82 réponses à ce sujet

[BabyPuncher]

Well, do you understand the (apparent) problem?

[BabyPuncher]

Right. Suppose Alice is on Mars and Bob is on Earth. Alice sends a message to Bob through conventional means asking "Is it raining outside the lab?" It takes several minutes to get there; however many light-minutes Mars is from Earth. 

 

Bob wants to reply "Yes" instantly. It's a yes/no question, so it only takes one bit. He can send a 1 for yes or a 0 for no. 

 

So basically, (and I don't have a great understanding of this myself) imagine the theoretical communicator as a particle randomly and rapidly switching states. So it randomly goes from spin up to spin down or something of the sort very, very quickly with its sister particle doing the opposite. And of course, Bob has the ability to manipulate the spin of his particle to alter the spin of Alice's. 

 

The apparent problem that Kaboom claims is the killer is that Alice has no way of knowing, when she looks at the particle, if it's spin up because Bob made it spin up, or if it's spin up because it's randomly spin up at that instant. In fact, she apparently has no way of knowing if Bob communicated at all. She has no way of telling the difference between the particle just being random and Bob trying to communicate. The only way for her to know is for Bob to tell her through conventional communication - which is inherently not FTL, of course and defeats the whole purpose.

 

In, fact, this isn't a problem at all. A simple way to solve it is to simply preface each message with a reasonably long predetermined code. So imagine that Alice has a computer that is constantly 'reading' the particle and recording it's spin as a stream of data. A stream of 1's and 0's. All Bob has to do is preface each message he wants to send, with say, the entire works of Shakespeare encoded in binary. The odds of the particle randomly generating that combination of 1's and 0's is effectively zero. So Alice knows that whenever that combination comes up, the following bits are not random noise - they're Bob's communications.

 

In fact, even that would probably not be necessary. If Bob is sending reasonably long answers instead of just single bits for yes or no, the data stream turning out as proper English instead of gibberish would likely be enough for Alice to 'know' it's Bob talking and not the particle being random.

[Vazgen]

Won't measurement process affect the particle state? 

[BabyPuncher]

The actual problem is that kind of communicator I described doesn't exist because, as I said, the entanglement collapses as you soon as you manipulate the bit. As soon as you poke or look at the particle, they're no longer connected. The entanglement is gone, they're just two particles and that's it. So, as far as well can tell right now, Bob has no way of making Alice's bit go 'up' or whatever in the first place.

 

So for this to work, I think there would have to be some way to manufacturer the pairs so you have a >50% chance of correctly guessing the state of a particle without looking at it. And even then, you would only be able to send a finite and likely very small number of bits. Once those particles are gone, they're gone. Still, FTL is FTL. It might be fundamentally impossible. It might not be.

[__________________________]

SPAAAAAAAAACE MAAAAAAGIC!

[BabyPuncher]

Won't measurement process affect the particle state? 

 

Right, that's exactly the real problem. Looking at the particle collapses the entanglement. They're no longer connected once you look at one.
 

[Kabooooom]

This is a complete and absolute load of drivel.

FTL quantum communication is indeed impossible by current though incomplete understandings, but it has utterly nothing to do with 'comparing entangled pairs.' (In that, Alice doesn't know if her data is a result of Bob's manipulation or not) That's a minor and completely solvable problem by not one, but several simple methods, which I'm fairly sure are used here and there in modern encryption and secure connections and so forth.

Even if that was the case, that has nothing to do with 'basic principles of quantum mechanics' which you seem you know very little about. It has nothing really to do with quantum mechanics at all. It's just simple causality.

The actual issue is that any sort of manipulation of the quantum bit collapses the entanglement. That's the problem.

You really should get your facts straight before you go claiming something is 'anti-science' and a fool of yourself.

Considering that I pulled that explanation literally from the textbook Introduction to Quantum Mechanics which is sitting on my bookshelf, I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you that it isn't a basic premise of quantum mechanics. Additionally, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you actually haven't taken any courses in quantum mechanics. I was speaking in layman terms for the sake of discussion. Obviously, any sort of comparison results in measurement, which must be done before any information can be obtained.

You do realize (actually I know you dont) that measurement itself is insufficient. You must compare both. If you are David, which you write like that punk used to, I remember having to school you repeatedly on various scientific topics before.

This discussion is pretty much exactly accurate for a detailed explanation of the matter:

http://everything2.c...t communication

Also, I wouldn't be quite such a dick to you if you were actually pleasant in, oh I dont know, ANY of your transactions with other human beings?

[Helios969]

Let's play nice.

[Matthias King]

If the franchise's current trajectory so far is any indicator, I would guess that the next mass effect will not be very scientific at all. Sad but true.

[General TSAR]

With ME4 having a focus on exploration/pathfinding (allegedly) I was thinking that perhaps the game could take on a more scientific tone (Like the 1960s Star Trek) as opposed to the more action-themed ME trilogy (like the JJ Abrams Star Trek Films). 

 

What do you guys think?

I think that would kill Mass Effect.

 

Leave all the techie stuff in the codex, I want to put high velocity rounds through the heads of bad guys.

[Matthias King]

I don't think a scientific tone and action have to be mutually exclusive.

[Iakus]

The actual problem is that kind of communicator I described doesn't exist because, as I said, the entanglement collapses as you soon as you manipulate the bit. As soon as you poke or look at the particle, they're no longer connected. The entanglement is gone, they're just two particles and that's it. So, as far as well can tell right now, Bob has no way of making Alice's bit go 'up' or whatever in the first place.

 

So for this to work, I think there would have to be some way to manufacturer the pairs so you have a >50% chance of correctly guessing the state of a particle without looking at it. And even then, you would only be able to send a finite and likely very small number of bits. Once those particles are gone, they're gone. Still, FTL is FTL. It might be fundamentally impossible. It might not be.

And this is why I say scientific accuracy matters somewhat less than the story playing by a consistent set of rules.

 

I mean, I'm willing to say "okay in this universe quantum communication is possible" provided that it abides by the rules set out for it:  The devices are prohibitively expensive and complicated to make, so they're rare.  They are strictly point-to-point, they can only communicate with it's pair.  And the data that can be sent is limited.

 

 If suddenly you can start playing "Galaxy of Fantasy" with a few dozen of your guildmates using QEC devices after explaining all that, we're going to have some problems.

[Heimerdinger]

No, but the only guy who seemed to write that way is L'Ecoile. I pointed out earlier that he was responsible for a lot of the codex.. If you look at his quests and dialogue, it's similar. He wrote ME2 EDI and Legion. He also wrote Noveria, which is full of technobabble.

 

Chris Hepler also wrote a lot of science stuff, codex, weapon descriptions and the galaxy map in ME2 and ME3. Not sure if he's still with Bioware.

[MrFob]

No, but the only guy who seemed to write that way is L'Ecoile. I pointed out earlier that he was responsible for a lot of the codex.. If you look at his quests and dialogue, it's similar. He wrote ME2 EDI and Legion. He also wrote Noveria, which is full of technobabble.

 

By far my favorite writer in the entire trilogy. A shame he left the project quite a while ago.

[Torgette]

As any good science fiction goes - just enough to wet our appetites or scare the bejezus out of us.

[Heimerdinger]

He also wrote EDI in 3, I think, so maybe he's the resident egghead now.

Well, apparently he's not. According to his linkedin profile, Chris Hepler is working on some free-to-play games and has left Bioware since 2013.

[Daemul]

Man, David isn't doing a good job at hiding himself. No one else on BSN talks with so much certainly, on thimgs they have no knowledge about whatsoever.

On topic: Mass Effect is leaning to being more Star Wars like, and with the writers choosing to put the rule of cool over any sort of consistency or established lore, then it will probably fully reach that point in ME4, because unless they can wish a wormhole into existence, they're going to need some mighty fine space magic to get us to Andromeda.

Honestly I wouldn't mind this, the writer's would have free reign to do what they want(not that they haven't been already) and they can stop pretending about caring about consistency and maintaining lore(not that they ever did).

[SolNebula]

I hope for a more scientific oriented game but something is telling me that is going to be less than its predecessors.

[Matthias King]

For me it doesn't have to be crammed full of techno babble. In fact, it's better when it isn't because a lot of it is made up nonsense. What I'm hoping for is that they just stay reasonably grounded.

 

ME1 took a fair few liberties with the accepted science of our time, but they did so in a way that felt grounded, and most importantly consistent in its internal logic. The more liberties they take and the more the 'rule of cool' wins out over logic, the less consistent and cohesive it feels. That's a big reason why the series felt more disjointed as it went on, at least for me. The grounded tone they established in ME1 took more and more hits until we got to ME3 and all pretense of scientific accuracy and realism had been abandoned in favor of space magic and all the other nonsense.

 

I realize that some liberties have to be taken to tell a sci-fi story and to serve a narrative and I'm totally fine with that, but there still has to be internal consistency to avoid violating the close aesthetic distance they've hopefully achieved.

 

I don't think the sci-fi genre is an 'anything goes' card. That's just my opinion, but it seems like a lot of people agree.

 

I also don't think that improving the combat mechanics or increasing the amount of action have to automatically hurt the tone. They can still polish the combat and create engaging action and conflict and battles without violating the rules they've established for their world. It's whether they'll actually do that or not that is the question.

[NM_Che56]

Don't sacrifice interesting story and game play for the sake of being beholden to science.  In other words, emphasis on the "fiction" in "science fiction".    Remember, this is a game, not a NOVA episode.