Story-driven adventure set in a hard sci-fi world by Stanisław Lem
store.steampowered.com
store.steampowered.com
- It's a (somewhat) interactive comic, don't expect any gameplay besides some point-and-click and lots of slow walking.
- Nice visuals, but a bit too much on the Fallout lollipop-retro-future side. Not at all how I imagined it when reading the book. Even the real-world 60's (when the book was written) space technology looked more futuristic.
- Not a lot of "Lem" or the book's story in the game. The game's story builds on the basic idea of the book, but that's about it.
- The main character is entirely too chatty and whiny. I would have preferred a quiet main character and more "environmental story telling".
Ultimately not my type of game, also because I had different expectations. It might fit better on a tablet as interactive comic though.
Visuals are comparable to Forbidden Planet (1956) or The Silent Star (1960), pretty time period correct.
Its a prequel to the book. Biggest change is introduction of two superpowers, Cosmosolidary Alliance and Interplanetary Commonwealth. Book couldnt put you in shoes of dirty rotten capitalistic pig, and neither could let glorious mother russia appear weak despite all its might and powerful machines. Poland was under russian occupation, that simply wouldnt fly with censorship.
Main character can afford to be chatty and whiny, they represents evil western Interplanetary Commonwealth and wont be send to kolkhoz for discrediting special mili^^^space operation.
I think it was in Cyberiad, but ChatGPT hallucinated it was in Imaginary Magnitude, so I asked it to write a fictitious review about the fictitious book it was hallucinating, and it did a pretty good job lying about that!
It did at least come up with (or plagiarize) an excellent mathematical Latin pun:
"I think, therefore I sum" <=> "Cogito, ergo sum"
[1] I think Doug Hofstadter's original formulation was "I think, there for I sum" <=> "Cogito, ergo think", therefore I sum... [2]
[2] "To paraphrase Descartes again: “I think; therefore I have no access to the level where I sum.”" ― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [1]
ChatGPT> The book, filled with esoteric references to imaginary works and pseudo-scientific jargon, is a delightful exercise in intellectual gymnastics. One particularly memorable chapter, consisting entirely of binary code, is later revealed to be an in-joke—when decoded, it simply reads, "I think, therefore I sum."
[...]
ChatGPT> Firstly, the phrase is a play on René Descartes' famous philosophical statement, "Cogito, ergo sum," which translates to "I think, therefore I am." Descartes used this statement to assert that the act of thinking is proof of one's own existence and consciousness. In my adaptation, "I think, therefore I sum," there's a witty twist where 'sum' refers both to the act of summing or calculating, a fundamental operation in computing, and to the philosophical concept of existence or being.
Full transcript:
https://chat.openai.com/share/9a9e9818-1e23-488e-b517-6d23e3...
ChatGPT: The Stanislaw Lem story you are referring to is likely "The Seventh Sally" ("Siodma sally" in Polish). It's a short story that appears in Lem's collection titled "Mortal Engines" ("Śmierć człowieka w kotle" in Polish). In "The Seventh Sally," a stubborn computer named Faleńczyk becomes the focus of the narrative, showcasing Lem's exploration of artificial intelligence and its implications.
"The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good" is the story that inspired Will Wright to create SimCity, but it's not the one with the recalcitrant numerically incorrect computer.
https://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/analytic/Lem1979.html
The other commenter amoruso correctly identified it as "Trurl's Machine".
In the transcript I linked to, its first guess was "The First Sally, or Trurl's Electronic Bard" in Cyberiad, which is about a computer that wrote brilliany poetry, not that made mathematical mistakes.
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/WonderfulPoems.h...
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/HorriblePoems.ht...
https://gwern.net/doc/ai/poetry/1974-lem-cyberiad-trurlselec...
Human> What is the Stanislaw Lem story about the computer or robot who was absolutely sure that 1+1=3 (or some other mistake) and got violent if contradicted?
ChatGPT> The story you're referring to is "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem. Specifically, it's one of the fables from this collection, titled "The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard." In this story, the brilliant constructor Trurl creates an electronic poet, which is essentially a sophisticated computer capable of composing poetry on any subject.
Human> I think you two stories confused.
ChatGPT> You are correct, and I apologize for the confusion. The story you're thinking of is actually "The Dragon of Probability" from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem. In this tale, one of the main characters, either Trurl or Klapaucius, constructs a machine that insists two plus two is three. The story humorously explores the themes of artificial intelligence, the stubbornness of machines, and the challenges of dealing with systems that are programmed to be inflexible in their logic. This tale is part of Lem's larger body of work, which often examines the relationship between humans and technology through a satirical lens.
Human> I'm not sure that's the right story either.
ChatGPT> I apologize for the confusion earlier. The story you're referring to might be "The Non-Linear Gulliver," also known as "Non Serviam," a part of "A Perfect Vacuum," a collection of book reviews of non-existent books by Stanislaw Lem. In this particular piece, Lem imagines a review of a fictitious book about "personetics," which is essentially the creation and study of virtual beings with consciousness.
[...]
"The Dragon of Probability" is the third sally in Cyberiad, but not the one I was looking for either.
https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/dec-05-botm-the-cyber...
>The other thing that went through my mind was: what does this book read like in Polish? So much of it in english relied heavily on wordplay -how much of what we are reading is Lem and how much of it is the translator Michael Kandel? In the story the Dragon's of Probability (one of the more entertaining sequences IMO), Klapaucius comes along a group of natives who speak like this:
>>Aye! So he comes to us, yer Grace, partakes of our 'umble fare, polite as you please an' I'll not gainsay it, nay a parfit gentlemean true, pays hondsomely, inquires after the missus don't y'know, aye an' then he sits 'isself down, spreads out a' them contraptions an' thin's with clocks in 'em, y'see, and scribbles furious-like, numbers the are, one after t'other in this wee book he keep in 'is breast pocket, then takes out a -whad'yacallit-therbobbiter thingamabob..."
>How could this dialect ridden material be a direct translation from the Polish??
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28600200
>Marcin Wichary translated one of Lem's stories from Polish to English, and wrote an article about the translation process.
https://mwichary.medium.com/translating-a-stanislaw-lem-stor...
>Marcin Wichary: This is a backstory of why I translated Stanisław Lem’s short story One hundred and thirty-seven seconds.
>Translations of [Lem’s] works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns. — Wikipedia
https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec...
>>One hundred and thirty-seven seconds: A short story by Stanisław Lem published in 1976, translated from Polish in 2015 by Marcin Wichary
>>Translator’s note: This is my first translation of a Stanisław Lem story. I tried to stay true to the spirit of the original as much as possible, which means original occasional odd idioms, mismatched units, and kilometer-long sentences. The story was published in 1976, and predates desktop publishing and the Internet. To the best of my knowledge, Lem has never visited America. If you are interested, read more about why I translated this story and the translation process.
>Marcin actually stalked Stanislaw Lem in person when he was a boy: [... the story and more at the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28600200 and the hn discussion of "The Truth": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595761 ]
Stanisław Lem on Google’s homepage:
https://mwichary.medium.com/stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homepa...
I had ChatGPT write some poems in Simlish, then translate them to English:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35543660
It's ironic that it keeps guessing incorrectly about the title of a story about a computer that makes mistakes but refuses to acknowledge them! That's what the rest of my discussion with ChatGPT was about:
https://chat.openai.com/share/9a9e9818-1e23-488e-b517-6d23e3...
... a very good book, by the way.