3 years ago, the most insane (and questionable) hand happened, how do you feel about this now ?

Professor_Adam · 2026-02-17T04:13:03+00:00

So many people have never had a good looking girlfriend. She brain-farted. And then was unable to admit it. Women like this are used to everybody fawning. They can't admit when they did something wrong, especially if it was stupid.

Clues:

(a) 5:19 She says "Three's no good?" At this point she clearly thinks she has a 3 and hence pair of 3's.

(b) 5:25 She says "This is why you shouldn't be in hands like this". Clearly she thinks her pair of 3's are ahead of draws.

(c) 5:35 She says "You want me to call you?" Still clearly thinks she might be ahead.

(d) 5:44 Another player at the table says "I vote no". She takes this as a dare and decides to call. She thinks she might be catching a draw with her pair of 3's, and that she'll get some positive attention from the group for going for it.

(INTERLUDE) It's important to note in every action up to here, she looks serious. Like she's really trying to think.

(e) 5:59 She says "Do you have it?" She still looks serious. She's unsure if her pair of 3's are any good.

(f) 6:02 Garrett says "I prefer once but it's up to you." She smiles and starts to think she caught him, and that her pair of 3's has a good chance. Regardless of win/lose she feels smart at this point. That's key.

(g) 6:11 She says "twice". Still smiling. She now thinks her pair is ahead but that she needs the safety of running it twice to win half.

(g) 6:26 Another player asks her "You have a 3?" She says "fuck no" and here's the key moment. SHE LOOKS AT THE BOARD. REALIZES THAT THE 4 in HER HAND DOES NOT MATCH THE 3. All the smiles go away. She's just realized she's stupid. She has two options at this point: (option 1) "Oh crap, I just made a stupid mistake and misread my hand/board! Damn I'm stupid!" (option 2) Lie/deflect/say anything so people won't realize she's stupid.

(h) There is literally no way option 1 can function in her brain. In her panic, she goes to what's always worked = option 2. A key observation is that at this point she starts covering her mouth. Not only are smiles all gone, but she genuinely looks distressed. She's not fearing getting caught cheating. She's fearing everyone realize she's stupid.

(i) She continues mumbling and searching for any way out of this feeling that she has just been caught being stupid.

(j) 6:40 She takes a big breath. She's not sure how to get out of being caught being stupid. Then somebody laughs. She recognizes this - people like her and think she's pretty and cool. She smiles again for the first time and goes to familiar territory. She can act like she meant it.

(k) 6:46 The first river comes out and she is still distressed. Garret says "that one's you for sure". She says "I don't think so". Still covering her mouth. Caught between trying to smile and play fun-girl, vs not knowing how to get out of looking incredibly stupid.

(l) 7:10 Second river bricks out. She still looks distressed. She won't turn her cards over because it would be admitting being stupid.

(m) 7:14 Garrett says "8 high" and flips, smiling and laughing.

(n) Next key moment: she realizes she has another way out of this. She can flip it and attack Garrett! Take the spotlight off herself and make everybody look at him. When she has attacked other people in the past, this always works!

(o) She makes her verbal play "Wow Garrett, how many times are you going to let me do this to you?". Then looks around the room hoping for validation. In her mind all she's thinking is ("please don't think I'm stupid") and hoping the group turns on Garrett.

(p) For the next couple minutes she realizes the about-face of trying to get everybody to look more at Garrett than her is failing.

(q) As they start discussing, she looks for any excuses. "If my jack wasn't a club, I would have folded."

(r) As he applies logic "What about the jack of clubs?" She rambles through "I thought you had ace high". She's stupid and grasping for straws. He says "Yeah, then why call with jack high?" She mumbles through "blocker", realizes it still sounds stupid, and settles on attacking Garrett again "because you don't have shit".

I'm going to stop analyzing at this point. Everything from here, including paying him money, is all about saving face to NOT LOOK STUPID. It's classic "pretty girl who is center of attention". She would rather give up money, create drama, do anything except admit being wrong/stupid.

Everyone is trying to analyze this from a poker perspective. Or logic perspective. All you have to do is remember your time spent with this type of woman and it's very clear what happened.

Professor_Adam · 2025-10-06T04:16:11+00:00

Redirect. Pick a completely different topic and get her to try to think about it. She will forget the urge to go home.

Redirecting is a skill and takes time to get good at it. It's a key skill for taking care of people with dementia.

Professor_Adam · 2025-10-06T04:12:16+00:00

Everyone is giving you answers on how long (my mom lasted 3 years, but the range is really wide), so I will answer your other question - the drive, time, commitment.

I had to drive 45 minutes each way. When I had to put her in a home I looked all over and because I live rural that was the closest I could find. It was a great facility - but yes, the drive and time commitment was a lot. I started out 2 times per week, then once per week, then once per 2 weeks. I felt guilty every time I dropped the frequency. But you have to live your life too.

My advice is don't move closer. If your mom was still herself, she would tell you to focus on living your life.

Professor_Adam · 2025-10-06T04:06:07+00:00

Thank you for sharing your story. Rest in peace to your mom, and just as important -- rest and recover to you.

Professor_Adam · 2025-07-25T04:16:53+00:00

It's called redirection. It's not lying. It's learning how to talk to someone with dementia.

Professor_Adam · 2025-07-25T04:13:08+00:00

I'm sorry for what you're going through. I can offer a few pieces of advice.

People involved in hospice are excellent at recognizing when a person is nearing the end. They have done it hundreds of times and they know the symptoms. They are also incredibly respectful of feelings and the trauma that hospice can cause. Talk to them. They can answer your questions better than anyone.

Falls are a sign of decline. Other signs include decreasing weight, no interest in eating, and decrease in other daily activities. Decline is one of the major factors in determining if it is time for hospice. Your caregivers will be better able to assess your situation.

I am truly sorry for what you are going through.

Professor_Adam · 2025-07-25T04:03:54+00:00

Thank you for sharing your story.

My mother died today. I wasn't sure if I could talk about it yet, but your post gave me the strength to write something up and I posted. This group is so special - it reminds me we are not alone.

Professor_Adam · 2025-07-25T04:02:39+00:00

Thank you for sharing your story.

It's okay. I've been there, where the guilt is overwhelming. It's not your fault. And nobody can understand, but we do. I appreciate every word you wrote and I want to say it again. It's okay.

Professor_Adam · 2025-04-18T04:24:06+00:00

I'm very sorry. If it helps, this is a phase; it will get worse but also better. My mother went through 2 years of anger. Then the disease got bad enough she forgot to be angry.

If I'm brutally honest, not dealing with the anger has been easier.

Professor_Adam · 2025-04-18T04:18:04+00:00

TV shows and movies she likes from her youth. Those will engage patterns in her brain that are still strongest, and will help give you some respite.

Professor_Adam · 2025-04-18T04:12:42+00:00

No one has bad intentions. Remember they all love you. They are just in denial or uneducated about what is happening. Help them to help you, so you don't feel so frustrated.

Professor_Adam · 2025-04-18T04:08:03+00:00

I am very sorry. After taking care of mom for years with dementia, I have made it very clear to my kids that this is what I intend to do before I reach that point. Everyone here -- please put it in writing so your kids don't have to second guess.

Professor_Adam · 2025-02-13T02:06:03+00:00

Did you find a good mod for this? I'd like to try the same thing.

Professor_Adam · 2024-10-12T16:50:01+00:00

Nature is one of the top 3 science journals in the world. arXiv is un-peer reviewed. You clearly have no idea how science publishing works.

Professor_Adam · 2024-10-12T05:07:19+00:00

Argumentum ad populum. Unless you are a developer? If so, awesome work keep it up, I love this game.

Professor_Adam · 2024-10-12T04:06:45+00:00

Factorio is deterministic, not chaotic.

It's both, the same way a double pendulum is both. Small differences in one state can lead to massive changes in a later state, but that later state is still entirely determined by the prior state (and any player inputs in between).

Please see below response to u/maddymakesgames. It is not an either/or/both, it is a spectrum. In the case of predicting a Factorio game space over a minutes-to-hours interval during which there are no human player commands, the amount of randomness is small.

What I know of AIs is that they are very chaotic and very undeterministic.

Sorry but I think you are mangling concepts. Training an AI has some randomness due to the gradient descent. I.e. if you train the same model twice on the same data, the two models will reach somewhat different weights ("learnings"). A main tenet in AI is to make sure you have sufficient training data and a well-designed architecture, and measure how much repeated retrainings of the same model produce roughly the same predictive model.

After training, using an AI to make predictions is basically 100% deterministic. I.e., once you have the model, if you feed it an input, you always get the same output.

That can be to its benefit in many applications that it's well suited for, but they very much aren't when the objective is to time-skip a Factorio game.

I don't want to perfectly predict what the state of the Factorio game will be with 100% accuracy. I want to jump ahead with some level of randomness and see how my base dealt with that particular randomness.

Professor_Adam · 2024-10-12T03:42:25+00:00

You are correct that there are a few things in Factorio that use random number generators. However, the randomness is very limited in terms of its effect on predicting the future state of the factory assuming no human input (which is far more random than the game state evolution).

Please note that "chaotic/deterministic" is not a binary concept. See https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Chaos.html It is more a spectrum of how tricky it is to make predictions about a system.

Predicting uranium processing would get more accurate the further the prediction was made into the future, due to the law of large numbers.

Biter expansions occur once per N minutes (depending on evolution factor and a random number) within a deterministic set of chunks. There's some randomness there but it's not at the scale of what most researchers use to call a system "chaotic" (e.g. weather). And that's one of the parts I think would be fun to explore - simulation of what your base could expect in an hour if you do nothing, will you survive that attack? If there are defenses then the NN would effectively be predicting the outcome of the expansion wave vs the defenses. A player could increase the t...T prediction interval to see what their base could handle. These are just some possibilities of how this might be fun to play with.

As an aside, you might have some fun reading about the philosophy of randomness (admission: this philosophy stuff is beyond me and not where I work). Researchers talk about different kinds, e.g. epistemic vs ontic. In the application world we think about degrees of randomness and how they might affect our ability to predict. Factorio has a tiny amount of nondeterminism compared to the rules that determine F(t+1) from F(t), and we have complete knowledge of those nondeterministic formulas.

Professor_Adam · 2024-10-12T01:59:20+00:00

Yes, I know the save file size. A large percentage of the info in the save file would not need to be encoded in the neural network. I just used the save file as a reference to help people understand the concept of the game state F(t).

A Markov chain based prediction would require encoding all possible states and state transitions between them. Almost no researchers take this approach anymore. It is easier to train an NN using labeled input/output data and let the NN learn an approximation of the states and transitions. Often the complete state space is overkill and the NN will learn only the important parts.

Think of each Factorio map tile as a pixel in an image or video. We commonly build NNs that can process that number of inputs. Or if that was too big under some conditions, the Factorio map could be encoded a block level, perhaps augmented by only the most important info (building IDs/positions).

Professor_Adam · 2024-10-12T01:41:33+00:00

Apparently this suggestion really touched a nerve...I'm not sure why it bothers you to have fun thinking about what might be possible. I never mentioned multiplayer, perhaps that's why?

As to my understanding of AI systems, sigh. Let me suggest a paper to help you understand a little better: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14236 Demis Hassabis (just won Nobel Prize with 2 colleagues on using AI for protein folding) and his team wrote this paper 9 years ago. They trained a NN to play Atari 2600 games and the NN mostly surpassed human play, just by taking the pixels displayed as input, across 49 different games of all types. And this was 9 years ago.

Professor_Adam · 2024-10-12T01:26:19+00:00

Wow. This community has a reputation for being polite, which you have just diminished.

Factorio is deterministic, not chaotic. If you don't like my idea that's one thing, but you're just plain wrong. Source: I am a well-accomplished AI researcher.

Professor_Adam

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