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    D&D General Forgotten Realms geographic changes.

    That could just be an in-universe cartographer accidentally assigning the wrong scale to an otherwise-accurate map. (Something similar happened in the real world when the maps in the Kara-Tur box set were commissioned. The cartographer drew proportionally-accurate maps but then assigned them an...
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    D&D General Forgotten Realms geographic changes.

    Now reverse the emphasis you added to the first sentence: The other two maps are detailed blow-ups of sections of the former maps, covering that region from the Sword Coast to The Dragon Reach in great detail, for use in adventuring through the Realms. A detailed blow-up of an in-universe map...
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    D&D General Forgotten Realms geographic changes.

    The first edition box set explicitly states the large-scale 1e/2e maps of Faerun are in-universe maps which might contain errors. I don't see any reason to assume later maps are any different. As far as I can tell, the only maps that are guaranteed to be accurate are the ones the DM has decided...
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    D&D General Forgotten Realms geographic changes.

    You responded to my post directly, but you seem to be addressing sticklers for setting canon, not me specifically. Given that, I'll try to frame my response in terms of setting canon (despite not being much of a stickler for setting canon, myself). Here's my current best effort: The DM's...
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    D&D General Forgotten Realms geographic changes.

    My in-universe explanation for the 3e map changes: the in-universe cartographers who made the 3e map used the same process as the real-world cartographers who made the 3e map. The real-world 3e cartographers decided to compress open spaces shown on older maps to fit the surrounding areas onto a...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    BTW, there seem to be two different definitions of determinism being used in the last few posts. Some posters (such as myself) are talking about what is deterministic in a strictly technical sense. We're talking about what it would be possible to predict given access to any arbitrary but finite...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    I believe our only point of disagreement involves your use of the bolded statement. I contend it would be more accurate to say, "not everything about AI is being predicted." I have seen enough first-hand evidence to convince me that everything about AI can be predicted. There is no theoretical...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    Because predictable output is what happens once you have error free code that covers all desired use cases, and that sort of code is the end result of an incremental process. As a developer, you (ideally) know the logic you want your code to follow, but due to human limitations, it's unlikely...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    Can a randomly selected person predict an AI's aggregate output? No. Can the developers of an AI predict its behavior in aggregate? In my experience, yes. I have been sitting in the room when AI developers have done it. They looked the training data, they looked at the code, and they said, "Add...
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    The Rise And Fall Of Evil Genius Games

    As a general principal, I'm sorry if anything I've said or done has unintentionally caused another person to experience undue distress. But feel free to apologize for other people's reactions to your words, if that's what works for you. Not a rhetorical choice I'd have made if I were trying to...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    I would say AI and other complex software is opaque for a number of different reasons. It's difficult to interpret without a lot of programming expertise. It's made up of many different interacting parts developed by many different engineers. It's a chaotic system (in the mathematical sense), so...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    In my three years working professionally with AI, I've routinely witnessed software engineers removing unwanted results by directly manipulating the code, because they wrote that code, understand what it does, and know how to change it. Granted, I was working at a small tech start-up whose AI...
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    Why do many people prefer roll-high to roll-under?

    This is only a problem in a system where the results of a die roll are always either complete success or complete failure. If you have degrees of success and degrees of failure, there are other factors involved beyond just, "Did I succeed, yes or no?"
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    Why do many people prefer roll-high to roll-under?

    I would assume roll-over is generally more popular because many people are conditioned by a variety of societal factors to assume the larger of two numbers is better. That being said, I'm going to cast my vote for Blackjack- or Price-is-Right-style mechanics, where you try to role as high as...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    To be fair, most code with lots of moving parts can be described as indecipherable by a majority of the public. If it doesn't have good documentation, it's probably indecipherable to most people who didn't actively write it. That's nothing unique to AI. That's just a function of extremely...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    Computer scientists like to use terms like "black box" and "hidden layers" as technical jargon. Personally, I think it would be more accurate to use terminology from chaos theory: every sufficiently complex computer program is a chaotic system. Roughly speaking, a chaotic system is one whose end...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    I agree with much of your argument, but I disagree with the conclusion drawn in the quoted statement. The fact that an AI assigns weights to training data has no bearing on how easy or how hard it is to create a human-readable explanation for the AI's output. It is neither impossible nor...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    When talking about the internal logic of an AI, I wouldn't say "the code is only half the equation." I would say the code is the internal logic of the AI. Full stop. The fact that there are millions of weights being automatically adjusted doesn't make the logic any more or less complex than the...
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    What's the difference between AI and a random generator?

    I worked for three years as a professional AI trainer at a tech start-up (using non-pirated data sets), and I have to largely disagree with your assertion. Software engineers who program AI professionally absolutely do know the logic their AI uses to produce results, to the same extent they...
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