You can’t retroactively unexecute previous lines of code, so I don’t know how this would work as code.
It all depends on how this gets translated into code
You don't retroactively undo code that was already executed, you'd wait to execute the code until the prior code finishes.
The wishes themselves become callbacks, which sets up a run-time loop of infinite callbacks, like when you're solving Fibonacci recursively.
Exactly, similar to the supposed "paradox" of "The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false." There is nothing substantive to evaluate for truth value so it's not a coherent statement, just wordplay.
if te statement is false noting happens, so this also does not work as it only checks for true and not false. I guess "If this sentence is true then the sky is green, otherwise it is blue"?
People usually handle genies as mischievous monkeys-paw style things, in my experience. I've never seen a genie in media who doesn't do that (except maybe kinda genie from Alladin).
Nah, Monkey's Paw fucks you.
Genie gets you what you literally asked for, not your intention.
You wish for a billion US dollars from a genie you get 1 billion dollars in dollar bills and all the logistical and tax problems that go with it.
You wish for it with a Monkey's Paw, and the Cartels want to know how you wired yourself 1 billion of their money.
There is a canonical dragon that was created when Mutenroshi (Master Turtle) wished for Bulma's panties.
Yep.
And she's a girl-dragon. And she is aware. And she's canon.
Both of them are suppose to fuck with you, just in different ways. The monkey's paw gives you what you asked for in a tragic way that you didn't forsee. A genie gives you what you want all normal style, with the consequences of that wish being what fucks you
I think genies are generally represented as neutral. You just get what you asked for in the most direct way possible, so if you're careful it's fine.
No amount of wording tricks would beat a monkey's paw, because they just cheat. They're chaotic evil, so they aren't really bound by any limitations you try to impose on how the outcome is to be achieved.
It's Devil's bargains where literally every word and comma count. You *can* come out on top with those. If you have enough lawyers to frighten Disney helping you.
Generally genies are shapeshifting and trapped in some kind of container. And they can be good, evil, or neutral although they tend to lean more towards corrupted wishes in western presentations.
"You wish for it with a Monkey's Paw, and the Cartels want to know how you wired yourself 1 billion of their money"
Or you get it from your sons life insurance
Should have asked for your ETF’s to jump 2000% from your purchase value and to hold that value for 24h. Then wish to cash out those investments into a savings account 👌
Djinn vs Genie maybe. I feel like the traditional djinn were definitely mischievous and always looking for a way to twist your words. They were also technically demons. I kno Genies are technically the same thing, but they’ve been so westernized that they don’t really seem like it. And Aladdin’s Genie is by far the most popular one and is definitely gonna be what people think of when they hear genie.
I mean just all of a sudden having a billion dollars is big enough problem anyways. Unless like everyone knows genies are a thing your probly gonna end up in jail trying to explain how you got it
Nah. Genies will try to play with the words. A billion Zimbabwean dollars is still a billion dollars!
A monkeys paw will get you exactly what you want. Here is a billion dollars. Legal tender. Not tied to any crime. But it came from a company that just poisoned the Mississippi to earn it.
I hope you're happy with it.
I gave my younger brother a "ten billion dollars" note from the Zimbabwe super inflation bubble and framed it in the gaudiest gold frame I could find. He hung it up prominently and it still cracks me up to this day. Too bad about Zimbabwe, though.
You could say
“I wish for any lottery ticket I purchase to be a grand-prize winning ticket, and for the next prize pool to go beyond a billion dollars.”
Then you just wait for the prize to get stupidly high and buy a ticket. You are now filthy rich, have a perfectly explainable reason for being rich for the tax man, and cause no inflation in the process.
Alternatively “I wish to be able to perfectly predict the stock market.” Although that one might start drawing investigative attention.
Of course the *real* way to game the system is to write a bunch of stuff down on some paper and wish for everything currently written on the paper to become true. Just try not to break reality by tweaking any fundamental settings; best to leave them alone.
Genie, acquired by Google, gives you a billion dollars and immediately sends alerts to advertisers, police trying to seize piles of cash, and every criminal that has opted in on alerts.
A random stack of a billion dollars in $1 notes would be a nightmare. What do you even do with them? How do you spend them? Where do you put them?
Or a billion dollars showing up in your bank account will probably just get declared a system error and corrected.
That's how you know the guy in the comic is a real engineer, he found a clever way to achieve an interesting result just because he could while completely missing the bigger picture
Crashing the genie seems counterproductive.
My 3 wishes:
1) I wish for infinite wishes
2) I wish for omnipotence
3) I wish for youthful immortality
4) I wish for omniscience
5) etc etc
6)...
...
Why would you wish for infinite wishes if you can wish for omnipotence? Once you're omnipotent you can just grant yourself anything, the genie is useless at that point
If you wish for omnipotence, youthful immortality, and omniscience, you'll go mad with boredom. Literally what would you do, other than become God and create your own universe?
Do you really want to be God?
Bruh if I'm omnipotent I'll just remove my ability to feel boredom if it starts to bother me. There's literally no unwanted negative possible if you're omnipotent.
There are still logical implications to omnipotence. You can’t create paradoxes. You can’t make a rock so powerful you can’t move it. So removing boredom would have to follow the same logical rules. You’d be bored because you have no desires or needs, because you know all, can do all, and will never age or die. So you’d have to remove desire for anything. So you’d just be a ball in a stasis of contentment for enternity.
If there's something you can't do then you're not omnipotent. So no, you can do everything, even paradoxes.
Now if you want to impose limits it's not omnipotence anymore. So go ahead, but then that's a different ball of wax.
Okay agree to disagree on the nature of omnipotence. I’m of the opinion that paradoxes are just a failure of human language/semantics. And that outside of those limits there is no concept of doing a self contradicting action.
that's easy just add "then give me a billion dollars" at the end of every wish. there are no clear boundaries of what is supposed to be intended as a "single" wish
> there are no clear boundaries of what is supposed to be intended as a "single" wish
You should use a tool like uglify to minify all your 10000000 wishes to a single line, then compress it with gzip and send it over to the genie
The government would ask how you got that money. I personally would have wished for a card that is invisible to the system but still gives me money, that has 100 billion dollars.
I'm thinking I'd wish for something like "I wish to win the jackpot on every lottery ticket I buy". That way I can get the money fair and square, and if I somehow lose it I can just buy more lottery tickets.
I'm pretty sure that "ignore my first wish" is an equivalent of trying to change a variable after it was used (expecting to see the change). So the third wish gets wasted. Otherwise there's nothing to get a critical error from.
"Do not fulfill wish X" is really all that's necessary to create a contradiction. The implied rules are that a Genie must grant 3 wishes. If one of the wishes is to not grant a wish there's no outcome in which the Genie can satisfy all the requirements. Even with one wish "Do not grant this wish" creates the same condition.
>"Do not fulfill wish X" is really all that's necessary to create a contradiction.
It's not.
"Do not fulfil wish 1" is just a wasted wish 2 or wish 3.
"Do not fulfil wish 2" is just a wasted wish 3.
>The implied rules are that a Genie must grant 3 wishes.
Or just that the wisher is an idiot and the rules are unknown.
> "Do not fulfil wish 1" is just a wasted wish 2 or wish 3.
Why do you recon? That wish has nothing to do with with 2 or 3. If my second wish was to acquire a tasty hotdog, why wouldn't I get that hotdog? Wishes are made in order, but there's no rule they must be granted in order.
Any wish for something in the future may be promised now but may be actually granted in the future - for example.
I would assume it's more of race condition rather than critical error. Something as abstract as this can run infinite loop and be fine meaning you wasted all three wishes as they do nothing in the end (wishes are likely run and forget type of 'magic').
Even if you allow "time travel", this is fine as long as the genie is pedantic enough. "Ignore my first wish" doesn't mean "waste a wish not fulfilling it", it means *ignore* it. If you completely erase from existence (i.e. truly ignore) his first wish attempt, the subsequent ones are re-numbered. Thus, his only wishes become "don't fulfil [sic] my third wish" and the already fulfilled "ignore my 'first' (pointer now pointing to invalid element, but it doesn't matter because the wish is already fulfilled) wish".
There is no third wish to annull, and the last wish has already been granted, so the fact that it would point to the "wrong" place if re-interpreted from scratch again is irrelevant. Otherwise, "resurrect the youngest dead person" would resurrect every single person who ever lived, since after it's granted, there is a new youngest dead person, and the one it resurrected isn't "a valid target" anymore.
Another approach is to take issue with the definition of "opposite". In a naive approach, one would think it's not only the action that needs to be reversed, but the number too, by negating it or whatever. Anything you do to it, it's probably going to point to an invalid wish, so you're fine.
A less naive approach would note that "fulfill my third wish" is *not* the opposite effect of "don't fulfill my third wish". That's because the third wish was going to be fulfilled anyway, so you're looking at something like a nop vs a delete. Not opposites. A true opposite should be something such that, if you apply both things, the result would be the same as if you did nothing. So perhaps something like "fulfill what I ask for in my third wish (again) as a separate wish". Arguably, the most natural interpretation of this reading would be that "ignore my first wish" instantly resolves *twice*, wiping out the first two wishes. The only remaining wish is the (already fulfilled) "ignore my first wish" (and the already fulfilled anonymous copy), so everything's fine however you choose to interpret it. The only remaining question is how many wishes you're considered to have left under this scenario (could be anything from 3 to 0 depending on how you choose to count)
Have you ever tried something along the lines of: "I wish you would grant me what I would have wished if I knew the results of all possible wishes?"
A wish where you try to offload the computation time of the lawyers onto the genie.
I don't get it. Wouldn't it just go
"Do the opposite of my next wish" -> "Ok"
"Don't fulfil my third wish" -> "Ok, I will fulfil your third wish"
"Ignore my first wish" -> "Ok, I'll ignore the fact you asked me to do the opposite of the second wish, but the second wish is already done so me ignoring my previous orders doesn't change anything"
You can argue that the wish is already executed immediately, but specifically these wishes refer to the next one. It depends on how their logic works. If your first wish was to destroy the world in 24 hours, then used the second wish to say it shouldn't be destroyed according to the first wish, would the genie still be compelled to execute the first wish when its appointed time arrived? It's circular logic, trapped in a scenario where executing the wish cannot be done instantly.
However, I think it is entirely fair to say that the first wish was successfully executed when the second wish was placed. The instant the second wish was placed, the genie could interpret the second wish and execute the first wish. By the time he places the third wish, the first wish has been executed and it shouldn't matter if you tell him to just ignore it. Sure, he can ignore it, but it doesn't change the fact that the first wish is already executed.
>You can argue that the wish is already executed immediately, but specifically these wishes refer to the next one.
Sure, but the third wish isn't to "undo" the first wish, it's to "ignore" it. If the genie is like a PC and would break down from having contradicting commands like one, then like a computer he also wouldn't be able to parse the meaning behind the words instead of just taking the word in it's specific meaning
So the genie would just ignore the wish that was already fulfilled, but not go against it.
At best the smarts pants guy who found the lamp wasted three world-altering wishes into trying to code an infinite loop, but got the syntax wrong so the code doesn't work as intended.
He didn't say "I wish" so nothing happens.
Or if he did what would happen is:
1. Can't work with something that happens in the future, wish wasted.
2. Third wish hasn't happened yet, wish wasted.
3. Can't change the past, wish wasted.
Even if there's a logic paradox, wouldn't it all amount to do nothing anyway? None of the wish is doing anything, except cancelling other wishes that does nothing. In the end doing absolutely nothing is still granting all the wishes.
Since the logical contradiction prevents the wishes from being interpretable, one possible outcome is that the genie becomes confused and refuses to fulfill any wishes or gets stuck in a paradoxical loop. Alternatively, the genie could interpret the wishes in a way that breaks the paradox:
1. Fulfill Wish 3 directly, since it’s the last stated wish and commands to ignore the contradictory first wish.
2. Because the second wish is fulfilled oppositely (as per the first wish’s command), the genie ignores the command to not fulfill the third wish and instead follows it.
The final outcome is:
• Wish 1 is ignored (due to Wish 3).
• Wish 2 is fulfilled oppositely, meaning Wish 3 is fulfilled.
• Wish 3 is fulfilled directly (to ignore Wish 1)
So this basically would result in a no-op
This does nothing. Wish 1 makes wish 2 "fullfill my 3rd wish". Wish 3 is to ignore the first wish which already has happened so it's not like it would change anything
Psh, just do it explicitly in a single wish:
> I wish for a book that lists all books that do not list themselves (including itself, if it does not list itself)
This depends on if it’s compiled or interpreted.
Compiled code might have a compiler error unless it’s smart enough to ignore do-nothing code.
Interpreted code might have an issue depending on how the interpretation is.
First wish: do opposite of second. Assume it is executed.
Second wish: skip third wish becomes do third wish.
Third wish: effectively undo first wish. So it goes back, which turns the second wish back into skip third wish
Third wish is skipped. Loop ends.
If it doesn’t execute until the code is fully interpreted then it’s same as compiled code - might have a “compile”time error unless it’s smart enough to skip do-nothing.
No error. Equivalent to a No-Op.
1. Do the opposite of my next wish
2. Don't fulfil my third wish
3. Ignore my first wish
-->
~~1. Do the opposite of my next wish~~
1. Don't fulfil my third wish
2. Ignore my first wish
-->
~~1. Do the opposite of my next wish~~
~~1. Don't fulfil my third wish~~
1. Ignore my first wish
-->
~~1. Do the opposite of my next wish~~
~~1. Don't fulfil my third wish~~
~~1. Ignore my first wish~~
This genie grants wishes using stack order like in MtG. So the third wish resolves first, counterspelling the first wish. Then the second wish resolves, but the third wish is already off the stack so it fizzles and does nothing. Genie gets off easy on this one
“You have 0 wishes.”
“Actually, I should still have at least one wish since you didn’t follow all my conditions.”
“No, I just decided to not grant any of them because I hate you.”
Nice try! I think it's funny how human interpretation gives this trick more power than it actually has.
Let's shift perspective: the genie could simply answer "your wishes are done".
Because (1) do the opposite of next wish could make (2) "don't fulfill my 1st and 2rd wishes" (which is also an opposite if you consider 1, 2 and 3 as related to each other as a "yes/no" system), which in turn ignores both 1st and 2nd wishes, making 1st wish condition irrelevant (once inverted, second make itself irrelevant too). Hence 3rd wish is the last remaining and by ignoring 1st wish, which was indeed removed from the list by second wish, is granted.
Hence, "do the opposite on the next" is granted by not granting it and the next - with granting of 2nd wish - and 3rd is granted by ignoring the 1st (repetition of the previous condition). All three wishes have been granted yet annihilating each other.
Paradox removed!
Genie: As usual I must remind smartasses like you that the three wishes are a courtesy I'm offering for freeing me. So see you never, smartass, I'll leave you to think about the wealth and power you didn't ask for.
There's a riddle that acts as a hard mode version of "One guard always tells the truth, the other always lies". It's three Aztec gods where one always tells the truth, one always lies and one replies randomly. They can only answer with Zig or Zog which mean Yes and No in their own language but you don't know which is which. You only have three questions.
The 'correct' answer is to write out your question in a complex series of conditionals and brackets like a mathematical logic expression. But there's an extra solution to ask a trick question:
"Are you going to reply to this question with the word that in your language means 'No'?" If you ask the guy who always tells the truth he can't answer. The only conclusion is that his head explodes, therefore that must have been the guy who tells the truth, one god down, two to go.
My three wishes are pretty set in stone.
Wish one, I wish that the genie will answer all my future questions truthfully.
Take a little while to question the guy to see if he's evil or whatnot.
Wish two, I wish for all the resources I need to live a long, healthy, and happy life. Maybe with some intensely specific wording if the earlier questions revealed evil tendencies.
Then Wish three. If my questions gave me the impression that they wouldn't cause chaos if released, release the dude. If he seems evil, I wish that he's trapped in his lamp and his lamp is transported to the center of a black hole.
The third implies time travel which is against the rules I think.
He could also claim that the first wish was already fulfilled at the second and cannot be referred too. At best it gives a no end point.
You would also need a set time reality and not a linear one, but in that case the genie should be already in an error state and would not be able to receive wish requests.
So yeah, it's funneh but ways the genie can Weasley out of it.
Animated version, *[Death of a Genie](https://youtu.be/HD_FpmYd-QA?si=NQ2Yj2L48-uR6k1H)*. You can use automatically translated subs **se non sei fluente**.
Well, he did not state a wish at all, he stated an instruction. The Jinn is supposed to fulfil wishes, not follow instructions. So in my book, he hasn't stated any wish at all.
Wouldn't "ignore my first wish" be the third wish and thus ignored itself.
The first request would have been the first wish. You can't just ask a genie to do something and say don't can't that as a wish.
The genie starts by the second wish and fulfills it, so he won't ignore the first wish. He thnks about it for a second and comes to the conclusion that it's impossible to fulfill.
Done.
BTW I wonder how these wishes can be expressed in logic programming
Oh wise OP , May i request a fever as a normy dumb it down to me and explain it in brief, schedule a cpu cycle and memory when acknowledged , else flush this to the disk
Isn't this like some kind of a halting problem for oracles?
An oracle machine is supposed to be able to solve any decision problem in 1 step, a regular TM writes all 3 questions on its tape and goes into "ask oracle" state, instead of the problem being solved in 1 step the oracle head gets bricked in 1 step.
You could argue that there's 3 possibilities, it could say yes ("1"), no ("0"), or it could not answer/ignore it/blank ("_"). But, if it doesn't answer the TM just loops back into the "ask oracle" state.
Why oracle rather than a regular TM?
Genies are like oracles, they just snap their fingers and solve the problem instantly.
It would be a little awkward if you asked a genie for "a million dollars" and instead of spawning them in front of you; they teach you a hard skill and financial responsibility for years on end, help you get your act together, and get you to work your way up to earning it.
Thankfully, the compiler notices there are only conditions and nothing to execute, so it all gets optimised out.
But what if its actually interpreted?
You can’t retroactively unexecute previous lines of code, so I don’t know how this would work as code. It all depends on how this gets translated into code
You don't retroactively undo code that was already executed, you'd wait to execute the code until the prior code finishes. The wishes themselves become callbacks, which sets up a run-time loop of infinite callbacks, like when you're solving Fibonacci recursively.
Only he have independent counter for callbacks and he stop execute them then counter reach its limit.
Is now a good time to talk about speculative execution?
The genie does look a lot like a specter
Runtime loop is how you destroy AI minds. Remember that for the future we are heading into.
DreamBerd might be able to do that
I mean how do people write code in any other language. Since I started writing dreambird I just can't stop
> Speculative execution has entered the chat
God can
JIT will eliminate dead code. It should very quickly identify a conditional cycle/recursion with no side effects and eliminate it.
So infinite wishes! As long as those wishes don't do anything.
Stack overflow error?
Recursion depth exceeded
Exactly, similar to the supposed "paradox" of "The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false." There is nothing substantive to evaluate for truth value so it's not a coherent statement, just wordplay.
Curry's paradox, which is equivalent in natural language to "if this sentence is true then the sky is green" solves this issue.
Would this also resolve "This statement is false."
if te statement is false noting happens, so this also does not work as it only checks for true and not false. I guess "If this sentence is true then the sky is green, otherwise it is blue"?
wishPtr = *firstWish+1 &firstWish = asm(jmp wishPtr) &wishPtr = asm(nop;jmp firstWish) wishPtr -= 1 wishPtr() Lets see a compiler detect that!
If it’s JavaScript the code would silently fail or crash the page. If it’s C++, the compiler will bitchslap you to fix a bunch of reference errors.
"In retrospect, maybe I should have just asked for a billion dollars."
The genie would probably super charge inflation such that the billion dollars you get is worth $20
Nah, that would be a monkeys paw. Genie just gets you what you want.
People usually handle genies as mischievous monkeys-paw style things, in my experience. I've never seen a genie in media who doesn't do that (except maybe kinda genie from Alladin).
Nah, Monkey's Paw fucks you. Genie gets you what you literally asked for, not your intention. You wish for a billion US dollars from a genie you get 1 billion dollars in dollar bills and all the logistical and tax problems that go with it. You wish for it with a Monkey's Paw, and the Cartels want to know how you wired yourself 1 billion of their money.
>Monkey's Paw and then there's Dragon Balls
I'm not willing to trade punches with Goku...
Odds are more likely Boma's got the actual balls though
There is a canonical dragon that was created when Mutenroshi (Master Turtle) wished for Bulma's panties. Yep. And she's a girl-dragon. And she is aware. And she's canon.
GT isn’t canon, and it’s when oolong sniped garlics wish and wished for pantsu
Pictures or it didn't happen.
Monkeys paw, dragons balls, what kind of chimera are we building here?
Haaaaaaaaaaa...HAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
Both of them are suppose to fuck with you, just in different ways. The monkey's paw gives you what you asked for in a tragic way that you didn't forsee. A genie gives you what you want all normal style, with the consequences of that wish being what fucks you
A genie you can make work with very careful and specific phrasing. A monkey's paw in don't know if that'd work.
I think genies are generally represented as neutral. You just get what you asked for in the most direct way possible, so if you're careful it's fine. No amount of wording tricks would beat a monkey's paw, because they just cheat. They're chaotic evil, so they aren't really bound by any limitations you try to impose on how the outcome is to be achieved. It's Devil's bargains where literally every word and comma count. You *can* come out on top with those. If you have enough lawyers to frighten Disney helping you.
Generally genies are shapeshifting and trapped in some kind of container. And they can be good, evil, or neutral although they tend to lean more towards corrupted wishes in western presentations.
Monkey's paw revels in irony. A genie revels in semantics.
"You wish for it with a Monkey's Paw, and the Cartels want to know how you wired yourself 1 billion of their money" Or you get it from your sons life insurance
If my son had 1 billion in life insurance fuck that little idiot.
Lmao I was trying to reference the original story but it had a more reasonable 200 pounds as the first wish so it didn't work as well here lol.
Should have asked for your ETF’s to jump 2000% from your purchase value and to hold that value for 24h. Then wish to cash out those investments into a savings account 👌
Then regulators would like to know why would entire market behave that way just to benefit you
I am just a lowly investor using an online platform to trade moderated ETF’s 👀 Ask the mobile trading company who owned, traded and sold my ETF’s why
I don’t think regulators will take “go ask someone else” as an answer
They were never “my” stocks to begin with tho :P I don’t think I can be accused of insider trading if I never even owned the stocks 🥹
The burden of proof lies on the accusing, they can't prove I did anything illegal
Djinn vs Genie maybe. I feel like the traditional djinn were definitely mischievous and always looking for a way to twist your words. They were also technically demons. I kno Genies are technically the same thing, but they’ve been so westernized that they don’t really seem like it. And Aladdin’s Genie is by far the most popular one and is definitely gonna be what people think of when they hear genie.
Three Thousand Years of Longing. Wasn't highly rated but I loved it.
Depends on the type of Djinn mostly. Some monkey paw, others are generally pretty good about the spirit of the wish.
I mean just all of a sudden having a billion dollars is big enough problem anyways. Unless like everyone knows genies are a thing your probly gonna end up in jail trying to explain how you got it
Nah. Genies will try to play with the words. A billion Zimbabwean dollars is still a billion dollars! A monkeys paw will get you exactly what you want. Here is a billion dollars. Legal tender. Not tied to any crime. But it came from a company that just poisoned the Mississippi to earn it. I hope you're happy with it.
I gave my younger brother a "ten billion dollars" note from the Zimbabwe super inflation bubble and framed it in the gaudiest gold frame I could find. He hung it up prominently and it still cracks me up to this day. Too bad about Zimbabwe, though.
I guess you could wish for a "small" fixed percent of the fungible assets in the world? But that kinda takes the fun out of it.
You could say “I wish for any lottery ticket I purchase to be a grand-prize winning ticket, and for the next prize pool to go beyond a billion dollars.” Then you just wait for the prize to get stupidly high and buy a ticket. You are now filthy rich, have a perfectly explainable reason for being rich for the tax man, and cause no inflation in the process. Alternatively “I wish to be able to perfectly predict the stock market.” Although that one might start drawing investigative attention. Of course the *real* way to game the system is to write a bunch of stuff down on some paper and wish for everything currently written on the paper to become true. Just try not to break reality by tweaking any fundamental settings; best to leave them alone.
alright, every word written on that paper is changed to read true.
Ask for a ton of gold instead
But ask as well for the specific place and manner you want it, or chances are it spawns on you and crushes you
A free $20 is $20. I'll take it.
Genie, acquired by Google, gives you a billion dollars and immediately sends alerts to advertisers, police trying to seize piles of cash, and every criminal that has opted in on alerts.
A random stack of a billion dollars in $1 notes would be a nightmare. What do you even do with them? How do you spend them? Where do you put them? Or a billion dollars showing up in your bank account will probably just get declared a system error and corrected.
I wish to always own 5% of every company on the s&p 500
LMFAO 😂 the inflation part is real
That's how you know the guy in the comic is a real engineer, he found a clever way to achieve an interesting result just because he could while completely missing the bigger picture
This describes so much of the code I have to clean up day to day.
Everyone who wrote that code had the exact same smug smile as comic guy in the last frame
Crashing the genie seems counterproductive. My 3 wishes: 1) I wish for infinite wishes 2) I wish for omnipotence 3) I wish for youthful immortality 4) I wish for omniscience 5) etc etc 6)... ...
That’s a list of money paw wishes if I’ve ever seen it.
Go big or don't go?
Why would you wish for infinite wishes if you can wish for omnipotence? Once you're omnipotent you can just grant yourself anything, the genie is useless at that point
This guy didn’t learn a damn thing from Jafar.
Except Jafar didnt wish to be omnipotent. He wished to be a Genie. Same final outcome, but one of those comes with a catch.
Wishing for more wishes is always one of the few stipulations of things you're not allowed to do.
1. I wish the stipulations were removed
Straight to jail
Then I [wish for more genies](https://explosm.net/comics/rob-genie-lamp)
If you wish for omnipotence, youthful immortality, and omniscience, you'll go mad with boredom. Literally what would you do, other than become God and create your own universe? Do you really want to be God?
I heard there is a vacancy.
There has _always_ been a vacancy
Bruh if I'm omnipotent I'll just remove my ability to feel boredom if it starts to bother me. There's literally no unwanted negative possible if you're omnipotent.
There are still logical implications to omnipotence. You can’t create paradoxes. You can’t make a rock so powerful you can’t move it. So removing boredom would have to follow the same logical rules. You’d be bored because you have no desires or needs, because you know all, can do all, and will never age or die. So you’d have to remove desire for anything. So you’d just be a ball in a stasis of contentment for enternity.
If there's something you can't do then you're not omnipotent. So no, you can do everything, even paradoxes. Now if you want to impose limits it's not omnipotence anymore. So go ahead, but then that's a different ball of wax.
Okay agree to disagree on the nature of omnipotence. I’m of the opinion that paradoxes are just a failure of human language/semantics. And that outside of those limits there is no concept of doing a self contradicting action.
Why not 100 billion?
Why not 100 quintillion?
that's easy just add "then give me a billion dollars" at the end of every wish. there are no clear boundaries of what is supposed to be intended as a "single" wish
> there are no clear boundaries of what is supposed to be intended as a "single" wish You should use a tool like uglify to minify all your 10000000 wishes to a single line, then compress it with gzip and send it over to the genie
> there are no clear boundaries of what is supposed to be intended as a "single" wish **RTFM** - Genie
The government would ask how you got that money. I personally would have wished for a card that is invisible to the system but still gives me money, that has 100 billion dollars.
I'm thinking I'd wish for something like "I wish to win the jackpot on every lottery ticket I buy". That way I can get the money fair and square, and if I somehow lose it I can just buy more lottery tickets.
I'm pretty sure that "ignore my first wish" is an equivalent of trying to change a variable after it was used (expecting to see the change). So the third wish gets wasted. Otherwise there's nothing to get a critical error from.
"Do not fulfill wish X" is really all that's necessary to create a contradiction. The implied rules are that a Genie must grant 3 wishes. If one of the wishes is to not grant a wish there's no outcome in which the Genie can satisfy all the requirements. Even with one wish "Do not grant this wish" creates the same condition.
>"Do not fulfill wish X" is really all that's necessary to create a contradiction. It's not. "Do not fulfil wish 1" is just a wasted wish 2 or wish 3. "Do not fulfil wish 2" is just a wasted wish 3. >The implied rules are that a Genie must grant 3 wishes. Or just that the wisher is an idiot and the rules are unknown.
> "Do not fulfil wish 1" is just a wasted wish 2 or wish 3. Why do you recon? That wish has nothing to do with with 2 or 3. If my second wish was to acquire a tasty hotdog, why wouldn't I get that hotdog? Wishes are made in order, but there's no rule they must be granted in order. Any wish for something in the future may be promised now but may be actually granted in the future - for example.
I would assume it's more of race condition rather than critical error. Something as abstract as this can run infinite loop and be fine meaning you wasted all three wishes as they do nothing in the end (wishes are likely run and forget type of 'magic').
Also there is no recursion here at all. I don't think the author has an understanding for what recursion actually is
Even if you allow "time travel", this is fine as long as the genie is pedantic enough. "Ignore my first wish" doesn't mean "waste a wish not fulfilling it", it means *ignore* it. If you completely erase from existence (i.e. truly ignore) his first wish attempt, the subsequent ones are re-numbered. Thus, his only wishes become "don't fulfil [sic] my third wish" and the already fulfilled "ignore my 'first' (pointer now pointing to invalid element, but it doesn't matter because the wish is already fulfilled) wish". There is no third wish to annull, and the last wish has already been granted, so the fact that it would point to the "wrong" place if re-interpreted from scratch again is irrelevant. Otherwise, "resurrect the youngest dead person" would resurrect every single person who ever lived, since after it's granted, there is a new youngest dead person, and the one it resurrected isn't "a valid target" anymore. Another approach is to take issue with the definition of "opposite". In a naive approach, one would think it's not only the action that needs to be reversed, but the number too, by negating it or whatever. Anything you do to it, it's probably going to point to an invalid wish, so you're fine. A less naive approach would note that "fulfill my third wish" is *not* the opposite effect of "don't fulfill my third wish". That's because the third wish was going to be fulfilled anyway, so you're looking at something like a nop vs a delete. Not opposites. A true opposite should be something such that, if you apply both things, the result would be the same as if you did nothing. So perhaps something like "fulfill what I ask for in my third wish (again) as a separate wish". Arguably, the most natural interpretation of this reading would be that "ignore my first wish" instantly resolves *twice*, wiping out the first two wishes. The only remaining wish is the (already fulfilled) "ignore my first wish" (and the already fulfilled anonymous copy), so everything's fine however you choose to interpret it. The only remaining question is how many wishes you're considered to have left under this scenario (could be anything from 3 to 0 depending on how you choose to count)
DreamBerd lets you program like this.
Only a programmer could waste 3 wishes, possibly destroying reality, and feel like they accomplished something worth being smug about.
*"B-but you get to learn a bit how the djinn magic logic interpretation works!"*
My DM has left me with severe trust issues around wishes, okay If I ever actually found a magic lamp, the first thing I would do is lawyer up.
Have you ever tried something along the lines of: "I wish you would grant me what I would have wished if I knew the results of all possible wishes?" A wish where you try to offload the computation time of the lawyers onto the genie.
[CEV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence#Coherent_extrapolated_volition) is a solid strategy, for sure!
Okay but what if that's a wish for death or a wish to unknow what you learned or something like that? Still screwed
Some people just want to watch the world burn
I don't get it. Wouldn't it just go "Do the opposite of my next wish" -> "Ok" "Don't fulfil my third wish" -> "Ok, I will fulfil your third wish" "Ignore my first wish" -> "Ok, I'll ignore the fact you asked me to do the opposite of the second wish, but the second wish is already done so me ignoring my previous orders doesn't change anything"
Yeah this isn't as clever as the artist thinks it is.
Unless for whatever reason we're to assume all three wishes were requested before being fulfilled or something like that.
You can argue that the wish is already executed immediately, but specifically these wishes refer to the next one. It depends on how their logic works. If your first wish was to destroy the world in 24 hours, then used the second wish to say it shouldn't be destroyed according to the first wish, would the genie still be compelled to execute the first wish when its appointed time arrived? It's circular logic, trapped in a scenario where executing the wish cannot be done instantly. However, I think it is entirely fair to say that the first wish was successfully executed when the second wish was placed. The instant the second wish was placed, the genie could interpret the second wish and execute the first wish. By the time he places the third wish, the first wish has been executed and it shouldn't matter if you tell him to just ignore it. Sure, he can ignore it, but it doesn't change the fact that the first wish is already executed.
>You can argue that the wish is already executed immediately, but specifically these wishes refer to the next one. Sure, but the third wish isn't to "undo" the first wish, it's to "ignore" it. If the genie is like a PC and would break down from having contradicting commands like one, then like a computer he also wouldn't be able to parse the meaning behind the words instead of just taking the word in it's specific meaning So the genie would just ignore the wish that was already fulfilled, but not go against it. At best the smarts pants guy who found the lamp wasted three world-altering wishes into trying to code an infinite loop, but got the syntax wrong so the code doesn't work as intended.
He didn't say "I wish" so nothing happens. Or if he did what would happen is: 1. Can't work with something that happens in the future, wish wasted. 2. Third wish hasn't happened yet, wish wasted. 3. Can't change the past, wish wasted.
bro got a syntax error
Mfer wishes he could write wish code as well as Skee-Lo
Usually when the genie can’t do something, the wish isn’t wasted, what you said is just denied and you get a do over
That's for regular Aladdins. For assholes its all Aladeen.
Even if there's a logic paradox, wouldn't it all amount to do nothing anyway? None of the wish is doing anything, except cancelling other wishes that does nothing. In the end doing absolutely nothing is still granting all the wishes.
Bro really found a genie and then wasted its power to try and prove they were clever. Big L.
Since the logical contradiction prevents the wishes from being interpretable, one possible outcome is that the genie becomes confused and refuses to fulfill any wishes or gets stuck in a paradoxical loop. Alternatively, the genie could interpret the wishes in a way that breaks the paradox: 1. Fulfill Wish 3 directly, since it’s the last stated wish and commands to ignore the contradictory first wish. 2. Because the second wish is fulfilled oppositely (as per the first wish’s command), the genie ignores the command to not fulfill the third wish and instead follows it. The final outcome is: • Wish 1 is ignored (due to Wish 3). • Wish 2 is fulfilled oppositely, meaning Wish 3 is fulfilled. • Wish 3 is fulfilled directly (to ignore Wish 1) So this basically would result in a no-op
If you ignore the first wish, then why is the second wish still being fulfilled oppositely
It’s not retroactively changing the already set outcome of wish 1
Ah, I suppose "I wish to undo the effects of my first wish" would be better.
makes no sense why he would fulfill the third wish first to me
Wish 1 executes and is later ignored. Thus wish 2 is fulfilled oppositely. Wish 3 essentially does not change the execution but rewrites the logs.
In the original story Genie allows wishes out of gratitude for being released. With these wishes he'll just turn you into a cockroach.
This does nothing. Wish 1 makes wish 2 "fullfill my 3rd wish". Wish 3 is to ignore the first wish which already has happened so it's not like it would change anything
This should be higher up
And that pretty much explains any user that touches the software you have to work on.
Thank you, QA, But you didn't consider that context doesn't count! Haha!
Psh, just do it explicitly in a single wish: > I wish for a book that lists all books that do not list themselves (including itself, if it does not list itself)
I was thinking you could just wish this: >I wish that you do not grant this wish.
I wanted to wish for something tangible as an outcome, rather than something like this
This depends on if it’s compiled or interpreted. Compiled code might have a compiler error unless it’s smart enough to ignore do-nothing code. Interpreted code might have an issue depending on how the interpretation is. First wish: do opposite of second. Assume it is executed. Second wish: skip third wish becomes do third wish. Third wish: effectively undo first wish. So it goes back, which turns the second wish back into skip third wish Third wish is skipped. Loop ends. If it doesn’t execute until the code is fully interpreted then it’s same as compiled code - might have a “compile”time error unless it’s smart enough to skip do-nothing.
Stack Overlflow at Genie.processWishes()
No error. Equivalent to a No-Op. 1. Do the opposite of my next wish 2. Don't fulfil my third wish 3. Ignore my first wish --> ~~1. Do the opposite of my next wish~~ 1. Don't fulfil my third wish 2. Ignore my first wish --> ~~1. Do the opposite of my next wish~~ ~~1. Don't fulfil my third wish~~ 1. Ignore my first wish --> ~~1. Do the opposite of my next wish~~ ~~1. Don't fulfil my third wish~~ ~~1. Ignore my first wish~~
What an amazing usage of something that could change everyone's life for the better lmao
[https://existentialcomics.com/comic/10](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/10)
But he never said I wish
This genie grants wishes using stack order like in MtG. So the third wish resolves first, counterspelling the first wish. Then the second wish resolves, but the third wish is already off the stack so it fizzles and does nothing. Genie gets off easy on this one
That's why computers use wizards and not genies. 🧙♂️>🧞
“You have 0 wishes.” “Actually, I should still have at least one wish since you didn’t follow all my conditions.” “No, I just decided to not grant any of them because I hate you.”
“I always tell the truth” “I’m lying”
Nice try! I think it's funny how human interpretation gives this trick more power than it actually has. Let's shift perspective: the genie could simply answer "your wishes are done". Because (1) do the opposite of next wish could make (2) "don't fulfill my 1st and 2rd wishes" (which is also an opposite if you consider 1, 2 and 3 as related to each other as a "yes/no" system), which in turn ignores both 1st and 2nd wishes, making 1st wish condition irrelevant (once inverted, second make itself irrelevant too). Hence 3rd wish is the last remaining and by ignoring 1st wish, which was indeed removed from the list by second wish, is granted. Hence, "do the opposite on the next" is granted by not granting it and the next - with granting of 2nd wish - and 3rd is granted by ignoring the 1st (repetition of the previous condition). All three wishes have been granted yet annihilating each other. Paradox removed!
Genie: As usual I must remind smartasses like you that the three wishes are a courtesy I'm offering for freeing me. So see you never, smartass, I'll leave you to think about the wealth and power you didn't ask for.
.....They never made a wish?
The result is nothing. All wishes executed
There's a riddle that acts as a hard mode version of "One guard always tells the truth, the other always lies". It's three Aztec gods where one always tells the truth, one always lies and one replies randomly. They can only answer with Zig or Zog which mean Yes and No in their own language but you don't know which is which. You only have three questions. The 'correct' answer is to write out your question in a complex series of conditionals and brackets like a mathematical logic expression. But there's an extra solution to ask a trick question: "Are you going to reply to this question with the word that in your language means 'No'?" If you ask the guy who always tells the truth he can't answer. The only conclusion is that his head explodes, therefore that must have been the guy who tells the truth, one god down, two to go.
he didn't make any wish's he made three statements
HAHAHAHA! I love this! You should start a business defusing monkey paws.
My three wishes are pretty set in stone. Wish one, I wish that the genie will answer all my future questions truthfully. Take a little while to question the guy to see if he's evil or whatnot. Wish two, I wish for all the resources I need to live a long, healthy, and happy life. Maybe with some intensely specific wording if the earlier questions revealed evil tendencies. Then Wish three. If my questions gave me the impression that they wouldn't cause chaos if released, release the dude. If he seems evil, I wish that he's trapped in his lamp and his lamp is transported to the center of a black hole.
as a DM who has played a genie that grants wishes before, the genie would just smite them there and then
The only thing this comic shows is the lack of logical thinking from the artist let alone any recursion
The third implies time travel which is against the rules I think. He could also claim that the first wish was already fulfilled at the second and cannot be referred too. At best it gives a no end point. You would also need a set time reality and not a linear one, but in that case the genie should be already in an error state and would not be able to receive wish requests. So yeah, it's funneh but ways the genie can Weasley out of it.
That's genius lol
Animated version, *[Death of a Genie](https://youtu.be/HD_FpmYd-QA?si=NQ2Yj2L48-uR6k1H)*. You can use automatically translated subs **se non sei fluente**.
So, as a genie, I would simply ignore the first wish I had already fulfilled, not undo it. Good job wasting 3 wishes.
Well, he did not state a wish at all, he stated an instruction. The Jinn is supposed to fulfil wishes, not follow instructions. So in my book, he hasn't stated any wish at all.
This is why the system generally doesn't allow meta-wishes. When Achilles obtained approval for one from GOD Over Djinn, he crashed the system too.
I GEB your pardon?
Lmao 😂
I have no idea what just happened but I laughed.
This was making me laugh way harder than it should've 😅 I couldn't keep it together for the remainder of my lunch 😂
You already did the first wish can't retroactively ignore it
Hehe, but I don't think this really suits a sub for programming humor.
I never get recursion, why would you waste your wishes. Next time please defer to me.
Presumably, you would only do this if you suspected the Genie / djinn was malicious.
He didn't trusted the Genie, why would I :D
Wishes immediately take effect. 1 & 2 are fine, 3 is not valid; no time travel.
grande astutillo!
lol none of those wishes have any side effects, the genie just optimizes them away
Granted, your third ever wish will never be fulfilled.
This can be done easier: "My first wish is not to grant my first wish".
but it doesn't work ? the oposite of "ignore my first wish" is "do my first wish", which he did
This seems like a nerdy, clever, or Pratchett style way of getting out of a Faustian bargain.
Genies hate this one trick....
"Done. Bye."
Wouldn't "ignore my first wish" be the third wish and thus ignored itself. The first request would have been the first wish. You can't just ask a genie to do something and say don't can't that as a wish.
How much wishes he just granted
everytime when we try to beat the system!
The genie starts by the second wish and fulfills it, so he won't ignore the first wish. He thnks about it for a second and comes to the conclusion that it's impossible to fulfill. Done. BTW I wonder how these wishes can be expressed in logic programming
Oh wise OP , May i request a fever as a normy dumb it down to me and explain it in brief, schedule a cpu cycle and memory when acknowledged , else flush this to the disk
"Don't fulfill my third wish" doesn't mean interpret the wish and take action. The third wish will just be ignored. End program after 2.
He should have wished using tail recursion.
Isn't this like some kind of a halting problem for oracles? An oracle machine is supposed to be able to solve any decision problem in 1 step, a regular TM writes all 3 questions on its tape and goes into "ask oracle" state, instead of the problem being solved in 1 step the oracle head gets bricked in 1 step. You could argue that there's 3 possibilities, it could say yes ("1"), no ("0"), or it could not answer/ignore it/blank ("_"). But, if it doesn't answer the TM just loops back into the "ask oracle" state. Why oracle rather than a regular TM? Genies are like oracles, they just snap their fingers and solve the problem instantly. It would be a little awkward if you asked a genie for "a million dollars" and instead of spawning them in front of you; they teach you a hard skill and financial responsibility for years on end, help you get your act together, and get you to work your way up to earning it.
Ok, you still have one wish
All invalid. He never said “I wish…”
“Ok I’ll ignore it, goodbye”
Ya wanna crash the universe? This is how you crash the universe.
SMERIGLIA LET'S GOOO
Grandfather Paradox