Questions about EMH

paladin · Post by **paladin** » 2002-09-23 10:06pm

I have a couple questions about the EMH:

1. If the EMH mark 1 had some problems, why could SF just upgrade them to fix the problems? After all, the doctor did have his program altered by Lameway and company several times.

2. Since the EMH is a program, should Voyager have had a back-up of his program? I think it was pretty stupid that his program was stole and Voyager had to recover him. Why not just activate a back-up copy?

RayCav of ASVS · Post by **RayCav of ASVS** » 2002-09-23 10:20pm

paladin wrote:I have a couple questions about the EMH:

1. If the EMH mark 1 had some problems, why could SF just upgrade them to fix the problems? After all, the doctor did have his program altered by Lameway and company several times.

2. Since the EMH is a program, should Voyager have had a back-up of his program? I think it was pretty stupid that his program was stole and Voyager had to recover him. Why not just activate a back-up copy?

1.) Because it's B&B, ok?
2.) They actually did have a back up program. It too was stolen![/b]

tharkûn · Post by **tharkûn** » 2002-09-23 10:25pm

1. If the EMH mark 1 had some problems, why could SF just upgrade them to fix the problems? After all, the doctor did have his program altered by Lameway and company several times.

Sometimes computer code is so terrible its easier to start from scratch than to fix the defects which are buried in uncountable pages of code. Winblows comes to mind (go Linux). Alternatively they may have upgraded without backwards compatibility (again Winblows comes to mind) and the time needed to upgrade the code would be close to that of a complete rewrite.

2. Since the EMH is a program, should Voyager have had a back-up of his program? I think it was pretty stupid that his program was stole and Voyager had to recover him. Why not just activate a back-up copy?
How big is his program? Does his software need to operate continiously (I'm guessing not on this one) some software needs to be continiously running otherwise you have to spend forever getting it to work again.

Some files are too big to back-up (a coworker of mine generates data sets in the 10's-100's of gigabytes ... if he "backs-up" the thing, the drive ends up full pretty damn quick).

Lastly I think they do back him up. In one episode he is found hundreds of years in the future on a planet voyager had visited. Yet he also remains on voyager throughout the entire series run (even makes it "home"). Either we are talking about an alternate universe or this was just a back-up. You might want to retreive the stolen copy because the data aquired since his last back-up makes him worth it. You also might not want the technology to fall into enemy hands.

VF5SS · Post by **VF5SS** » 2002-09-23 10:27pm

He isn't backed up because you can't create drama if he can just come back! Of course there's asome much better stories you can do with the EMH angle, but this is B&B...

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2002-09-23 10:33pm

tharkûn wrote:Some files are too big to back-up (a coworker of mine generates data sets in the 10's-100's of gigabytes ... if he "backs-up" the thing, the drive ends up full pretty damn quick).

Damn. What line of work are you guys in?

tharkûn · Post by **tharkûn** » 2002-09-23 10:42pm

Damn. What line of work are you guys in?
Me? I'm in biochemistry. Basically I grow GE bacteria with interesting genes in annoying media (like heavy water) and extract and purify the protein of interest. Basically lab grunt work.

Him? He does multidimensional NMR/MRI (4 or 5-D I think) and one of his monster data-sets takes over a month to generate at continious operation. He then proceeds to do quantum physics calculations on the data (damned if I understand it).

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2002-09-23 11:33pm

To answer question number 1, it is pretty clear that the EMH Mark 1 was not only problem-riddled to the point where it was actually easier to begin anew, but also that they found it was insufficient for dealing with medical problems. Remember that it was intended to be used in a VERY brief fashion and then discarded. They probably found that many of the premises and assumptions that they had for the original EMH were flawed, which would almost necessitate a completely new program.

In regards to question 2, perhaps personalities and personal experiences cannot be backed-up for some reason. I really don't know, but I can't imagine that Voyager just has free hard-drive space lying around waiting for things like that. This would be especially relevent because so much importance was being placed on ensuring that their ships' logs survived the journey as a record of parts of the Delta Quadrant and of their exploits in it.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2002-09-23 11:47pm

tharkûn wrote:Some files are too big to back-up (a coworker of mine generates data sets in the 10's-100's of gigabytes ... if he "backs-up" the thing, the drive ends up full pretty damn quick).

So... they don't have a file compression utility like StuffIt Lite in the 24th century?

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2002-09-23 11:50pm

Patrick Degan wrote:
tharkûn wrote:Some files are too big to back-up (a coworker of mine generates data sets in the 10's-100's of gigabytes ... if he "backs-up" the thing, the drive ends up full pretty damn quick).
So... they don't have a file compression utility like StuffIt Lite in the 24th century?

Apparently not. Maybe that's why it took the E-D's computer so long to scan for people showering with clothes on. Google would have done it in a tiny fraction of the time.

neoolong · Post by **neoolong** » 2002-09-24 12:19am

Does anybody know how big the data storage is onboard Voyager is though? I mean considering they contain enough space for the data patterns of everything in the holo deck with enough space for the crew to make up new programs? In my opinion they probably don't have room for another copy of the EMH because their databanks contain extraneous crap like info for the holodeck.

Setesh · Post by **Setesh** » 2002-09-24 12:20am

Yahoo found 206 exact matches to "Taking a shower with their cloths on" the search to 46sec incidently only 84 were Star trek related.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2002-09-24 12:24am

Setesh wrote:Yahoo found 206 exact matches to "Taking a shower with their cloths on" the search to 46sec incidently only 84 were Star trek related.

That's actually pretty slow. Google is a direct search (Yahoo, in fact, now uses it, so you are really getting slowed down by the double-download problem). But the point is pretty clear. It took the computers in ST HOURS to crank that data.

TheDarkling · Post by **TheDarkling** » 2002-09-24 12:27am

I imagine the SF comp records have alot more data in them but it should have be able to limit it to simple mission records (still 70000 Vessels making logs every day is going to mount up).

Setesh · Post by **Setesh** » 2002-09-24 12:28am

Its the 'using other search in AOL' bug AOL also has a google search, the reasults were the same speed just a lot more pages of them.

tharkûn · Post by **tharkûn** » 2002-09-24 10:31am

In regards to question 2, perhaps personalities and personal experiences cannot be backed-up for some reason. I really don't know, but I can't imagine that Voyager just has free hard-drive space lying around waiting for things like that. This would be especially relevent because so much importance was being placed on ensuring that their ships' logs survived the journey as a record of parts of the Delta Quadrant and of their exploits in it.

I'm fairly sure in "Living Witness" we find a back-up copy of the doctor, the only other explanation is alternate reality and that one should be used as last resort. It makes much more sense with with a back-up.

So... they don't have a file compression utility like StuffIt Lite in the 24th century?
There is a limit to data compressability (hence why you can't run compressed files through the compressor ad infinitum). Shannon showed that for lossless compression you can't do better than H. For purely random values you just get the standard bit totals. For instance the classic 26 letters and space comes out to 4.75 bits/character. Now a third order compression model comes out to ~ 2.3 bits/character. Things that are *highly* repititive and the ith term is greatly influenced by the i-1th term can get lower. In any event you very quickly reach the limit of compressibility. With the doctor you have to deal with computer commands which are either in binary(or whatever base their computers run on) or machine code (or possibly something higher level). In either event you have *no* garuntee that he can be compressed at all. The only reason modern programs can be compressed is because we don't bother optimizing them at the beginning, given our penchat for high level langauges and inefficient data mediums ... we virtually never have incompressible files. If we started with optimized code it likely could not be compressed at all.

In short the amount of compression you can do without losing data is dependant on the nature of what you want to compress. If its already space efficient you will gain little when compressing.

Evil Jerk · Post by **Evil Jerk** » 2002-09-24 12:09pm

I think the guy in the future finds a back-up module of the EMH.
Precisley how it got stolen (what, was it lying around?) and why the Kyrians then lost the damn thing can be put down to B&B style garbology, but they did have it.

greenmm · Post by **greenmm** » 2002-09-24 12:39pm

tharkûn wrote: So... they don't have a file compression utility like StuffIt Lite in the 24th century?
There is a limit to data compressability (hence why you can't run compressed files through the compressor ad infinitum). Shannon showed that for lossless compression you can't do better than H. For purely random values you just get the standard bit totals. For instance the classic 26 letters and space comes out to 4.75 bits/character. Now a third order compression model comes out to ~ 2.3 bits/character. Things that are *highly* repititive and the ith term is greatly influenced by the i-1th term can get lower. In any event you very quickly reach the limit of compressibility. With the doctor you have to deal with computer commands which are either in binary(or whatever base their computers run on) or machine code (or possibly something higher level). In either event you have *no* garuntee that he can be compressed at all. The only reason modern programs can be compressed is because we don't bother optimizing them at the beginning, given our penchat for high level langauges and inefficient data mediums ... we virtually never have incompressible files. If we started with optimized code it likely could not be compressed at all.

In short the amount of compression you can do without losing data is dependant on the nature of what you want to compress. If its already space efficient you will gain little when compressing.

We already have that now.

JPEG is a picture format meant to compress down the data from bitmaps so that they can be stored more easily. However, I've found that with most compression utilities, the compressed file is just as large, if not larger, than the JPEG file. The same thing happens with EXE files: using a compression utility doesn't really save any space, because it's already been "compressed" from the source code into the executable format.

So yes, probably part of the problem is the doctor's main programming portions are already optimized, and therefore hard to compress. Where they really need compression, though, is in the data section. It seems like the doctor accesses similar databanks to those available to the crew... and there might be a possibility that that data could be compacted to save space...

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Questions about EMH

Questions about EMH

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Don't they have utility apps in the 24th century?

Re: Don't they have utility apps in the 24th century?