kodan50 on 29/9/2008 at 18:54
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
No. No no no no no no no no nononononononono.
Read Neuromancer. That's what SS1's cyberspace is modeled after.
I'll do that. I never really imagined you would have to upload your conscience into the system anyways. If your brain needs to accellerate, then having a changeable image in par with the Matrix would be completely incompatible with this style of conscience in system anyways.
Although we would have to change game mechanics if we ever did multiplayer. Not only would everyone get pissed because "He went into cyberspace!!! AGAIN!!! >_<'!!!", but also if someone used a speed patch deal, then everyone would be running slow. MP in SS1 would require CS to be real-time, making your body vulnerable against bad guys. Better get your ally to defend you. Although that would make an excellent variant of cyber CTF!
Actually, that just got me an excellent idea! You have to find your enemies cyberspace jack and use it to capture their team data. You need to get your allies to defend you while you hack (which means everyone needs to decide who goes in), but you also need to defend your cyberjack against the enemies. You might also have other cyberjacks for your enemies to log in and defend from within. Sounds like I got some more Half-Shock ideas to toy with :D
catbarf on 30/9/2008 at 21:34
Quote Posted by C0rtexReaver
I would disagree that the a cyberspace session is instantaneous. It's still a human brain making the interface. There's no de-materialization. You're just standing there with the interface pads on you skull, pressed against the cyberjack, vulnerable to physical attack.
-CR
Quote Posted by RocketMan
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the brain works fast enough to make the experience last on the order of seconds.... the fact that a brain is sub-consciously controlling respiration, balance, taking input from all your senses and controlling all the chemical reactions in the body, all the while doing calculus in your conscious parts, preserves the suspension of disbelief. How much can happen in the real world in a few seconds if you make sure you are "relatively safe" when you enter?
I'm going to second RocketMan on this. If you've got the tech to wire the brain directly to a computer, then you've cut out the middle men of image processing, reaction time, and conscious thought.
demagogue on 1/10/2008 at 01:25
Not to quibble philosophically, but what exactly do you think the brain does except image processing, reaction time, and conscious thought? Whether info is coming in through the retina or an external wire wouldn't really make much difference.
The only thing that might matter is if the computer itself were carrying the cognitive workload to speed up the "consciousness" ... But then you have to wonder to what extent it's really "you" in the computer, or is the computer now in you, and there's no "you" left?
Haha, such a dumb debate for what was primarily a gameplay design decision. :joke:
Carry on, carry on...
DaBeast on 1/10/2008 at 04:08
Quote Posted by catbarf
I'm going to second RocketMan on this. If you've got the tech to wire the brain directly to a computer, then you've cut out the middle men of image processing, reaction time, and conscious thought.
Machine circuitry is built to tolerate high speeds/frequencies of electric signals, the stuff the circuits are made of are increasingly tested and pushed to handle more and more.
The brain is organic, although it handles bio-electric signals, I don't think it could be pushed to such a degree that our perception of time could sync with a computer, to do so would risk burning out and going crazy :p
RocketMan on 1/10/2008 at 16:16
Some savants are acutely aware of the briefest passage of time and I have read that our perception of time can and does indeed vary. However my point was basically that the brain has more computational and multitasking horsepower than we give credit for. It may or may not be possible to slow a person's perception of time by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude but it's certainly believable.
demagogue on 1/10/2008 at 18:22
Actually, I studied this a little in cognitive science.
There's a very clever experiment that tested our perception of time. A person has a watch which flashes a number and a blank so fast the number is blurred out. The person is then dropped from a cliff (with a bungie cord) while looking at the watch, and for the first moments of the drop their perception of the blinking literally slows down enough to read the number. In emergency situations, our time-perception slows down perception is of time slowing down, so we can do more cognition in less time (jumping away from the bear or whatever).
Our normal time perception is around a flow that resolves events at ~40Hz (iirc; not exactly that simple because events gets blurred together through an "animation" effect that starts earlier, ~24Hz, as we all know from watching FPS in Fraps, but roughly...). It's not really defined by the "speed of thought" at its limit, but by an inner clock that resolves events in 40Hz beats (in the hypothalamis; a nucleus of neurons which literally sends out a beat at that speed) set probably by natural selection because of the physics of day-to-day stuff we did (like climb trees or whatever). But in emergency situations, the clock speeds up to resolve events at 100Hz (iirc) for brief moments (so what feels like 1 second is actually .4 sec., or 10 sec's would feel like 4 if it lasted that long; i.e. "1 pulse" of resolution feels like the "same" time has passed. Time appears slowed down.).
So for the record, the computer would be making that clock pulse at a faster beat. Eventually it would start running into a hard physical limit that consciousness could resolve images at that speed (there's a loss of resolution as the speed goes up generally). But if the computer took on some of the work-load of resolving the images, then maybe you could get it to pulse very fast and slow our time perception way down. I think as far as scifi wizardry goes, yeah, this is something well within the range of not absolutely nuts to imagine.
ZylonBane on 1/10/2008 at 19:07
You're stating it somewhat backwards. To better perceive rapid events, you speed up your time perception, not slow it down. The faster your perception, the more slowly external events are perceived to be.
Yes, it's semantics. But in this case it's semantics which completely invert your statements.
Lansing on 1/10/2008 at 19:52
Quote Posted by 'demagogue'
There's a very clever experiment that tested our perception of time. A person has a watch which flashes a number and a blank so fast the number is blurred out. The person is then dropped from a cliff (with a bungie cord) while looking at the watch, and for the first moments of the drop their perception of the blinking literally slows down enough to read the number. In emergency situations, our time-perception slows down so we can do more cognition in less time (jumping away from the bear or whatever).
Sounds similar to the Eagleman experiments. From (
http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/time.html) http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/time.html:
Quote:
Many people report that time appears to run in slow motion when they find themselves in an impending car accident -- for example, sliding toward a bad situation. Crudely speaking, are neural ‘snapshots’ clicking faster during a high-adrenaline situation? To bring this into the realm of scientific study, we have measured time perception during free-fall by strapping palm-top computers to their wrists and having them perform psychophysical experiments as they fall. By measuring their speed of information intake, we have concluded that participants do not obtain increased temporal resolution during the fall -- instead, because memories are laid down more richly during a frightening situation, the event seems to have taken longer in retrospect.
Unfortunately that seems to run counter to what you heard so it'd be interesting to know if it was a different study or the same study but mis-reported.
demagogue on 1/10/2008 at 20:27
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
You're stating it somewhat backwards. To better perceive rapid events, you speed up your time perception, not slow it down. The faster your perception, the more slowly external events are
perceived to be.
Yes, it's semantics. But in this case it's semantics which completely invert your statements.
ZB keeping us honest.
Yes, exactly, the mechanical speed of your perception, the actual HT-clock, speeds up relative to normal (e.g., 40Hz->100Hz); what you literally "perceive" (if you asked a subject) is time looking like it's going more slowly, in slow motion (relative to what you'd normally see).
I wasn't being careful in distinguishing that at the time because I was focusing just on the internal perspective and not the mechanics (but I edited it to hopefully be more clear now). In misleadingly saying "your perception slows down", I should have said (and meant) "your perception is of time slowed down", because I wanted to say something about the experience, not the speed of the internal clock. Literally the clock speeds up, like you say, (although, to add just one wrinkle of a footnote, that extra speed would only be "felt" by an outside observer).*
*(On that last point, from your own internal perspective in a sense the "speed of perception" should always stay the same; it's only the outside world which seems to speed up or slow down from your own pov. That is, if you could watch your sped up HT-clock in a brain-scan in slow-motion, it would still look like it's beating at 40Hz just to you, that's what it would "feel" like, but the clock on the lab wall would be going more slowly, too, so you'd still scientifically count it at 100Hz like everybody else.)
Quote Posted by Lansing
Quote:
Many people report that time appears to run in slow motion when they find themselves in an impending car accident
Unfortunately that seems to run counter to what you heard so it'd be interesting to know if it was a different study or the same study but mis-reported.
No, this is exactly what I meant. In the bungie-cord experiment, also, the (say 60 fps) number/blob flashes appeared to slow down enough (to say 5 fps, below the "animation" effect) to read the number unobscured. In emergency situations time appears to run in slow motion because the hypothalamus clock speeds up. (e.g., there are more clicks per second, 1 click feels like the same amount of time no matter how many there are, so one second [measured scientifically in terms of the time light takes to go some distance] "feels" longer when there are more clicks in that intervening time. So events appear in slow motion.).
BTW, general footnote, I realize I'm oversimplifying things from how the hypothalamus actually deals with time, and there's a lot still not understood, certainly to me, but I think the general principle holds.
Lansing on 1/10/2008 at 23:10
Quote Posted by demagogue
Quote Posted by Lansing
Many people report that time appears to run in slow motion when they find themselves in an impending car accident...
No, this is exactly what I meant.
I think you may have missed the point of my quote - that part was the setup, not the summary.
Quote:
To bring this into the realm of scientific study, we have measured time perception during free-fall by strapping palm-top computers to their wrists and having them perform psychophysical experiments as they fall. By measuring their speed of information intake, we have concluded that participants do not obtain increased temporal resolution during the fall -- instead, because memories are laid down more richly during a frightening situation, the event seems to have taken longer in retrospect.
i.e. people say after an event that time runs in slow motion in a stressful situation, but that experiments suggest that it's not information being processing quicker but rather that the experience was recorded with greater clarity than normal.
