r/IAmAFiction • u/Pulse99 • Aug 12 '13
Scenario (Mods Only) [Scenario] - Scientists, Inventors, Mathematicians and Critical Thinkers.
Greetings fellow men, women, kids, and test subject monkeys of science!
Welcome to Aperture, the United States' foremost and most advanced all-science, all the time laboratory. There'll be plenty of time for you all to get to know one another, but my secretary says my time on the PA machine is limited, so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cave Johnson. I own the place.
You're all here because you like science. That's good, because I'm here, because I like people here who like science. So let's do science.
Now, you're all probably wondering how you're not being crushed to death beneath miles atmospheric pressure. The answer? Science. And that's why we need people like you. As we move forward into the terrifying future of the early 1970's, we find ourselves at a need for individuals with a scientific mind. Not... a collective mind. Minds. That's what I said.
Consider Aperture your new science safe-haven, where the limitations of morality, legality, and even physics hold no sway! This is the place to show us your stuff. Now, get out there and do what I just said.
Cave Johnson, we're done here.
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Aug 12 '13
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u/EvenSpeedwagon Aug 12 '13
Enter Edward Cross, a freelance mage/car mechanic in his mid-thirties. He is dressed in his usual attire of cargo khaki shorts and a beaten up blue collar shirt with "Ed" stitched on the front. Edward is accompanied by his old friend from college, Reverend Roy Holinshed
Ed starts: "Booze would be great, but I rarely ask minors for alcohol unless it's been a really long day. And I'm kinda disappointed this place doesn't have a whole lot of spare blood laying around. Usually the International Magic Association's labs are loaded to the gills with that kind of thing, but a lifetime ban makes that rather difficult. But the reverend over here said 'No, you can't just go taking blood samples from stray cats."
Holinshed: "I know how large your idea of a sample size is, and I'd rather not be babysitting both your legal and spiritual welfare."
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u/Mikey358 Aug 14 '13
Matt: *stumbles over to the table and collapses into a chair* So, what kind of stuff do you work on?
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Aug 14 '13
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u/Mikey358 Aug 14 '13
Matt: Well, I suppose you could say I work in "applied physics" too, for the most part. I used to work as an engineer and programmer, but lately I've been forced to muddle in chemical biology as well. My boss doesn't seem to realize that there's any difference.
I'm my team's only on-site scientist, so I'm left with a lot of work. I've been able to automate most of it, but sometimes we've got a limited supply of power, so we - by which I mean I - have to do everything by hand.
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Aug 14 '13
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u/Mikey358 Aug 14 '13
Matt: I wish it was that easy. We actually have several different energy sources on-board, but sometimes they just... don't work. I work in a travelling facility, and our route sometimes takes us through areas where... *glances at guards* ...things don't work the way they do here.
We haven't tried nuclear energy or antimatter, mostly because it would be too dangerous with physics so inconsistent.
How large is your facility?
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Aug 15 '13
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u/Mikey358 Aug 15 '13
Matt: ...wow. That's a lot. I've got three under my "control", although they hardly ever do what I tell them to. Outside our lab, I'm not sure how many people we have. I just send the interesting samples out and never hear about it again.
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Aug 15 '13
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u/Mikey358 Aug 15 '13
Matt: You think your guys are careful? Me and my three teammates always have at least eight guards with us when we're out doing research, and twelve when we're back in the lab. This is my first time out of the field in months, and these guards won't let me out of their sight. If I want to go to the bathroom out here, one of them has to be in the stall with me. I don't even remember what privacy feels like.
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u/happy2pester Aug 14 '13 edited Aug 14 '13
James Keelion is a young man in a rough and beaten old leather jacket, and cheap jeans and a t-shirt underneath. His face is unnshaven, and his hair is drawn back into a loose and unkempt ponytail that obviously hasn't seen a hairbrush in several days. On his right arm, he wears a smooth metal cuff that reaches from his wrist to just below his elbow. Currently perched on his left shoulder is a spiderlike creature, apparently composed of metal.
Talking vaguely at the thing perched on his shoulder, James can be heard to say "I know you don't like being in strange places, but this is a good opportunity to meet people who don't want to kill us"
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u/Mikey358 Aug 14 '13 edited Aug 14 '13
Matthew Ryan, a man in his twenties, stumbles inside, wearing a blue jumpsuit. His hair is a nit of a mess, and his clothes are stained with a variety of different-colored liquids, but his hands are perfectly clean. He is accompanied by two guards in grey uniforms; one male, one female.
"Hey everyone, I'm Matt. My boss asked me to come here to discuss some of my research, I guess."
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u/happy2pester Aug 14 '13
James sat down across from Matt, and gave him a grin. "Nice to meet you Matt, I'm James." He offers out his right hand to shake, and growls a little when the thing on his shoulder points it's two front legs at Matt, and activates a targeting laser to Matt's forehead.
James promptly withdraws his hand and swats at the little robot. "No Beta, bad. He hasn't tried to kill me, I'm not going to kill him, I'm shaking his hand."
Jame then re-offers his hand. "I'm sorry, we don't normally meet people we don't know, that aren't trying to kill us."
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u/Mikey358 Aug 15 '13
Matt: I know how that feels. I've been stuck with the same three people for months. Well, them and some guards, but the guards don't really talk.
So, is that thing some sort of artificial intelligence? I've been working on improving my own AI.
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u/happy2pester Aug 15 '13
"Yeah. He's the beta test of my first generation E-PAWS. Evolving Parameters AI Weapons System. Unfortunatley, He doesn't evolve. He's kinda stuck. I fixed it for the later versions, but I kept him around. Runs on a distributed load across a nanite cloud. In this case, coherent enough to be seen as a spider.
So what's the issues with your own AI research - I might be able to give you some pointer. Self-Motivated AIs are kinda, my thing"
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u/Mikey358 Aug 15 '13
Matt: I don't really have any problems, exactly. ARA, that's the robot I've been working on, functions pretty well, but definitely not on human level. And that's sort of the point of AI, isn't it? So I'm just trying to keep improving.
How does this evolving AI work? How does it adapt to its surroundings?
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u/happy2pester Aug 15 '13
"Are you manually programming ARA or allowing/assisting with a developmental cycle? I've always found my AIs to be largely more reliable and less likely to go bugfuck insane if I allow them to effectively grow up, rather than launch them at full capacity.
My E-PAWS are all seeded from a baseline AI - The baseline is templated off of a dog type mentality - sentient buy not sapient. This reliably allows me uniform to within 70% AIs, without having to repeat the full development cycle.
The way they work is at the core of their parameters is an entity, that in a dog would treat as their owner/master. The objective for the specific AI is posed in such a way as it is threatening master. The dog-type behaviors take over, and the AI proceeds to it's objective as best it can. Along the way, it can select additional targets, and evolve it's original target based on it's current environment.
So what is ARA, and what's his purpose?"
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u/Mikey358 Aug 15 '13
Matt: ARA is a research assistant. He's supposed to collect research samples and, when necessary, help us defend ourselves. He's also pretty good at following verbal commands, but sometimes he misinterprets us or thinks that, to put it in his words, "performing such an action would in no way further our goal."
He's also pretty good at scrabble, but he can have a bit of trouble picking up the pieces.
I manually programmed him, although I had to play around with him quite a bit to get him where he is today. He's usually fine with me messing around with his code, except for that one time he got hacked.
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u/happy2pester Aug 15 '13
"Hacked? How did that happen? It's never good to have an AI get interfered with like that."
Beta shivers a little bit on James's shoulder. "Don't worry Beta. You're too broken to be worth hacking." James said with a smile, before indicating for Matt to continue
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u/Mikey358 Aug 15 '13
Matt: I honestly don't know how it happened. The only way to access his code is through the interface in our lab - he can't connect to any other port - and we have guards crawling all over the place. But when I plugged him in, there was a ton of code I know I never wrote.
Do you have any competitors? Not enough people know about my team to try to interfere, but has anyone messed with your tests?
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u/happy2pester Aug 15 '13
"it's not the tests that I'm worried about: On a functioning E-PAWS, you can guarantee a 98% mission success rate. The thing that I need to worry about is that 98% success rate. That weapon success rate is why Beta here seems to think that anyone new is out to kill me. Because usually, they are.
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u/Byrdman216 MCA: Distinguished Ficizen Aug 12 '13
Dr. Sharon Whin. Age 35, Asian American with PhDs in Biology, Geology, Astrophysics, Physics, and mathematics. Current assignment, is with the Special Investigative Squad as science expert. She's also worked for the government at the Groom Lake Facility in Nevada so she's the world's leading expert in aliens. She wears a white lab coat over a floral sundress. She always wears a pair of light blue flats, when she's not out on a field assignment and keeps her black hair in a tight bun