THIS is WHY I need the CLONES, damn you all

[maradydd]

Earlier today, I was browsing through the silly programming languages here (think INTERCAL or Brainfuck, only with a weirder sense of humour), and noticed a reference to the Esoteric Language Contest. This apparently no longer exists, as googling on it turned up nothing, but five hits down I discovered TRANSCRIPT. It's a programming language whose syntax is designed to look like a transcript of an interactive fiction game. (Think Infocom.)

New TODO item, perpetually at the bottom of my list: write a Z-Machine interpreter in TRANSCRIPT. Most. Self-referential. Code. Ever.

Unless the extropians are right or the Singularity hits, I will never have time to do this. Life would be so much easier if I could spin off a new clone every time I came up with something that Simply Must Be Done, give her a braindump of useful skills, and assign the project to her. I guess being the youngest clone would suck, because you'd always have to tackle some weird new thing that I didn't have time to learn how to do, but assuming braintaping, you'd benefit from the accumulated experience of all the other Meredith-brains out there.

I don't need world domination. I just want clones I can restore from tape.

Comments

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Have you read David Brin's Kiln People?

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Not yet. I gather it is somehow relevant?

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

It describes what you really want, instead of clones.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I'll have to take a look.

I still like clones, though, because they give fundamentalists the willies.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Eh. Abortions are cheaper. ;)

[steer.livejournal.com]

Most. Self-referential. Code. Ever.

Write a Z-machine interpreter in the lisp variant implemented on the Z-machine in Andrew Plotkin's lists and lists

http://www.wurb.com/if/game/128

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Ka wow. Where do you find these things?

Of course, if it's a fully compliant Scheme implementation you can write anything in it. But in principle you can write anything in brainfuck, so that's hardly an argument.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Ah... I had a fairly major obsession with the Z-machine a few years ago. I even wrote a good part of a text adventure in Inform before (as usual) losing interest. :-)

Clones & Braintaping

[shkspr13.livejournal.com]

Interesting idea... Standard clone-who-wants-to-live story, with the philosophical spin of the inherent and comparatively objective superiority of being more intelligent/capable than the original due to the acquisition of notable knowledge/ability since creation.

Re: Clones & Braintaping

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

See, I really think that'd only be the sensible way of going about it: give every clone after the second a braindump that's the set-union of the brains of the previous ones. You don't get real benefits until you've got a third clone, but it increases exponentially after that.

Of course, where that gets tricky is when two (or more) clones' memories of the same thing diverge. What happens if Meredith[0] and Meredith[1] no longer have the same interpretation of an event which happened to [0] before [1] was generated and backed-up? (They both started with the same memory, but the passage of time has placed a different interpretation on the past.) What if two clones are across the street from each other when a traffic accident happens and they see the same event but from different perspectives? Does it produce horrible cognitive dissonance in later clones, who aren't sure which memory is "really theirs"?

Dude. It's like Rashomon, but with clones. I must play with this. Thanks!

Re: Clones & Braintaping

[extropic-artist.livejournal.com]

Well, since any future clone will be cloned from either Meredith[0] or Meredith[1] incorporating the memories of previous clones but not both clones after they seperated (after Meredith[1] was generated), I don't see how this would be a problem.

Re: Clones & Braintaping

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

But if you incorporate the aggregated knowledge (which presumably would also include memories) of both [0] and [1] (and all subsequent ones), then later clones will have a greater reserve of knowledge to draw and build on. Thus the "set-union" remark.

Re: Clones & Braintaping

[extropic-artist.livejournal.com]

Gotcha...
The integration would be next to impossible. Memories by definition are subjective. Once Meredith[0] and Meredith[1] diverge, their identities too will diverge and they will begin to have, perhaps very subtly at first, different interpretations of past memories -- especially if their lives and work take them down different paths. This, however, does not dilute the memories themselves, it just means the two Merediths are beginning to develop their own independent self identities.
You can no more reintegrate two clones (even assuming the clone was created as an adult with taped memories) than you can reintegrate identical twins. Each clone is her own unique person, regardless of past similarities.
IMHO...

Re: Clones & Braintaping

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Each clone is her own unique person, regardless of past similarities.

Right, and I'm absolutely not disputing that. If there were some way to make skills portable, though, that would be awesome -- but the more I think about it, the more I think it's impossible in just the way you say. The Meredith of 2 June 2005, for instance, has a much different perspective on GNU bison and how it works than did the Meredith of mid-January 2005 (when I first started learning it). Those perspectives are ultimately reconcilable, but I think they'd still lead to cognitive dissonance because the June perspective is rather more thorough and elegant than the January one.

Re: Clones & Braintaping

[songblaze.livejournal.com]

...sounds to me like everything from Meredith[2] onward would have a serious case of MPD to me.

Re: Clones & Braintaping

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

There are people who would say that explains everything.

[alfvaen]

Have you seen dmmaus's page at http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/?
More silly programming languages. Though TRANSCRIPT also looks cool.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Neat! I especially like Piet (http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html).

[extropic-artist.livejournal.com]

Merging your brain with a computer familiar would go a lot farther than clones. The creation of the clone and maybe even the brain-dump would be relatively feasible, but reintegration would be a bitch. Being able to fully explore several options at once would be far more useful.