posted
I've never seen this connection made before, but I can't believe that I'm the first one to notice it.
It started out with me reading the summaries of a few old TOS episodes. In particular, the climax of "I, Mudd" in which Kirk and Spock talk the android Norman to death. He gets stuck in a contradictory loop about lying and telling the truth.
It occurred to me that Isaac Asimov used the exact same trick any number of times. Read a book like "I, Robot" (even the title is similar!) which is a collection of short stories about robots and the Three Laws. Most notably among those is the story "Liar!" which was first published in 1941. It was about a mind-reading robot designated QT-1 and nicknamed "Cutie." In the end, he was deactivated by tricking him into a contradictory loop where both inaction and action would cause harm to a person. Then there's the story called "Little Lost Robot" published in 1947, where a robot is trying to hide and is ended up caught through use of logic and the Three Laws.
Both of these stories are actually interesting, despite the classic "talking the computer to death" situation in the first example. It makes me wonder why some people deride the TOS theme quite so much.
Of course, the quality of the TOS writing isn't quite up to Asimov's standards, and the frequency with which Kirk talks computers to death is rather ludicrous, but the idea itself shouldn't be that bizarre.
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i was under the impression that "I, Mudd" and, later and more appropriately "I, Borg" were both titled as they were as homages to I, Robot. Of course, the former does border on satirical (or plagiaristic!) stealing the title and that plot point.
BTW, its not that unrealistic. I do things to my computer all day long that make smoke come out its ears.
The best one lately.. for some reason, if i select more than a certain number of MP3 files and right click and select 'Enqueue' it will get confused and instead of adding them al lto one playlist, open up a Winamp player for each file. Do it with a thousand and you computer will be about as happy as Norman was in the end. (To my computer's credit, it played several hundred songs at once for a while before it completely went to sleep. You havent lived until youve heard the cacophony of artists A through E playing simultanously.
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just made by the Presbyterian Church
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It's not a bug, it's a feature.
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thbbt
if i select ten files and hit 'enqueue' it adds them to my playlist. if i select a thousand and do the same operation, it does something else. sounds like a bug to me.
or does MS refer to bugs as 'features' these days
"Hi this is Tech Support.. I hear you've been using our new fatal exception program closing feature that we installed in your version..."
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And I was under the impression that Microsoft really shouldn't be blamed for Winamp fucking up.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
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i'm under the impression the problem lies, not in the nullsoft prog, but in my windows folder options.. the file associations are always getting trashed by something.
BTW, seeing as the Mudd ep has in common with both I, Claudius and I, Robot, its seems that it is about twice as clever as i gave it credit for!
twice zero is of course, still rather low
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The only thing I didn't get about the whole talking a machine to death thing was the AI involved...
In general, somebody should have forsaw some machine getting fed some sort of input that, if it was continued to be fed to the machine, would make it crash.
Thus, I don't know why the designers didn't write the code for the machine to say that if system performance is starting to degrade and if system instability is starting to come to kill all extraneous thinking processes (example, think about the truth-lie thing in I-Mudd), then ignore all input that is similar to the previous input for a period of time (in other words, the TOS crew acting and saying things), and then start a self-defence program (which is go to each crew member and kill).
If a robot were so programmed, would you be able to talk it to death? I think not...
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