Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Magic and Technology

[Murtak]

And why does functional programming take away assignment? Doesn't every functional programming language include assignment operations? I thought that the key to functional programming was having first-class functions.

The idea behind functional programming is that most (ideally all) of your code consists of functions that have no state. That is, variables are only assigned when entering the function. These functions therefore have no side effects - just like 2+2 is always 4 a "pure" function will always return the same value when called with the same parameters, no matter what the rest of your program does. And since this is true you can split them off from the rest of your program and run them on another CPU. You can map and cache them, curry them, or even have the compiler reconfigure them at runtime. The only issue is, you need state somewhere. Oh, and writing decent functional code is actually quite hard.

But yes, functional programming tries to take away something - state.

[Stahlseele]

Problem: Spells ignoring the speed of light mean that you can use magic to transmit information backwards in time.

how?
the distance is pretty limited . .

[CatharzGodfoot]

And why does functional programming take away assignment? Doesn't every functional programming language include assignment operations? I thought that the key to functional programming was having first-class functions.

The idea behind functional programming is that most (ideally all) of your code consists of functions that have no state. That is, variables are only assigned when entering the function. These functions therefore have no side effects - just like 2+2 is always 4 a "pure" function will always return the same value when called with the same parameters, no matter what the rest of your program does. And since this is true you can split them off from the rest of your program and run them on another CPU. You can map and cache them, curry them, or even have the compiler reconfigure them at runtime. The only issue is, you need state somewhere. Oh, and writing decent functional code is actually quite hard.

But yes, functional programming tries to take away something - state.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the idea of "referential transparency" or "pure functional programming"? What would you call the use of functions that have functional parameters to raise the level of abstraction and increase generality? Is that more "object-oriented" than "functional"?

Problem: Spells ignoring the speed of light mean that you can use magic to transmit information backwards in time.

how?
the distance is pretty limited . .

You're still, in a sense, sending information back in time. Just not very far. Although when you're talking about communication with space colonies, it is far enough.

[Stahlseele]

So . . what?
You wanna have a spaceshuttle go up to a colony, drop a communications anchor there and phone back with stuff that was forgotten on this space shuttle so when you pack it into the space shuttle before it leaves you do not need to send the message to put the stuff on the shuttle in the first place?

[Grek]

Basically, what you do is get two magicians, Red and Blue. They both make a crate full of magic markers that let them send messages. Red goes up to Mars with the crate full of Blue's markers, while Blue stays on Earth with the crate full of Red's markers. Because magical communication is FTL, Blue can send information about the stock market to Red and have it get there before the radio signals from Earth reach Red on Mars. Red receives the message and then repeats it back to Blue. He now has the message several hours before he sent it. They repeat this a few dozen times until Blue has stock market info about next week. He uses this to get super rich, fund the whole scheme and pay is buddy Red half the profits.

[Endovior]

Basically, what you do is get two magicians, Red and Blue. They both make a crate full of magic markers that let them send messages. Red goes up to Mars with the crate full of Blue's markers, while Blue stays on Earth with the crate full of Red's markers. Because magical communication is FTL, Blue can send information about the stock market to Red and have it get there before the radio signals from Earth reach Red on Mars. Red receives the message and then repeats it back to Blue. He now has the message several hours before he sent it. They repeat this a few dozen times until Blue has stock market info about next week. He uses this to get super rich, fund the whole scheme and pay is buddy Red half the profits.

(Emphasis mine)

This is the part where you lost me. Obviously, magical signals being FTL invalidates relativistic theories regarding the impossibility of simultaneity. Accordingly, there actually is one objective universal time that proceeds forward, and the slowness of light-based information transfer does not actually have any bearing on the real metaphysics involved here.

[fectin]

Problem: Spells ignoring the speed of light mean that you can use magic to transmit information backwards in time.

No it doesn't. Magic doesn't work that way.

And even if it did, it couldn't send it to your past.

[Grek]

Saying that the theories of special/general relativity is wrong is one way to resolve it issue, yes. But you do have to actually say that, and explain how all of the observations which make people thing that relativity is true now make sense in light of relativity not existing.

It's just a lot easier to have everything be STL and not take time explaining how physics works.

E: @fectin,
If relativistic theories are true, AND magic allows for FTL communication, than magic allows people to send messages back in time. Breaking causality is required to have FTL communications if relativity is true.

[Endovior]

Saying that the theory relativity is wrong is one way to resolve it issue, yes. But you do have to actually say that, and explain how all of the observations which make people thing that relativity is true now make sense in light of relativity not existing.

It's just a lot easier to have everything be STL and not take time explaining how physics works.

As with any great theory, it's not a question of relativity being wrong, just incomplete. Obviously, relativity is not an adequate explanation for the metaphysics behind a magical FTL signal. As Einstein surpassed Newton with a theory that could adequately explain observations that Newton could not, some future metaphysicist will someday come up with an elegant theorem that explains just what it is that's going on there that makes FTL signaling possible.

Of course, that scientist may or may not have been born yet, as of 2070...

[Grek]

That explaination needs to be in the book, if we're assuming there is one.

[Endovior]

Not necessarily. You don't need to do that level of homework to explain the metaphysics behind your world. You do, however, need to explain that scientists are baffled as to how this works, and that while some are in the camp that relativity is specifically wrong (and are looking into some really weird and strange metaphysical theories to explain why a universe where relativity is totally untrue produces observations consistent with relativity), and others are in the camp that relativity is true but incomplete, and are working on a supreme unified theory to unify the standard model, relativity, AND magic (and are no doubt having even less success then the people who were working on a grand unified theory as of 2010).

[fectin]

I don't think that's true. That explanation only makes sense if there's so absolute time which everything is measured relative to, which I don't think is the case.
Besides, you're making some strong assumptions as to how it works. It could just be that it locks on to whenever "now" is for you, finds the same "now" for your target, then let's you chat without propagation delay. Maybe that just means people on relativistic starships speak very slowly.

[Lokathor]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the idea of "referential transparency" or "pure functional programming"? What would you call the use of functions that have functional parameters to raise the level of abstraction and increase generality? Is that more "object-oriented" than "functional"?

That's not a thing that's part of either. You can do currying or pass around functions in Haskell, or you could force currying and function passing into your Java. OO lets you pass around collections of functions, and if they do have and use internal variables to the object then it's a lot like having a value curried into the call of a function. If you have an object that only has a single function, regardless of if you need to put args into that function to run it, you can pass around that object and that's passing around the function. "functional" languages just do this better, but it's not unique. The unique part about them is the enforced lack of mutability.

If relativistic theories are true, AND magic allows for FTL communication, than magic allows people to send messages back in time. Breaking causality is required to have FTL communications if relativity is true.

Could I get a far more detailed explanation about this one? Pretend I don't know physics.

I really don't get how sending information at FTL speeds is automatically sending it back in time. I understand how it works when you travel FTL, but since the information isn't "crossing the distance" at FTL speeds (it's more like wormholing through the astral plane), it seems like you'd just send the signal to the "present".

As far as I can see we are only getting more and more programming languages. If you want to extrapolate from current trends to write your fluff I suggest you move away from a unified single language and towards tons of specific languages with common interfaces.

To a large extent I'd agree. It seems like the C family is picking up more from Lisp, and Haskell is doing their weird shit and people are stealing things from that. A future "single language" would probably just be a hyper advanced lisp dialect. :3

For what it's worth, I consider many-core to be a horrible paradigm for the setting. You really want there to be a difference between shoddy and expert systems, and functionally unlimited processing power completely kills that. Program ratings don't even make sense when you can just throw more hardware at the issue, deck ratings can't really be limited and corporate hosts should really have a rating of infinity.

I suggest software is dead, for all the reasons already is mentioned. Expert systems and unlimited memory can be plugged in, if desirable. But many-core will probably kill a part of your setting that you really don't want to be killed.

I think that Ends Of The Matrix style "limited many-core" works out okay. True many-core would be bad. Software Is Dead should be used for some but not all things; In SR4, for example, we have software programs, but then also we have Noise Cancellation taking up slots on your ear-buds and such, with the rough explanation that the Noise Cancel is a hardware effect not a software. Mixing it like that would be good I think.

[fectin]

Loosely, there's no such thing as "the present" it's all just the point in time that you happen to be standing on.

[Endovior]

Quick google-fu reveals this link explaining the time travel thing.

Here's the thing, though... the only reason we have to believe that special relativity is totally true is that it has accurately predicted the results on every relevant experiment we've actually been able to do on it thus far... so we assume (not unreasonably!) that it will continue to hold true in terms of those experiments that we're not able to do, with the relevantly counter-intuitive predictions.

But the fact is, that we haven't actually been able to do experiments like the one where two spaceships are traveling at .9c opposite each other and one flashes it's headlights at the other, and we haven't been able to do any experiments regarding FTL signaling.

The issue here is that we did the experiment listed in the article, and instead of the FTL signal sent at X absolute time (as determined by atomic clock or whatever) that special relativity predicts would arrive at X-Y relativistically offset time actually arriving at that time, it in fact arrives at X time.

This is huge news to physicists, who are still scrambling to find explanations for it. This is less interesting news to anyone else, since it means there's no way to use FTL signaling to gain information on the stock market from the future.

[Grek]

Could I get a far more detailed explanation about this one? Pretend I don't know physics.

Alright. First thing to note is that photons in a vaccuum travel at a fixed speed regardless of who's measuring them, where they're sent from or anything else that seems like it would make them go faster or slower than that fixed speed. We've discovered this to be true in all of the experiments that tested it, so it's fairly certain that this is always the case. Likewise with gravity and all the other fundemental forces we've observed.

One of the implications of this fact (derived in ways that requires physics to understand) is that two people that are travelling at different accelerations will disagree about when a radio (or microwave, or gravity or whatever) signal was sent and over when it arrived to a degree proportional in the difference in their acceleration.

If you have an magic spell that sends information to someone such that it arrives when you say you sent it according to your reference frame, it will arrive before they say you sent it according to their reference frame. Which, to them, is the same as actually getting it before you actually sent it. And if they do the same thing back, you'll experience them contacting you about a message you haven't sent yet.

If you do what fectin said and have the spell lock on to the appropriate "now" for both parties, then, that's exactly the same as magic travelling at the speed of light. You'll receive the message no sooner than you would have using radio, but at aleast nobody ever receives a message before seeing it sent.

[Vebyast]

Okay, better explanation of why FTL communication results in time travel is here. This is probably the best short explanation I've found on the web. You might need to read up on Minkowski diagrams first, but they're easy.

The technique isn't quite as simple as a simple retransmission (you need at two spaceships traveling at a significant fraction of lightspeed, for example), but given FTL you can transmit information into your own past.

Here's the thing, though... the only reason we have to believe that special relativity is totally true is that it has accurately predicted the results on every relevant experiment we've actually been able to do on it thus far... so we assume (not unreasonably!) that it will continue to hold true in terms of those experiments that we're not able to do, with the relevantly counter-intuitive predictions.

We actually have done all of those experiments. We can't actually get up to .4c, sure, but the clocks we use for GPS are sufficiently precise that we have to constantly correct them for both inertial and gravitational time dilation. We've also tested and verified lorentz contraction, speed of light isotropy in inertial reference frames, frame dragging, and pretty much everything else.

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I'm a bit too tired to think about this, but would giving the Astral plane a privileged frame of reference fix this? Can we establish a privileged frame of reference?

Alternatively, can we establish a magical time police that blows up anybody that attempts faster-than-light communication with a frame of reference traveling at significant relative velocity?

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Also, just for kicks, the computer scientists among you will appreciate what I stumbled over while finding links: the Novikov self-consistency principle and time loop logic.

[Lokathor]

It seems like if you send a Message from A to B, then B relays the message back to A, it should arrive at A just after A sent it. The sending of the message from A to B would tie both A and B into the same causality/reference frame thing.

[Vebyast]

It seems like if you send a Message from A to B, then B relays the message back to A, it should arrive at A just after A sent it. The sending of the message from A to B would tie both A and B into the same causality/reference frame thing.

That's true if A and B are in the same inertial frame of reference. Really, you have A and B in one frame, then C and D in another frame at high relative velocity. D sees A -> B as going "backward" in C and D's reference frame, then B sees C -> D as going "backward" in A and B's reference frame, and finally everybody sees C -> A going backward in everybody's reference frame.

[edit: got something slightly wrong. Fixed.]

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Second edit to avoid double-post.

This also makes physical time travel by exploiting teleportation impossible. You can only build ansibles and send information. Why? Teleporting between relativistic reference frames means that a simple teleportation operation can accelerate you discontinuously to relativistic velocity. That's bad.

[fectin]

I got it! This is all churn!
It's magic, so it can break normal behaviors: specifically, it behaves like the two points you're linking are collocated and in the same inertial frame. That means none of the normal rules apply, because space is wickedly curvy there. The right metaphore is not a cell phone call, it's a face to face chat.

The pasts and futures there are the same, so you can't phone up anything except a little later in the afternoon.

[Endovior]

Ahem. To be precise in my wording: We have not, in fact, done any experiments where the net difference in speed between two observers is greater then c, because we can't get anything to go at more then .5 c. Similarly, we have not, in fact, done any experiments on FTL signaling, because we don't have FTL signals. Both of those are cases where it seems as though might be possible that we could be surprised by the results. If we received results different then those anticipated by relativistic theory, it'd be weird, but that's the kind of thing that's happened to science before, and the result has always eventually been that science figures out why the weird thing is happening and why it's not actually weird.

In this case, game mechanics trump existing models of reality... which makes sense, because we're trying to model magic, which explicitly violates all kinds of scientific rules. Whatever. We want a clear and simple set of magic rules, and we don't want to be obliged to rewrite physics, and we don't want to deal with time travel shenanigans. Accordingly, if you send a message from A to B, and B relays it back right after, then the message from B arrives right after, irregardless of reference frame, and scientists are totally baffled because this doesn't fit their existing models at all, nor any they've managed to whip up thus far, and the whole phenomenon is almost paradoxical in and of itself.

So far as any in-universe experimentation goes, relativity just doesn't seem to apply to things that travel faster then light. Instead, instant FTL signals always just seem to arrive pretty much instantaneously, and without doing anything that would obviously violate causality from a universal time perspective. This is, of course, a clear violation of relativistic time principles. Some people take this to mean that the idea of relativistic time is wrong and theorize absolute time instead; this theory lines up pretty well with the data available from experiments with magical FTL signaling, and pretty badly with any data from the whole rest of science. Some people theorize that the magic 'locks on' to a theoretically appropriate 'now' to signal to instantaneously; if so, then it does so in an arbitrary and inconsistent way that differs from all the other known rules of science and magic. Some people theorize privileged observers or special metaphysics on the astral plane; none of them have a really good explanation of how this would work beyond some especially opaque mathematical systems, and even they are incomplete. No one has a really complete theory of anything that accounts for the questions at hand; in the year 2070, this is the major unsolved question of physics.

[zeruslord]

Catharz: functions that you can pass around and curry and the like are generally referred to as "first class functions". You can force these into any programming language if you try hard enough, but you usually don't want to unless it's necessary. The name functional programming derives from mathematical functions, which are stateless and abstract. Now, the kind of people who want to program with mathematical functions also tend to be the kind of people who want to pass functions around as arguments, or at least are more likely to be working in an environment where they can do that sort of thing. In addition, in most functional languages, you still want to do things that are a lot like having state, and you generally do this through recursion. Now, hand-writing a full recursive function every time you want to iterate over a list sucks, and first-class functions solve that problem nicely; the core libraries of most functional languages provide a standard set of abstractions of different forms of iteration (map for making a new list where we transform each element of the first in the same way, fold when you want to iterate and collect up some information). Because of all this, and because the names are really similar, the notions often get confused or identified.

As far as the options presented by Murtak go, software is dead makes a very good point. Given that you're going to be willing to pay more-or-less arbitrary amounts of money for high-end combat electronics, it doesn't make any sense to bother with instructions and pipelining and program storage if you can bake all of the logic into the hardware and get something faster, lighter, and cooler. It's also total bullshit as far as consumer electronics or anything that you'd want to do real-time hacking on goes - the kinds of things custom hardware is good at are also the kinds of things distributed/many-core systems are going to be good at, and not having to replace your system for every logic improvement is going to be a big deal to people who don't need super-high-end performance and to the kind of people who want to change the logic a lot (namely, hackers will want to modify system behavior in combat time). FPGAs can help some with this, but if the edge in processing speed can be a matter of life and death, they're never going to be fast enough. So, all the little techno-gadgetry on your gun, armor, etc. is going to be implemented in hardware, but not much else.

As far as the future of software companies goes, remember that most of the hot, exciting web companies don't actually make money by selling any software. Facebook's power comes from owning the relationship graph, Google makes all their money by advertising, and Amazon, at least for now, is fundamentally a web analogue of the glory days of the Sears-Roebuck catalog. By 2070, there will be no money to be made by selling programs to consumers, but there will still be companies which claim to sell software. This will be bullshit, just like it is today. The real product that Microsoft, Oracle, and Redhat are selling isn't software - it's support, and that business isn't going away any time soon.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the idea of "referential transparency" or "pure functional programming"? What would you call the use of functions that have functional parameters to raise the level of abstraction and increase generality? Is that more "object-oriented" than "functional"?

That's not a thing that's part of either. You can do currying or pass around functions in Haskell, or you could force currying and function passing into your Java. OO lets you pass around collections of functions, and if they do have and use internal variables to the object then it's a lot like having a value curried into the call of a function. If you have an object that only has a single function, regardless of if you need to put args into that function to run it, you can pass around that object and that's passing around the function. "functional" languages just do this better, but it's not unique. The unique part about them is the enforced lack of mutability.

Catharz: functions that you can pass around and curry and the like are generally referred to as "first class functions". You can force these into any programming language if you try hard enough, but you usually don't want to unless it's necessary. The name functional programming derives from mathematical functions, which are stateless and abstract. Now, the kind of people who want to program with mathematical functions also tend to be the kind of people who want to pass functions around as arguments, or at least are more likely to be working in an environment where they can do that sort of thing. In addition, in most functional languages, you still want to do things that are a lot like having state, and you generally do this through recursion. Now, hand-writing a full recursive function every time you want to iterate over a list sucks, and first-class functions solve that problem nicely; the core libraries of most functional languages provide a standard set of abstractions of different forms of iteration (map for making a new list where we transform each element of the first in the same way, fold when you want to iterate and collect up some information). Because of all this, and because the names are really similar, the notions often get confused or identified.

Thanks for clearing that up. I was just thrown by the prevalence of procedures like set! in "functional" languages. Since many "structured" languages include goto, I shouldn't be surprised.

[Murtak]

As far as the future of software companies goes, remember that most of the hot, exciting web companies don't actually make money by selling any software. Facebook's power comes from owning the relationship graph, Google makes all their money by advertising, and Amazon, at least for now, is fundamentally a web analogue of the glory days of the Sears-Roebuck catalog. By 2070, there will be no money to be made by selling programs to consumers, but there will still be companies which claim to sell software. This will be bullshit, just like it is today. The real product that Microsoft, Oracle, and Redhat are selling isn't software - it's support, and that business isn't going away any time soon.

Oh sure, there will always be companies who install, hook up and support your office, accounting and security systems. But cyberpunk games have always assumed that software is something you pay for. Newer editions of Shadowrun have gone to elaborate lengths about copy protection on your illegal hacking programs for example. And that is absolute bullshit unless you are actually selling something that can not simply be copied and uploaded and downloaded. If fluff tells us programs are software then those programs have to be free, or virtually free. Office software is fine - you pay for the license/support. Perimeter control is fine - you pay for them to hook it up and to be somewhat liable if someone breaks in anyway. But Blackhammer will necessarily be free. As will agents, meaningful ice and military autopilots. Basically if all you are paying for is the know-how of others, the second where you have the know-how yourself, programs become free.

And I am pretty sure we don't want that.

[Stahlseele]

Thing is, all of this discussions is about useless, because as far as i understood franks magic system, magic does not work via interstellar space distances . .
in your example with the red and blue mage, te blue mage on earth could, with his markers on mars, do stuff on mars, but not from mars to earth . .
at least if i understood franks intent correctly . .