Superintelligence fiction - "Understand", by Ted Chiang

It is clear that the ending would have been very different had the author heard about TDT.

I'll have to reread before I can make a comment specific to this story. But I found the collection as a whole (Stories of Your Life and Others) incredibly stimulating. I don't think I've ever seen so many really original ideas between two covers.

I liked this, and it was excellent. It possibly even conveys the idea of a sufficiently intelligent entity deriving complicated and useful results from little information, implementing superior evidence-gathering and processing to win, and possibly having sapient emotions.

Thanks, nice story.

My reaction was somewhat opposite to what the others described: I thought the beginning was a somewhat generic and implausible brand of superintelligence porn, but the end was cool. Mostly I enjoyed the way a "conversation" and battle between superintelligences was depicted, and the attacks and countermeasures were rather cool.

This did provoke me to reread Jeeves and the Singularity, by Andrew Hickey.

Recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504332

Oooh, I read this and...

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The should have understood the concept of love.

The superpowers are fun, but pretty implausible. I think a lot of the fun is because it's out of the mainstream. We have so many stories where being crazy-superpower-smart just means making fancy gadgets, or developing an inflated ego and pulling off one successful scheme before perishing at the hands of the hero.

After reading this story I spent about 30 seconds worrying that my ipad was broken because the display was now tinted pink. Even a restart didn't fix it. Then I realized.

Never seen this before, I enjoyed it.

Tangent: I've always had a strong appreciation for stories which have smart protagonists - even if the actual actions being taken by the protagonists are, on second thought, not quite the genius strategic moves that the author intended them to be. I think that at a fundamental level this is because reading stories like this requires more or less putting yourself into the shoes of a superintelligence to even determine if what they are doing is optimal or not, and after the story finishes when you go back to coding, reading, or playing music you still have the lingering thought patterns of a being which is, in some stories, many times more intelligent than you. It's a very useful state to be in, but for some reason when I stop reading books like that for a bit it becomes harder and harder to sustain over time. Does anyone else experience something like this?

I read it recently. I liked it overall but found the ending a bit strange/unsatisfying. Did anyone else have that experience?