Ic Rainbow

“Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can't do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY, you've got to let yourself do better than other people!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“It’s no magic bullet and cannot solve every problem. In further experiments in the maze domain, we generated hundreds of random mazes of different difficulties and applied both novelty search and objective-based search to solving them. The trend that resulted from the data was that as mazes grow increasingly complicated, both novelty search and objective-based search can fail to solve them. However, objective-based search’s abilities taper off much faster [55].”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“But—let me tell you my cat joke. It's very short and simple. A hostess is giving a dinner party and she's got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting to be cooked while she chats with the guests in the living room—has a few drinks and whatnot. But then she excuses herself to go into the kitchen to cook the steak—and it's gone. And there's the family cat, in the corner, sedately washing it's face."

"The cat got the steak," Barney said.

"Did it? The guests are called in; they argue about it. The steak is gone, all five pounds of it; there sits the cat, looking well-fed and cheerful. "Weigh the cat," someone says. They've had a few drinks; it looks like a good idea. So they go into the bathroom and weigh the cat on the scales. It reads exactly five pounds. They all perceive this reading and a guest says, "okay, that's it. There's the steak." They're satisfied that they know what happened, now; they've got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, "But where's the cat?”
― Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

“To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?”
― Charles Stross, Accelerando