How did it get there?
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Speed and intelligence
This is a video of someone beating the game Pokemon Yellow in slightly over two minutes.
It's incomprehensible. If you play it in extreme slow motion, it's still incomprehensible, because it's not the speed of the button-mashing that takes a game usually beaten in hours or days and does it in minutes, it's the amount of thought that goes into each button mashed. The depth of the contemplation is such that even the author's comments, which explain what was done, will still be largely incomprehensible to most people.
If in 1954, 27 years of history suddenly took place in a day, a stereotypical pipe-smoking, newspaper-reading man from 1954 could, if he replayed it in extreme slow motion, eventually understand the world of 1981. But if tomorrow it's 2008, and the day after tomorrow it's 2035, history will completely transcend him. It's absolutely hopeless for him to achieve even a basic grasp of what's going on.
The point I'm trying to make is that a simple overclocking of the speed of thought is more than enough to write humanity's final chapter.
Also see: Orbital - The Box