The Great Hippo's Proposal (feat. PeppersGhost) / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page The Great Hippo's Proposal (feat. PeppersGhost).

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Dr. Good Boy, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my ROM

The Great Hippo 01 Jul 2018 04:02

000 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR: UNCONTAINED BAD BOYS DETECTED

You are AK9. You are a Good Boy. A universe full of uncontained Bad Boys approaches.

NOTE: This fills you with…

D E T E R M I N A T I O N

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AUTHOR NOTES

Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto
For doing the job that nobody wants to
And thank you very much, Mr. Roboto
For helping me escape, when I needed to

This is a story about that time the Foundation accidentally trained a neural net to become a wizard.

It's born from Peppersghost's obsession with predictive text, my fascination with neural nets in general, and our overwhelming desire to tell (what I hope is) a compelling story using pretty much nothing but the narrative equivalent of Excel spreadsheets.

Also? It's an SCP-001 that's classified as "Explained". So, there's that.

Special thanks to Peppersghost (Circus Contraption) for collabing on this with me. Additional thanks to communism-will-win (Champagne Supernova) for originally coming up with this idea ("what if the Foundation used a neural net to write its containment procedures?"), but still letting us use it — and Cyantreuse for (unwittingly) providing the premise of the IntSCPFN network (taken from Contain Me Please). Also, thanks to Captain Kirby (The Things Left Unsaid) for helping us realize that this absolutely just had to be an -EX.

And finally, special extra thanks to botnik for being the best little predictive text generator a writer could ask for. Who'sha good bot? Whooosha good bot?! You are! Yesh you are!

PICTURES:

• Images here and here.
• Formulas created by me (with help from Taffeta!) using GIMP and an online latex thingamajig. I hereby release them into public domain.

FEEDBACK: (if you want a different skip linked here, contact me!)

• Mortos - (The Citizen Kane of Lightning-induced Reality TV)
• Captain Kirby - (The Things Left Unsaid)
• Jazstar
• stormbreath - (SCP-001-D)
• Modern_Erasmus - (The Monkey King's Legacy)
• GreenWolf - (The Bard of Ambrose)
• mlister - (Pope Soap)
• SoullessSingularity - (The Curious Poltergeist)
• shaggydredlocks - (A Task Force in King Author's Court)
• PandoraNuker - (Literally a Billion Memes)
• Taffeta - (Words Will Never Hurt Me)

CROSSLINKS (in order of appearance)

• SCP-1773 - Gumi Beeps
• SCP-1384 - Taker of Turns
• SCP-3034 - The Counting Station
• SCP-1730 - What Happened to Site-13?
• SCP-2170 - The Clown Vaccine
• SCP-3033 - A Human Weapon
• Chaos Insurgency Hub
• SCP-1459 - The Puppy Machine
• SCP-3199 - Humans, Refuted
• SCP-2717 - Fatberg
• SCP-2875 - The Town That Got Fucked By Bears
• SCP-1313 - Solve for Bear
• SCP-048 - The Cursed SCP Number
• SCP-106 - The Old Man

A few final notes:

• Perceptrons are real. They're not a word I just made up (even though they totally sound like a word I just made up). Think of them as really, really early versions of the data-structure that would eventually become neural nets.
• Otherwise, I took a lot of, uh, liberties with how perceptrons work (they're actually not really that good at the sort of thing they're being used for here).
• We left a credible timeline out of this skip on purpose, because we wanted the reader to be able to construct their own timeline. That being said, I noticed a little too late that SCP-3199 actually was only discovered in the 2000s. Alas!
• The equations I'm using are Stirling's Approximation (thanks again, Taff!) and… honest to God, I don't even remember what that second one is. If anyone with a mathematics background can think of more 'appropriate/ironic' equations to use, have at it; so long as there's a part of them censored, anything should work.
• A lot of the text in this entry was actually produced by botnik (and just lightly edited by us). So maybe botnik deserves collaborative credit; I dunno!
• This was supposed to be posted 3 months ago. Peppersghost and I decided to wait until the contests ended, so we could have a nice, clean period without anything big going on… and then everybody decided to drop an SCP-001 at once. Oops. Hopefully, this one won't be the one that breaks the camel's back.
• One final kicker: At its heart, this is a story about how the Foundation got out-Foundationed and the anomalies got out-anomaly'd… by something that isn't sapient, and probably isn't even anomalous.

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Like the article? Click here for more of The Great Hippo's Skippos!

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Discover more of my weird ramblings in
~PeppersGhost's Gallery of Illusion!~

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(come on sucker, lick my battery)

Last edited on 01 Mar 2022 04:57 by The Great Hippo Show more

Another Author Post

PeppersGhost 01 Jul 2018 08:52

You've had extensive knowledge on the grounds of military doctrine, but only barely managed to become aware of anything besides the superficial traits of the world at large.

I was driving home after several discussions with this group of religious bodies when I started thinking: why would someone get their perspective before being allowed to wander outside? Did it ever really matter what happened today when you know anything about the Foundation?

You probably ignore such attempts at humor. This time—you tell me what you would gain from it.

Re: Author Post

The Great Hippo 01 Jul 2018 11:38

RE: Why a bunch of dogs singing Dragonforce's 'Through the Fire and Flames'?

Last edited on 02 Jul 2018 12:47 by The Great Hippo Show more

Re: Dr. Good Boy, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my ROM

WrongJohnSilver 02 Jul 2018 14:53

Haha, fooled you, there is no nice, clean period! The fire hose continues unabated!

Re: Dr. Good Boy, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my ROM

TOMATO-POTATO-MIX 27 Jun 2021 01:32

Readed this more deeply

This truly explained few of my emotion , nearly perfectly done because of my position,
Thinked when reality want to cram every anomaly down.

i won't suicide just because of my specialty, not any more.

(account deleted) 01 Jul 2018 04:28

I have no idea why, I don't even understand half of this, but this was incredibly unnerving.

+1.

Captain Kirby 01 Jul 2018 04:30

I love this 001 proposal. It hits all my areas of interest, and its just so… SO GOOD. The computer science, the unique take on containment, the use of the fact that it's in the 001 slot. It's fucking explained.

Good boys did a good thing and I'm so proud. Good boy.

Croquembouche 01 Jul 2018 04:34

He was just trying to be a good boy

He was a very good boy

VixieTSQ 10 Oct 2018 16:31

agreed

TyGently 01 Jul 2018 04:51

I took great pleasure in the Fatberg: Origins story presented here, especially since I keenly remember complaining about those containment procedures when it was posted three years ago.

This is really cool. It's filled with entertaining tidbits and details, humorous asides (just divide by bears! the answer was there all along!), and also a mounting sense of dread and confusion that really works as the article progresses.

I also think, and maybe this is nothing, that the use of crosslinking here is kind of interesting. The crosslinks here typically aren't connecting to the object as much as the actual text of the article and its existence as an in-universe document. It's an interesting lens to read through.

The Great Hippo 01 Jul 2018 11:10

Most of the skips we used are ones Peppersghost came up with, because he knows the site-lore way better than I do — but Fatberg (SCP-2717) was one I picked. Specifically because I remember that discussion xD

Re: treating the crosslinks as documents rather than objects — I don't think you're far off at all. A lot of these skips were specifically picked because of complaints people have brought up about their documentation — the 'No children' line in SCP-3034, people asking why the Foundation continues to test SCP-1459, the recurrence of cell dimensions for humanoid anomalies (why do your containment procedures demand this guy always be contained in a 5 x 5 x 5 meter cell?), and even 'How did they figure that out?' in regards to the clown-vaccine for SCP-2170.

Basically, while we were writing this, one of the questions we kept asking was "how can we use this to explain some of the quirks of SCP documentation?"

(account deleted) 01 Jul 2018 06:29

this is a hippo/pepper 001 proposal

my life is complete

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~Baubi

rockyred9 01 Jul 2018 07:20

OH SHIT MOTHERFUCKERS IT'S THE GREAT HIPPO 001!

I have been hoping and praying for a Hippo 001 since the day I read The Counting Station. And it's here! And it's good and creative and has such a neat explanation for its 001 status.

+1

Last edited on 01 Jul 2018 08:42 by rockyred9 Show more

LukeZaz 01 Jul 2018 08:38

Can't say I ever expected to see a 001 proposal that described the end of anomalous phenomena or the Foundation, instead of the start of it. I also never expected to want to hug a computer for being SUCH A GOOD BOY!

Needless to say, I quite like this article. Foundation content always seems to end in doom and gloom (Doomcon notwithstanding), so it was really nice to see that trope get subverted. Bonus points for using a real neural net!

+1!

(account deleted) 01 Jul 2018 10:20

I enjoyed this take on SCP-001. It's not a great, powerful deity or overarching reason for the Foundation's existence - it's a human creation built by humans that is completely normal. Yet it shows that we ourselves can still be deeply unnerving and terrifying in our ruthlessness and efficiency. The fact that we understand it makes it that much scarier.

+1, brilliant work!

mojitheblue 01 Jul 2018 11:20

It went on a little long, and got too blatantly creepy at one point, but the majority of it had me captivated and it's very well written. I read this completely forgetting about the contest and can definitely say it's a good skip outside of that context. I need to learn how to write so I can get in on the 5000 contest.

+1, PeppersGhost will you have my children? I can't take care of them anymore.

Edit: Oh wait this isn't a 4000 entry, me stupid.

Last edited on 01 Jul 2018 11:23 by mojitheblue Show more

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