The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover

Thanks. :) This story simply made me wonder if it was possible to create a "fair" scheduled version of the program-of-all-possible-programs, and this was the first one I came up with. Not sure if there are any more elegant ways of doing that.

Though, of course, this wouldn't change the whole issue of programs being embedded in other ones... And, actually, my instinct is that, given that all programs are actually run with an unbounded number of cycles, I'm not sure that the RATE at which they're run relative to each other would affect the amount of reality-fluid each one got, but there's much here that I'm confused about on that matter...

(EDIT: to clarify, I don't think the relative rate they're run at would make any difference.)

Oh, just for clarification: With the bit about Maria distributing the computing time exponentially according to complexity, did you mean each higher (starting?) complexity program got exponentially less time or exponentially more time? And what was Maria's motivation there for that scheduling rule?

The bloodstained sweater in the original song refers to an urban legend that Mr. Rogers was a Marine Sniper in real life.

Well, since any finite number is smaller than infinity, for ANY program, once it starts running, it would get just as many steps per, well, step, as any other program (in the original version). ie, consider two programs A and B such that A came earlier. In the original scheduler, once B started up, for each tick A gets, B would also get one tick. But A would also have an initial bunch of ticks that it got before B even started.

My version makes sure that B gets those extra ticks too, that's all. I, personally, don't think it would change the probability distributions that would be experienced from the inside, given that the base computation really is run with unbounded resources and so on and so forth.

Thanks! :)

For my next trick: A scheduler that can look inside a program, take into account the fact that it's encoding another program, and schedule stuff so that the total number of ticks that each program gets, summed across all instances of the program, including those embedded in other programs, would be approximately the same for all.

Or I'll just leave this one as an exercise for the reader. :)

And since somewhere in this discussion the link is deserved: The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

Hmm, you seem to wedge in general on paradoxes involving very large numbers times very small ones.

I know that my own heuristic is simply to refuse to multiply with very small numbers. This prunes the paradoxes but has obvious disadvantages. The counters "but, number of fundamental particles in universe" and "but, other daft things with similar small probabilities" feel like cop-outs.

Sure; but Eliezer isn't that old! And don't forget, these aren't the only ones who he consumed, but the ones he consumed, remembered, and chose to put into the fic.

If we (or more realistically, he, since I'm not sure whether any of the LW readers can identify every ref he used) toted up all the refs and got, say, 120, how much could we infer he has consumed? Surely several many times that, possibly an order of magnitude or 2 more.

And some of the works are very extensive (Evangelion TV, 26 eps at 30 minutes a piece = 13 hours + 3 hours of movies; Oh My Goddess, 39 volumes (20 minutes apiece?), 5 OVAs (half an hour), a movie (2 hours), 50 TV episodes (half an hour) = 42.5 hours). And there's only so much waking time.

And then there's the recency of most of these works. If we make some reasonable assumptions about when Eliezer's most mentally productive period would be, mirroring those for mathematics, he's through a decent fraction of it.

I think my objection, as a past donor, is that: by producing & deliberately posting in a high-profile place something like this fanfic, Eliezer - the founder & public face of SIAI - is damaging the serious public image which is necessary for SIAI to accomplish its goals.

SIAI works in the real world; I don't think it can afford for its people to make contrarian choices to watch anime instead of signal.

I thought the numbers were some clever Tom Swift reference, although for the life of me I couldn't figure it out. Swift popped into my mind because there have been at least three Tom Swifts about which it was unknown if they were the same person. I have no idea what those numbered characters might be from.

The first one made me laugh out loud. Three copies of Tom Swift hanging around, um, Asuka Langley Soryu...

The rest are correct, except that Wbua Pyrrfr is more of a generic representative for the show as a whole, and for Ivetvy Fnzzf I had in mind KK, not VS - though on reflection, VS would probably fit in better with the crowd.

You're probably right about that; Rincewind would be constantly looking for opportunities to run away. He'd fail, but he'd still try. I'd rather bring along Granny Weatherwax or Susan Sto Helit than Vimes, though.

Rincewind tends to be terrified of everything... but he does get stuff done. And in "Sceince of Discworld 2", he was the one who orchestrated the entire plot to free roundworld from the elves.

(Although that book pissed me off in other ways. Thermodynamics is just "a theory about gases"?! (That was its explicit justification for stuff for dismissing the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy))

It's a different Jake. This one, Jake Stonebender, is from the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon stories. (I had to Google the name.) The Jake from the Dark Tower series is Jake Chambers.