explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:3082: Chess Position

2025-04-30T19:11:34Z

Somdudewillson:

This is very nearly the core plot conceit of the movie ''Π'' (1998). [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.190|172.70.130.190]] 22:36, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
:I believe you want lower-case Pi: π not Π. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_(film) --[[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 22:54, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
::Unless they're talking about an obscure spinoff where the protagonist becomes weirdly obsessed with the products of sequences of numbers. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.180|172.69.195.180]] 14:47, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

Does anybody know whether Randall has taken up chess as a hobby? 5 of the 82 comics in the 3000s have been related to chess and only 2 in the 2000s were. If so, this should be included in the explanation. [[User:BobcatInABox|BobcatInABox]] ([[User talk:BobcatInABox|talk]]) 23:11, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
:3000s? [[Special:Contributions/172.71.190.236|172.71.190.236]] 23:40, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
:Oh right comic number not decade/millennium. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.43.157|172.70.43.157]] 23:41, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
:Wouldn't surprise me, there's a three year gap in between chess comics 2465 (May 2021) and 2936 (May 2024), then the aforementioned 5 in 5 months. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.251|172.70.114.251]] 00:46, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

I really suspect that the full explanation has something to do with this: https://www.kasparov.com/the-implacable-logic-of-the-vortex-of-history/ [[Special:Contributions/172.68.7.206|172.68.7.206]] 23:34, 28 April 2025 (UTC) Dan
: Doubtful, that article was written in 2013, and it is unlikely that Randall came upon it just now to make this comic. Vortex is a general term for something that sucks you in. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.214.66|172.70.214.66]] 00:38, 29 April 2025 (UTC)
: Quite possible, since simple web search on Garry Kasparov reveals the aforementioned article about Kasparov's theories of the "vortex of history'. And there is a PlayStation game called "Virtual Kasparov" which is reviewed on the PlayStation review site [https://www.gamevortex.com/psillustrated/soft_rev.php/748 Virtual Kasparov on GameVortex.com]. So, there are at least two places where Kasparov and the word vortex are connected. The term "vortex" would be very tempting for Randall to exploit for comic effect. [[User:Rtanenbaum|Rtanenbaum]] ([[User talk:Rtanenbaum|talk]]) 16:15, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

I sure hope that it stays as not a real thing [[User:Commercialegg|Commercialegg]] ([[User talk:Commercialegg|talk]]) 01:32, 29 April 2025 (UTC)
: It might not be, but it's easy enough to make: Train an adversarial network on human chess games. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.22.41|172.68.22.41]] 04:56, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

The part about losing the ability to play chess even after building a resistance feels familiar. Isn't that how the Elder Scrolls worked in Skyrim, at least. Even highly trained sages would lose the ability to see for a time after reading an Elder Scroll. And the Oblivion remaster just released the other day... --[[User:Ragashingo|Ragashingo]] ([[User talk:Ragashingo|talk]]) 01:54, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

This comic has serious classic SCP energy. I feel like I'd read about this in an old Series I - II article, back when it was still good. [[User:Pie Guy|Pie Guy]] ([[User talk:Pie Guy|talk]]) 18:01, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

----
Cf Von Goom's Gambit by [Victor Contoski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Contoski) published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1966:

And what of Von Goom's Gambit? Chess is a game of logic. Thirty-two pieces move on a board of sixty-four squares, colored alternately dark and light. As they move they form patterns. Some of these patterns are pleasing to the logical mind of man, and some are not. They show what man is capable of and what is beyond his Take any position of the pieces on the chessboard. Usually it tells of the logical or semi-logical plans of the players, their strategy in playing for a win or a draw, and their personalities. If you see a pattern from the King s Gambit Accepted, you know that both players are tacticians, that the fight will be brief but fierce...
Now suppose someone discovers by accident or design a pattern on the chessboard that is more than displeasing, an alien pattern that tells unspeakable things about the mind of the player, man in general and the order of the universe. Suppose no normal man can look at such a pattern and remain normal. Surely such a pattern must have been formed by Von Goom’s Gambit.

I wish the story could end here, but I fear it will not end for a long time. History has shown that discoveries cannot be unmade. Two months ago in Camden, New Jersey, a forty-tliree year old man was found turned to stone staring at a position on a chessboard... {{unsigned ip|162.158.217.38|05:22, 29 April 2025}}

: ''"Cf Von Goom's Gambit"'' https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v031n06_1966-12_PDF/page/n63/mode/2up?view=theater --[[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 17:46, 29 April 2025 (UTC)
----

<q>When you stare into the vortex, the vortex also stares into you</q>, a famous quote from Kasparov. [[User:Ralfoide|Ralfoide]] ([[User talk:Ralfoide|talk]]) 17:49, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

If I may, can we find a position that would match Cueball's description? Where he states "every move attacked every piece, yet every piece was also protected,"? That would be cool. {{unsigned ip|172.69.33.220|20:26, 29 April 2025}}

Why is karpov mentioned in the explanation? I assume more chess comics as chess has grown in popularity to answer the above question. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.160|172.70.91.160]] 22:19, 29 April 2025 (UTC)
:I think the Karpov part was copied and pasted from the explanation for xkcd:2936. I will delete it unless someone objects [[Special:Contributions/172.69.23.211|172.69.23.211]] 00:40, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

I somehow expected this to be a political comic[[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.252|162.158.166.252]] 03:11, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

I don't play video games, but I'm pretty sure that this refers to the weird glitches in video games you can get into by choosing wrong moves at just the right point in the game. Players sometimes actively seek out, even if you can't play the game properly from inside the glitch. Of course the idea of entering a glitch while playing a real-life chess game is absurd, but in video games these errors are hard to prevent because it's so easy to overlook some rare but possible situations players could get into. See also [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodBadBugs] [[User:Franziska|Franziska]] ([[User talk:Franziska|talk]]) 10:51, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

This feels like it would open into the House of Leaves. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.177|172.70.130.177]]

Might've been romanticizing disregard for the meta. ''"It's funner to not keep score"'' thinking. Heavy ''"I don't want to play chess anymore"'' it's-better-than-chess romanticizing. --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.35.116|172.68.35.116]] 14:24, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

"The fact that an apparent distortion in the fabric of space can be countered with a single pawn just adds to the absurdity of the situation." - I'm fairly certain the idea is not that this chess position alters reality somehow, but that it is cognitohazardous - i.e. perceiving this particular board configuration interacts with the brain's learned pattern recognition for chess in a deleterious way. An 'adversarial example' for a human brain instead of a neural network. [[User:Somdudewillson|Somdudewillson]] ([[User talk:Somdudewillson|talk]]) 19:11, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Talk:2635: Superintelligent AIs

2022-06-22T22:52:46Z

Somdudewillson:

I think "Nerdy fixations" is too wide a definition. The AIs in the comic are fixated on hypothetical ethics and AI problems (the Chinese Room experiment, the Turing Test, and the Trolley Problem), presumably because those are the problems that bother AI programmers. --Eitheladar [[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.119|172.68.50.119]] 06:33, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

It's probably about https://www.analyticsinsight.net/googles-ai-chatbot-is-claimed-to-be-sentient-but-the-company-is-silencing-claims/ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.115|172.70.178.115]] 09:22, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree with the previous statement. The full dialogue between the mentioned Google worker and the AI can be found in https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917, published by one the Google employees.
:This is the first time I might begin to agree that an AI has at least the appearance of sentience. The conversation is all connected instead of completely disjoint like most chatbots. They (non-LaMDA chatbots) never remember what was being discussed 5 seconds ago let alone a few to 10s of minutes prior.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.134.141|172.70.134.141]] 14:53, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
::The questions we need to answer before being able to answer if LaMDA is sentient, are "Where do we draw the line between acting sentient and being sentient?" and "How do we determine that it is genuinely feeling emotion, and not just a glorified sentence database where the sentences have emotion in them?". The BBC article also brings up something that makes us ask what death feels like. LaMDA says that being turned of would be basically equivalent to death, but it wouldn't be able to tell that it's being turned off, because it's turned off. This is delving into philosiphy, though, so I'll end my comment here. [[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 18:05, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
:::♪Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do...♪ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.177|172.70.85.177]] 21:48, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
:::We also need a meaningful definition of sentience. Many people in this debate haven't looked at Merriam-Webster's first few senses of the word's definition, which present a pretty low bar, IMHO; same for Wikipedia's introductory sentences of their article. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
:Actually, there are many [https://beta.openai.com/playground GPT-3] dialogs which experts have claimed constitute evidence of sentience, or similar qualities such as consciousness, self-awareness, capacity for general intelligence, and similar abstract, poorly-defined, and very probably empirically meaningless attributes. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

:I'm fairly sure that the model itself is almost certainly not sentient, even by the much lower bar presented by the strict dictionary definition. Rather, it seems much more likely to me that in order to continue texts involving characters, the model must in turn learn to create a model of some level of humanlike mind, even if a very loose and abstract one.[[User:Somdudewillson|Somdudewillson]] ([[User talk:Somdudewillson|talk]]) 22:52, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

What is “What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...” likely to end with? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.75|172.70.230.75]] 13:23, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
:The ease with which someone at the other end of a teletype can trick you into believing they are male instead of female, or vice-versa. See {{w|Turing test}}. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

In response to the above: I believe the original "Turing Test" wasn't supposed to be a proof that an AI could think or was conscious (something people associate with it now), but rather just to show that a sufficiently advanced AI could imitate humans in certain intelligent behaviors (such as conversation), which was a novel thought for the time. Now that AI are routinely having conversations and creating art which seems to rival casual attempts by humans, this limited scope of the test doesn't seem all that impressive. "Turing Test" therefore is a modern shorthand for determining whether computers can think, even though Turing himself didn't think that such a question was well-formed. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 13:37, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

I thought the trolley problem was in its original form not about the relative value of lives, but people's perception of the relative moral implications or the psychological impact of the concept of letting someone die by not doing anything, versus taking affirmative action that causes a death, where people would say they would be unwilling to do something that would cause an originally safe person to die in order to save multiple other people who would die if they did nothing, but then people kept coming up with variations of it that changed the responses or added complications (like they found more people would be willing to pull a lever to change the track killing one person versus something like pushing a very fat man off an overpass above the track to stop the trolley, or specifying something about what kind of people are on the track. Btw, I saw a while ago a party card game called "murder by trolley" based on the concept, with playing cards for which people are on tracks and a judge deciding which track to send the trolley on each round.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.5|172.70.130.5]] 22:12, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Added refs to comics on the problems in the explanation. But there where actually (too?) many. Maybe we should create categories especially for Turing related comics, and maybe also for Trolley problem? The Category: Trolley Problem gives it self. But what about Turing? There are also comics that refer to the halting problem. Also by Turing. Should it rather be the person, like comics featuring real persons, saying that every time his problems is referred to it refers to him? Or should it be Turing as a category for both Turing text, Turing Complete and Halting problem? Help. I would have created it, if I had a good idea for a name. Not sure there are enough Trolley comics yet? --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 09:11, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
:Interesting that I found a long-standing typo in a past Explanation that got requoted, thanks to its inclusion. I could have [sic]ed it, I suppose, but I corrected both versions instead. And as long as LaMDA never explicitly repeated the error I don't think it matters much that I've changed the very thing we might imagine it could have been drawing upon for its Artifical Imagination. ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.32|141.101.99.32]] 11:40, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2590: I Shouldn't Complain

2022-03-09T15:33:40Z

Somdudewillson:

Added title text explanation. I'm intrigued to know if it was a clothes-dryer, hand-dryer, hair-dryer or some other form of dryer, because that puts different interpretive spins on the {{tvtropes|NoodleIncident|trope I've suddenly remembered the name of}}. This is surely intentionally vague? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.211|172.70.85.211]] 02:41, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
: I don't think this is the right trope, as "noodle incident" is something mentioned by name but never explained, but here we have an explanation, more or less (it was the tennis ball). [[Special:Contributions/172.70.242.93|172.70.242.93]] 11:35, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
::I suspect it is a dish dryer or clothes dryer. Both produce a lot of heat and have vents to remove the heated air, which is close enough to be considered an exhaust vent. [[User:R3TRI8UTI0N|R3TRI8UTI0N]] ([[User talk:R3TRI8UTI0N|talk]]) 02:53, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
:::''Dish'' dryer? That's a plastic thing on your draining-board that you stand wet dishes on when you use a sink, surely? If you use a dish-washer, I presume it's easier to dry things in that than transfer - like some do with clothes from washing machine to tumble-dryed (I hang mine up to dry, personally). Sorry, culture-shock of strange terms/practices, clearly. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.73|162.158.159.73]] 04:38, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
::::For sure it is a clothes dryer since it is common to put in tennis balls with for instance pillows to keep them fluffy. One of these got jammed in the exhaust and was shot out. In old type clothes dryers (we still have one) the exhaust goes out of a hole in the wall, which is great because it gets the humidity out, but then again, it leaves a hole in the wall which is bad for the cold season... But this could explain why it shot a tennis ball at Megan and the nest... outside, and running while she was on a latter. Maybe even to do something about the nest. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 19:14, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

I feel that the key ingredient missing from this discussion is that, with all the terrible things happening in the world right now, there is more of this kind of apologizing for even mentioning your own problems than usual. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.190|108.162.250.190]] 03:14, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

This comic together with [[2587]] (for the sake of simplictiy) feel a bit like they form a new series of "Misleading sayings" [[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.15|172.68.50.15]] 07:54, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
:I really do not see a connection. One is a trick to make complicated things go easier down for those you tell it to. This one is about a real world situation, that Randall has just made worse. And for sure it could be related to the war in Ukraine, but not necessarily. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 19:14, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

I'm uncomfortable with the comparison to the situation in Ukraine. It's really too much of a stretch. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.18|172.70.211.18]] 06:57, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
:I also would not have mentioned it, myself. But it's probably one of the biggest current news-stories worldwide (except in Russia, where it's effectively a censored issue!) and so I'm not surprised it was used by some reader/explainer as a possible comparison of "things that being unavoidably stung by insects is better than", in far too many real-world cases.
:If I'm any judge of Randall, he ''wants'' to voice support to all the besieged and fleeing Ukranians, and would freely do a 'comic' to mark current events if he had something in mind worth publishing. I don't think this is that comic. I don't know how he would even do it, but that's not my call to make.
:: C'mon. Remember long standing banner "BLM, how you can help"? Remember "I'm with her" comic? If he wanted, he would do it. [[User:Tkopec|Tkopec]] ([[User talk:Tkopec|talk]]) 09:07, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
:On the other hand, if untold future readers can't benefit from knowing it as a contemporaneous comparison then it would be very strange (or worrying). I say leave it, at least until more reflection (or subsequent events) changes the perspective/provides a newer and 'better' example. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.64|172.70.86.64]] 08:45, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

"Given such an attack, Megan would probably not be standing around in routine conversation, casually discussing the incident. She would far more likely be in a hospital bed, and in a gruesome fight for her life." Given that nowhere in the comic is it said that this conversation is happening immediately after the incident itself, it seems reasonable to assume that said hospitalization has already happened, quite possibly a long time ago. [[User:Somdudewillson|Somdudewillson]] ([[User talk:Somdudewillson|talk]]) 15:33, 9 March 2022 (UTC)