This started as an investigation into the bad way modern sci-fi is portrays fungi and veered into a mix of various IPs that are (coincidentally) mostly owned by Disney. I am presenting my idea, as always free to use and abuse, as a series of book stories.

Premise

A fungus evolves to facilitate communication, kind of like a biological version of the Internet. On its planet, the ecosystem is connected through its mycelial network where it acts as a general field, bestowing intelligence to anything connecting to it. Due to the slow speed of connection, this transforms the entire planet into a large thinking brain, dreaming vast thoughts and living in symbiosis with the plant and animal life which provide it with real life experience and goals, plus fast local intelligence. The result is a society that looks like a Disney kingdom, with talking animals and plants and so on. Interesting ideas of conscious animals sacrificing themselves for food because their soul rests in the network arise.

Now humans from an Alien/Blade Runner universe come along, with a corporate mindset, and the fungus world understands that they are toxic.

Book 1

Act I

We introduce the crew of a Nostromo-like ship, flying under a human corporate flag. They are tasked with investigating a new planet. 

Act II

They are amazed to discover something looking like Fantasyland. Castles, princes, princesses, people happy and beautiful landscapes. But they reveal their mindset and through some misguided actions, they make the planet see them as a threat which puts them in peril.

Act III

They fight for survival, Alien style, where everything and everybody is trying to hurt them. And also like Alien, it wants them alive, because Fung'y wants to study the crew, maybe even incorporate them into its structure, even if they are of different biological make up than life on Fantasyland. They have superior technology and weaponry, but they are fighting with never ending swarms of animals and knights and poisonous plants.

Act IV

They discover a lot more of what the planet is like, how it works and why it wants to kill them, the survivors try to escape in a rescue shuttle. They fail, but not only because they can't make it, but also because they are - kindly - explained how they are the bad guys. And they are captured in understanding of their role as the villain in the fairy tale.

Book 2

Act I

We introduce one of the people we thought dead in the first book, found by another human ship while drifting in space hibernation in an escape shuttle. They have been drifting for decades. They tell the story of the killer Fantasyland planet. Humans prepare for investigation and attack.

Act II

Human ships arrive at Fantasy land, examining the planet from afar. Automated and android teams are sent for burn and grab missions. They need samples and to study the fungus. Some don't make it back.

Act III

Humans realize that the planet has changed in a few decades. The economy is no longer feudal, it went through some kind of technological advancement as well. It's subtle, but they can't explain electromagnetic emissions and weird heat signatures.

Act IV

Humans go into the offensive, using a toxin that kills the fungus, using it to horrific effects. We see how the land physically collapses in some parts, how the animal populations lose their minds, literally. Humans rejoice but suddenly the electromagnetic emissions start increasing and weird beams of energy start cutting through human ships. Space... things... start popping up and attacking the ships. You get weird battles between people on starships fighting creatures with armor and sword, lion-like creatures and swarms of rats. In the end humans poison and nuke the entire planet and while winning, it's a pyric victory, with most of their resources depleted, ships destroyed and the prize (a pristine planet ready for plunder) completely destroyed 

Book 3

Act I

The survivor from book II is back home. We see how the human world works and how bad things are. Though corporate compensation packages and insurance money keep them in relative comfort, our survivor has to find a job soon if they don't want to go into a pool of unhireables which would guarantee debt and a life of corporate servitude. They try to get a job, but even as a known hero, it's hard.

Act II

The survivor is now exploring the underworld of the human society, the gangsters, the hackers, the underground economy. While looking for a job they realize they are not feeling well. People are trying to take advantage of that. It does not turn up well for them.

Act III

The survivor realizes that they are capable of things they didn't think they could. But Dunning-Kruger effect makes them believe it's plausible. Or is it DK? They capture one of the gangsters who attacked them and instead of killing them, they keep them captive.

Act IV

Our survivor becomes a kingpin of an underground society. They have a reputation of getting some of their worst enemies to join their organization as trusted allies .

Book 4

Act I

A human military warship, the crown jewel of a corporation, patrols the waters of space. They are attacked by space things. The mighty warship is destroying them as they come, but they keep coming, some breach the ship, creatures attack the crew. Strange energy emanations come from some of the space things, disrupting defense. Escape pods are launched. Space things keep coming and attack everything, space pods included.

Act II

A human corporation meeting is under way. These things are rare because corporations are stuck in unending bitter corporate wars and face to face communication of the major corporate leaders is not safe. The media is abuzz, but cannot be privy to the meetings, because they are closed. A reporter is obsessed to finding a way in.

Corporate meeting is under way. These people are ruthless, intelligent, fashionable. They all breach the subject slowly and carefully, but a larger picture emerges: corporate planets of various factions are disrupted by a special kind of organized unrest. Corporations are experts in dismantling criminal organizations they do not suffer, but these are hard to crack. People are loyal, methods are unusual, communication is not traceable, they have access to weird technology. In the end they have to admit they have a common problem. It is then when one of the leaders there admits they have lost their military flagship to unknown assailants. Shock comes as they realize none of the people at the table were responsible.

Act III

The war comes in the clear. Fung'y didn't die. It reverse engineered space travel and energy manipulation weapons. Before the humans attacked, it spread spore ships to random places in space. The original survivor was first captured, infested and let go, as yet another experiment. Many other humans were infested in the same way in the attack.

Original Fung'y died, but its seeds are now everywhere. Silently, versions of himself grew inside human societies, on new planets. Now, they are starting to connect using human technology into a thing even larger than before. Planet brains that took forever to finish a thought incorporate human technology to facilitate long distance communication. Determining as a consensus that the human world is both valuable and a pest, the Fung'y dominion continued with its ancestral plan: find all humans and... domesticate them.

Act IV

War and paranoia destroys the order of the human universe. Trust disappears, planets become insular, human travel practically ends. Both sides: human and fungus, work on finding the weaknesses of the other, probing, testing, frantically researching. The human strategy: find reliable ways to detect infestation and eradicate it. Find reliable ways of finding planetary brains and destroy them. Fungus strategy: infiltrate and coopt human societies. Isolate and eliminate human defense, weaponry and communication.

Novellas

Mandalorian style stories set into the now complete Disney universe: Fantasyland, Alien, Blade Runner and a fungus clone of The Last of Us. Complete artistic freedom. Anything goes, from children fantasy to gory horror, maybe at the same time.

Bonus: Fung'y vs Alien, or even better, the Xenomorph brood gaining (even more) intelligence from a temporary alliance with Fung'y, until it realizes they are worse than the humans, but both gaining some characteristics from the other in the end.

Continuation

Of course this can continue in any number of ways. I used known IPs for succinctly expressing my ideas, but of course they don't have to go the same way and can be (and should be) set in a standalone universe of their own. However, if Disney wants to use my idea, they are free to do so!

Hope you enjoyed this. Tell me if you want more stuff like this.

  As always, everything that is on this blog is free, including my ideas. If anyone wants to implement it, I am not asking for anything, although a little credit would be nice. It might already be out there, for all I know.

  This is a game idea. It's a multiplayer game of chess, assisted by computer engines. The interface is a chess board and a number of button choices holding the best N moves as found by a chess engine. Possibly the choice of opening should be slightly different, but the MVP product is just that: computer suggests N moves and player choses one. Making a choice will show the move on the screen, tapping the button again will send it to the server.

  It would be a more casual way of playing chess. Moreover, it would train players to choose between candidate moves, which is a secondary skill. The more difficult part of playing chess is finding candidate moves and usually most effort goes into it. This way, the computer takes care of that and lets the player focus on learning how to spot the better move.

  The advantage for the game builder is that they get a database of how humans (at specific levels) select the moves. Next step is to create an AI that can consistently choose between candidates just as a human would. This can then be added to any existing chess game to provide a more human feel, regardless of the underlying chess engine.

  The game could be played against the computer from the very beginning, by altering the probability to choose between top moves based on the supposed chess level. At maximum level the best move will always get selected, while at lowest level the choice will be completely random (but still pretty good, because it will only choose between top N moves).

  Choosing the opening from a list by name could also be interesting, and showing the player the most common replies and what the plan is. Perhaps the number of candidate moves could be a game parameter, so both players agree to play six candidate move game, but others would go for three.

  The interface is simple enough for people to play it on any device, including with a remote on a Smart TVs or on small screen devices.

  Implementation should be relatively trivial. Open source chess engines like Stockfish are available for most major programming languages, including JavaScript. It is the interface that requires most work. Perhaps the possibilities for optimization are the most interesting, as development goes, having a cache of common positions and the top moves, for example.

  Drawbacks include not being able to follow a plan, assuming the computer doesn't give you the choice to move in a direction you worked for. Also, the computer analysis should be consistent over devices, not giving an advantage to more powerful ones. That means both players waiting for the amount of time that analysis takes on the slowest device on the same number of plys.

  There are single player game modes (training) that can be added:

• play the best move - choose the best move from the four presented
• find the top moves - a position is presented and the player must make the top moves. When a move is found, points are given. When a move is wrong, points are removed.
  • yes, this requires actually moving pieces, which would not be "on brand"
• find the best pieces - pick the best piece for either player in equal positions 

I was listening to this Software Engineering Daily podcast about Facebook Relationship Algorithms and I had this weird idea. The more I was thinking about it, the more realistic it felt (as well as more than a bit creepy). Let me lay it out for you. The podcast is interesting in its own right, so go listen to it, it's instructive.

So they describe these metrics of your Facebook connections that they reached while trying to find an algorithm to detect your romantic relationship. They took a large sample of users that have declared their significant other and tried to find an automated way of predicting that from the other information Facebook had. The first idea was to use connectivity, one often used idea in sociology that the more common friends you have with someone, the closer you are, but it didn't quite work. One clear counterexample would be coworkers connected on social media. Instead, they realized that such functional connections often cluster, so you would have the cluster of coworkers, your family, your club friends, the people who share your hobby, etc. The romantic partner would be connected with many of these friends, but across clusters, in other words you would have many common friends that are not really connected with each other. By using this metric they called dispersion, they would guess with more than 50% accuracy from the first try who your partner is from the list of hundreds of your friends.

And here is my idea: why not reverse engineer it? Imagine you have someone you want to hook up with, but have no idea how to proceed. Maybe asking them on a date is not an option or maybe, like any engineer out there, you want to maximize the chances your experiment would work. Why not find the smallest subset of friends of that person that have the largest value of dispersion? So here is what this "hook me up" algorithm would do:

1. Collect the list of friends of your target
2. Find a sample that are well connected to the target, but less connected with each other
3. Approach each of them and befriend them

The result would be that you would become the "natural" choice for a relationship, by going backwards and reversing the direction of causality. Automatic stalking, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood software developer: Siderite! We live in an age in which information about us can be used or abused in innumerable ways and we become addicted and stuck to this way of relating. It's not a bad thing, but it has its drawbacks. It is good to know of them.

Just a short revelation that I had. It starts with the definition of free speech, which is considered free if it does no harm. This is what is called the principle of harm. But what is increasingly happening all over the world is that more and more of what people do is considered harmful. Things like racism or misogyny have been now joined by online bullying, pro-life discussions, fat shaming, you name it. The result is a reduction of free speech.

If you want free speech, then brave the words of others. It is the penchant of humans and all life in general to categorize the world and then act in different ways based on discrete cases. It is not entirely correct, but it is how nervous systems work since worms were invented. It is a biological impossibility to be confronted with human behavior and not consider one category of people better than another based not only on color, but whatever you see differentiate them. And while I understand the need to push back with legislation against some biases that have become counterproductive, we have to eventually dial back even on those. Adding more exceptions to how thinking and feeling works just pushes people away and stifles the ability to speak freely.

An especially worrying trend puts copyright and commercial interests higher and higher on the list of things you should not cross. It is becoming so powerful a concept that it is increasingly used to stop people from expressing themselves. Online reviewers are being sued for not liking a product, people are being stopped from reading controversial material by buying the rights and then not publishing it and so on. But even small things that seem proper at first glance are just as toxic, like protecting children from all kinds of perceived threats. Forget they are children, just analyse the social cost of having them exposed to something; people learn from experience, there is always a balance between harm and evolution.

When will it end, you might ask yourself. Think of border cases like Snowden. Do you side with him, for disclosing information that affects all of us, literally, or do you side with the people that say he committed treason? Do you think encryption should be banned, so that governments can better take care of us by knowing everything there is to know about what we communicate? How about getting fined by the hotel you've just been to because you write a negative review. Are all these worth stopping people from calling you fat, gay, colored, old, stupid, or whatever you feel offends you most?

I had an idea one of the previous days, an idea that seemed so great and inevitable that I thought about patenting it. You know, when you have a spark of inspiration and you tell no one about it or maybe a few friends and a few years later you see someone making loads of money with it? I thought I could at least "subscribe" to the idea somehow, make it partly my own. And so I asked a patent specialist about it.

He basically said two things. First of all, even if it is a novel idea, if it made of previously existing parts that can obviously be put together, then it doesn't qualify as a patent. If the concept is obvious enough in any way, it doesn't qualify. Say if someone wrote a scientific paper about a part of it and you find the rest in some nutjob blog about alien conspiracies, then you can't patent it. The other thing that he told me is that a true patent application costs about 44000$, in filing and attorney fees. I don't imagine that's a small sum for someone in the US or in another rich country, but it is almost insane for anyone living anywhere else.

But there is a caveat here. What if the nutjob alien conspiracy blog would be this one? What if, by publishing my idea here, no one could ever patent it and the best implementation would be the one that would gather the most support? It's a bit of "no, fuck you!", but still, why the hell not? So here it is:

I imagine, with the new climate of "do not track"ing and privacy concerns that search engines will have a tougher and tougher time gathering information about your personal preferences. Google will not know what you searched for before and therefore will not be able to show you the things it thinks you are most interested in. And that is a problem, since it probably would have been right and you would have been interested in those things. The user, seeing how the search engine does not find what they are looking for, will not be happy.

My solution, and something that is way simpler than storing cookies and analysing behaviour, is to give the responsibility (back) to the user. They would choose a "search profile" and, based on that, the search engine would filter and prioritize the results in a way specific to that profile. You can customize your profile and maybe save it in a list or you can use a standard one, but the results you get are the ones you intended to get.

A few examples, if you will: the "I want to download free stuff" profile would prioritize blogs and free sites and filter out commercial sites that contain words like "purchase", "buy", "trial", "shareware", etc; it would remove Amazon and other online shops from the result list and prioritize ThePirateBay, for example. Some of the smarter and tech savy Googlers are using the "-" filter to remove such words, but they are still getting the most commercially available sites there are. A search profile like this would try to analyse the site, see if it fits the "commercial" category and then filter it out. Now, you might think that sites will adapt and try to trick the engine into thinking they are not commercial in nature. No, they won't, because then the "I want to buy something" profile would not find them. Of course, they will adapt somehow and create two versions of the site, one that would seem commercial and one that would not. But the extra effort would remove from their profit margin. Or try a search profile like "long tail", where the stories that get most coverage and are reproduced in a lot of sites would get filtered out, allowing one to access new information as it comes in.

Bottom line is, I need such a service, but at the moment I am unwilling to invest in making one. First of all it would be a waste of time if it didn't work. Second of all it would get stolen and copied immediately by people with more money than me if it did work. Guess what? It's in my free blog. If anyone does it, they can't patent it, they can only use it because it is a good idea and they should make it really nice and usable before other people make it better.

As a small joke I've added a new feature to the blog. If you don't see it, it will see you, hee hee! Warning: the eyes are not visible when the pages first load, only if you spend some time reading.

There is no clear formula for calculating the concept of success because success can only be defined from factors like goal and duration. For example, a guy might be considered successful in getting a girl, but a failure if the relationship does not work and they split up in terrible anger or grief. In the long run, it was not a good idea to get the girl.

The same theory can be applied to any problem. For example outsourcing. In the short run, the company wins, because they reduce the costs of employment. They might even win in the long run, but the money go outside the country, diminishing by a little the success of all companies in the same region. In this case, the long run might prove that making a united front is better than scattering the resources between competing factions. Or maybe not.

The other day I was thinking of oil. A friend of mine sent me this link to a site that talks about the coming of an age in which oil is no more. It is coming soon and it basically means a dramatic (and probably violent) scaling down of world energy output. In the same time, a Romanian minister declared that he intends to push for investments in the gas sector, like finding new natural gas reserves.

And something blinked. If the oil and natural gas are scarcer and the price is likely to go up very quickly and dramatically, wouldn't that mean that keeping the oil in the ground would be a far better deal? Why extract it now, when the US and OPEC are still managing to keep the prices to a decent level (through a lot of indecent actions)? Wouldn't it be better, in the long run, to wait until the price skyrockets and everybody else is left without? In the short run, oil companies and ministries make a lot of money from it, but in the long run, they could make a lot more. Yet the people that are in charge now probably won't get anything. So they greedily suck it up and sell it.

Now, since I've defined the problem, I should think of a solution. And I think the only solution here is this: people that have charge over the oil in the ground should be able to sell the rights to the oil once it has been extracted. That means that I could sell some guy the right to the oil underground, even if I am not extracting it. Maybe even a nice clause that if the oil is not extracted in time, the guy could get his money back with a considerable interest as penalty. I believe it could work, since the price of the underground oil is likely to increase in time.

Thus the oil in the ground is transformed into money, independently of the extraction process. The extractor will get a percentage of the price of oil, then pass it to the owner or find some other arrangement to sell it and split the profits with the owner of the oil. I think it's a great idea to make money from oil without burning it. The only drawback is that someone could invent a better and cheaper and cleaner energy source. Bummer! :)

Update 2020 - most of the links here are dead, the things they referred to long forgotten. So much for "once you put it on the Internet it never disappears".

Having reached the 200^th entry, I really wanted to write something cool, something interesting, something that sticks (and it ain't shit).

I thought of blogging Kartoo, a very nice - albeit slow - visual search engine that shows not only relevant links, but also the context items that link different pages.

But Kartoo is not personal enough, so I switched to YouTube, thought about blogging (yet another) female vocalist nu-metal with goth overtones band like the Italian band Exilia. Or something else, like the Turkish band maNga, or the Spanish Dead Stoned or Demiurgo. But this is a blog, not a video/music site.

Then I thought about programming; there must be something in the three projects I am working on worth blogging about, or at least something important like Don't use the .NET Random class when concerned about security. But then again, the blog is full of (I hope) interesting programming hints.

What else is there? Ranting about bycicle lanes the city hall is building on the sidewalk and on which old people are happy to walk (slowly) without losing themselves;
interesting conceptual games like BoomShine, Straight Dice or Stickman Fight and how they can be improved;
the BBC Baghdad Navigator, to show you the distribution and timeline of Baghdad bombings;
the Lilium song for the anime Elfen Lied;
the Coma article on Wikipedia (I didn't write it);
coming improvements in the Sift3 algorithm;
InuYasha manga reaching chapter 500;
the new Google/Kartoo/Wikipedia searches for any selected text in the blog;
how I am reading Il Nome de la Rosa and The Name of the Rose in the same time, trying to grasp more of the Italian language;
Gwoemul, a very nice South Korean film...

No, there is too much to choose and I can't decide. I think I will skip entry 200 entirely.

I have always been fascinated by the concepts of Artificial Intelligence. I truly think that computerised brains are the next step of evolution, as biology (hindered by outdated morals, also) will never develop or evolve quickly enough. But enough of that.

I was thinking the other day of artificial neural networks, the electronic analogy to a brain, and the fact that for N neurons, you get to have N*M connections, where M is the average number of connections a neuron makes, which are in fact the important parts.

Click for details

Let's assume that we can simulate exactly a human neuron on a computer. We would have to have 100 billion of these simulated neurons to simulate a brain. Each neuron would have to be connected to at least 10000 others. That means one million billion connections. Imagine you could put the entire information of a neuronal link on a single byte and you would still need 1000 TB of storage. Multiply this value with the real number of bytes necessary to encode the information of a neural link. But it doesn't stop here. You would need to update this entire huge quantity of data in real time, as the brain itself is a parallel processor, not a sequential one.

Now, this is only an idea, Haven't thought it through, but if history is anything to go by, I will quickly forget it, so I'll just write it up. What if we could use a discreet interval for describing neural connections? Kind of like when paying money. You make thousands of payments every day, but you use only a finite number of coin and banknote values. Assume you want to operate a change on a neural link. You want to weaken it and make it twice less important or you want to make it twice as strong. Imagine the link is a money value, like 1$. Then you would weaken it to 50 cents or make it a strong 2$. But there is no two dollar bill, so you create another one dollar link.

The advantages of this, as far as I thought of it, are that you would have 10000 or more connections for each neuron, but only 6 or 10 types of them. So instead of operating 10000 operations, you would use only one operation per type. It also allows for different link operations, not only multiplications (as neural weights normally are used for). Maybe type 1 through 5 performs multiplications, but type 6 makes a logarithmic operation or something.

So the main advantage is that the entire structure can be scaled better. The only thing I can compare this with is a supermarket chain. You have thousands of customers and millions of transactions, but you have only three loyalty card types and only ten demographic groups that you compute your strategy on.

Now, of course, I will have to figure out the math of it, which I was never particularly good at, and the first problem I see is that each neuron will have to have its own neural neighbourhood lists and that might prove trickier than just making a note of each connection. However, since connections can only be of a certain type, compression of neural data is much easier, operations faster, as each list functions as an information index in a database.

Maybe all this is something trivial for a neural network scientist or I am just full of useless thoughts, but I'll note them nonetheless.