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swordbroken
@swordbroken

The Solved Game

or

They Asked the Machine That’s Killing the World About Chess, and It Said Black Has a Forced Win in 10,084,718,004,934,623

The day before, there had been an update to the knowledgebase. A redundant frontal core, extracted and trained separately for weeks on new data from a rediscovered population, was reconnected with the primary. Integration continued through the night. When the system was back online, finally, in the glowing AM hours of a Thursday in May, the lone researcher on duty downed a ceremonial last swig of tepid coffee and entered the first of the standard prompts: “Request diagnostic report on solving chess.” Some time elapsed—much longer than usual—before the machine gave a response.

SOLVED: BLACK
10 084 718 004 934 623 MOVES

The researcher hurried to wake the others and found that they were already up, awakened by a thunderous overture of vibrations accompanying the first diagnostic. They stood gazing out through the facility windows with hands clasped over their ears, watching a mandala of interference patterns rippling for miles across the surface of the ocean, emanating from the nearby island of the machine and stretching out beyond sight, past a ring of distant patrol boats, lost into the gleam of the rising sun on the mirror of the water. Could the waves reach the horizon? It was unclear. Surging, draconic heralds of steam rose through twilight off the rocky facility shoreline, directly below, where sea crashed against the blazing concrete of the station and exploded into vapor.

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in reply to @swordbroken's post:

soll
@soll

incredible incredible story. i'm not sure why but i was particularly struck? enchanted? by the idea of any chess move being a disadvantage — the game only being pure as long as it remains still, and no matter how White attacks they're also opening themselves up and becoming vulnerable

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swordbroken
@swordbroken

Thank you, and that's very well put. This is one dimension of the whole thing that I'm surprised I neglected to put explicitly into a "question" here, in fact totally forgot to dwell on it at all while writing. I am always saying "the best way to play chess is to not play chess," but that we have to play chess, or something like that, and I feel like I'm usually not expressing it clearly. A missed opportunity, maybe, but if you're getting that from it anyway, I'm glad.

If this was a story with actual character/s and a more personal, character-driven plot, I think that would be a beautiful angle to work from. Putting this out into the world so someone else will write it for us...

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ozydamians
@ozydamians

Very interesting. I'm not much of a choster but I was linked here. My experience reading was pretty early on going, well that's weird it solved for Black, which was a good hook. Then I had the natural (naive) QUESTION: Why not ask the machine not to kill the world? Of course, the econmony, ain't that how it goes. The refrain of the machines name was very compelling. What is the answer I wonder, the key is that we can make the same moves over and over, which logically would say there must be indistinguishable game states, and that would feel "unoptimal". Would TMTKTW agree? The color symbolism of white always wins or ties until the end when black wins reads as somehwat pessimistic, but perhaps resonants with the Machine that is Killing the World. But if Black is destined to win, as solved by the Machine, then every move is suboptimal. Perhaps the only optimal move is to make the game last as long as possible.

If we were at a Q&A, I think I would ask if you, as author, chose the Big Number arbirtarily or calculated it by some means. I suspect you wouldn't answer :) Good story, thank you!

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swordbroken
@swordbroken

These are good questions and thoughts. I will say that 1) I think, if I understand correctly, I agree with you re: "the key" proposed, at least in everyday application, but it can be said and done many different ways. 2) The color symbolism is not meant to be pessimistic; it is merely a convenient coincidence that the real subjects of solving the game and the advantage question lean in the direction of Black being a surprise, and that we have associations of black with void, darkness, devouring of meaning, etc. So, it's only pessimistic if you see not being able to know or do things as inherently bad. Thematically, at least, that's in opposition to the project goals and the internal logic of TMTKTW, which wants to know everything and do anything. 3) Interesting observation re: making the game last as long as possible. That is sort of the natural way of things, isn't it--or not, in opposition to the way, if driven unnaturally. 4) The number is pure fiction. There were a few factors going into how I chose the general size/impression of it, to make it do what I wanted. Not sure it was a perfect execution. Reveal: I am the machine.

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nycki93
@nycki93

I found the ending a little vague and unsatisfying. It really does bother me that, if everyone agrees the machine is killing the world, that they would want to keep it running anyway. Held at gunpoint, sure, I suppose individuals can be convinced, but it sounds like this machine is also massively expensive to run and produces mostly useless insights... surely "the economy" would abandon it, then? Maybe that's the point, that I'm supposed to be kind of incredulous because truth is stranger than fiction and all that?

Regardless, it made me think so its good art. Just not sure if I'm alone in finding it feels kinda inconclusive.

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Dragaroths-hideaway
@Dragaroths-hideaway

I felt the same until it went over things the machine had done in the past -- when something had created mostly utopic conditions insofar that its solved disease, poverty, etc. The reason its not abandoned in my eyes is because its done so many BIG things, now all thats left is mostly useless insights. but its provided so much else how could you abandon it?

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secrets
@secrets

It's living on borrowed time in roughly the same sense that the entire tech industry is; there are no plans to cancel it and quite a lot of pressure from everyone actually able to influence such things to expand its use as aggressively as possible

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swordbroken
@swordbroken

To sort of break kayfabe here, the obvious wrongness of the machine and the urgency of the need to stop it is intended in part as a maximally absurd stand-in for living and thinking and doing; it's an easy way to force the premise and highlight those paradoxes more accessibly played-around-with via chess. The machine is not just the AI or the machine of the world, it's the machine of our seeking and our actions. It is inconclusive, because if there was a conclusion there would be no game. 🖤

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nycki93
@nycki93

Ahh. I have to admit that this went over my head, and continues to go over my head, in the same way that Gary Larson complained about after "Cow Tools." The cow tools were meant to be pure abstractions, "tool shaped" but with no discernible purpose. However, one of the tools in the illustration accidentally resembles a saw, leading the viewer to ask "what do the other tools resemble?" and completely miss the point of the abstraction. By making the Machine That's Killing The World clearly resemble a specific real-world machine, it's nearly impossible for me to view it as a pure abstraction -- like, it's obviously a political caricature, just of a machine rather than a person, which means I am too easily seduced into the mental mode of asking "what is the political symbolism of the other characters in this image?" rather than being able to engage with it as a koan.

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Science
@Science

To answer this in a more direct way (that the author probably doesn’t fully intend based on the previous comments): Humanity usually already doesn’t turn off machines that kill the world.

We keep using fossil fuels, which are “bad” to put it simply. And the replacement ideas that get used are like… fracking. The US took like 15 years to ban lead after everyone knew it was killing people and creating a literally stunted generation. Have we yet arrived at even all acknowledging that global warming is happening? “Yes but it’s not made by us”, the liars in charge say. How many species are going to die out this year that would be preventable in various ways? We gotta keep sending kids into the Kobalt mines, there’s just no alternative because iPhone n+1!

There is barely anything that The Machine in the story could be driving forward that we aren’t already doing. Has it, in the process of fixing The Economy, found that actually we have to slowly but surely remove all animals from the world somehow? We’re already doing that now, it’s not even sci-fi.

Even if it were only like chatGPT-8 or whatever. Even THAT world seems worse to me than today. TMtktW might just create any written, visual or audio work you request from it happily. And in the process, it ruins all the joy of human artistic expression. Maybe it has gotten so good that it’s indistinguishable from Pixar or real actors or your favorite author. And now you can’t even decide to “not consume AI stuff” anymore because they don’t label it.

All of these are concrete ways in which The Machine could Kill the World. I kind of agree too that, if AI technology we have IRL stalled right today, that would be the only good outcome I give any likely chance.

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barbarian-radish
@barbarian-radish

To me, when the machine went on overdrive to give a low level explanation and it killed the world less, that indicated that the killing of the world isn't inherent to the machine but rather what people have asked the machine to do. In other words in the hands of capitalists, the machine will be used to kill the world, but other people might use it to a different end.

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swordbroken
@swordbroken

That's a fair observation to make, and I'm realizing now that I didn't totally think through the mechanics of that joke. It's a bit confused, how I wanted the machine power source and effects to function before vs how they need to function in that moment. However, and I cannot stress this enough, a machine that is killing the world less-than-usual is still killing the world.

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barbarian-radish
@barbarian-radish

definitely still killing the world, yeah. Not sure what joke you're referring to though. It seems thematically important that asking TMTKTW chess questions causes it to kill the world slower, but still kill it. If you really wanted it to be only the power source that is killing the world, I guess that is confusing, but I think it's easy enough to explain away (by saying there is also a social component to the world-killing), and the mechanics of the machine are not crucial to the story so they can suffer if it serves a thematic point. Thanks very much for sharing this very well-crafted narrative.

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