Question About tech/computronium

[Drashner1]

Thanks, that helps a lot. just one other question though...

The article about gnuff's curse, its meaning is that a hyperturing is better off with less brute force intelligence and better organization, opposed to just adding on more computing power, right? Just want to understand.

Essentially yes. OA aims to avoid the overly simplistic (in our view) approach to achieving superhuman intelligence just by adding more and more processing power and nothing else.

This is an editorial choice grounded in various factors:

a) If becoming transapient is too easy then everybody does it and we rapidly end up without a setting to play around in and write stories about. In that sense, this limitation is something like Vinge's Zones of Thought.

b) It seems more realistic to us that 'merely' adding more processing power is not an automatic be all and end all for any problem. For one thing you have to coordinate all that processing power so it doesn't just metaphorically (or literally) run around in circles chasing its own tail. Also, things in the real world rarely work out to be that simple. There are always costs and downsides and complications. To use an example: If you strap a jet engine to the roof of your care with the intent of making it go faster (and do nothing else) - the reality is that that is not the only effect you are going to get - and the odds are very good that many of the effects you get are going to be negative ones.

Becoming transapient means not only adding the processing power, but learning/figuring out how to use it most effectively.

To use another example - if you obsessively lift weights and take every performance enhancing drug in the book you may indeed get very big muscles and become very strong - but you will also experience a number of downsides and will likely still get your butt kicked if you get into a fight with a martial arts master (or a skinny little person armed with a gun) - even if they don't have the same brute power as you do.

Note that transapients can augment themselves to have more capability than a 'baseline' transapient of their S-level - but what their version of augmentation looks like might be very different from what modosophonts engage in (we haven't really explored that aspect of the setting much). And they would still need to exercise care when augmenting themselves to ensure they don't bog themselves down or suffer other side effects from the augmentations not being properly coordinated and balanced as they are added into their mind and physical structure.

The story is about a ToPoGo tournament, where each of the great hexadecimal archai create one champion to compete in the tournament. The rules state that each champion can only take up a few meters in unaltered time-space(no wormholes), and that each champion must not meet or exceed the first singularity. The main character is the proxav representing Red Star M'pire, but he's at a bit of a disadvantage considering that everyone else was designed by a S6, while Farview is only a S5.

Thanks, and i hope you like it

Sounds interesting

Todd