So I'm probably missing something here, but it seem like this is a major rules inconsistancy. Fork pruning takes seconds for any unskilled operator to sift out memories and reduce skills. Psychosurgery takes weeks for a very skilled practicioner and is likely to fail or leave serious scars.
I get that Deltas are just "AI templates" with a hint of your personality or whatever -- and I have some confusion around that as well -- but even if we just look at Betas, there seem to be some pretty serious inconsistancies.
Does anyone have any insight on how it is supposed to work, or what I might have overlooked?
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Fork Pruning vs Psycho Surgery
Mon, 2011-06-06 16:39
#1
puke
Fork Pruning vs Psycho Surgery
Mon, 2011-06-06 17:01
#2
CodeBreaker
Re: Fork Pruning vs Psycho Surgery
I am going to use an analogy, but I am not sure if it will make any sense, because I suck at analogies.
Lets say your ego is a bonsai tree. Psychosurgery is the process of carefully shaping the tree to the shape you want, sculpting its branches and clipping away foliage until you get exactly what you want. Neural pruning is taking that bonsai tree and a chainsaw, and hacking away at it until it kind of looks like what you want. With psychosurgery you are inflicting minimal impact to get the desired result, while with neural pruning it doesn’t really matter. There is no subtlety to neural pruning, if you want to remove memories, you do it in massive clumps (6 months or more).
You are also downplaying how hard it is for an unskilled person to make a decent beta fork. Most people have a psychosurgery skill rating of between 15 and 30, if they have it at all. So for most people, they have between a 85 and a 70% chance of screwing it up and inflicting damage on the beta. Then you have to instigate the beta as an infomorph, which results in even more stress. The average beta created by your average citizen tends to pick up a lot of stress damage. And because they have a reduced WIL (average of 10), they are going to pick up a huge number of derangements.
If we go by the rules, Beta forks are almost certainly not made by the citizens who actually use them. It is much more likely that they use the freelance services of a local hypercorp/skilled individual.
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Mon, 2011-06-06 20:43
#3
Yerameyahu
Re: Fork Pruning vs Psycho Surgery
Agreed. Pruning uses the same skill (Psychosurgery) and it's only got one setting: 'short'. You can't be selective (memories are deleted in 6 month chunks), and any errors really mess up the fork. In addition, even the successful outcome of pruning is massive, across-the-board reductions in everything.
Other Psychosurgery, on the other hand, is typically trying to alter just one little thing, while very much avoiding sweeping damage or 6 months chunks of memories being destroyed. The rules for pruning also specifically mention that you can go slow and be careful (+30, for about 44000x slower).
Mon, 2011-06-06 21:43
#4
The Demon Code
Re: Fork Pruning vs Psycho Surgery
Also, most people probably store a set of pre-pruned forks that have been modified for specific tasks/situations (using long-term psychosurgery) rather than attempt to do any sort of neural pruning themselves.
I figure skill imprinting, so that the fork is better at select tasks than the original, and behavioral control: don't go insane and kill the alpha fork, are pretty popular for those that can afford it.