjoyed this lp. Okay, so, hey, here's the deal: The fall semester sucks for me. I run a competitive extracurricular, and basically once October hits I have no free time (since that puts extra time constraints on the normal grading load). We actually have three more episodes recorded and uploaded from back in September that I simply haven't had time to get through editing/polishing/posting. BUT, things should look up dramatically very soon now -- we hope to get back on a regular schedule starting in January-ish, and despite the long hiatus and indeed all outward appearances this LP is not dead. I'm actually really, really excited to get to the third world, because I have a LOT to talk about there. e: if you didn't catch it, Matt and I actually did a weird, experimental sort-of-LP of The Beginner's Guide earlier this fall, and if you like the pedantic overanalysis of this LP you're quite likely to enjoy it as well. Occultatio fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Dec 22, 2015 |
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Dec 22, 2015 03:33
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Thanks for the update; I've always enjoyed your LPs and I was hopeful that this was just delayed.
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Dec 22, 2015 04:54
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The game is currently only 10$ on steam.
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Dec 27, 2015 12:10
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I ATEN'T DEAD I will try to get some more knocked out relatively soon? In the meantime please enjoy this video from I think October. (trufax: as mentioned at one point late in the video, I started feeling super nauseous about halfway through this recording session, which is part of why it's so short, but at least one part of the reason it's so late to go up is that every time I tried to rewatch it for editing purposes it kind of made me feel sick again like some kind of sympathetic response. Matt said that he couldn't tell from my voice that I was feeling unwell, so hopefully none of this comes through in the final product.)
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Jan 23, 2016 21:20
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That was a tedious puzzle to return to. But I still enjoy your banter and it actually feels like I am learning a few things. Also, Choice of Robots is great. If you can run it on your phone it's a perfect time waster, while your in a train or something. It really helped me bridge a terrible time when I had to stay at a hospital for a few days.
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Jan 23, 2016 23:36
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I am pretty certain with the conversation at the end of this episode that there is no hacker. Just Milton trying to make you think there was someone else trying to connect with you.
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Jan 24, 2016 11:50
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Shaded Spriter posted:I am pretty certain with the conversation at the end of this episode that there is no hacker. Just Milton trying to make you think there was someone else trying to connect with you. However, they show on one of those terminals that thought experiment where people believed in a chat that they were talking to a real person, but it was just a sophisticated chat bot. The problem is that, as the MLA mentions, you can't really trust anything you see in this place. So he could also be lying. But it does seem more than likely that he was testing you with the 'hacker' thing.
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Jan 24, 2016 17:09
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Air is lava! posted:That was a tedious puzzle to return to. I agree. So, have another video!  (they won't all be coming out this fast, but I'm trying to at least clear the backlog, so we're not just sitting on a pile of ready-to-release videos)
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Jan 24, 2016 18:01
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This game is  on the new Steam Sale, which I think is the lowest price it's been
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Feb 6, 2016 02:34
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In which we finally get out of loving Egypt. We won't get to the videos where we discuss this directly for another chunk, but: anybody who likes the puzzles of Talos should really, really, really check out The Witness. While it doesn't have the philosophical depth and satisfying thematic layer of TTP, The Witness has basically the best pure puzzle design since, well, Braid.
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Feb 20, 2016 22:32
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Occultatio posted:In which we finally get out of loving Egypt. Watching the reaction to world C was good...It is great when you realise that what you were hearing on the title is chanting in a great cathedral. I have visited a couple of them (Durham and York) the acoustics in them are breath taking. Glad you enjoyed/enjoying The Witness (Not sure how complete you are with it...I haven't 100% it yet.) It is something I would like to watch a competent half-blind let's play of in the future. It might not be as interesting discussion wise but then again you managed to make a silent let's play of the Beginner's Guide fascinating.
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Feb 21, 2016 02:57
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Occultatio posted:In which we finally get out of loving Egypt. You missed a QR code to the left of the C elevator (27:34 in the video). 
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Feb 21, 2016 18:51
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Shaded Spriter posted:Glad you enjoyed/enjoying The Witness (Not sure how complete you are with it...I haven't 100% it yet.) It is something I would like to watch a competent half-blind let's play of in the future. It might not be as interesting discussion wise but then again you managed to make a silent let's play of the Beginner's Guide fascinating. "Sadly," we have both played it, and that is a game that if it is to be properly LP'd (and I'm vaguely of the opinion that it shouldn't be, but eh) it MUST be done totally blind -- the process of discovery is literally the entire point. Fortunately, Pete and Amy's ongoing blind LP of it is vicariously scratching the "I wish I could wipe my memory and play it again" itch quite nicely, for anybody who HAS played The Witness themselves and wants to watch new people stumble through. Anyway, today is sort of a double update!  This is a long video consisting about 75% of solving tetromino puzzles. I try to help Matt approach them a little more strategically, and talk about why tetrominos are cool in a general sense, but in the end it's still close to 40 minutes of solving tetromino puzzles. I put a generous amount of annotations in the video to help anybody who wants to jump around, and I would suggest that at least the last ~15 minutes (there's a link to the timecode at the very beginning) are worth watching, as I discover something about the game I legitimately did not know before and it sort of blows my mind. Buuuut, since I don't honestly think even that redeems an entire video of solving tetromino puzzles, here's the next "real" update, in which we FINALLY start solving World C puzzles and get into some pretty heated philosophical arguments: 
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Feb 28, 2016 00:46
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Just watched the first video, and I'm honestly surprised I had never seen anything about that Messenger interaction until this LP. Even with a bunch of Steam friends with the game, I must have been the first to become a messenger, since I only ever saw epitaphs from the game's own AIs. I agree with you that it really strengthens that ending. Again, though, I wonder why I've never seen anything about it before now?
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Feb 28, 2016 02:49
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Your discussion at the end of the second video, about maximizing happiness, hit a couple of mental tangents and reminded me about Maimonides's levels of tzedakah. Let's see if I still remember my Sunday school... --Give grudgingly after being asked. --Give willingly when asked, but not enough. --Give willingly and adequately when asked. --Give (willingly and adequately is assumed from here) without being asked. --Give without knowing the recipient. --Give knowing the recipient but anonymously. --Give blindly and anonymously. --Give a job or teaching or some other form of help that benefits them forever. (The "give a man a fish" proverb, though I think that one's only a few hundred years old, well after Maimonides) The levels are arranged both by benefit and by how much they allow the parties involved to keep their pride, which is definitely a variant on "maximizing happiness."
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Feb 28, 2016 08:07
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Missed a QR code on the wall to your right at 51:02
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Feb 28, 2016 20:33
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The most infamous example of chirality in chemistry is thalidomide, which was developed to combat morning sickness in pregnant women - unfortunately, it was produced without worrying about the chirality of the thalidomide molecules, and the molecules of the wrong chirality ended up producing deformed children. We could probably develop thalidomide specifically with the correct chirality these days, but good luck getting anyone to test it. Mathematicians typically don't worry too hard about the chirality of tetrominos - S and Z are both congruent after all, as are L and J - and to a mathematician, congruency is the important part. So they typically allow mirroring of them. This might be why a lot of mathematicians prefer puzzles with pentominos - five squares joined together, rather than four. With pentominos, there are twelve distinct shapes (as opposed to the five plus two chiral versions with tetrominos). There are a fair number of neat tricks you can do with pentominos, such as forming all 12 of them into differently shaped rectangles (12 x 5 = 60, which has a lot of factors - so lots of different rectangle shapes to play with there). Tetrominos are a lot more famous outside of mathematics though, thanks to good ol' Tetris. And similar general ideas apply - Ss and Zs are a pain because they are chiral, and because they only have two distinct ways they can be arranged. Squares are also a pain because, although there's no chirality, they only have one distinct orientation. Ts are great utility pieces because they have four distinct orientations, and aren't chiral.
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Feb 28, 2016 23:09
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I noticed that Matt was often quite quick to restart those puzzles. He probably could have solved them a bit faster if he just moved around and replaced some pieces until everything fits. That's how I solved most of those. Also. That messenger thing is quite cool, Thanks for pointing that out.
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Feb 28, 2016 23:14
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Hello it has been literally the absolute most horrible week of my entire life in every possible way which is why this update is late but here it is so enjoy it(?)
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Mar 10, 2016 03:42
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Occultatio posted:Hello it has been literally the absolute most horrible week of my entire life in every possible way which is why this update is late but here it is so enjoy it(?) You need all the red sigils for the big door to open.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:29
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God, I am sorry to hear that Occulatio. That sounds really terrible. I hope you have support. Please don't feel preasured with these videos. I do enjoy them, but if you have serious poo poo to sort out, that should be your priority. whitehelm posted:You need all the red sigils for the big door to open. What? No. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the tower he could do right now.
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Mar 10, 2016 19:55
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If it's any consolation, it was worth it
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Mar 11, 2016 15:53
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There is another Easter egg in C2 you didn't get - it is a simple one just go through the red door you actually talked about in the video. (It isn't solid.) the 5 messages outside confused about what they saw are actually referring to that easter egg.
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Mar 12, 2016 01:00
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Okay sorry for the gloomy tone -- I had recently and unexpectedly lost my dog (among other poo poo I'm not going to talk about) a few days before I posted the previous video, and was still pretty depressed about it. We still miss him, but a) life moves on and healing happens, and b) the experience actually fed into what I think was a really fascinating conversation in the videos we just recorded this weekend (19 and 20, hopefully up within the next couple of weeks). Anyway, this video features a grand total of two puzzles, neither of which I remembered how to solve and so was working alongside Matt. I don't think we were particularly stupid or anything; I just think these are two really difficult puzzles, and we went down some really plausible but ultimately futile blind alleys. In any case, the video description (as always) features links to let you jump around if you get really bored. In the second half, though, we discuss The Witness (which had just come out when we recorded) and, in as non-spoilery a way as possible, what makes it so loving amazing. To summarize: anybody who likes TTP for the puzzles and philosophy NEEDS to go play The Witness; you will not regret it. Oh yeah, video:  (also, if anybody can .gif the moment at about 16:30, I will be very grateful; it's basically too_clever_for_own_good.jpg)
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Mar 22, 2016 03:10
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I am glad you went into the misuse of the word Pretentious...this is the thing I hate the most about any video I watch of The Witness. People when they come across their first 2 minute quote always do it. (Not watched a video of anyone getting to any of the longer video clips.) I think it might have a lot to do with the art of let's playing meaning that you are thinking of what to say as soon as it finishes rather than just thinking about what the quote means and what it means in is position to the puzzles.
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Mar 22, 2016 15:58
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Shaded Spriter posted:I am glad you went into the misuse of the word Pretentious...this is the thing I hate the most about any video I watch of The Witness. People when they come across their first 2 minute quote always do it. (Not watched a video of anyone getting to any of the longer video clips.) I think it might have a lot to do with the art of let's playing meaning that you are thinking of what to say as soon as it finishes rather than just thinking about what the quote means and what it means in is position to the puzzles. I think the word a lot of people are searching for -- which admittedly does, somewhat, apply to Braid at least -- is pompous. Whether you agree with them or not, whether you consider them deep and insightful or not, both of Blow's games legitimately do have things to say about such Big Topics as science and religion and humanity and all that. The themes may not be breathtakingly original, but they do cohere -- they're not "pretending" to have greater depth than they in fact achieve. The DELIVERY of those themes, however, definitely (in Braid, at least) is unneccesarily grandiose and apes a very "artsy" aesthetic. The Witness's audio logs may also come across that way at first, but if you reach the post-game content and find the "bonus" logs then it immediately recontextualizes how you should interpret them all -- you may still legitimately argue that it's pompous or over-the-top to make players listen to a 2-minute spiel about the nature of god and discovery within 15 minutes of starting the game, or that that's a bad design decision, but it's only "pretentious" if it doesn't follow through with its exploration of those ideas. It's basically why I love the Talos Principle: if all it did were have random musings from philosophers and such on optional computer terminals while you solved puzzles, that would be pretentious, but instead the entire game's narrative is not only built around that philosophy but makes a really thoughtful and coherent statement about it: they don't pretend to understand any lofty concepts that they, in fact, don't.
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Mar 22, 2016 16:39
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Man that was frustrating. He had the right idea at the start, but you insisted that he should restart when he put the box in there.
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Mar 22, 2016 21:22
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Air is lava! posted:Man that was frustrating. He had the right idea at the start, but you insisted that he should restart when he put the box in there. I know, I'm sorry.  On the bright side, it led to a truly beautiful failure mode.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:22
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Occultatio posted:I know, I'm sorry. To be fair, it felt a bit worse because I have this stupid puzzle memorized, since I literally spend hours trying to get that stupid star. I kept trying to do that the same way Matt tried by levitating that cube. But it just barely didn't work. Eventually I had a weird solution which may not be intended. Stack both cubes on a fan platform, jump onto the fan, up to the cube stack and from there you can go up on the wall, where you can place a reflector. That is a ridiculous solution.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:39
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Not a video update, but exciting news nevertheless: The Sea Will Claim Everything, a previous game by Talos Principle co-writer Jonas Kyratzes, is finally off Greenlight and onto Steam!  Sadly, it has apparently not qualified for Steam's list of front-paged Popular New Releases, so it's really reliant on word-of-mouth. I know for me at least this is a day-1 purchase, because, beyond the fact that it looks like a really, really interesting game, I really want to support Kyratzes (who is largely responsible for all the terminal entries we've read, among other bits and pieces). Do note the system requirements, though: quote:OS: XP (SP3), Vista, 7, 8, 10
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Mar 24, 2016 14:44
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That was the first time I can remember where I knew you guys were close to figuring it out but instead it took about 10 minutes of checking everything else first before discovering the solution.
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Mar 24, 2016 14:56
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Having recently seen the Talos Principle AGDQ video I just wanted to tell you that you are about 37 minutes in. It's really worth a watch once you don't care about spoilers. It's only 6 minutes longer than the previous video.Occultatio posted:Not a video update, but exciting news nevertheless: The Sea Will Claim Everything, a previous game by Talos Principle co-writer Jonas Kyratzes, is finally off Greenlight and onto Steam! I really liked this game, even though I don't agree with some of the political points. Clicking on ever single mushroom to learn their stories is great. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Mar 26, 2016 |
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Mar 26, 2016 20:44
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Occultatio posted:Not a video update, but exciting news nevertheless: The Sea Will Claim Everything, a previous game by Talos Principle co-writer Jonas Kyratzes, is finally off Greenlight and onto Steam! A Rock Paper shotgun article brought the information to my attention - The next game in this series The Council of Crows is also on greenlight.
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Mar 29, 2016 23:27
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I've enjoyed watching this LP, hopefully you get the time to finish it this summer. A lot of the existential/consciousness questions reminded me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI I think my favorite part of the whole thing was when you called Diogenes the best Greek philosopher - I was all "yep they're goons alright" 
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Apr 7, 2016 07:01
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Wow, how did I miss this LP for almost a year? I loved you guys' previous LPs but somehow I just never saw this thread. In any case, it finally spurred me to play the game through for myself ahead of watching your videos. For the record, one reason the clever solution in the previous video couldn't be the "correct" one is that it requires the alternative use key. While it's really helpful, it is never required for the intended solution of a puzzle. If you can't point the connector to all its targets without putting it down, you're probably on the wrong track.
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Apr 24, 2016 21:23
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