Dear Platinum Games
Holy crap! Are you living in my house?
Have you overheard my inebriated rantings and ravings
about how there aren't any games that combine perfectly crafted
NAY! Virtuostically sculpted fan service with compelling characters, consistent writing and fun dark soulsy gameplay?
Yokotero get out of my closet!
Even more irritating this game was out a solid month before
I wasted an entire week playing the piece of garbage pile where pissed in a bucket before slapping a Mass Effect logo on it
To think instead of spending that week grinding my own kneecaps off
with a belt sander and repeating to myself maybe if I just keep going this will eventually become 'fun'
I could've been zooming around a post-apocalyptic world
as a Lolita goth android with a fetish for swords and stepping on 9-s's little face!
But I didn't come here to dunk on Mass Effect Andromeda
The internet as a whole is doing a pretty good job without me piling on more than I already have
instead today I want to focus my laser beam SCIENCE VISION on the surprisingly successful game
about lingerie models with the strength of superman.
I don't know what it is about games that combine bullet hell
creators with an encyclopedic knowledge of video game tropes
and incorporating saving and loading into their core plot structure
But $!#& if I don't definitely have a specific type of game that gets me freaking pumped to play it
Nier Automata is like UnderTale plus Magical girls
Anyway, enough fawning and let's pick this game about sexy androids apart and get to the SCIENCE!
And while unfortunately the science isn't goddamn terrifying this week
It is absolutely some of the coolest stuff I've ever looked into.
So! Let's get to it, shall we?
(Music)
This is like, the smallest spoiler on the planet,
But saving your game in Nier Automata isn't a meta mechanic like it is in most other games that aren't Undertale
it's a in game thing that you actually experience.
effectively, you're backing up your android brain.
So, if you die, It's no biggie!
You can just download yourself into a backup body with a fresh skirt and hair-do, good as new!
And while this mechanic seems kind of arbitrary to look at since the game made it clear that this is something important I couldn't help myself.
How possible would it be to back up your entire brain on a server somewhere.
I mean it's not even a ludicrous question to ask. Technology is getting exponentially more advanced.
Even as I'm making this video right now.
In fact, the information I'm going to dump into your head like it's a download from the Matrix will be irrelevant in a couple of decades.
You save your game by reaching access points and unlocking them. But it gets deeper than that.
This isn't a wired upload. Once unlocked you're not required to physically visit an access point like your grandpa's save points.
Good bye cloud strife heading toward that... you know I never knew what this thing was supposed to be. A fricking...
What are you!!!? A question mark with a diamond!? I just, just ...dahhh!!
Anyway. No, once you unlock an access point you can upload your personality when you're within a certain distance from it.
Free wifi son!
This got me thinking, could you actually upload an entire human consciousness via wifi?
I mean, could you do it at all?
In order to figure this out, we're gonna have to do some cross-disciplinary work by combining computer science, neuroscience and signal engineering.
So! Hold on to your buds, it's science time!
Ahh.... Where to start?.....Look if that's the question
Alright let's talk about something that every human has used for good or ill every single day before we get to the thing that most of us in modern time use every day.
The brain! How do you build a brain?
(Laughing) I have no f***ing idea.
I'm not a real scientist, I just play one on tv. But we don't have to know exactly how a brain works in order to know how one could be wirelessly uploaded.
We just need to know how big it is. If you're a fan of film theory and you caught the video on Ghost in the Shell.
You'll remember that they stipulated that the human brain is 2.5 petabytes.
That's petabytes MatPat, not Pentabytes. Pentabytes are how black middle bands measure their hard drive size.
Not that I should be throwing stones. I totally messed up saying Epidural last time. Where was I?
Oh right! Petabytes. So you may know this 2.5 petabyte number, but where's it coming from exactly.
What does it mean? Well, here's the 411.
Our brains are made up of about 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has roughly 1000 connections to neurons around it.
That's over 1 Trillion fricking connections.
You feel me? Now when your brain does well anything, these connections send electrical impulses to one another.
Computers communicate in 1s and 0s, that's called Binary.
Scientists at the (inaudible) Institute, however, who have been spending YEARS constructing a functioning model of a rat hippocampus
measured 26 different intensities of signals neurons can send. As opposed to just 2.
Which if you're thinking like a computer means that our brains are coded in uhhhhh...
(muttering) 2 is binary, 26 is...."quinvigentary"
When you add up all the bits and pop them into bytes, this gets you 2.5 petabytes.
Now there are some problems with thinking about the brain this way.
As we'll explain later, while it is possible for digital systems to take advantage of analog signals
to send digital signals, brains are entirely analog!
They don't have bits, they have...well
Okay, if I knew what they had instead of bits we wouldn't be here right now.
I'd be in a tropical country getting full service massages from women that look like 2B everyday.
The point is they're not digital media. So trying to compare us is well...gonna get messy.
Problem the second, that if you could compare digital systems to neurons in this way, knowing how many different signal strengths a neuron is capable of sending doesn't tell you jack $h*†.
if you don't know the encoding system, more on that later.
That being said, we're just gonna take this 2.5 petabyte number that will totally and be completely out of date at any moment as new scientists discover more things.
Plus the people at (the unknown institute) are smarter than I am.
So! We need to know this because we need to have some estimate of the size of a brain, so we know how to transmit it
Now if you want 2.5 petabytes for yourself in 2017, I hope you have the best credit card in the world.
It would take over 9000 micro SD cards crammed into a box weighing almost 5 kg or over 10 lbs
And would cost over 1.5 million dollars!
Why micro SDs? Because otherwise you're looking at a stack of 2,500 terabyte hard drives.
They take up their own frigging book case and weigh God knows how much.
And it still costs a butt load!
So yeah. That thing between your ears is kind of expensive.
It takes 8 bits to make a byte, which means we got 20 petabits in our 2.5 petabytes or over 20 quadrillion bits to take care of.
We only have limited time here before Ronny starts to get fatal carpal tunnel syndrome. So!
So I'm sorry neuroscience geeks, it's here that we have to stop talking about the brain and move on to (Interruption): But Austin, what about the heirachical pattern recognition theory of
SHUT UP!! THERE'S NO TIME!
Get back into the comment section where you belong! We gotta talk about SIGNALS!!
How is information sent wireless?
Photons baby!
You know, Light!
Well, sort of. It's not light if you think of light being only what we can see
Light comes in all shapes and sizes though, from barely measurable waves in a wavelength of over a 100,000 km in a frequency of 3 hertz
All the way up to incredibly energetic and incredibly deadly, very high energy gamma rays with frequencies in the 10s of octillions of hertz
And wavelengths as tiny as the radius of neutrinos.
All of these things are essentially, the same thing. The only difference.
Their Energy!
The more energy, the higher the frequency, and generally speaking the smaller the wavelength.
The relationship between wavelengths, frequency, energy and power are...complicated.
For the most part, higher frequency means more energy but there are ways to inject higher amplitudes without manipulating the frequency.
A perfect example of this is microwave ovens. Most microwave ovens actually operate at the exact same frequency as wireless routers,
But you can't explode an egg with a router!
Light, Gamma radiation, radio waves, they're all the same thing
Electromagnetic radiation with different levels of energy.
They are weaves of synchronized electric and magnetic fields that are measured in Hertz,
which means cycles per second.
Every time a light wave completes a cycle, that is moving from crest to crest, that's one cycle in the hertz.
Electromagnetic radiation that we can see with our eyes cycles between 430 to 750 teraHertz.
Meaning visible light waves cycle over 430 to 750 trillion times a second.
So how do you send information with electromagnetic radiation?
Well the best examples are AM and FM radio waves.
AM stands for Amplitude Modulation, and is used to send sound to people across miles.
This is done by modulating the amplitude of the electromagnetic wave.
This can then be read as a sound wave by your car's or radio's antenna.
FM or frequency modulation works similarly, but instead of changing up the amplitude of the wave, it changes up the frequency.
These waves can transmit sound to your radio receiver and it's fricking awesome.
Of course, these are analog signals and they're prone to interference which you hear as static.
Your phone, your computer and everything else that exists that runs off of computers needs data to be PERFECT!
Or the whole system can come crashing down. It's here that the power of electromagnetic radiation's ability to travel vast distances unimpeded is married with modern computing to send digital signals.
Digital just means that it's operating with 1s or 0s. or ON or OFF.
This makes it really easy to tell when say a high amplitude wave with a lot of interference is a 1 and a low amplitude wave with a lot of interference is a 0.
As you may have guessed it, since each cycle of a wave carries information, they're not usually just a 1 or a 0.
Really smart people have spent decades maximizing the efficiency of the analog nature of electromagnetic waves to send batches of code
But the principal remains true
Each cycle equals 1 small chunk of information. This means it stands to reason the higher frequency of light you use
the more information you can send right?j
Totally! But there are limitations.
For one, the higher frequency of electromagnetism the more it attenuates or dissipates in the atmosphere.
I mean AM radio which is measured in KHz or thousands of cycles per second can travel ten, sometimes over hundreds of miles
But my wireless router which is measured in Giga Hertz has trouble when I'm in my bedroom.
It's not even that far away but it is past a wall.
And higher frequencies are terrible at penetrating walls.
Fiber optics use visible light to transmit information but they have to lock the light away from everything else in cables where there is no interference.
So sending more information wirelessly to the point where you're uploading an entire 2.5 petabytes of a brain or near
isn't as simple as turning your frequencies up as high as they'll go.
Taking all this, we can finally figure out how saving works Nier: Automata.
I don't want to base my numbers off of how long it takes for me to save an actual game since that can vary from computer to computer and from console to console
Thankfully, there's actually a segment in the game where you upload your personality in an actual arbitrary timeframe
It's a bit spoilery so I won't show you the actual spot, but all 2.5 petabytes of sweet sweet android brain is uploaded in 32.64 seconds
which gives us and upload speed of over 612 terabits per second
How fast is that?
Approximately 3 billion percent faster than my upload speed of 20ish megabits per second.
And that's wired!
You could upload the entire iTunes music library in 5 fricking seconds at these speeds.
This is freaking fast!!
But extraordinarily, it's not impossible.
Especially 9000 years into the future.
Scientists at the University College of London set data at 1.125 terabits per second.
Sure, this is 0.16th of the speed of our Nier network, and it was over fiber optics
But this is something that happened last year!
5g broadband is looking to take advantage of the faster transmission speeds of higher frequencies of electromagnetic waves by completely changing network structures.
Instead of using one giant tower to service multiple devices, they're planning on putting several smaller towers that broadcasts to smaller areas.
Using a combination of beam forming and smart transmitters that can actually bounce wireless signals off of reflective surfaces dynamically to reach devices
Phone service providers are looking to get us internet on our phones that's WAY faster than what we have now.
And the access points of Nier: Automata seem to be acting almost exactly like this.
Using a combination 2B's cannon height of 1.68 meters, and her run speed most access points have a radius of 250ish meters.
And a lot of them are blocked by tall buildings and won't work, and sometimes they do.
Technology am I right?
You know, I started researching this video convinced that it would be absolutely absurd trying to broadcast the contents of a human brain over airwaves.
But honestly, it's possible that speeds like this will exist in my lifetime!
Between the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing that can send huges batches of information with overlapping waves
multiple input, multiple output, and beam forming!
It's kind of amazing that in what is essentially a post apocalyptic world without a lot of radio interference
They're not able to get faster speeds than this.
Although considering they're capable of sending this information to satellites and geostationary orbit above the earth before beaming that information down to the
bunker, and orbit 7000 km above earth, maybe I'm being too critical of uhhh...1000 G broadband.
I just hope that they don't figure out that we used to call our phones androids.
Although I do admit that I wish that my pixel XL had an *ss like 2B's
Sincerely, Austin
Thank you, everyone, for watching my video on Nier Automata.
This video, like there's a lot of information I didn't include in here.
Like how I figured out the orbital height of the bunker which I did using the window and it's roundness
and di-di-divisibility of the t-thing.
It doesn't matter. I did it!
It wasn't relevant, but I figured it out anyway.
Thank you for watching. Subscribe to the Game Theorist. Follow me on twitter @arhourigan and uh..
(Inaudible)
know the science of
Don't ask me to do warframe. I'm not going to do war frame.
You can suck it!
Never gonna do war frame
You can't make me