Xox not clone (was: Re: copying related probability question)

Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Wed, 24 Sep 1997 12:50:59 +0000


At 07:22 AM 9/23/97 -0700, Hal wrote:

>When you get cloned, all your property gets divided by two, at least on
>average. It may not be a step to take lightly. But the result of the
>cloning is that your productivity is doubled. You can handle twice the
>liability afterwards as you could before. This changes how you should
>evaluate bets.
>
>In effect, cloning makes it a non-zero-sum game.

Can I do a bit of lexical nagging? (Yes, again.) What's being discussed
in this thread *isn't* `cloning', (which has an exact denotation) - it's
wholesale duplication. The only kind we're likely to see, given known
physics, is uploading a brain to a computer substrate and then copying the
whole thing.

Anders and his Aleph mates have a useful term for this as-yet imaginary
procedure: xoxing a xox (from xeroxing). The moment of duplication is
`forking'.

I like it, if only because it has a rather charming Dr Seuss tone to it.
Karen Cassidy, posting on the Moles ng, imagined the consequences:

Fox, fox, fox and xox,
Xox, xox, xox in box
Fox in socks, xox on blocks,
Throw some rocks with fox and xox.

and asked, `But how could the illustrator differentiate between the fox and
its xox?' Someone else instantly noted that the xox would be the one with
the branch (but I think that would be the original, in fact).

Damien Broderixox