Anyone have some map coordinates with The Positronic Brain breakthrough and most disasters at 3-4? I like the disasters to be reasonably high to add some challenge. I want to do a playthrough where I turn off all births and let biorobots take over. Any other breakthroughs that synergize well or are just generally cool are a plus, but I appreciate any help at all.
I'm reading I, Robot at the moment, just finished reading "Evidence". Dr Susan Calvin says at some point that "you can't build a positronic brain that doesn't follow the Three Rules", and she should know, given her position. But then, in "Little Lost Robot" there is something that (almost) directly contradicts that — I won't go into details to keep this spoiler-free.
So my question is: what does it mean that you can't build such a brain? Is it somehow physically impossible, or is it just a matter of US Robots's internal bylaws that forbids it?
PS - I haven't read any other robot books besides this one so far, so if the answer is in one of the other ones, forgive me :)
I know that the transporter can be a deus ex machina at times, but why couldn’t Starfleet cyberneticists use Data’s pattern to help create more Soong type Androids.
I still think that 5N179E is the easiest map for most achievements if you have all current DLC active and no tech-altering settings. https://www.reddit.com/r/SurvivingMars/comments/l3ld3v/advice_for_factionbased_achievement_hunting/
But the map has no Positronic Brain Breakthrough, which makes it... rather useless for that achievement...
Instead I present to you... 4N172E! All 4's except Water (3) and all 1's except Meteors (2)
I've spoilered the detailed initial instructions in case you don't want it too easy.
- >!Land near D4 and scan C3, D4, and D5 in that order. This will find your initial concrete, rich minerals, and water.!<
- >!Research deep scans ASAP (it's on the first row) and once you have it scan C6 for the S-tier breakthrough Extractor AI!!<
- >!Positronic Brain is deep on C4, once you're ready to go for that.!<
Bonus style points for combining it with the achievement of passing the Founder stage with one colonist and then yolo-ing towards a colony of only biorobots, using the one founder to build the robots before either letting them die of old age or getting Earthsick and leaving.
This post was inspired by the article at https://underlore.com/datas-read-time/.
In ["The Measure of a Man"](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Measure_Of_A_Man_(episode)), Data states that he has an "ultimate storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits" (100 petabytes), and that his "total linear computational speed is 60 trillion operations per second" (60 teraflops).
A 2016 article suggests that the human brain may have a memory capacity somewhere on the order of 1 petabyte. Today, 100 petabytes of storage would probably cost somewhere on the order of $10 million, and wouldn't fit inside a humanoid body such as Data's. I find this stated memory capacity to be reasonable.
60 teraflops, on the other hand, seems slow. Depending on whether you're talking about the CPU or GPU, a modern personal computer probably averages something on the order of 1 teraflop. Today's supercomputers are running on the order of 100 petaflops, or 1666.66 times as fast as Data's "total linear computational speed", using massive parallel processing.
I therefore believe that Data's stated specifications suggest such massive parallel processing as well.
In ["Where Silence Has Lease"](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Where_Silence_Has_Lease_(episode)), we have the following exchange:
> RIKER: Data -- is there any record of any occurrence even vaguely similar to this?
> PICARD: "Similar" in even the slightest way.
> DATA: Accessing. (he pauses a moment) Negative. There is no record of any Federation vessel encountering anything remotely like this.
Three seconds were spent accessing, and for the purposes of this post, we can only assume that Data used that time to search the entirety of his stored memory before returning a null result. Given such an arbitrary and vague question posed, I doubt that sorting tricks to shorten the search from O(n) time had been previously set up. Then again, clearly the human brain does not need to iterate through the entirety of its memories to confirm such a negative, so if Data's positronic brain works the same way, he would have used fewer operations (and therefore has fewer parallel processors).
One area of speculation is whether Data's positronic brain utilizes quantum computing. /u/spatialwarp kindly [points out](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/ibzb41/thoughts_and_calculations_on_data
... keep reading on reddit ➡How much different is it from being deconstructed and reconstructed by the transporter? And even if the positronic brain is 100% not me, maybe Data will get a new friend who will hopefully put my body to good use.
Issac Asimov coined the term "Positronic Brain" for his series of Robot stories, which were eventually compiled into the book "I, Robot". At the time, positrons were a newly discovered subatomic particle, and Asimov thought it sounded cool and used it for the basis of the brains of his androids.
Thing is, positrons are a form of antimatter. It has the mass of an electron, but with a positive charge rather than a negative one. Like any form of antimatter, it will annihilate on contact with normal matter and release gigantic amounts of energy. Annihilating only half a gram of antimatter would be equivalent to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
This seems like an insanely dangerous thing to have zooming around in your android's head. Even if the total amount of antimatter measures in picograms, a few accidental contacts with matter would cause the android equivalent of severe brain damage, if not worse. It's also not clear what advantage positrons would have over plain electrons, or some other, safer subatomic particle, like photons. While Star Trek does show large scale, safe, and reliable control of antimatter to power warp engines, why would you bother to make a robot brain that way? Even if you wanted to, the methods of safe control would not necessarily scale down to something that size.
I propose that Soong didn't actually use positrons in the design of his androids. He knew his work was on to something, and decided to use the name for what was going to be the realization of this centuries old dream. The Asimov novels have been referenced directly as existing in-universe by the Picard series, and cyberneticsts seem to be aware of them (if not read them in whole). Soong likely knew the term and decided to slap it on to signify his great success.
Thus, Soong borrowed the term in-universe, just as Roddenberry borrowed the term out-of-universe.
Is it a computer or a circuit that uses a current of positrons (anti-electrons) instead of normal electric curents hich somehow allows it to generate artificial intelligence and consciousness?
Hi, I was just watching Buck Rogers in the 25th century and Dr. Goodfellow mentioned the same word to describe one of the sidekick robots in this episode. Did any other SF series beside ST:TNG use this phrase? Buck Rogers aired 1979-1981. Thanks very much
With the new Picard series, I started wondering what's the difference between the EMH program, and Data's positronic brain and why is it so much more difficult to create an android with human personality than it is to create digital AIs? Can't they just build a robot and upload such a program to its computer (which you can then call 'brain')?
Lewis Zimmerman's holograms achieved a much better simulacrum of sapience than Data ever exhibited. Voyager's Doctor was active for so long that he developed hobbies, close friendships, and even fell in love. The Enterprise-D computer succeeded in developing an apparently-fully-sapient hologram in the form of Professor Moriarty. I don't believe Data was ever shown to substantially outperform the Enterprise-D computer.
Is it perhaps that rather than being a truly revolutionary new technology, the positronic brain is more of an example of exceptional miniaturisation, and the Federation already possesses the ability to create sapient machines through the use of large computer networks?
Nowhere in the series does it occur. I don't recall if the possibility is discussed.
Hi all.
I've spent three days looking for this breakthrough to finish the platinum off but I cannot find it (PS4 ver. updated).
I have tried all sorts of locations on the Mars screen as well as many from forums across the Internet (inc. 28N10W which I see a lot). I went through all of my PS+ cloud saves, also checking all anomalies, expeditions and the telescope. Still nothing. I've tried with a mixture of sponsors, technologies and settings.
I haven't once seen this breakthrough.
I posted on the official forum; no reply.
Does anyone know any coords and locations where they found it so I could try them?
Thanks in advance.
I just don't get it. This breakthrough seems to be tailored towards late game. But at the very least you need the drone printer and a a steady supply of electronics to make it useful, so at least mid games?
This is generally also the point where births get crazy anyway so much easier to just.. do it the natural way. Now some might argue that biorobots are better since they never expire but considering that in those 70+ sols it takes for a human to "expire", you could birth and school thousands of replacements with real humans.. automatically replaced by shuttles.
It just seems like one of those "fun" breakthroughs and not actually useful efficiency wise to me
Imagine getting this early on. I got both late game and am slowly replacing humans.
What still bugs me is that Sung’s work on Data still cannot be replicated, and they completely take for granted that the transporter computer disassembles and reassembles beings’ bodies and intellect over and over and over. Despite all these countless transmissions of Data in probably dozens, if not hundreds, of different Federation transporters no one has even considered making one copy of Data. Even if you made one copy from each of these individual transmissions you could have an individual Data posted to every federation ship, starbase, spacedock and outpost in the galaxy almost instantly, since you can just message the transporter pattern via subspace communication to all the various transporter equipped facilities. And not only is this merely feasible by virtue of the general function of the transporter, but it is essentially the same thing the saved Pulaski from the aging disease in TNG Season 2 and how we ended up with a Riker clone in DS9. Long story short, if Data can be transported, and people can be cloned and/or “rebooted” why can’t we copy Data and his positronic brain?
So i am gonna replace all my skinbag whit robot. I am sure this will not cause any unfortunate movie scenario to appears in the future, right?
Data and the Doctor are prime examples of non human entities that branch out/discover to be more human like. Both are controlled by algorithms and go beyond the means of their original programming. But is it a failure for Soong since his work could not be replicated/mastered? To date there were 3 Soong androids: Data, Lore and B4. There are near infinitesimal amount of EMH/repurposed doctors in the quadrant, from replacement ship doctors to dilithium miners. The Doctor also grew to have what we could see as emotions which nearly caused his destruction (when he had to choose to save Kim over another crewman) or when his desire to sing caused him to develop vanity and nearly leave the ship.
It seems the federation mastered the concept of their own artificial intelligence, rendering what Soong had done as obsolete and pointless
I was doing a long-term biorobot run when I kept finding humans around, and left unchecked (as I did) kept reproductions of humans going. I couldn't figure it out and then it all made sense. Project Phoenix reconstructed dead biorobots as humans. Quite the revelation into the 700th sol of a play through that wasn't making sense.
Thought I'd share this with y'all.
Do you think it would it be similar to humans, were we just instantly "know" the information we are thinking about. Or would it be like accessing a file on a computer, where he has to consciously navigate to the right file? A mix of the two? Something else entirely?
I know on a few occasions he's said he was accessing information, but was it like a human thinking, were we "think" about it to remember the information, or was he manually navigating through files. -Documents - organic requirements - food - chocolate cake - Shortcut: Deanna Troi
I recently watched the DS9 episode Life Support, something just didn't sit right with me. It's been stated on more than one occasion in TNG that no one has been able to reproduce a stable positronic matrix (i.e. duplicate the Soong-type androids like Data). Yet in the span of a few hours Bashir whips up some positronic implants to replace parts of Vedek Bareil's brain! Is this even remotely realistic within the Star Trek universe? Granted, Bashir has his genetically enhanced intelligence, but I think there has to be more to it than that. A few theories that might make it plausible...
- Bareil's matrix is not a Soong-type matrix and therefore simpler.
- It's not fully autonomous like an android's since it's only replacing part of his brain
- Prior to this episode (TNG Birthright), Bashir personally met Data on the Enterprise, and perhaps took some scans or downloaded some files from the Enterprise that he was able to study off-screen.
What does the Institute think? How would you explain Bashir's ability to create a functioning positronic matrix to keep Vedek Bareil's brain functioning?
Edit: Spelling
Positrons are subatomic particles with the same mass as electrons, but are positively charged vs. their negatively charged counterparts.
"In "The Measure of a Man", a Starfleet judge rules that Data is not Starfleet property. The episode establishes that Data has a storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits, (88.81784197 PiB) and a total linear computational speed of 60 trillion operations per second.
Info taken from KnC´s newsletter
Titan Chip Specs Each Titan will have four of our groundbreaking chips installed on delivery to make sure they'll output the guaranteed minimum performance we have specified (300 MH/s). We're delighted to release these eye-catching specifications on our new Titan scrypt miner:
- 4 chips with 2284 cores each — truly record-breaking numbers in this space.
- 18272 threads per chip.
- 300 MB of onboard memory.
If you do the math you'll find that each Titan miner has a whopping 9136 cores running 73088 threads in total.
found information on the web that mining bitcoin requires 3385 integer operations per bitcoin hash But for Scrypt hash it seems to be a lot lot looot more.
So to make it simple
lets say it takes 138072 (128K) operations per Hash, could be more, could be less. (but way more than a Bitcoin Hash, 40 times more) Would equal ~434.555.884 Hashes/second, 434.5MHs Scrypting, (Litecoin) and that is with a Positronic brain which is in no way optimized for scrypt-mining, But it´ll do just fine But im not sure you will ever reach ROI haha
For Bitcoin , assuming "60 Trillion operations" could be integer operations aswell, would be able to calculate 17.725.258.493.35 Hashes/s 17.725GHs SHA-256.
. . .
Summarizing. Mr data´s Positronic brain, that has a capacity of 60 Trillion Operations per second would be able to
- Mine LiteCoins at 434.5MHs
- Mine BitCoins at 17.725GHs
Bear in mind that
- Positronic brains does NOT exist in todays wonderful world but in the world of Star Trek, OK?!
- Mr Data´s Positronic brain was designed for other purposes than mining cryptocurrency !
- The calculation made for Litecoin Mining is rather fictive (made up) since there were no info about how many operations that is needed to do 1 Hash for Litecoin as far as i have searched.
- ROI is NOT going to be reached until sometime after year 2336 when Mr Data is born"
source: http://forum.kncminer.com/forum/off-topic/humor/34636-data-s-gh-sec
I'm currently reading I, Robot, which takes place in a period of time where humans co-exist with the machines. I would like to be exposed to the period of time that comes after that.
What books would you guys recommend?
Data was a marvel of computer science and AI technology. But what really made him unique was the skillful operation of his mechanical body. The potential for quantum computing and other unique computer and networking technologies is high and there's no reason to think there won't be breakthroughs of this magnitude in a couple of hundred years.
But what's extraordinary is the way Data's body moves in such a human like way. He's moves virtually silent, like a human. Modern moving non-biological machines make noise. The more they move, and the more they can move, the more noise they make. Even the Tesla automobile, which is all electric and noticeably quieter than a combustion automobile, still makes noise. Also, where the Tesla generates consistent circular motion, Data is performing a range of motion using joint-like pivots, all with perfect dexterity and speed. He demonstrates enormous strength, again perfectly silently, while utilizing perfect balance and control. He is capable of being shot with arrows without taking damage, and requires almost no maintenance time. Being around him would not be strange because of a really fast computer in his head. It would be weird because of how much his body and voice come across as human.
Or should we trust them to get all their nutrition from replicators?
