a lore question about Fallout world computer science

[Thatdude]

So we know in Fallout world most computers are super huge because computer tech in Fallout universe is very different from our real world.

Then why Institute scientists in Fallout can build cyborg???

In Fallout 3, there is even a cyborg slave runs away from his master for freedom, which indicates his computer is so powerful that it can generate human emotion and logic.

If they already invented a computer(cyborg's brain) that's sooo small and powerful why they never build a better computer?

[Sonny]

Първоначално публикувано от X HATE TELEVISION:

Първоначално публикувано от Laudablecube56:

Another Bethesda retcon, they don't care what makes sense or not.

Again, The Institute has probably developed their own advanced computing technology, and they wouldn't necessarily share it with the rest of the Wasteland. For all we know, the synths could use Positronic brains.

Considering the level of technology available before the war, I find it highly unlikely that the Institute has developed computers small enough to create androids.

[TVMAN]

Първоначално публикувано от Laudablecube56:

Considering the level of technology available before the war, I find it highly unlikely that the Institute has developed computers small enough to create androids.

The level of technology available before the war? You mean functional Artificial Intelligence, fully simulated virtual reality, and working Fusion reactors? It's really not that unlikely at all.

[sven10077]

Първоначално публикувано от Thatdude:

So we know in Fallout world most computers are super huge because computer tech in Fallout universe is very different from our real world.

Then why Institute scientists in Fallout can build cyborg???

In Fallout 3, there is even a cyborg slave runs away from his master for freedom, which indicates his computer is so powerful that it can generate human emotion and logic.

If they already invented a computer(cyborg's brain) that's sooo small and powerful why they never build a better computer?

A few potential explanations...

It's true that the microchip never made its appearance in FO canon, but they have far more advanced biossciences date for date than we do and mastered robotics faster than we did.

1) the cyborgs are packing "donor brains" that are reprogrammed with instructions and a backstory.

2) the institute has been engaged in high level research with a defacto slave colony and captive economic system to get the needed raw resources for its gains...

take your pick

[Sonny]

Първоначално публикувано от X HATE TELEVISION:

Първоначално публикувано от Laudablecube56:

Considering the level of technology available before the war, I find it highly unlikely that the Institute has developed computers small enough to create androids.

The level of technology available before the war? You mean functional Artificial Intelligence, fully simulated virtual reality, and working Fusion reactors? It's really not that unlikely at all.

Not so much the technology as the size of the technology. There were no computers powerful enough anywhere close to small enough to construct a pretty much perfect android.

[sven10077]

Първоначално публикувано от X HATE TELEVISION:

Първоначално публикувано от Laudablecube56:

Considering the level of technology available before the war, I find it highly unlikely that the Institute has developed computers small enough to create androids.

The level of technology available before the war? You mean functional Artificial Intelligence, fully simulated virtual reality, and working Fusion reactors? It's really not that unlikely at all.

Quite people underestimate the R & D that took place because of the elongated cold war, while their tech LOOKS like Bozo the clown is doing the engineering specs to our eyes they mastered near solar system travel faster than we have and far surpassed this reality in biosciences and computer science THEORY which led to their AIs..

[sven10077]

Първоначално публикувано от Laudablecube56:

Първоначално публикувано от X HATE TELEVISION:

The level of technology available before the war? You mean functional Artificial Intelligence, fully simulated virtual reality, and working Fusion reactors? It's really not that unlikely at all.

Not so much the technology as the size of the technology. There were no computers powerful enough anywhere close to small enough to construct a pretty much perfect android.

The BIG MT in FNV was shown using the supercomputers to program biological "AI" for the cyber critters....

I'd wager that the synths have BIO brains not positronic ones.

[sven10077]

Първоначално публикувано от Lunessence:

Първоначално публикувано от Dodece:

Nuclear fallout lasts weeks at most. Not years, decades, or centuries. Further more mutatations as depicted are completely impossible. Pretty much everything in Fallout is impossible.

Actually, not trying to be THAT guy, but ... Chernobyl still has radiation issues with the nuclear plant accident that happened. And it happened in 1986. The rate at which the half-life of a radioactive isotope decays or disintegrates can take billions of years. You're right, though, that in some cases the decay can take just microseconds. It depends on the isotope.

Since Chernobyl looks like the following today in 2015, it's fair to assume that a fictional nuclear war in the Fallout Universe could have after-effects that last hundreds or thousands of years, if not longer:

||Scroll all the way down to see a strangely familiar-looking setting||

https://www.rt.com/news/155072-chernobyl-images-now-then/

Funnily enough, we're starting to get some of the nuclear fallout on American coasts from the recent nuclear plant accident from Japan that happened in 2011. We're also getting air pollution from China. Funny world we live in, huh?

Chernobyl is hard to compare to a nuclear detonation because it was a sustained release of a different cocktail of material and radiations...

Chenobyl is "safe enough" now to walk around in sub MOPP-4....good enough for me.

[TVMAN]

Първоначално публикувано от Laudablecube56:

Not so much the technology as the size of the technology. There were no computers powerful enough anywhere close to small enough to construct a pretty much perfect android.

Who said they're using computers for the androids 'brain'? Considering the retrofuturistic motif of the Fallout games, they could be using Positronic brains[en.wikipedia.org] or biocomputers like the Robobrain robots.

[SIlverblade-T-E]

1) "normal" nulear fallout from a high detonated *clean fusion* bomb, decays so that usually 99% of the radiation is gone within 3 weeks.

2) However, ground bursts, "dirty weapons" (specificially designed for excess long term radiation by adding cobalt or strontium directly into the weapon), or the massive three stage fission-fusion-fission weapons (which are very dirty because of the 3rd stage conversion of U238)
and worst of all by far, direct ground bursts on nuclear submarine bases (warheads, metals which will be "neutron activated"), and reactors)
and the REAL asskicker: ground bursts on major civilian reactors (a hit on Sellafield would eradicate Northern England for Millenia for all major life forms not merely weeks! it stores 130 tons of Plutonium, thousands of tons of highly irridiated fuels and materials)
So those would produce hellish long lived radiation as there'd be enough of it to be a severe long term threat
Ground bursts are used vs special nkers, weapons tores, command centres, sub bases etc
please read up on the OPERATION PLOWSHARE, SEDAN CRATER screw up in the USA and the even worse CASTLE BRAVO TEST

3) The weapons used in the Fallout nuclear exchange seem moslty to have been a HELL of a lot of small fission weapons which are a lot more dorty than "clean" fusion bombs
partially it's game design, the use of a single multi megaton class hydrogen bomb would have left Washington DC's centere nothing but shaved flat radioactive glass, NOTHING would be left standing, but that would be very boring and no use to play a game in ;)
so the Developers admitted the "fudged" that
and the lroe in the game does sugegst an echange moslty with tactical, Hiroshima sized warheads using fission, the game lore suggests they were much more used ot usign and even more advanced than we are with fission, so that makes sense.

Fission bombs, assuming they went for higher yield ones, use plutonium as to the much smaller fission cores of "clean" hydrogen bombs
but the big, say 100 to 300 kiloton fission bombs are extremely dirty, uch of their core gets turned into fallout and they fire out an immesnse "neutron shower" which converts the elements it hits into radioactive isotopes (I put that simply do not hammer me with detials lol)

Also the bomb/missile case gets turned into veyr high level radioactive fallout, more and bigger the case, more nasty fallout
generally and simply speaking, the larger the atomic weight, the nasty and longer lived the isotope will be. WHich is why radium plutonium and uranium are really nasty
smaller atomic weights can produce shortr lived isotpes that fling out very hard/nasty radiaiton but for shorter periods of time
half lifes in days or even seconds but the damage is huge (again that is simplistically put! talking the typical fallout not rarer exotic plutonium isotopes etc)

Radium, uranium and plutonium are very dangerous because they are alpha emitters, if they get ingested, they will wreck absolute havoc
the short lived particles tend ot be beta and gamma emitters whose radiation has longer range, may go through clothes or even walls (beta radiation penetrates thin cloth and a metre or more of air, gamma takes a lot to stop it but it's so tiny the odds of a single gamma ray hamring a specific cell is lwo, but snce it passes through so many it may hit one, beta particles are bigger more energy more damage, alpha particles are huge and do immense harm for the scale of such things)

3) as the Tale of the Survivalist notes in Fallout New vegas Honest Hearts, he too had been told radiaiton decays rapidly, but it did not
of course it s just a game, but perhaps lots of fission, hits on the large number of nculear waste dumps etc...and the fact that fission and fusion power was COMMON, so radioactives were all over the damn place, it would be very nasty!!

[Heinrek]

Първоначално публикувано от Thatdude:

So we know in Fallout world most computers are super huge because computer tech in Fallout universe is very different from our real world.

Then why Institute scientists in Fallout can build cyborg???

In Fallout 3, there is even a cyborg slave runs away from his master for freedom, which indicates his computer is so powerful that it can generate human emotion and logic.

If they already invented a computer(cyborg's brain) that's sooo small and powerful why they never build a better computer?

It Just Werks

[Sonny]

Първоначално публикувано от X HATE TELEVISION:

Първоначално публикувано от Laudablecube56:

Not so much the technology as the size of the technology. There were no computers powerful enough anywhere close to small enough to construct a pretty much perfect android.

Who said they're using computers for the androids 'brain'? Considering the retrofuturistic motif of the Fallout games, they could be using Positronic brains[en.wikipedia.org] or biocomputers like the Robobrain robots.

Positronic brains are still sophisticated pieces of electronics, and Fallout's electronics are primitive and bulky, so it's unlikely they exist in Fallout.

As for Robobrains, look at how bulky they are. Robots require more electronics then just a CPU, and electronics in Fallout are primitive compared to the real world, and bulky.

[Haunt Fox]

But the bombs in Fallout are more like the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, right, rather than nuclear bombs attached to ICBMs of the later Cold War era? How long did it take for the effects of radiation to die down in Japan (if ever?) Or Bikini Atoll? It's a question I haven't thought of in decades, but I supose it's a valid one still. How about the site where the French last set off nuclear bombs in a test? That wasn't too long ago, I don't think. 20 years? Or Three Mile Island ...

As far as the computers go, I understand they're mechanical and use vacuum tubes, as the transistor was never invented (and so, neither was the microprocessor). As far as the robots go, I kind of imagine their inner workings to be like those clockwork robots in Doctor Who (The Girl in the Fireplace, and a more recent episode) - clockworks combined with vaccuum-tube "computer" tech (or, as I see above, they could be like clockwork Cybermen.)

[Golemite]

Computer Science likely continued to progress without transistors, so the theory was likely very developed at the point transistors were developed prior to the war (limitations may have even forced a lot of efficient algorithm development, optimization, and compression techniques to increase performance). Additionally, the fallout world has very advanced robotics and fabrication techniques, so transistors would be able to shrink very quickly. In fact, since AIs already existed in the Fallout universe, the developers would just need to shrink down the computer components to fit into an android (Computing would probably be distributed throughout the android, as power armor shows that motorized joints could fit in a body with space to spare)

[TVMAN]

Първоначално публикувано от Laudablecube56:

Positronic brains are still sophisticated pieces of electronics, and Fallout's electronics are primitive and bulky, so it's unlikely they exist in Fallout.

As for Robobrains, look at how bulky they are. Robots require more electronics then just a CPU, and electronics in Fallout are primitive compared to the real world, and bulky.

You keep comparing the Pre-War computers we've seen so far with whatever the Institute has been doing in the 200 years since the bombs fell. Are you really suggesting they've been technologically stagnant since the war? They have androids after all, so that's obviously not the case.

Anyway, the answer to your question is Science!, and if you're looking for hardcore realism in the Fallout series you should probably look elsewhere.

[SIlverblade-T-E]

note that the AI computers are huge, but...there's hints that near the end they did make microelectronics or some other advancement that helped make the AIs practical and sentient.
actually the AI you meet in Fallout 2 suggests it was one of the AIs that started the war.

other universes don't have to follow our technology
it's only a matter of happenstance that the internal combustion engine dominates in our world, in others, more efficient steam engines or fusion/fission may be the ruling method

if a civilization works long and hard on one tech they are likely to far eclipse us

even now we cannot replciate the Roman balllista exactly, we don't know how they made the sinew ropes, and it was only recently they figured out how they used recurve bow limbs to get the phenomenal ranges they Romans did, and that's with a 2000 year old weapon technology it's take us 2 decades to approximate!

So, the world of Fallout may have fission and AI/electronic tech way way beyond what we have, by sheer trial and error, or fortuitous circumstances: a genius dreams up a positronic or ORGANIC computer brain.
it's like the Pyramids: you do nto need aliens to build them! just hseer bloody hard work and experience over centuries of building such things, and the brilliance of the crafstmen and dreamers.
(caveat: hey, it's Fallout, maybe the Pyramids were alien bases after all, lol!)

it's a game of course, but there's no good reason to say it's impossible for such tehcnological differences to exist. Aztecs never smelted learned to smelt metal, but they did amazing work in building their fortifications and arts. they COULD have welcomed the Conquistadors with a hail of grapeshot from cannons if things had been just a little different centuries before...