Problem Machine

You are taking the risk by deciding to pick both boxes and choosing to be the jackass who takes both boxes. This is a 'paradox' created by picking apart the timeline in a highly specific way rather than creating an actual strategy. The best play is to choose to take one box. Maybe in the future it would be better to take both, but making the decision now you choose to take one, and you commit to that decision because to do otherwise would be to fuck with the prediction that is making it the best choice to choose one box. See, you're coming at this from the perspective that if people have spent a long time arguing about it it's an intractable problem. I'm coming at it from the perspective that if people have spent a long time arguing about it it's probably a stupid problem. Most 'paradoxes' are just tricks of semantics and sloppy thinking.

If the goal is to make the most money possible and they wanted actual clarity to that goal they should have just loaded them both with something close the same amount, like $1000/$2000. The way this is framed, it's taking a huge and unnecessary risk for a 0.1% gain. Casul decision theorists, good job, you just screwed yourself out of a million dollars with your bad decision-making.

I'd ask whether the AI knew you would be here and also whether you or someone like you was there for the last 50 draws

I mean but so what though? A decision that's been made in the past unbeknownst to us is not observably different from a decision that's made on the spot right in front of us. I don't see how that should affect our reasoning at all, especially since we have so much to gain from, in essence, colluding with the AI. I have to assume that someone in the past thought they could get one over on the AI and it figured them out, why would I think I could do any better just by being a 5-year-old's idea of sneaky?

This actually becomes an easier choice I think the huger and more life-changing the amounts involved are. If there's a way to consistently get enough money that you will probably never need to worry about money again, that's always what you're going to choose -- I would take a sure 1 million over a 50:50 shot at 10 million any day, even though a naive assessment would put the latter as a 5 times as valuable play. However, if it becomes a contest between risking 2 months rent to get 6 months rent, it becomes a much more agonizing choice. This sort of thing comes up a lot in game balance. I wrote a bit about how weighting these choices often goes wrong in games a while ago.

Risking a million, even slightly, for an extra thousand dollars is idiotic. A thousand dollars is like twelve day's interest on a million dollars. I'll take the 1-2% risk of being the AI's first failure over that kind of marginal benefit.

re: PUBG spawning imitators, while I'm sure that will happen in its own right it's also probably worth mentioning that PUBG is just one of a spate of battle royale games like this that have come out recently, many of them before PUBG, with I think the most notable of these being the King of the Kill mode for H1Z1, which is almost exactly the same game as PUBG but worse. I think it's likely that this streak of battle royale games will continue and cohere into a genre with its own conventions, and I think as that happens we'll probably see the sorts of changes you guys are talking about as these games try to distinguish themselves from their competitors.

Yeahh I was pretty sure that there was something that wasn't adding up about the "humans eat 50% of the world a year" theory. Thanks for running the numbers on that. I love that this podcast has become the "we turn your emails into a 90s movie" podcast

That's a good point! And what qualifies as eating? Like, could we create an army of child super-soldiers if we resigned ourselves to licking 10,000 babies, or maybe biting off a toe?

Man you guys sure do talk a lot about assassinating people with food. I had no idea you were so enthusiastic about ham shanks.

ftfy

I like liverwurst. Then again, I've also been an old man since I was like 12.

I endorse chocolate ice cream with malted milk powder on top

Yeah it's fascinating that Dark Souls didn't actually represent a change in approach for From, it just represented them getting good enough at the kind of game they've been making all along for people to really sit up and take notice. It's really blatantly obvious how much shared DNA there is there if you've spent a lot of time with both series, with the biggest standout common element being the stamina/energy system.

Oh man I was all getting ready to write a post about when the time traveling robot priest's batteries ran out and spawned a new religion about its eventual resurrection when Chris went down that exact same discussion path. Well played, thumbs.

Lots%

Hm that would put Dishonored Hoistmas awfully close to normal Halloween though, wouldn't it?

Both sources I just checked (the forum description and the first page of this topic) said 2nd-18th. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from getting started a day early, and as long as you get a submission in in time nothing stopping you from continuing work on the project afterwards,

What I'm doing: Music! Contact Info: Forum PM, direct message on Slack, or email at problem.machine at gmail Time Zone: Pacific Portfolio: https://problemmachine.bandcamp.com/

The "you have 72 hours to breed" movie idea sounded a lot like The Lobster, which posits a world in which adults who are unable to find a life partner are killed and their remains are turned into an animal of their choice. That deadline is a bit longer than 72 hours (I'm thinking it was maybe two weeks), but the atmosphere of horny dread is very much in line with what you had in mind I think.

I think I'd like to take more of a support role for this jam than to make my own project, so I'll be doing music for anyone who wants it, up to maybe 15 tracks total or so. Here's the track I did for myself last wizard jam: I'm not very good at making classic video game sounds I think, my music tends to be a bit quirky in a way that might not work with all games. But you can listen to a bunch of it at my Soundcloud/Bandcamp and figure out for yourself if my approach will work well for your project https://soundcloud.com/problem-machine/ https://problemmachine.bandcamp.com/

Speaking of Wizard Jam, I keep meaning to mention this, but I am actually kind of salty that the WJ forum has gotten shuffled way down to the bottom of the page. It's much harder to remember to check up on it now; mentions like this are great, but just having it someplace visible helps a lot with building momentum.

I think the addition of an entire cast of nightmare versions of Mario characters is exactly what the Idle Thumbs Mario universe theory needs to become truly complete

I'm officially registering myself as pro-spicy. Fuck all y'all anti-spices.