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Comment by TruthWillHurt | Hacker News Reader

Ha ha! Very good! The writing is good, the ending is brilliant! :)

I love the binary numbers bit. It appears very often in sci-fi when interacting with aliens. very good to have it explained nicely and be a "puzzle" to solve.

But I'll just note that as far as I know - von Neumann probes are not passengers, but rather the ship itself, which replicates and travels to new destinations.

It might be ok in this short story because kids found the ship, so they didn't know better, but it's important to get the science right in sci-fi. Readers are smart :)

Keep at it! I'd love to read more of your stories. (Short stories are great for sci-fi in my opinion!)

P.S

A great book about Von Neuman probes is - We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

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The Bobiverse - A good read to be sure. But for some reason Bob never engages in geometric growth. The resources in our asteroid belt for instance could run to billions of Bobs, but his numbers somehow grow linearly (even though out of communication with other Bobs for millenia; how do they coordinate?)

Also the contradiction where you can make backups, but somehow they lose some Bobs to accident or war. Wtf? The principle benefit of being a Bob is backups.

Then there's the oddity that backups work and reinstate the same Bob, but new containers for Bob always end up with slightly different personalities even when programmed with a backup. Seems a direct contradiction, but oh well.

The central conceit of the series is, most personalities instantiated as a machine intelligence went nuts. But Bob was a science fiction fan/writer. So he managed. I like that.

> ...lose some Bobs to accident or war. Wtf?

Because the copies are imperfect, I took the in-universe explanation to be that, while yes, they can technically restore a backup, the restoration is going to be another new personality.

>...but new containers for Bob always end up with slightly different personalities

I think this is a story-telling device to give us new character perspectives. Otherwise the majority of the story would be, "Great idea Bob", "I agree, Bob". It also allows for the writer to invent whatever character expertise is required for the plot.

The newest bobiverse book hints that the copies are slightly different due to the no clone paradox.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem

Came here to recommend the Bobiverse (first book of 4 so far: We are legion (We are Bob)) as it's simply fantastic read or listen.

Can't recommend it more. The whole series is muah

100% This series is so fun to read.

Another vote for bobiverse, absolutely great book.

I had the same thought. Great series.

"Spin" is also an interesting Von Neumann probe story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(novel)

The Hypotheticals are far removed from the majority of the plot. While it is in the background, with some philosophical waxing about their nature, I do not think that is fair to characterize it is as a Von Neumann probe story. To a fairly similar effect, the novel could have been catalyzed by a wizard casting a magical spell.

(spoilers)

Granted it is a sci-fi novel, but I did not care for how humanity's probes are able to spread across the galaxy for generations before ultimately being absorbed by the already established super entity. Said super entity which has been already been manipulating Earth for billions of years. Somehow, humanity's first generation probe is able to slip under the radar of the ancient, highly evolved, intelligence?

Thank you! I recently read a great von Neumann biography (The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya) and I've thinking about the von Neumann probes ever since. Definitely agree with you on how von Neumann probes are typically represented as ships or machines, but I wanted to make the nibbles "cute", so I thought "why not make the probes organic little blobby things?" But I'm definitely going to pick up the "We are Bob" book this week - seems from comments below that it has a lot of fans!

Also, I have been writing one short story every week this year, as a project to get better at writing, and you can read them all here: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/

Some favorites of mine are: - The Correctives - Flynn's Arrow - El Codigo de los Estados Unidos - Plastic Man on the Moon

Love the pun on nibbles too since half a byte is a nibble, and there are 4 slots.

I was torn about whether or not to call them nybbles :)

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