Happy Fun Adventure Time! - an Illustrated Adventure

[Krylo]

Robots don't have retinas.

USE MASS to EVOLVE a method of TURNING EXCESS MASS into ENERGY.

USE MASS to EVOLVE a method of CHANNELING ENERGY INTO LASER EYES for more powerful and energetic bursts.

With our now significantly reduced mass RETREAT quickly to the NORTH, the way that we came.

Once it is safe to do so, RETURN to EAT REMAINS of the DWELLER.

[Donomni]

Originally Posted by BitVyper

I have a compromise.

Seriously. The cuteness must not be sacrificed!

I mean, yeah, keep working on evolutions that work, but in the general direction of godless cute-and-blobby killing machines.

[tacticslion]

Originally Posted by ziratha

>learn to love
>love the robot
>sign up for a 20 year mortgage with the robot
>get in fight with robot
>take the house in the divorce
>get your groove back.

>In your mind only, as a theoretical excercise significantly after you are no longer in danger of being imminantly squished by robot fist and thereby losing your prescious, prescious internal thinky bits.

Originally Posted by Wigmund

So how does IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY work Squishy? You have time to ponder this before the GENTLEMANLY ROBOT's HAND decides what to do next.

Basically, we can't "power up" the laser until we have a number of specific, related (yet independantly semi-sensible) evolutions which would logically contribute to the over-all 'powering' of the laser. In other words: you can't have a motor without all the parts. Right now, to extend the analogy, we've got a simple bicycle motor - it uses pedals to turn a basic gear that moves a chain attatched to two wheels for the express purpose of moving it. The mechanical parts are all present and made of a similar element - effectively making it self-sufficient (it's part of us, we supply the external power).
What we're talking about is turning this into an internal-combustion engine, like a motorcycle, or even race car. The "chain" needs to become a serpentine belt, we need pistons instead of pedals, fuel-storage* and fuel* instead of our current 'us' power, the fuel injector, the spark plug, the antifreeze (and storage elements), the battery (different from fuel, we may already provide this), the radiator, and all the other individual parts of the engine.

All of this is metaphorically speaking, of course - I have no idea "how" our current laser eyes work - and I bet our squishy protagonist doesn't know either, he just uses it, as we would our arms or eyes 5,000 years ago - with no modern scientific understanding of our bodies, just how we do it.

The analogy above, however, is what irreducible complexity is all about. If an internal combustion engine is missing only one part, it doesn't work - it is irreducibly complex. I grant that the machine - the car or motorcycle - can be moved without the engine, but that's really slow and ungainly, and the motor itself - the normal driving force - can't and won't work. Alternatively, if it does, it won't work long: it'll overheat and catch fire (potentially blowing up) or simply break and never work again. That said, we aren't trying to make a car - we don't need the AC, the heater, the stereo, or anything else 'extra' for simple comfort. We need to go minimal until we know we can survive the game, whatever that is... which brings up the point that we still don't know what we're doing, exactly, or what the rules are.

When we do try to make changes we will need to understand what rule-system we're working off of (which it seems to be a near-ideal physics-and-chemistry system with sci-fantasy biological overtures) in order to know what we do need. We may need to abondon the laser eyes, sadly - it might be prohibitively expensive. Alternatively, we might just have to grow into it - literally, we might not have enough bio-mass right now. You can't stick a motorcycle engine on a bycicle - you have to have a large and strong enough framework to support it.

To get back to the quotes in question: the reason that the quoted post was the opposite of how irreducible complexity works, it's like saying "Hey, guys, I know how we can save a ton of money - instead of buying all the motorcycle parts, we can build a unicycle (they're much cheaper) and then use that the same way we would a motorcycle, including filling up its internal combustion engine with really high quality fuel that we make in our distillery in our house! Brilliant!" while Ahra's response indicates "No, that's stupid, you need the (larger and more complex) motorcycle body and the engine - you can't reduce it to being a unicycle to avoid paying the price. Further your distillery will wreck that engine faster than you could sneeze 'oops'."

*fuel: it will require more than what we can give it now. I'm going to say we have to find a powersource greater than "ourself". Perhaps somehow converting the gold thing, but I'm not certain.

EDIT:
...
...
...
Dang. Kirby is... is really an impressively accurate conceptualization for what we are. Consumption leads to utilizing what we consume to achieve a limited set of "higher" evolutionary states. Pokemon has been an adequate analogy until now, but Kirby is even better, as he can 'sacrifice' unwanted power for another more useful one. Huh. I wonder if - upon consuming the dweller - he can inherent some of its properties (including the hypnotic mouth effect which would, in theory, be infinately useful to an all-consuming cuteness). Again, I reitterate, we don't know the rules yet - we need to be more aware of what's going on. I'd suggest a better brain - but we need to get out of here first, so our current one can't be squished.

Also: dang it, krylo, why are you so much better and faster at saying everything I want to? Well played, good sir, well played.

EDIT PART 2:
No, we're totally not godless. We totally worshipped that mega mushroom, the strange mushroom, and/or whatever primal and/or divine spirit was "behind" such a glorious thing.

ALSO, while I wholeheartedly embrace the cute in general, we may - at some point - need to evolve past that/mature to the point that we can truly survive. As evidenced by Kirby, we are probably some ways off from that, but I would like us to keep our options open.

[Krylo]

Forgot about this:

Originally Posted by tacticslion

Regardless: I've a bad feeling for our current predicament - we need to get out of the robot's attack-zone, but we don't know what that is, exactly. How did the robot send its fist (containing, of all things, a new set of eyes) all the way down here? Where is the main body? At what point and in what way did it arrive here? Certainly not down the main passage presented in post #104 where we ate the mold - we don't even know where that led (I'm actually having some problems putting the full map in order in my head).

See attached file for basic Layout. Robot not drawn to scale.

As to Evolution (for discussion, not for now):
In general/theory, I agree with the basics of SWBob's suggestion here, however now is not the moment as we don't have enough fluid or time to do so, and, if I may suggest, we seriously consider a focusing element so that the lasers run through our crest (instead of our eyes) for various effects (scattering, focusing, intensifying, etc) based on how we work it.

The shards are parts of a broken bottle from the room the robot is in. It was full of nutrient rich liquid. This is pretty obvious from looking at the first few pages and using some deductive reasoning.

Knowing this and basic light physics, we know that any attempts to 'focus' our lasers through the shards would be foolhardy, as you don't use random glass bottles to focus lasers. You use carefully created and aligned lenses. The only result firing our lasers through the glass shards would have is diffusing them even further than they already are, and considering how weak they are currently this would effectively remove all use for them. They already don't have much of one.

We need to increase energy output.

Currently we have both laser eyes and bioluminescence - not bad, but that's two things that take radiant energy (light) and focus it into two different ways, being inefficient in both evolutions and our (limited) bio-energy distribution.

Thanks for the reminder. With the Dweller dead bioluminescence is now useless considering we have echolocation.

UNEVOLVE BIOLUMINESCENCE.

EDIT FORGOT TO ACTUALLY ATTACH ATTACHED FILE!

[BitVyper]

Robots don't have retinas.

You can't prove that!

[tacticslion]

Originally Posted by Krylo

The shards are parts of a broken bottle from the room the robot is in. It was full of nutrient rich liquid. This is pretty obvious from looking at the first few pages and using some deductive reasoning.

Knowing this and basic light physics, we know that any attempts to 'focus' our lasers through the shards would be foolhardy, as you don't use random glass bottles to focus lasers. You use carefully created and aligned lenses. The only result firing our lasers through the glass shards would have is diffusing them even further than they already are, and considering how weak they are currently this would effectively remove all use for them. They already don't have much of one.

We need to increase energy output.

I'd agree in general, however do remember we're living in a world where we maintain sensual "vision" while we shoot photons out of our photon-receptor things (eyes), at least by way representation within the comic so far, however that could have just been artistic liscence, or the Dweller's view, as we have seen things (to a limited extent) from the veiw of another (the robot, explaining he was a gentleman). Hm, actually, this could be a limited form of telepathy. All that said, yeah, I get the fact that reflection and refraction would be a part of the negative processes, but that's gotta happen in the eyes too, at least to some extent. Further, it's theoretically possible for us to 'grind' the glass into suitable lenses. Really, I was thinking of a shining horn-of-light like thing (think Carbunkle from various final fantasy games), but I'm not overly attatched to that idea - so consider it withdrawn. Currently the glass is purely decorative to the best of my knowledge, though it might come in useful at some point. We really don't know the full rules of the world we're living in yet, only that they aren't completely ours.

Originally Posted by Krylo

Thanks for the reminder. With the Dweller dead bioluminescence is now useless considering we have echolocation.

UNEVOLVE BIOLUMINESCENCE.

I gotta disagree, especially right now. UNevolving might use up 'fluids' just as evolving might - we know this isn't a perfect system with no loss. Currently we're in the middle of a battle. Discretion, I think at this point, is the better part of valor, and safety before boldness.

Originally Posted by Krylo

EDIT FORGOT TO ACTUALLY ATTACH ATTACHED FILE!

Thanks for the file, but that still doesn't explain where the distant warm glowy thing was, or how our little pit was relative to the sun. I'm just unsure of those locations at present.

[Aerozord]

I think we need to run. look we couldn't handle the dweller, I doubt we can do anything about the thing that killed it in half a second

[tacticslion]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

I think we need to run. look we couldn't handle the dweller, I doubt we can do anything about the thing that killed it in half a second

I think we are mostly all in agreement with this at this time. The Robot is just too much. That said, it may be quite possible for the robot to simply seal us in our little hole. We don't know that there's another way out... so hm.

Oddly, we know that the robot is "Guardian" - but "Guardian" of what? Of the plaque? Of this whole? Yeah, we know the glass came from "above"... but why? Where did we come from? Why did we just spontaneously start existing (and evolving) in this pit? Were we in that glass beaker/vial/thing that shattered? Was that red stuff we drank? Were both we and that red stuff? We don't know.

Incidentally:
>compare "taste" of red liquid to Dweller's 'leakyness' and think if they're similar*

*I know we could experience (and still can experience) 'taste' without a devoted tongue because the red stuff tasted 'salty' and the mushrooms were 'delicious'.

It's quite possible that the Guardian is here to prevent the experiments (creatures like ourself and the dweller) from getting out. Perhaps its after the gold thing. Perhaps it simply is there to ensure that the gold thing doesn't leave (though that seems unlikely as it punched us the first time it saw us, even without the gold thing). It's still quite telling that the only 'sentient' life we've found so far is: a Dweller (tentacle horror) and a Guardian (massive punchy robot).

My point - again - is that we're lacking in information. But also that we should get some ideas going here. We need to think - why was the "Dweller" dwelling there - obviously it can't stand light, but why here? Why is the "Guardian" guarding here? What is the "Guardian" guarding? Is it independantly sentient, or is it highly limited in its programming with only apparent sentience due to the parameters it opperates under (like a golem)? I know its likely we won't come up with actual answers, but I'd like to hear from others and see what they think... and we might be able to get some ideas together for hammering out how things work.

[Tev]

Originally Posted by tacticslion

My point - again - is that we're lacking in information. But also that we should get some ideas going here. We need to think - why was the "Dweller" dwelling there - obviously it can't stand light, but why here? Why is the "Guardian" guarding here? What is the "Guardian" guarding? Is it independantly sentient, or is it highly limited in its programming with only apparent sentience due to the parameters it opperates under (like a golem)? I know its likely we won't come up with actual answers, but I'd like to hear from others and see what they think... and we might be able to get some ideas together for hammering out how things work.

That sounds like waaaaaay to much using your thinking brain to work through our squishy, lazer-eyed problems. Imagine that we have the mental capacity of a cat. Enough autonomy to make humans think we are intelligent yet at the same time very instinct driven.

In our current situation what we are doing is failing at hunting. We have the most awesome ability to consciously acquire evolutionary adaptations at will. Our biggest hold-up is the conference in our mind that is interfering with our focus.

Decisions for the here and now are as follows:
-Herbivore, Carnivore, Omnivore, or at the very least, Predator or Prey? We need to pick one and stick with it. We need to settle on a frame of mind and work our evolutions to fit the mold.
-Fight or flee? The Dweller is not going to go away. We can either fight it now or spend our time running from it. We need to establish the food chain of this little hole and I want us to be on top.

[Krylo]

Omnivore, Predator, Flee Robot, Fight Dweller.

Also: Laser eyes.