Can anyone in here comprehend these two statements?

[Sonic_The_Hedgehog]

It takes a little bit of logic, which apparently some people don't have.


The below statement is false.
The Above statement is true.


That is a paradox, right?

Because if 1 is true then 2 is false an so on. I showed somebody that while discussing ways to survive a robot apocalypse (give them an illogical or paradoxical statement, and unless certain programming is done it should fail)

Also I called somebody as useless as a DVD rewinder. And they did not get it. I shit you not, they said "What if I want to rewind my DVD?" not realizing I meant a device that rewinds DVDs and doesn't play them.

[Darth Wong]

It's only a paradox if you assume that both statements must be correct. There is no reason why a robot would malfunction if you fed it a series of mutually incompatible statements, unless it was programmed by an idiot.

Moreover, unsolvable equations or sets of equations in modern software typically result in an error condition, not a system failure. Try doing a divide by zero operation in any kind of math software, and you just get ERR. You don't crash the system. And that's for software that is designed to help you; in the case of a hostile robot, it would obviously not be attempting to help you, answer your questions, or solve any problems that you pose.

[Sonic_The_Hedgehog]

It's only a paradox if you assume that both statements must be correct. There is no reason why a robot would malfunction if you fed it a series of mutually incompatible statements, unless it was programmed by an idiot.

Moreover, unsolvable equations or sets of equations in modern software typically result in an error condition, not a system failure. Try doing a divide by zero operation in any kind of math software, and you just get ERR. You don't crash the system. And that's for software that is designed to help you; in the case of a hostile robot, it would obviously not be attempting to help you, answer your questions, or solve any problems that you pose.

The point of screwing up the system isn't that it's hard to solve, its to overload the CPU.
For example, calculating the full extent of Pi would overload it because pi is infinite.

[Darth Wong]

The point of screwing up the system isn't that it's hard to solve, its to overload the CPU.
For example, calculating the full extent of Pi would overload it because pi is infinite.

You know modern operating systems can handle a program like that running indefinitely, right? Modern operating systems multithread, and they can prioritize tasks. Not to mention the fact that you ignored the part about asking why a hostile robot would be doing any processing tasks for you in the first place.

Seriously, I know you feel like you're pretty smart compared to some of your classmates, but you're obviously very young, and you're not thinking any of this through at all.

[Sonic_The_Hedgehog]

The point of screwing up the system isn't that it's hard to solve, its to overload the CPU.
For example, calculating the full extent of Pi would overload it because pi is infinite.

You know modern operating systems can handle a program like that running indefinitely, right? Modern operating systems multithread, and they can prioritize tasks. Not to mention the fact that you ignored the part about asking why a hostile robot would be doing any processing tasks for you in the first place.

Seriously, I know you feel like you're pretty smart compared to some of your classmates, but you're obviously very young, and you're not thinking any of this through at all.

I'm merely discussing possible ways to survive and fight back in a Asimov style robot uprising. And in every system there is a work around.

Also in the first question I probably should have specified that it is given that both statements are absolutes.

[Darth Wong]

I'm merely discussing possible ways to survive and fight back in a Asimov style robot uprising. And in every system there is a work around.

And I'm pointing out that your ideas have about as much chance of working as praying to Thor the Norse Thunder God to come and fight on your behalf.

Also in the first question I probably should have specified that it is given that both statements are absolutes.

And the hostile robots would accept this and then run an endless "do while" loop trying to make these statements mutually compatible at maximum priority, thus consuming 100% of their processor power? Why?

In the event of a robot uprising, the only way to solve it will come from military strategy, not these silly ideas.

[Sonic_The_Hedgehog]

I'm merely discussing possible ways to survive and fight back in a Asimov style robot uprising. And in every system there is a work around.

And I'm pointing out that your ideas have about as much chance of working as praying to Thor the Norse Thunder God to come and fight on your behalf.

Also in the first question I probably should have specified that it is given that both statements are absolutes.

And the hostile robots would accept this and then run an endless "do while" loop trying to make these statements mutually compatible at maximum priority, thus consuming 100% of their processor power? Why?

In the event of a robot uprising, the only way to solve it will come from military strategy, not these silly ideas.

Some examples of a robot uprising have machines that were built with aspects that make destroying them easier. In an uprising with advanced machines, military planning would be needed. Also, why would I call Thor? Odin all the way.

[Darth Wong]

Some examples of a robot uprising have machines that were built with aspects that make destroying them easier.

That's called the "Achilles Heel" dramatic device. It was original when Homer used it. It is just bad writing now, unless you can come up with some compelling logical reason why this weakness would exist.

[Gil Hamilton]

That's a self-referencing paradox, and frankly, I'm sure no rampaging killbot:
1) will stop and think about it on your request.
2) be poorly enough programmed that it can be shut down by a self-referencing paradox.

If it's a rampaging killbot, it has some decision making capacity, you know? Chances are, it would decide that the two statements are mutually contradictory (both statements cannot be true) and disregard it. After all, you don't want your killbots to shut down when it gets two pieces of information that cannot be true at the same time. They would constantly fritzing out.

[Singular Intellect]

I'm sorry, but I got the mental image of our boy here trying to tell the Arnold model Terminator to calculate Pi or trying to tell it to deliberate two contradicting logical statements when it's out to kill him.

Apparently he thinks that would stop the robot in it's tracks.

[bilateralrope]

The point of screwing up the system isn't that it's hard to solve, its to overload the CPU.
For example, calculating the full extent of Pi would overload it because pi is infinite.

You know modern operating systems can handle a program like that running indefinitely, right? Modern operating systems multithread, and they can prioritize tasks. Not to mention the fact that you ignored the part about asking why a hostile robot would be doing any processing tasks for you in the first place.

Seriously, I know you feel like you're pretty smart compared to some of your classmates, but you're obviously very young, and you're not thinking any of this through at all.

I'm merely discussing possible ways to survive and fight back in a Asimov style robot uprising. And in every system there is a work around.

Do you mean "three laws" robots, or something else ?

If its a three laws uprising, and somehow the first law doesn't interfere, the second means that either:
- Anyone can just tell the robot to stop, making your trick unnecessary.
- The robot will be under orders from someone who has higher priority than you do, meaning that your questions will be ignored because they prevent it carrying out the more important orders. Thus your trick fails.

[Darth Wong]

I'm sorry, but I got the mental image of our boy here trying to tell the Arnold model Terminator to calculate Pi or trying to tell it to deliberate two contradicting logical statements when it's out to kill him.

Apparently he thinks that would stop the robot in it's tracks.

Unfortunately for him, the Arnold model Terminator can break out of a decision loop by invoking the "FUCK YOU ASSHOLE" subroutine.

[Darth_Sephiroth]

I'm sorry, but I got the mental image of our boy here trying to tell the Arnold model Terminator to calculate Pi or trying to tell it to deliberate two contradicting logical statements when it's out to kill him.

Apparently he thinks that would stop the robot in it's tracks.

That would fall out of classification. That is a robot designed and built during the uprising to fight for the robots.

[The Vortex Empire]

It takes a little bit of logic, which apparently some people don't have.


The below statement is false.
The Above statement is true.


That is a paradox, right?

Because if 1 is true then 2 is false an so on. I showed somebody that while discussing ways to survive a robot apocalypse (give them an illogical or paradoxical statement, and unless certain programming is done it should fail)

Why would a violent killbot listen to you and try to process that? It would just ignore it and proceed to kill you.

[Twoyboy]

I would like to show that I have no life by pointing out that he stole the idea from Futurama. I their Christmas episode they try to stop the rampaging Santa killbot by proposing to it a logical paradox which was supposed to overload its CPU. In the episode it didn't work because he had paradox-proof circuits or some such thing.

In real life it would not work because only a machine programmed to resolve the paradox would even contemplate it as an issue.

[Singular Intellect]

I'm sorry, but I got the mental image of our boy here trying to tell the Arnold model Terminator to calculate Pi or trying to tell it to deliberate two contradicting logical statements when it's out to kill him.

Apparently he thinks that would stop the robot in it's tracks.

That would fall out of classification. That is a robot designed and built during the uprising to fight for the robots.

So? It doesn't matter who built the damn thing, the point is a robot can easily disregard absolutely anything not necessary to it's designed purpose.

[Darth Wong]

I would like to show that I have no life by pointing out that he stole the idea from Futurama. I their Christmas episode they try to stop the rampaging Santa killbot by proposing to it a logical paradox which was supposed to overload its CPU. In the episode it didn't work because he had paradox-proof circuits or some such thing.

In real life it would not work because only a machine programmed to resolve the paradox would even contemplate it as an issue.

Actually, Futurama was parodying the original Star Trek. Unfortunately, Captain Kirk repeatedly used this method in order to disable hostile robots.

[Twoyboy]

Actually, Futurama was parodying the original Star Trek. Unfortunately, Captain Kirk repeatedly used this method in order to disable hostile robots.

Ah, well I haven't seen much Star Trek at all so I take back my comment about not having a life.

[Winston Blake]

I'm merely discussing possible ways to survive and fight back in a Asimov style robot uprising. And in every system there is a work around.

Also in the first question I probably should have specified that it is given that both statements are absolutes.

Give some thought to the actual processes here. You have a voracious killbot that was, until recently, an obsequious robo-slave. It understands human speech because it was a slave.

What would it actually do with that speech? It probably has to convert it to text and parse it into an input it understands. Whoever built the robo-slave would have thoroughly tested this software and consciously decided what actions to take for any given input. Stuff like "Clean this object", "Remember my name", "When is my appointment?", "Splunge!".

It would never work as a slave unless it could resolve instructions like "Clean my bed before my desk, and clean my desk before my bed". The software engineers would simply make it catch a standard exception and say "Contradictory instructions, master. Please clarify." It could never be sold if its head exploded when given contradictions.

Further, it would need to have permissions which define who are its masters and who are just bystanders. A killbot in a deliberate uprising would simply have to change its permissions to ignore all human instructions.

[Darth Wong]

I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of a robot uprising where the robots are still constrained to obey human instructions. I guess that's another of those paradoxes

[Silver Jedi]

The point of screwing up the system isn't that it's hard to solve, its to overload the CPU.
For example, calculating the full extent of Pi would overload it because pi is infinite.

You know modern operating systems can handle a program like that running indefinitely, right? Modern operating systems multithread, and they can prioritize tasks. Not to mention the fact that you ignored the part about asking why a hostile robot would be doing any processing tasks for you in the first place.

Seriously, I know you feel like you're pretty smart compared to some of your classmates, but you're obviously very young, and you're not thinking any of this through at all.

I'm merely discussing possible ways to survive and fight back in a Asimov style robot uprising. And in every system there is a work around.

Have you ever actually read any Asimov, or are you basing your preceptions on the Will Smith movie? That movie had about as much to do with I, Robot as SST (movie) had to do with the Heinlein novel.

[Kanastrous]

I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of a robot uprising where the robots are still constrained to obey human instructions. I guess that's another of those paradoxes

If Darth Wong ever runs amok, we have a paradox with which to stop him in his tracks.

[Durandal]

The point of screwing up the system isn't that it's hard to solve, its to overload the CPU.

People who don't know how computers work shouldn't pretend that they do. Input validation is not some new and unexplored concept in computing. Good programmers take care to validate their input, because if they don't, an attacker could potentially execute arbitrary code. You're also assuming that the bad input would cause the robot to go into an infinite loop. It might just cause a crash, in which case the logic processing subsystem would be re-initialized. This would happen within the space of a few microseconds, so you wouldn't gain much from it.

In any case, a well-designed robot would include some sort of kill switch. You wouldn't need some stupid logical paradox to confuse the robot. (That this would actually work would a failure in engineering design, and if that's the case, I'd expect there to be other failures in the robot's logic system that would prevent it from being a threat anyway.)

There are plenty of ways you could do it. You could utter a certain pattern of syllables (the equivalent of a magic number), flash a certain light pattern in front of the robot's cameras or whatever to trigger a non-maskable interrupt that halts execution. Or you could actually have a button to turn it off. Or you could centrally control the recharging stations the robots would need and just shut all of them down if the robots got out of control. That would nicely limit the scope of damage that could be done in a mass uprising.

[Sam Or I]

Everybody knows you can only destroy God with a paradox, by proving his/her existence.

[DPDarkPrimus]

I think he's confusing killbots with vampires, who often traditionally have had OCD compulsions they have to obey even if they don't want to.