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[The_Numerator]

This is baffling. We're saying exactly the same things, yet arriving at two different conclusions. What the hell is going on?

I really have nothing to say-- At this moment, I'm completely confused. I don't suppose you see where the distinction is?

Wait wait-- Are you under the impression that the Geth have to "actively infiltrate"(ie. software hacking) communications in some way in order to physically receive military information?

Modifié par The_Numerator, 23 octobre 2010 - 03:36 .

[GuardianAngel470]

You're saying, I believe, that the geth had a large amount of information on the quarians already, and that from a security standpoint, they would logically have gathered information on the species of the galaxy's military activities.



What I'm saying is that the Geth are still immature. They were barely sentient when the quarians attacked, and by the time they could distinguish a third option, the vast majority of the quarian race was wiped out.



The geth seem to me as if they lack the understanding of organics to properly determine whether they are a threat or not. They are only monitoring things that can give them an understanding of organics because they still don't understand very basic concepts like fear and reverence.



And yes, they would. Both for a database of information as well as an encryption level. They can't just capture the information and then spend time decrypting it because the extranet is line-of-sight communications. They could ping sites from wherever they are getting access and have the data sent to them but they can't just listen in in the literal sense.



The extranet is based on line-of-sight FTL comm buoys. Data is sent as light through these buoys to where it needs to go. It isn't like radio transmissions with data being sent in every direction. It is too slow to transfer data from say, the Citadel to Noveria.



Legion's exact line is "Extranet data sources, insecure broadcasts. All organic data sent out is received. We watch you."



So I don't know whether there is a discrepancy between the established technology or there is some other explanation. Based on my understanding, these buoys transmit a connection directly to a hub on a colonized planet. It could be that the geth simply attach a device to the nearest buoy, but that would still limit their reception of military transmissions. And they would still have to bypass the encryption.

[The_Numerator]

God. Way to go, me. Leaving it for... 8 days? Bog's dawls.

So much meh; so little time for hurrah. I ain't dead yet! I've got such a backlog of responses to make, though. Damn me.

And this whole thread is only 14 days old. You know, I'd really forgotten what a endless cluster**** being an undergraduate was. I can't believe I left grad school for more of this **** again.

Ugh. I should have just joined the navy. "No reward is worth this!" 


Alright, so seems like it comes down to disagreement over just how sophisticated we each imagine the Geth to be right now.

As you say, it is your view that their continued monitoring of even the most banal details of organics' existence suggests that they "still have a lot to learn": That they are what we might call "culturally backward"-- Or if that's too strong for you, then that their social comprehension capabilities are as yet sorely underdeveloped. And that this underdevelopment has in made the Geth unable to, as you put it, "determine whether they are a threat or not."

Meanwhile-- in principle, if nothing else-- I cannot begin to imagine how a species which has demonstrated its rapid adaptability(at least developing at a rate greater than that which the Quarians were able respond to), and which has enjoyed 300 years of the uninterupted exponential growth of collective neural capacity, could possibly be as unsophisticated as you suppose.

But, I don't want to be seen as trying to sell you short here, because you did also say, and I'll paste it verbatim since it's been 8 days and the whole matter is probably as fuzzy to you as it is to me:



"They never did express how long the Morning War was so I am going to
assume, based on the stop-start sound of the recording Legion plays for
you, that at the beginning they were just barely sentient. However, as
all wars do, there was a huge technological advancement.

Since
the geth's intelligence is based on technology, such an advancement
would take them from toddlers to young adults very quickly. I believe
that as they progressed and devoted processing power to it, they came to
realize that a total extermination of the quarian race wasn't the only
solution. They likely saw the possiblity of isolation from the quarians
as a viable alternative, and simply extended this concept to include the
rest of organics.

This conept of advancement is why I believe
the geth stopped killing quarians at all. One would think that if a
machine decided from a fully logical and intelligent position that
extermination was the only solution, they would have pursued that goal
to its conclusion. If, when they made the decision, it was to them the
only alternative to destruction, there would be nothing that could stop
them.

But they didn't, they stopped. This leads me to believe
that they had initially seen the extinction of the quarians as the only
solution but later decided that it wasn't. I assume it is because of the
advancement of the geth as a species. Just as you wouldn't expect a
five year old to understand the idea of detente. The third option is the
hardest one to come to in my opinion because it involves weighing the
risks of allowing your enemy to live against the goal of survival. It is
a decision that an intelligent person would make."



So... Actually, I think this is a good place to stop, and pose a question to clarify. I was going to go on, but if there's still misunderstanding, then there isn't much point if it turns out it would be for naught later on... But one more thing, first. You also said, before all that:



"To me it would be like locking a baby up in a closet for her whole life
and then letting her out and expecting her to recognize a car, or a TV,
or anything. They just weren't provided with that information, at least
to my knowledge. The best they might have had were videos and
advertisements and to be honest, if you never expected to come out of
the proverbial closet, would you spend the time analyzing what you don't
have? The geth want to understand organics, it is their sole driving
aspiration aside from the Dyson sphere. They don't however want to
understand their tech. That is something they have expressed."



So you acknowledge their rapid development in the longer section, but suppose in the short one that their development was insufficient for them to... to... to develop a sense of.... to develop a sense of "why" they should care about organics in the first place?

So this is how I understand your position. And based on this understanding, that is why I asked, basically, "Isn't the fact that the Quarians tried to exterminate them reason enough for the Geth to care about organics?"

And finally, on much more easily addressed note:

[The extranet is based on line-of-sight FTL comm buoys. Data is sent as
light through these buoys to where it needs to go. It isn't like radio
transmissions with data being sent in every direction.] ... [So I don't know whether there is a discrepancy between the established
technology or there is some other explanation. Based on my
understanding, these buoys transmit a connection directly to a hub on a
colonized planet. It could be that the geth simply attach a device to
the nearest buoy, but that would still limit their reception of military
transmissions. And they would still have to bypass the encryption.]

In fact, each buoy would necessarily have to be a radio transmitter and receiver, sending and receiving signals about a spherical geometry, else vessels travelling through space would have no way of sending or receiving transmissions.

Logistically, what they propose is a system analogous to old telegraph cables... Actually, land telephone lines, too... And even wireless internet, actually... In fact, it's most directly relatable to wireless internet.

So suppose you have an... I don't know. A blackberry, or something. And a wireless router at home. So your modem is connected to the planetary network of fiberoptic cables which carry signals overland and undersea. And your router is connected to your modem, which has a limited effective range but transmits these signals via radio-- the router, not the modem. So you check your Bioware Social Network messages with your blackberry, from your favorite chair. Which for the sake of the point, we'll assume is not already the chair you sit in to use your PC. Or Mac, if PCs just aren't "good enough" for you, princess.

Where was I? Oh yes. So the router transmits and receives through space spherically, and then the signals go through the cables to their destinations. Now the analogy: Planetary network becomes galactic network, wireless router/modem becomes comm buoys, blackberry becomes ship in range of a buoy, and fiberoptic landlines become the tight-beamed signals that FTL comm buoys are connected with.

Except of course, the fiberoptic cables and wireless routers both transmit and receive at the speed of light, whereas... Well, actually, even in the case of buoys, both transmission methods would still be travelling at the speed of light, but in the buoys case, some manner of spacial compression would need to be present. I don't remember exactly what device Mass Effect employs to achieve this effect. Something about "low mass space", I think. To be honest, I try not to think about it. One of those things better left glossed over.

Oh yeah, almost forgot to ask: Is "angst" still used primarily as a pejorative term?

Modifié par The_Numerator, 31 octobre 2010 - 06:32 .

[GuardianAngel470]

The_Numerator wrote...

*Snip*

"Human history is a litany of blood fought over different ideals... Geth have no such history."

"How could we have become so different? What did we do wrong?"

These two lines from Legion are why I believe they aren't yet fully matured as a species. They have only just now started diversifying culturally, they have a long way to go in my mind.  As for my quotes, I believe that the first is true, that they advanced quickly and could come to the conclusion that there was a third option. To continue to use the child analogy, it would be the same as a teenager realizing they didn't have to fight over every insult, thus realize the concept of a third option that previously hadn't been known by them.

The second one is also true. It simply refers to their ignorance, as opposed to their cognitive abilities. You've attached the same meaning to two analogies, but I didn't use them both for the same purpose. One detailed their ignorance, the other detailed their intelligence; it's knowledge vs smarts, and they aren't mutually exclusive.

As for the comm buoys, I wasn't very clear about why I thought they would have to hack a database. I believe that military LADAR profiles as well as those of other vessels wouldn't be transmitted as widely as a call to one's mother. They would be stored on a hard disk on a ship or in a database on a planet, and thus the Geth would have to hack their way through to get to it. And in regards to other military transmissions, they would be encrypted, and any actual wireless signals would have to be very, very close to the Perseus Veil in order for it to be relevant by the time the Geth received it.

The FTL comm buoys transmit Faster Than Light, while any wireless transmission would be travelling at the speed of light. I'm also taking into account the isolation of the Veil. Most traffic doesn't go near it because the geth are perceived as a threat. Military presence is strictly probes from what I understand it, so ship to ship communications wouldn't be available. It's hard to remember the scale we are dealing with here, but the Geth are isolated in such a way that receiving transmissions of any kind would require access to a buoy. Even then, LADAR profiles would have to be transmitted through whatever buoy they have tapped in order for them to capture it.

I am basically saying that while it is possible for them to get access to those profiles, it is exceedingly unlikely. Any buoy they could actually get access to would have to be on the fringes of the network, and thus information being routed through it on its way to another destination would be rare. They would have to rely on transmissions being received by whoever relies on the buoy, and in all probability any sort of data received this way would be non-essential or at least incomplete.

[The_Numerator]

What I was saying is that you acknowledge their obvious intelligence in the longer section, and then place an upper bound on that intelligence in the shorter section... But you use the word "ignorance", which I think you use to acknowledge the fundamental difference in cognition between Geth and organics, resulting from the radically different origins of Geth and organics... You mean "ignorance of what it is to be an organic", I think... Which means that when you say "intelligence", you mean "knowledge". But when I say intelligence, I mean the magnitude of their ability to take in and make sense of information... And of course they have demonstrated an upper bound-- Legion has shown both
implicitly and explicitly, that clearly the Geth are very much a developing species.

So that's just recent stuff.

Next,

Recap: [The original question was, "Why wouldn't the Geth be monitoring and collating all organic transmissions they receive, instead of focusing only on the 'cultural' details, and ignoring the 'mechanical' details of organic civilization?"]

And your answer: [And as for why the geth weren't actively monitoring military resources,
there are any number of reasons. Most likely they decided that more
invasive monitoring might have incited a military reaction.]

After reading through the entire thread again, I see that there were
points where I should have gone, "Oh, I think the wheels are coming off." We've been having two parallel conversations which I'd mistaken for one. I thought you were explaining the lack of tactical information gathering from the standpoint of Geth psychology... And I think that you thought I was... What exactly is it you thought I was doing? At any rate, it's a technological matter that needs to be dealt with. The psychology conversation is a pleasant bonus I can get back to after.

So, you know how radar works, right? And you understand that LADAR is just high-resolution radar? So identification of vessel class is based on known silouhettes, like they did during the second world war?

So my point concerns civilian vessels. There's no reason to think LADAR profiles for civilian vessel models couldn't be located with an extranet google-search, as part of their registry information, right? So for this simple example, why should we suppose the Geth wouldn't have those for use in attempting to identify vessels?

As for range, obviously the Geth have to have set up some devices for real-time monitoring. Probably somewhere along the Terminus branches of the communications network, else they wouldn't have been up to date on Shepard's exploits and disappearence-- As it was exactly news of this disappearance which prompted them to dispatch Legion.

And yeah, the codex talks about "FTL" comm buoys, but I have difficulty talking about physics and "fiction physics" in the same train of thought, so I sort of auto-corrected to be consistent with physics, and just sorta' handwaved away the ME jargon.

[GuardianAngel470]

The_Numerator wrote...

What I was saying is that you acknowledge their obvious intelligence in the longer section, and then place an upper bound on that intelligence in the shorter section... But you use the word "ignorance", which I think you use to acknowledge the fundamental difference in cognition between Geth and organics, resulting from the radically different origins of Geth and organics... You mean "ignorance of what it is to be an organic", I think... Which means that when you say "intelligence", you mean "knowledge". But when I say intelligence, I mean the magnitude of their ability to take in and make sense of information... And of course they have demonstrated an upper bound-- Legion has shown both
implicitly and explicitly, that clearly the Geth are very much a developing species.

So that's just recent stuff.

Next,

Recap: [The original question was, "Why wouldn't the Geth be monitoring and collating all organic transmissions they receive, instead of focusing only on the 'cultural' details, and ignoring the 'mechanical' details of organic civilization?"]

And your answer: [And as for why the geth weren't actively monitoring military resources,
there are any number of reasons. Most likely they decided that more
invasive monitoring might have incited a military reaction.]

After reading through the entire thread again, I see that there were
points where I should have gone, "Oh, I think the wheels are coming off." We've been having two parallel conversations which I'd mistaken for one. I thought you were explaining the lack of tactical information gathering from the standpoint of Geth psychology... And I think that you thought I was... What exactly is it you thought I was doing? At any rate, it's a technological matter that needs to be dealt with. The psychology conversation is a pleasant bonus I can get back to after.

So, you know how radar works, right? And you understand that LADAR is just high-resolution radar? So identification of vessel class is based on known silouhettes, like they did during the second world war?

So my point concerns civilian vessels. There's no reason to think LADAR profiles for civilian vessel models couldn't be located with an extranet google-search, as part of their registry information, right? So for this simple example, why should we suppose the Geth wouldn't have those for use in attempting to identify vessels?

As for range, obviously the Geth have to have set up some devices for real-time monitoring. Probably somewhere along the Terminus branches of the communications network, else they wouldn't have been up to date on Shepard's exploits and disappearence-- As it was exactly news of this disappearance which prompted them to dispatch Legion.

And yeah, the codex talks about "FTL" comm buoys, but I have difficulty talking about physics and "fiction physics" in the same train of thought, so I sort of auto-corrected to be consistent with physics, and just sorta' handwaved away the ME jargon.

Ok. We did start running with several discussions at once, so I will clarify my understanding of ignorance vs intelligence.  For me, ignorance of organics involves a lack of knowledge to properly predict the behavior of organics, their thought processes, how they decode information, and just anything that involves knowing anything about organics. Their intelligence I spun off to explain their apparent immaturity in regards to their own internal structure and diversity. 

My child in a closet analogy was to explain their lack of knowledge, and the detente analogy was to explain their lack of intelligence/maturity. Cognitively, a child would not be able to understand the complex state that is detente, while a teenager would be able to, at least enough to establish a crude version of it themselves.

My use of intelligence and maturity are interlinked simply because they are in real life. You can have an intelligent child, but with maturity they will be able to grasp more complex and abstract concepts.

The geth, being AI, have a baseline intelligence in that they can compute and disseminate information very quickly, but that doesn't mean they would understand it fully. With maturity, they would be able to. That's how I'm using it.

Also, you may be viewing maturity and knowledge as more similar and to a degree that would be correct. However, from a biological standpoint, the organic brain is not the same when it is young as when it is older, ie when it is 5 it is less developed than when it is 16. So while experience is important for maturity, there is also a hardware constriction to the development of abstract thought.  When I say that the geth, shortly after the morning war, were akin to teenagers, I mean from a hardware constriction point of view. They still have heavy limitations on their ability to form abstract thoughts because they have yet to develop more advanced platforms. 

I apparently confused you by using similar analogies and I'm sorry for that. Totally my error of laziness. Now for bullets, cuz bullets are awesome.

• Child in a closet: Funtions to explain why the geth most likely didn't have LADAR profile data, not given open information due to isolation
• Young Child vs Teenager: Meant to explain why the Geth's hardware developed to allow them to see a third option as well as why they continue to be immature; Hardware limitation vs software

Ok, now for RADAR functioning like LADAR, the only one that does is what my dad, an aeronautical engineer for the military, calls synthetic aperture RADAR. I also asked him what he thought LADAR stood for and he said LAser Detection And Ranging.

In both cases, he's told me that a human operator would be required to recognize the shape depicted, or at the very least a software algorithm that was capable of determining the shape accurately. So the need for proper silhouette profiles is still valid as the Geth would need to determine what the shape they were looking at was.

And as for those profiles being widely available, my only theory for them not being thus would be pirates. There are a ton of pirates in the ME universe, and giving them free access to profiles that would allow them to identify every sort of private vessel would be foolish. But that's just conjecture obviously, I have no idea whether they are or aren't. I just assumed these sorts of things wouldn't be commonly available.

[GuardianAngel470]

As for the FTL codex entry, that makes perfect sense. The Galaxy is huge; astronomically huge (see what i did there?). Light takes forever to get from place to place under its own power and the only way to communicate realistically in such a huge space would be to utilize FTL technology. That means funneling data from buoy to buoy, which requires streams that go from point to point. It would be absolutely unrealistic to try and make every photon sent out in a spherical shape go faster than the speed of light, you have to limit where it goes.