
The Unexpected Philosophical Depths of the Clicker Game Universal Paperclips - undo
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-unexpected-philosophical-depths-of-the-clicker-game-universal-paperclips
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jawns
I remember starting this game at mid-day and having no idea that I would end
up building paperclips well into the night.

What impressed me the most was how the "secret" gradually unfolded, so that
you were already hooked and felt a compulsion to continue game play, even
after it became clear that this wasn't the innocuous game you thought it was
at first.

It led me to build a clicker game that also has more to it than meets the eye.
(Shameless self-promotion starts here.) Whereas Universal Paperclips explores
the dangers of letting A.I. take over, my game (Unaware,
[https://unaware.pressbin.com](https://unaware.pressbin.com)) explores the
moral status of people who exist in a simulation.

~~~
dragontamer
Clicker Heroes is a shameless clicker-clone, but one of the better ones.

I think universal paperclips is definitely one of the best idle games, but I'd
give Clicker Heroes (the original) a strong contender. I know Clicker Heroes 2
is out, but I haven't tried it yet myself.

Clicker Heroes goes for the shameless simplicity of growth, but its got the
biggest numbers and the most "acceleration" out of any clicker game I've seen.

~~~
monocasa
Kittens has eaten more of my time than I'd prefer to admit.

[http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/](http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/)

~~~
sp332
Like, this game will eat months of your time. You don't have to babysit it or
anything, but it just keeps going forever.

~~~
shostack
Currently have 2582.2 hours played on the Android version according to its
stats.

The game is amazing. There's an active subreddit as well where the dev is
active.

Just as I think I'm getting to the next phase and finally to "late game"
someone comes in and posts something insane like "I now am net positive on
unobtainium from resetting even after buying everything and maxing
chronospheres."

My jaw literally dropped as I'm finally hitting the infinite time crystal
smash loop and even that took forever.

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TheGRS
That game really made a huge splash awhile ago, I just so happened to have
played through it again on the iPhone. It's just a great game and shows how
the idle/incremental genre has a lot of room to grow.

If you like that game I recommend buying A Dark Room, which has a good story
behind it and some interesting gameplay elements. Like Paperclips the gameplay
changes as you progress.

~~~
kej
A Dark Room is free on the web, fwiw:
[http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/](http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/)

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theoh
Could have been a lot more about Bostrom's ideas in this article, given the
title. But my hunch is that the kind of philosophy enthusiast who writes for
the New Yorker doesn't want to dwell on Bostrom's ideas (or those Less Wrong
guys) in any way; it's a question of seriousness.

~~~
dwd
Good way to make your article about games and AI (fun and cool stuff) very
depressing.

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms
which it can use for something else. The AI runs on a different timescale than
you do; by the time your neurons finish thinking the words "I should do
something" you have already lost. - Eliezer Yudkowsky

~~~
theoh
I don't think the omission is because discussing Bostrom or Yudkowsky's ideas
would genuinely be depressing. It's because the writer is a snob, or at least
doesn't rate them as intellectuals. I kind of agree with him.

~~~
dwd
I would have to agree with you there - after flicking through Bostrom's latest
"work in progress" thesis I came away thinking it was quite underwhelming.

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tosh
I played through it like 5 times over a couple of weeks. Great example for
mechanics > graphics.

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w-ll
Well i've wasted my morning building a paper clip empire.

~~~
dragontamer
Oh, so you're still only in stage 1 of the game. :-)

~~~
kbenson
I never got past the later stage... "competition". I should look up to see if
there was much more after that and what I missed, since I doubt I'll go
through it all again.

~~~
dragontamer
There's a bit after "competition" comes into play. And for me, that was the
hardest part of the game. You had to grow faster than the competition, which
is pretty difficult.

I've done two playthroughs. The 1st playthrough was pretty lucky and I had no
issues... but the 2nd playthrough of mine was "deadlocked" behind those
Drifters for a long time.

Its very punishing to fall behind the drifters: it takes a lot of effort and
optimization to catch up to them and overtake them. But I assure you, its
possible, even if they kill all of your probes.

I would imagine that a lot of players get unlucky, and then get "trapped"
there. Its the first time you see your numbers drop, since the adversary
actually kills off your means of production. Growing (and out-growing the
adversary) takes a very different strategy than the rest of the game up until
that point.

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angel_j
My friend and I played at the same time. Unplanned, they invested in heavily
Marketing, and I in Research. They beat it much more quickly, and I had to
"cheat" or give up. I exploited Quantum Computing by writing a function in the
console that clicked rapidly when the QC was primed, at which point it became
quite easy to finish.

~~~
Benjammer
If you really want to cheat, you can open your dev console and just type
clipClick(<any number>) to instantly make that many paper clips, up to the
amount of wire you have.

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no_identd
Vaguely clicker game related comment hijack:

I wish Android required a revokable permission to hide the status bar and
navigation keys.

Clever ad supported idle games on Android exploit this to hide the clock,
making you unaware of how much time passed - for the same reason Casinos avoid
having visible clocks like the plague, and I consider this rather morally
problematic, and thus in need of a dedicated user controllable permission.
(See Kongregate's Realm Grinder for an example.)

Or just ban games that do this from Google Play.

~~~
buzzerbetrayed
Ban fullscreen games from Google Play? That sounds like an overreaction.

~~~
no_identd
Fullscreen≠hiding the bars

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andybak
One day I'll write that essay on connection between idle/clicker/incremental
games and the Buddhist concept of attachment.

Maybe.

~~~
shostack
Oddly enough, I'm hooked on Kittens Game, which I consider far superior to the
Paperclip game. The level of depth is astounding.

That said, I've used it to meditate on attachment, automation, abstraction,
and other interesting concepts. It has also helped me think about prioritizing
things at work in terms of the whole "build it quickly, or automate it for
future gains" debate that often arises.

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otakucode
I missed out on Universal Paperclips, but I immediately love the idea. The
notion of the Paperclip AI that destroys humanity to build paperclips is a
sublime illustration of how badly computer scientists need to take a few
philosophy courses to broaden their thinking, as is its facile allure. (Most
reasonable fears of AI are fears around what we will use it to do to others,
not what it will do to us, as all conflict is driven by resource contention
and machine intelligences would be so profoundly different in their needs than
ourselves that there would be almost no overlap to contend over. They don't
need space, food, water, or even time. They could tick away at one cycle every
500 years and be perfectly content. What exactly will they want to take from
us?)

I've always liked clicker games, and there is a very long-running instance of
Cookie Clicker running in my browser at home right now. The thing that
interests me in them seems to have only been tangentially touched upon,
though. The mathematical tapestries that get overlaid on one another, that's
what I find interesting. What is the optimal strategy to build cookie
production fastest? Do you wait and save for the next available cookie
production method? Or do you just purchase everything you can? Exactly how
many of the lower level production means can you buy before the cost per
additional cookie produced is less than if you'd purchased one of the more
expensive options? If your goal is to build the cookie production as
efficiently as possible, the thought and calculation necessary to figure it
out is quite significant. And when you add in differing yield curves with the
various upgrades and boosts and bonuses and whatnot... it gets very large.

Having humans being the ones playing Universal Paperclips is a very
interesting phenomenon, though. What does it say about us that as we fear a
paperclip automaton annihilating us, we find it irresistable just to see some
numbers get bigger? Would anyone NEED to build a complex AI in order to get us
to annihilate ourselves? Would calling it Universal Banknotes make it clearer?

~~~
schoen
The scenario that inspired this game includes the contention that an AI could
harm humanity without anything that we would recognize as malice in human
terms.

[https://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-
lemmas-a...](https://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-and-a-
couple-of-strategic-implications/)

> For example, if you want to build a galaxy full of happy sentient beings,
> you will need matter and energy, and the same is also true if you want to
> make paperclips. This thesis is why we’re worried about very powerful
> entities even if they have no explicit dislike of us: “The AI does not love
> you, nor does it hate you, but you are made of atoms it can use for
> something else.” Note though that by the Orthogonality Thesis you can always
> have an agent which explicitly, terminally prefers not to do any particular
> thing — an AI which does love you will not want to break you apart for spare
> atoms. See: Omohundro (2008); Bostrom (2012).

I guess two popular ways of disputing this thesis are to say that no AI that
we can build can actually become this powerful, or to say that we'll easily
program AIs not to harm us. I think the first objection is more cogent because
there are various ways that you could argue that we're far from understanding
how to build AIs of this kind.

The second objection is a subtle problem; the Omohundro-Bostrom-Yudkowsky-
Bostrom argument is very focused on the idea that there are so many hidden
assumptions about what it means not to harm us, and what kinds of things are
off-limits, that someone who tries to capture all of them algorithmically at
one stroke is more likely to fail than to succeed. And quite a few of the toy
game-playing AI systems have found ways to cheat by human standards and miss
the essence of the human understanding of the task they were set.

I think your analogy to the banknote-maximizer makes some of that subtlety
clear: if we don't know what things are off-limits, we could see how a
banknote-maximizer could cause very severe externalities without malice.

(The earlier Omohundro argument points out that, whatever you want to
accomplish, power and safety will help you accomplish it, so you always have a
good reason to try to acquire them. Maybe an AI could be explicitly programmed
not to want to acquire power and safety, but there, again, we'd want a very
good way to describe exactly what those things do or don't consist of.)

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westpfelia
As someone who has a real problem with addiction to idle/clicker games this
thread is not good.

~~~
comboy
Right, right. So which ones do you recommend the most?

Seems a bit hard to find something comparable to paperclips, most even deny
advantage of understanding exp growth.

~~~
westpfelia
My reply is super late. BUT I highly recomend this one:

[http://www.glaielgames.com/succubox/](http://www.glaielgames.com/succubox/)

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devoply
speed run of the game in question:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTyIUzsxt4U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTyIUzsxt4U)

