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Comment by Andrex | Hacker News Reader

That explanation should have been in the show, it was my biggest question of the first season (in a show designed to beg questions).

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The show is loosely based on the movie, and there’s no reason to think that’s how it worked in the show. In the show, it’s pretty easy to conclude that a lot of that type of stuff was controlled by an AI advanced enough to “just know the difference” between the humans and the hosts.

But it was never explained, and that’s fine because leaving stuff like that as a mystery is a big part of storytelling. Or, they wanted to avoid having a bunch of scenes with characters spewing technological gobbledygook like Star Trek.

> an AI advanced enough to “just know the difference”

I think the issue would be guests accidentally shooting other guests.

At some point in the show William gets shot at, it hurts but it doesn't break the skin, so somehow the bullets have a variable speed controlled by computers.

There's also a short scene in the show where two humans are talking. One of them takes his knife out in an intimidating way and in a split second the closest host just takes the sharp part of the knife in his hand and put it in the table, so even melee weapons can't hurt real humans.

The scene with the knife didn't show that the hosts would try and save every human life in the park, just the life of the creator of the park.

I think he meant ai in the gun. The original movie androids appeared to just have normal guns lol.

Honestly, a lot of what goes on with shooting, fighting, etc. just takes a certain suspension of disbelief that no guest gets killed or seriously hurt.

Seems like the easiest way is to do it the other way around. The robots (walls, whatever) have tiny explosives in them and when the gun reports its orientation and location when the trigger is pulled, it signals some local computer attached to cameras in the room to compute the path of the virtual bullet and then trigger the appropriate “explosion”. Gunshots in films work this way (without the computer, but the explosion is in the target). This can make all shots at real humans into realistic misses as well.

This is the only way where people would ever enter such a theme park, realistically.

The show is fairly explicit that life outside the park—at least for the folks who could afford to go to Westworld—is effectively risk-free, and one of the primary reasons guests attend is to experience at least the frisson of danger.

Right, but you could still get a bit of that frisson of danger, but instead by environmental hazard or robots potentially choking or applying blunt trauma to guests.

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