The Matrix Meets Braid: Artificial Brains in Gunfights

It’s The Matrix meets Braid: a first-person shooter video game “where the time moves only when you move.” You can stare at the bullets streaking toward you as long as you like, but moving to dodge them causes the enemies and bullets to move forward in time as well.

The game is called SUPERHOT, and the designers describe it by saying “With this simple mechanic we’ve been able to create gameplay that’s not all about reflexes – the player’s main weapon is careful aiming and smart planning – while not compromising on the dynamic feeling of the game.”

Here’s the trailer:

I’ve always loved questions about what it would be like to distort time for yourself relative to the rest of the universe (and the potential unintended consequences, as we explored in discussing why The Flash is in a special hell.)

In Superhot, it’s not that you can distort time exactly – after all, whenever you take a step, your enemies get the same amount of time to take a step themselves. Instead, your brain is running as fast as it likes while (the rest of) your body remains in the same time stream as everything else.

And then it struck me: this might be close to the experience of an emulated brain housed in a regular-sized body.

Let’s say that, in the future, we artificially replicate/emulate human minds on computers. And let’s put an emulated human mind inside a physical, robotic body. The limits on how fast it can think are its hardware and its programming. As technology and processor speeds improve, the “person” could think faster and faster and would experience the outside world as moving slower and slower in comparison.

… but even though you might have a ridiculously high processing speed to think and analyze a situation, your physical body is still bound by the normal laws of physics. Moving your arms or legs requires moving forward in the same stream of time as everyone else. In order to, say, turn your head to look to your left and gather more information, you need to let time pass for your enemies, too.

Robin Hanson, professor of economics at George Mason University and author of Overcoming Bias, has put a lot of thought into the implications of whole-brain emulation. So I asked him:

Is Superhot what an emulated human would experience in a gunfight?

His reply:

An em could usually speed up its mind to deal with critical situations, though this would cost more per objective second. So a first-person shooter where time only moves when you do does move in the direction of letting the gamer experience action in an em world. Even better would be to let the gamer change the rate at which game-time seems to move, to have a limited gamer-time budget to spend, and to give other non-human game characters a similar ability.”

He’s right: thinking faster would require running more cycles per second, which takes resources. And yeah, you would need infinite processing speed to think indefinitely while the rest of the world was frozen. It would be more consistent to add a “mental cycle” budget that ran down at a constant rate from the gamer’s external point of view.

I don’t know about you, but I would buy that game! (Even if a multi-player mode would be impossible.)