dooo doo dooo .... Just mining for resources ...
Put this guy right over here
aaand we should be good to go ... ummmmm
Let's see what should I be doing now.
oh no. OH NOO. No it can't be! MATPAT RUSH!!
(Game Theory Theme)
Hello internet. Welcome to Game Theory.
Ahhh the Zerg, when it comes to video game
species they get a bad rap.
They're the most memorable alien race in video game history,
so much so that there's a special google search when you type in zerg rush but
anyone who's played Starcraft knows that the Zerg are by far the least
sexy aliens in the galaxy.
When you compare them to the other races like the
Protoss, super techy ultra powerful, or even the Terrans, the scrappy humans just
trying to make their way in the wild west of outer space,
the Zerg are just like these weird insectoids and we're not talking a bunch of
Jiminy Crickets up in space, these guys are like that huge spider that crawls out
of the drain while you're trying to brush your teeth in the morning. (choking sounds)
Seriously, has this ever happened to you? It is terrifying, just turn on the water
and hope that it washes the spider back down into the depths where it came from.
Back you dread beast to leave my menta-dent alone! (shudders)
What makes the Zerg feel particularly alien to us humans though is that they
don't act as individuals.
They're a hive mind.
We're used to being unique
and special flowers, having our own thoughts and opinions, but in a high mind
there is no blue hair and emo eyeliner for Zerg adolescents, no elite Zerg
driving hybrids in the HOV lane while the rest of us Zerg are stuck in traffic.
Everyone is the same.
It's like one shared consciousness across everyone in the species, and in a
world where we value individuality so much,
no wonder we look down on the Zerg.
We see the Zerg as a mindless mass of units
that act without thinking, but hold on a second.
What if I told you that we have
more in common with the Zerg than you think,
more in common with the Zerg then we do the Protoss,
or even the Terrans, who are human.
At the end of this episode, you're going to have a newfound appreciation for the
buggiest race in space or a newfound
hopelessness towards the state of humanity,
maybe a little [bit of both.] (tongue twisted MatPat)
To start with we need to understand the way the Zerg function a
little bit better.
If it's been a while since you've thrown down with some
Starcraft or you uhhh ... (laughs)
weren't alive for the first installment back in 1998,
first off stop flaunting your youth in my face but secondly let's learn a
little bit about these digital insectoids.
In Starcraft lore, the Zerg have what's
called a purity of essence, which is basically a fancy name for their ability
to evolve by eating other species.
mmmmm mmm mmm
nutritious and delicious.
They evolve by absorbing a new species, gaining their
powers, and becoming stronger.
Well a special ability like that doesn't go unnoticed and so in the game
lore, a super powerful species called the Xel'Naga found the Zerg and wanted to
use them to enhance their own powers, creating an awesome super race combo
of Zerg and the other major species in the game the Protas.
Unfortunately, before that could happen the Zerg needed to get to a better
evolutionary state.
It sounds cool, and it is, but let's face it who's got time to wait millions of
years for the Zerg to get there.
Ain't nobody got time for that,
especially the Xel'Naga so they gave the Zerg a gift,
the Zerg over mind.
Before the Overmind, the Zerg were trying to become more
evolved and advanced on their own, but they were doing it as individuals not really
as a group.
The Overmind brought evolution to the next level,
evolution evolved, by giving the Zerg a hive mind so what is a hive mind?
It's a lot more than just zillions of bugs; a hive mind or as it's actually called
scientifically swarm intelligence is where a large group of individuals
receive information from a centralized source that ultimately drives their decision making.
The rules set by the hive are designed to find the best
answers to a problem that the group faces,
so when the entire Zerg colony is like what are we having for dinner, there's no
argument that breaks out between the faction who wants to order takeout and
the faction who's like guys were on a budget here we need to eat some of these leftovers.
Instead, the Overmind calculates the pros and cons of each
decision and provides an answer that makes mathematical sense to benefit the
most members of the group.
It's like democracy except it runs on autopilot.
No one even knows that they're voting.
At it's core, the Zerg Overmind is an information filter, taking all the data
from each individual and condensing it into what is most relevant to the group,
cutting out all the noise and only focusing on what's important.
With the hive mind created by the Overmind, the Zerg function together as a unit, don't
question their objectives, and go from primitive individuals to single-minded
killing machines in a fraction of the time.
Now the most obvious example of how the hive mind works in real life is with
large groups girls going to the bathroom at the same time. Just kidding ...
It's actually bees, but seriously why do girls do that?
Why would you want to
go to the bathroom with other people going to the bathroom at the same time?
It's weird. Give me some privacy when I pea,
but enough about girls bathroom habits, bees, bees use pheromones.
Communal pheromones, or basically bee smells, control almost everything in a hive.
Pheromones given off by the Queen dictate almost every decision the bees make.
The big Kahuna of these is the Queen mandibular pheromone or the QMP that can
make all the bees swarm differently, redistribute bee labor, and tell the
colony how to react in emergency situations by following the Queen's
pheromones directives.
Some of the queen bee's pheromones can even slow down or
speed up help fast different bees grow up in the swarm.
It's like if that Glade
plugin your mom put in your room to control the smell of your gym socks also
kept you 15 for the next eight years.
She just wasn't ready to let you leave the nest, ok?
In a lot of ways, bee pheromones are pretty good model
for our in-game Zerg, where the Overmind is
making decisions for the swarm about when to produce units, went to build,
attack, anything as long as it's the best bet for the swarm's survival.
In bee terms, the Queen makes the tough decisions
to actually make sure the hive continues to function.
Does that make the bees in the hive stupid or mindless?
Actually, no!
In the example, the individual bees still have extremely specific skills
just like specialized Zerg troops.
Our forger bees, for instance, have been
shown to have awesome individual memory for shapes, colors, and direction which is
why they're great at finding food, remembering which flowers are best, how
to find them, everything.
It's actually a huge skill set. It's just that the bee knows when they get
that signal from the higher-ups, it's time to pack it in its own best interest..
He knows his skill set doesn't involve knowing when winter is coming.
Only Ned Stark knows that,
so he leaves it up to the hive mind to make the decision for him.
Tons of organisms work this way, where individuals are really smart but the hive
is smarter, ants, bacteria, some fish they all work this way and we think of them
as some of the most resilient organisms on the planet.
The Overmind in the game acts in the same way, driving zerg evolution forward
and building up the swarm when it makes sense but not letting the swarm waste
their time or disagree because it's not in the best interest of keeping everyone
alive.
But okay, I hear you say that some little
bees are one thing, but the Zerg Overmind is different.
It's an outside source coming in and taking over the Zerg to
which I say, yeah you're absolutely right, so let's update our example to something
a little closer to home, AI.
People have been working on artificial intelligence for a while, but
the hip new thing in AI is called swarm robotics, which you can tell is
super-intense simply by the name.
If you think it sounds like something that
comes out of, well a video game or Big Hero 6,
you wouldn't be far off.
Scientists are now taking what they know about
biological systems like bees and ants and putting the same kind of hive
mentality into physical robots.
The idea behind building swarms of robots is that
basically they can act exactly like the Zerg we see in Starcraft.
Swarm robotics is all about scale,
creating huge numbers of simple robots that can do two or
three basic things and receive information from each other or from an
overarching control signal that's operated by a real person.
The swarm mentality keeps them all on task doing whatever we want.
Instead of a single robot making a couple simple decisions, the group of
robots can now make really complex decisions and this yields a lot of
really cool and also a lot of really scary possibilities.
We could produce robots to do the jobs that are really dangerous now
like mining deep underground where it's too risky to send people.
We can send them into storms where
they could give us data; we can send them to Mars where
they can make the hard choices
just like humans do.
You can also use them though, like it's shown in the game.
Instead of risking tons of human lives trying to take over a city or sending
waves of soldiers out on military expeditions, you could send a swarm of robots.
Based on the hive-mind interactions, they know when to switch
weapons or tactics, when to chase down the enemy, or even when to retreat.
The Navy is already running tests on swarm robots who can run up to an enemy
ship, completely surround it, then take it down all at once without any humans on board.
The technology is real and it shows real potential,
but it's also really terrifying.
I mentioned it before, here on my Mega Man episode,
but there is already a lot of talks about whether it's ethical to use
autonomous weapons, weapons that can kill people without an actual person making
the decision, but swarm robotics takes it to a whole new level
because it's not just the power of one weapon acting on its own.
It's an entire army making life or death
decisions based on the way that they're programed.
If that sounds a lot like the
Zerg then you're right, kinda.
Like our bee example, there's one big difference between swarm robotics and the Zerg.
In swarm robotics, the Overmind, in this case us, the humans, create the
robots from scratch.
The robots were never sentient. They were never individuals on their own.
The Zerg on the other hand started off as individuals with their own skills,
goals, everything; in short, they were a lot more like us so that seems to leave our
example incomplete once again but I'd like to propose one more example for you
where instead of us being the overlords creating swarms of robots to do our
dirty work, what if
we were the mindless swarm.
Humans are a more interesting parallel to the Zerg
than bees or ants or even killer robot armies because we actually have more of
the same goals than any of our other examples.
The primary directive of
the Zerg, before and after the presence of the Overmind, was to become the most
evolved race in the galaxy.
As a species they wanted to evolve so they could
adapt to any situation and ultimately anything that happened to them couldn't
threaten their existence in the universe.
Bees in a hive definitely want to stay alive but they don't have higher
aspirations to become the galaxy's greatest super bees.
Over time, evolution happens
but they're not out there trying to learn how to better evolve from ants
and birds and whatever but we are. Humans are the only species in the world who
actively sets a goal of evolving.
Think about it; the purpose of evolution is to
become stronger, to eliminate the things that threaten your survival.
Every disease we cure,
every tool we build, even the idea that we use bee behavior to help us build
our own robotics.
It's all about humans trying to evolve more quickly, become
more adaptable, become invincible to preserve our survival.
If the Zerg are looking to absorb information from everything around them
to help them evolve.
Well then, guess what. So are we.
We like to go all Judge Judy on them
because they're acting based on a Hive-Mind,
but we're no different.
Consider this: We might not actively recognize, that we have a Hive-Mind,
but if you actually think about it, we've had it for years.
We don't have pheromones to share information
and we might not be programmed to exchange data
just by bumping into each other like a Million swarming robots,
but we do contribute to a Hive-Mind all the time.
It's called 'The Internet'
and it's the greatest evolutionary tool we've ever had...
Instead of us sharing information on by one by reading books,
buying newspapers or (gasps)
talking to each other. (shudders)
We now share information with everyone all the time, at the same time.
This video is doing it right now.
The internet is literally a web of consciousness.
It's the web and if you think about it, we weren't always a Hive-Mind.
In fact, we used to be primitive, isolated, unevolved...
A lot like our friends, the Zerg...early on
but as soon as we started to share information collectively,
we started evolving faster.
The Internet IS our Hive-Mind,
and as much as we look down on the idea of a collective conciousness
of simple worker-bees, of the Zerg,
we created our own Hive-Mind for ourselves,
we chose it, because it gave us the greatest evolutionary advantage.
We craved information and the opinions of others
and so we built a system, that allows us to have that at our disposal,
but I hear one more argument,
that we don't have an Overmind.
We still have our individuality because
there's no central power filtering our information and making decisions for us
but there is.
Remember what we said the role of the Overmind was at the beginning of the episode?
An entity that takes all the information from the individual zerg and
aggregates it, distills it down to the best answers, the best decisions, the best
information and decides what makes the most sense for the benefit of the group.
The Overmind functions based on an algorithm that delivers the best results
to the greatest number of Zerg. Does that description remind you of anything?
Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Bing, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter
all systems that filter out the loads of information to find what is most
pertinent to you, to help guide your decision making.
Every meme you see, every
news article that stays in your headlines, every YouTube video that shows
up on your homepage
all of it comes from the Overminds we built to aggregate our global thoughts,
ideas, fears, everything, filtering them through the algorithm that best serves
the most of us.
How many decisions do you make based on aggregated reviews on the
internet from thousands of other people who have raided the thing.
Everything from what you wear, what you eat, what movies you watch, where you go
on vacation.
Everything is influenced by our own hive-mind and it's viewed as the best
advancement the human race has ever had
so as you get ready to pick up Starcraft: Legacy of the Void, take a closer look
at the Zerg, and see them for what they really are, not a scary
mindless hive, but a mirror that reflects the same evolutionary choices we make every day
and remember that's just a THEORY,
a GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching.
Welcome back to the SUPER AMAZING END CARD TOURNAMENT, where last time you
overwhelmingly said that until Dawn's Windigo is not getting you hot under the
collar.
Three hundred percent more of you actually. Well remember it's what's on
the inside that counts
since we're talking about the Overmind, this time I want to know, do you think
the Internet has truly been a good thing for Humanity?
It seems like an easy yes, right, and yet we hear complaints all the time about
people being on their phones all the time, people having shallow interests,
people not thinking for themselves,
so honestly what do you think? Is the progress worth it?
Click on one to choose and cast your votes. Once you click you'll be taken to
the channel page where I want you to check out the special playlist I created
specifically for this episode, dedicated to interesting and scary technological
advances,
covering everything from killer robots, to hackers controlling your body.
Truly uplifting stuff just in time for the holiday season
and speaking of uplifting things ...
(creepy laugh)