Log Horizon: Elder Tale World Theories and Speculation [Absolutely NO SPOILER]

[hamazura]

Originally Posted by Xacual

That goes against what we know of the game. We know that's it's a 20 year old game. The timing would mean the development would have started 29 years ago which would be around 1989 our years. No one was developing or even thinking about developing MMO type games that far back.

btw what year is now in log horizon?
just want to say 20 year old online game is possible. just like ragnarok online, the legendary online game appeared in 2002 and still exist and popular now, even sequel.

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by hamazura

btw what year is now in log horizon?
just want to say 20 year old online game is possible. just like ragnarok online, the legendary online game appeared in 2002 and still exist and popular now, even sequel.

LH is set in 2018

[FRS]

Originally Posted by Xacual

...


I'm not sure how these have to do with what I said, none of these had their development started at the end of the 80s.

Thoses are the releases dates so the dev started in the begining of the 90's or late 80's.

[teja208]

Here's something I came up regarding demihuman existance.

If the third world fraction is what cause players' consciouses to merge/trap whetever etc. into their game avaters, how can we tell whether or not the same thing doesn't happened to demihumans. What I'm implying is demihumans conscious could exist or used to exist somewhere else in another world where someone or something (alian species maybe) are controling them from behind a screen in another dimention.

[hamazura]

Originally Posted by teja208

Here's something I came up regarding demihuman existance.

If the third world fraction is what cause players' consciouses to merge/trap whetever etc. into their game avaters, how can we tell whether or not the same thing doesn't happened to demihumans. What I'm implying is demihumans conscious could exist or used to exist somewhere else in another world where someone or something (alian species maybe) are controling them from behind a screen in another dimention.

i think they are just a normal mob... they cant think or talk like adventurer

[Tenzen12]

They aren't so smart as adventurers (in general), but they can think and talk and as was stated they have also Psyche. So even though I don't think that theory is correct, there is nothing wrong with it technicaly.

[Moridin]

Originally Posted by Roger Rambo

Except the timelines for that don't mesh up. The beta for Elder Tales started in 1998, or 240 years ago in game time...but we were told about events that happened centuries before that, which would have chronologically been been during the late 1980's. Elder Tales the MMORPG couldn't have started it's development existence then. That's not even dealing with the fact that 350 years ago was when civilization on Elder Tales was at its peak. A civilization needed to have been gradually built up over the centuries.


The world of Elder Tales chronologically seems to have existed prior to when the Elder Tales MMORPG was developed. The development of the MMORPG game only seems to coincide with MMORPG elements starting to appear in the world.

1) That need not be the case. When Shiroe played Elder Tales the game, the speed factor was 12 times as fast in the game. if that had been consisten it would be as you say, and as Shiroe deducted, players emerging around 240 years ago, and 350 years ago being in the late 1980's. However, it is common to simulate things at a much greater pace in the early trials, to see that everything continues working and that there are no "bottlenecks" in the world economy and stuff like that.

Depending on how much faster than the current 12 times speed factor, and depending on how long the left the game running with that, the development could have started somewhere between the summer of 1998 and the late 1980's, with the 1998 end of the timeline being much more likely than than 1080's end.

2) There is nothing that argues agains Elder Tales being designed to start at "its peek" of civilization, and then have things gradualy fall apart since then. In fact, that is what I think is the most likely scenario. You programm the game world with prosperous cities and othe such "high culture" stuff, and then you start the simulation at that point.

3) Things further back in history than 350 years could be programmed to have happened, like Game Lore. Or, it could be due to the time acceleration at the begining of the simulation.

[aohige]

Originally Posted by NorthernFallout

I personally believe that the devs achieved their objective, but instead of an addition to the game in the form of an expansion, it created an alternate reality by toying with powers beyond their understanding.

Well, I'm more inclined to think perhaps the world "connected" to Shiroe's world with the first World Fraction.
And the reason game systems are reflected on the world is because the devs, completely unaware their game was linked to another world, unknowingly developed that world with the game physics simply by developing the game.

That timing would depend on whether the pre-alven-apocalypse world was nothing but a lore, or an actual history.

[Keroko]

Originally Posted by Moridin

1) That need not be the case. When Shiroe played Elder Tales the game, the speed factor was 12 times as fast in the game. if that had been consisten it would be as you say, and as Shiroe deducted, players emerging around 240 years ago, and 350 years ago being in the late 1980's. However, it is common to simulate things at a much greater pace in the early trials, to see that everything continues working and that there are no "bottlenecks" in the world economy and stuff like that.

Depending on how much faster than the current 12 times speed factor, and depending on how long the left the game running with that, the development could have started somewhere between the summer of 1998 and the late 1980's, with the 1998 end of the timeline being much more likely than than 1080's end.

That... is a point. If open beta started in 1998 at 240 years, that means the game at 350 years was in development for well over 9 years. This is a long time for modern game development terms, but not impossible. Current estimations on Blizzard's Project Titan are that development started somewhere around 2007. That's at least 6 years ago, and we have yet to see even a single shred of information about it. Well, aside from the information that they've recently thrown pretty much everything off the table and started over again.

Originally Posted by Moridin

2) There is nothing that argues agains Elder Tales being designed to start at "its peek" of civilization, and then have things gradualy fall apart since then. In fact, that is what I think is the most likely scenario. You programm the game world with prosperous cities and othe such "high culture" stuff, and then you start the simulation at that point.

3) Things further back in history than 350 years could be programmed to have happened, like Game Lore. Or, it could be due to the time acceleration at the begining of the simulation.

If any of these were the case, there would have been players during the high culture phase, which means Shiroe would have known about it. Instead, it came as a complete surprise to him.

[Moridin]

1.

Originally Posted by Alf

Your calculation is based on the assumption that neurons for each Lander can be approximated. However, there is no way to prevent players from interacting with Landers randomly. In the case of close interaction like Krusty and Princess Renessia, I assume that she requires more complex network. Is it possible to build up a more complex network for the princess on the fly, when Krusty suddenly decided to keep her close? And what about the case of other nobles in the conference?

In short, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are brains. They are amazing. They are not pre-programmed, instead they learn as they are exposed to events. They learn by forming connections between neurons and these connections being of different strenght. These connections are both the memories of what have happened to the individual ANN and they are its duducting power when faced with similar events. You yourself are a Neural Network, they are simply Artificial.

Originally Posted by Moridin

If you had a sufficiently large group of ANNs, with the same amount of Neurons as a human brain, enough training and the same sets of input as a human brain, there would exist one that have the same exact thought (yes, Thought) as you do when you are both exposed to the same stimulus.

Also, their is no need to "build up a more complex network ... on the fly". Elder Tale could easily have enough memory to simulate 10 million landers and all of the other entities, each having its own ANN, simultaneously by the year 2018

Originally Posted by Moridin

Lets say that there are 10 million Landers, and that the rest of the creatures have a simpler AI, that is about 300 million GB, 230 million GB for all the sentient beings, 70 million GB for the rest....
Which means that Elder Tales developers could easily have 110% of the memory required...
Lets say that I was wrong somewhere along my guesses. If the devs really needed more memory and made that a priority they could have had 10 times as much. Although, my guesses where catious and I think it is more probable that I have erred on the side of caution.

2.

Originally Posted by Alf

And, what would be the processing power requirement for such interaction? since the system is interfacing with about 30 thousand players on Yamato server alone, is it possible to be done in real time, or 12 times speed of real time?

Yes. Currently, it is possible to chain large amounts of processors together and get an enourmous processing power. There is a limit to how much you can get though, but it should be enough.



3.

Originally Posted by Alf

Before Catastrophe, NPC are not individually identifiable, but now as Landers they are, and with human like behavior. That's a big leap, and it means if Landers are AI driven then the neural networks only started working at Catastrophe. Neural networks can be trained but is it possible that the resulting society can be tuned to current state as a stable system?

In 1998 it was impossible to do something like which I propose, and through most of the 2000' it would require vast resources and be "technicaly impossible". But yeah, the AI of the creatures had to have been updated to ANNs sometime close to 2018.

Originally Posted by Moridin

Elder Tale could have started with poor AI back in 1998, and then closer to 2018 there could have been a patch.

After that patch though,

Originally Posted by Moridin

However, each time an NPC interacted with an Adventurer the NPC gained some input out of that interaction and its AI learned. Soon the AI of some NPC had learned enough to change their reasoning. It was only a matter of time before the AI of some of the NPCs started doing more than its basic routines. Soon one of them became selfaware. When that stage had been reached, that NPC would "infect" the others by simply interacting with them. One of the selfaware NPCs used a powerfull spell that pulled all the Adventurers into Elder Tale and trapped them there, physically. The programmers of Elder Tale had made magic real inside their universe, and thus the NPC mages of Elder Tale needed only to find, or invent, the proper spell to do this.

(During the writing of that post, I did not think that I would bother explaining the intricates of how ANNs work, and thus the termonology is verry vauge.)

But seriously, read my previous posts. As you see, when combined they explain it all in great detail:

1) http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...&postcount=122
2) http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...&postcount=127
3) http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...&postcount=134

[Moridin]

Originally Posted by Keroko

That... is a point. If open beta started in 1998 at 240 years, that means the game at 350 years was in development for well over 9 years. This is a long time for modern game development terms, but not impossible.

Try reading it agian, that is not at all what I said, nor is it my conclusion.
Im saying that the development could have started in 1996, with a time factor of 150 instead of 12. When the devs saw that all was working they slowed it down to a factor of 12. Inside the game, this could not be detected. When Shiroe then in 2018 thinks that the game have been running at 12 x speed the entire time, he comes up with a faulty conclusion.

Originally Posted by Keroko

If any of these were the case, there would have been players during the high culture phase, which means Shiroe would have known about it. Instead, it came as a complete surprise to him.

No. It does not affect that at all. The players would still have first entered Elder Tale 240 years ago, nothing I said indicated otherwise. You are quoting a response to Roger Rambo, who said that 350 years ago was the peak of civilization, thus there had to be more history earlier so that said civilization could have been built up.
I was simply telling him that there is no need for that, since that history could have been skipped by starting the civilization in its peak state when the simulation started 350 years ago.

PS: Serriosly, should it be this hard to make quotes inside qoutes? Is there some guide to how to do it properly that someone knows about and can point me towards?

[NorthernFallout]

Originally Posted by aohige

Well, I'm more inclined to think perhaps the world "connected" to Shiroe's world with the first World Fraction.
And the reason game systems are reflected on the world is because the devs, completely unaware their game was linked to another world, unknowingly developed that world with the game physics simply by developing the game.

That timing would depend on whether the pre-alven-apocalypse world was nothing but a lore, or an actual history.

Setting my non-serious side aside, I'd go completely along with that, because after EP14, it kinda fits well.

[Moridin]

Originally Posted by aohige

Well, I'm more inclined to think perhaps the world "connected" to Shiroe's world with the first World Fraction.
And the reason game systems are reflected on the world is because the devs, completely unaware their game was linked to another world, unknowingly developed that world with the game physics simply by developing the game.

That timing would depend on whether the pre-alven-apocalypse world was nothing but a lore, or an actual history.

I like that idea, it would explain alot of things. But, one immediate problem with it is the Landers. According to your current version of this idea, there is no explanation for why the Landers behaved as they did between the 2nd and 3rd World fraction, i.e the time players played Elder Tale. If it was an actual world, that connected to ours through the 1st World Fraction, then the landers should have been every bit as alive and have personalities during that time as they are now, after the 3rd World Fraction.

[aohige]

Originally Posted by Moridin

I like that idea, it would explain alot of things. But, one immediate problem with it is the Landers. According to your current version of this idea, there is no explanation for why the Landers behaved as they did between the 2nd and 3rd World fraction, i.e the time players played Elder Tale. If it was an actual world, that connected to ours through the 1st World Fraction, then the landers should have been every bit as alive and have personalities during that time as they are now, after the 3rd World Fraction.

Huh?
You have no information how they behaved before the 3rd fraction.
At least within the rules of the thread, we don't have any information.

Anyways, needless to say, everything points to them as being just as sentient as they do now.
Keep in mind, Landers acting as NPCs is from the players' view, through the interaction on the game.
Not necessarily what was actually happening.

[Keroko]

Originally Posted by Moridin

Try reading it agian, that is not at all what I said, nor is it my conclusion.
Im saying that the development could have started in 1996, with a time factor of 150 instead of 12. When the devs saw that all was working they slowed it down to a factor of 12. Inside the game, this could not be detected. When Shiroe then in 2018 thinks that the game have been running at 12 x speed the entire time, he comes up with a faulty conclusion.

Why would you speed up the time factor? That doesn't really add anything to the tests, especially when you already have a generous 12 to 1.

Originally Posted by Moridin

No. It does not affect that at all. The players would still have first entered Elder Tale 240 years ago, nothing I said indicated otherwise. You are quoting a response to Roger Rambo, who said that 350 years ago was the peak of civilization, thus there had to be more history earlier so that said civilization could have been built up.
I was simply telling him that there is no need for that, since that history could have been skipped by starting the civilization in its peak state when the simulation started 350 years ago.

Ah, I see. That still doesn't change that there suddenly is a pile of history that never existed in the game, as shown by Shiroe not knowing about it. Core background material, even.

Originally Posted by Moridin

PS: Serriosly, should it be this hard to make quotes inside qoutes? Is there some guide to how to do it properly that someone knows about and can point me towards?

Inside quotes are disabled by default on this forum. I don;t really mind, since over the course of a long debate it leads to terribly long posts filled mostly with quotes within quotes within quotes.

[Moridin]

Originally Posted by aohige

Huh?
You have no information how they behaved before the 3rd fraction.
Well, actually you do, but I can't discuss it here due to the rules.

Needless to say, everything points to them as being just as sentient as they do now.
Keep in mind, Landers acting as NPCs is from the players' view, through the interaction on the game.
Not necessarily what was actually happening.

We have information how the landers were prior to 3rd World Fraction. In the anime the characters have mentioned that prior to the Apocalypse:

1) The Landers offered quests
2) They could only say preset lines
3) They have no personalities
4) Exist only to fullfill their roles in the game

Afterwards, all of this changed. Had Elder Tale been a world all along, that simply connected to the database of the Elder Tale game developers after the 1st World Fraction, then the Landers should never have been percieved as they were by the players of the game Elder Tale.

[Keroko]

Of course that course of reasoning also means that the "the game came alive from the moment the development started" theory is flawed as well.

[Chaos2Frozen]

That's from the perspective of a player.

Likewise from the perspective of a Lander, the Adventurers... Might be different before the 3rd World Fraction in their eyes.

[aohige]

Originally Posted by Moridin

We have information how the landers were prior to 3rd World Fraction. In the anime the characters have mentioned that prior to the Apocalypse:

1) The Landers offered quests
2) They could only say preset lines
3) They have no personalities
4) Exist only to fullfill their roles in the game

Afterwards, all of this changed. Had Elder Tale been a world all along, that simply connected to the database of the Elder Tale game developers after the 1st World Fraction, then the Landers should never have been percieved as they were by the players of the game Elder Tale.

No see, that's not my point.
1) - 4) are all how "NPCs" acted from player's view. In the Elder Tales game.
Do you see the difference there?

NPCs are nothing but "crude representation", just like your own avatar are.
Notice how ReGun mentioned he's a successor of the title of Wizard of Miral Lake?
And also notice that many NPCs didn't have a name in the game?

If you see a "bag trader NPC" in Elder Tales, who has crafted bags for 240 years, that may not be the same person.
He may belong to a family of bag crafters, and is the 20th generation of his heir.
But the players may not see all that baggage and just see the resulting "representation" of a NPC bag crafter.

There's also a lot more Landers than there were NPCs in the game.
A NPC vendor in the game (who never left her job) was actually not a single Lander either, they likely took shift changes.

[Kafriel]

Well, the Landers viewed the adventurers in the same light; mindless workers, only there to do tasks for them, until the apocalypse - in a sense, both parties became sentient from the other's perspective.

Anyway, with ep.14 released, the time difference between the real world and the Elder Tale world has been stated, but now that the adventurers live in Elder Tale, does that mean that their bodies will age 12 times as fast?