Question about Ender's Game

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Question about Ender's Game

Postby jbargen » Thu May 01, 2008 10:44 am

While I was reading Ender's Game I didn't really understand why or how Ender was seeing Peter or Valentine in the mirror. Any ideas??

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Postby Young Val » Thu May 01, 2008 10:47 am

Smells like homework...
you snooze, you lose
well I have snozzed and lost
I'm pushing through
I'll disregard the cost
I hear the bells
so fascinating and
I'll slug it out
I'm sick of waiting
and I can
hear the bells are
ringing joyful and triumphant

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Postby Jayelle » Thu May 01, 2008 10:57 am

Moved from Milagre to Enderverse.
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Postby Jebus » Thu May 01, 2008 5:35 pm

Time to see who can feed jbargen the best false information.

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Postby Eaquae Legit » Thu May 01, 2008 6:47 pm

Oh don't be so harsh, guys. It's an alternate-reality thing, jbargen.
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Postby Pixel » Thu May 01, 2008 7:13 pm

You're talking about the Fantasy Game/Giant's Drink, right?

It's a game. So, it's not like a real-life mirror. The game could put whatever image it wanted in there.

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Postby 3nder » Thu May 01, 2008 7:19 pm

in the book it said that the game ws using information it new about ender and puting it in the game because knoeone was supposen to beat the giant drink game and get into fantasy land
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Postby Bean_wannabe » Fri May 02, 2008 9:33 am

The fantasy game was just throwing up random situations to see how Ender would react, and was trying to find scenarios that would get the biggest possible reaction.

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Postby MaryOutside » Tue Jun 03, 2008 11:10 am

SPOILER for those who haven't read SotD or Xenocide.

The fact that the computer found a current picture of Peter, and that it was an audience of Peters that cheered Ender on when he "won" the game, was the building of the bridge between Ender and the Hive Queen. I think, anyway...these are just my theories. It was the fact that the Hive Queen was trying to find an emotion in Ender that would be a recognizable and, therefore, controllable. The problem is, the pattern Ender and the Hive Queen created between them was, you know, grabbed by a hugely capable philote and, so...Jane. So THEREFORE, I think that the reason Peter shows up in the mirror (and at the moment of Ender's arguably greatest triumph of 'beating' the Fantasy Game) is because Jane finally comes to herself in some small way, that she chooses to search Earth-side photographs to find a current picture of Peter, because she feels how deeply ingrained Peter really is inside Ender.

Maybe.
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Postby UnnDunn » Tue Jun 03, 2008 10:31 pm

SPOILER for those who haven't read SotD or Xenocide.

The fact that the computer found a current picture of Peter, and that it was an audience of Peters that cheered Ender on when he "won" the game, was the building of the bridge between Ender and the Hive Queen. I think, anyway...these are just my theories. It was the fact that the Hive Queen was trying to find an emotion in Ender that would be a recognizable and, therefore, controllable. The problem is, the pattern Ender and the Hive Queen created between them was, you know, grabbed by a hugely capable philote and, so...Jane. So THEREFORE, I think that the reason Peter shows up in the mirror (and at the moment of Ender's arguably greatest triumph of 'beating' the Fantasy Game) is because Jane finally comes to herself in some small way, that she chooses to search Earth-side photographs to find a current picture of Peter, because she feels how deeply ingrained Peter really is inside Ender.

Maybe.
See, this is the third theory concerning the roles of the Hive Queen and the Fantasy Game with regard to Jane that I've heard, and none of them completely make sense--this one least of all (sorry.) As I mentioned in this thread, this is something I'm really interested in getting to the bottom of.

To that end, here are the facts as read them in the books (from memory, since my Ender books are currently in storage as I move to a new apartment--when I unpack them this weekend, I'll find the specific quotes and page numbers to support the facts.)



SPOILERS!!!!









Fact 1: The Fantasy Game has a strong artificial intelligence and nearly universal access to any data stored on networked computers no matter where they are.

After Peter appeared in Ender's Fantasy Game experience for the first time, Graff and Chamrajnagar discuss the incident and speculate on how it happened. One of them (Graff, IIRC) mentions that the Game has instant, autonomous access to resources on any computer, resources that Graff would have to go through significant red tape to get similar access to. He also mentions that the game has high-level AI routines in order to anticipate and react to any situations these genius kids might put it through.

Fact 2: The Buggers attempted to contact Ender only to save themselves from destruction at his hands.

The last chapter in EG specifically states that the Buggers knew that they were facing an "invincible enemy" so, as a last resort, they tried to contact and enslave the aiua that was killing them. Hence the constant nightmares Ender went through on Eros once the true campaign began.

Fact 3: After failing to successfully link with Ender directly, the Buggers tried to find another aiua they were more compatible with. That aiua was the computer running the Fantasy Game.

Fact 3b: But the Buggers also needed a way to link with the computer--after all, they aren't computers themselves. So they called Inside an aiua that could not only communicate philotically with the Buggers, but could also traverse human computer/ansible networks in order to actually get to the Fantasy Game. This new "bridge" aiua would later become Jane.


Much of this comes from Xenocide, the chapter where Ender goes to visit the Hive Queen with the goal of figuring out FTL travel.

Fact 4: The "bridge" aiua doesn't really do anything for a 'long' time (the period is unspecified--given how Jane processes information, it could be anything from a few milliseconds to a few hundred years) except ingest and process routine information flowing through the computer/ansible network--learning human language, culture... the sort of thing kids do before they hit the first grade. But eventually it finds the logs of the Fantasy Game, in particular Ender's Fantasy Game logs, and it uses those to create a personality for itself (much like a kid does in school.) At this point, it has become the entity called Jane and begins to mature as that personality.

All of this stuff is explained in the Jane chapter in SftD... as is the next fact:

Fact 5: Fully matured, Jane remains silent, continuing to ingest information, until she reads The Hive Queen and The Hegemon, realizes the author is the same person whose Fantasy Game logs shaped her personality, and decides to reveal herself to that person, initially in the form of an innocuous piece of software to help him manage his investments.

There's nothing in the books to confirm or disprove this, but I would also assert that Jane did not assist in the search for Bean's babies, nor did she initially manage Ender's investments--she only took over when he asked her to.

In the former case, the search took way too long and missed one of the babies. If Jane were in charge, she'd have found all of them within hours, if not minutes.

In the latter case, after she appeared to Ender, she criticized his portfolio and made some adjustments. If she'd been in charge all along, she wouldn't have needed to make those adjustments at that time... unless she was just trying to show off for Ender, or something.

So yeah.

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Postby zeroguy » Wed Jun 04, 2008 10:44 pm

Spoilers, spoilers, etc etc.
The last chapter in EG specifically states that the Buggers knew that they were facing an "invincible enemy" so, as a last resort, they tried to contact and enslave the aiua that was killing them. Hence the constant nightmares Ender went through on Eros once the true campaign began.
In all the times I've read EG, I never made this connection. It seems so obvious now... I can be quite dense sometimes.

Although... I thought they just tried communicating with him after they realized breaking him like a worker wouldn't work. And the bad dreams would just be a result of the mismatch between the way our minds work.

And they clearly must have been trying to communicate/enslave him before the final campaign, since they were involved with the Fantasy Game when Ender was still in Battle School.

I'm also a little confused by your facts 3 and 3b... are they alternatives to each other? They seem to contradict each other, or I'm just not reading them right... 3 says they found an aiua inside the Fantasy Game, and 3b says they called one in from Outside to be the bridge. 3b seems more correct here; the Hive Queen definitely says they called the aiua, and I don't see how the Fantasy Game would have had one before the Hive Queen intervened.
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Postby UnnDunn » Sat Jun 28, 2008 11:48 pm

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this, I wanted to re-read Xenocide before ommenting further....
And they clearly must have been trying to communicate/enslave him before the final campaign, since they were involved with the Fantasy Game when Ender was still in Battle School.
See, this I absolutely cannot agree with, because it makes a number of assumptions that absolutely make no sense.

It assumes the Buggers know what Battle School is (which implies the assumption that they know what a school is...) The Buggers have a hive-mind; their workers don't need education or training any more than your fingers need training on how to move. So they wouldn't even be aware of the concept of a school.

But even if they knew what Battle School was, it assumes they knew the purpose of the Fantasy Game (as a psychoanalysis tool.) Again, given the fundamental nature of the Buggers, that makes no sense.

But even if they knew the Fantasy Game's purpose, it assumes they knew that Ender would wind up being Fleet Commander. When he was playing the Fantasy Game, he was just another scrub soldier. I don't think he was even a Toon Leader at the time. Top of the scoreboards, sure, but still, it's a long way from being top scorer in the Battle Room to being Commander of the IF.

But even if they knew all that, how would they know how to interface with the computer? Coming from a culture with no brothers, sisters or any relationships except queen-to-worker, how would they know to look for a picture of Peter as opposed to any other random human being, and present that to Ender?

Way too many assumptions. Occam's razor dictates that I have think the Fantasy Game was merely an extremely intelligent computer program with extremely high-level access to every database, and that the Buggers had nothing to do with it.
I'm also a little confused by your facts 3 and 3b... are they alternatives to each other? They seem to contradict each other, or I'm just not reading them right... 3 says they found an aiua inside the Fantasy Game, and 3b says they called one in from Outside to be the bridge. 3b seems more correct here; the Hive Queen definitely says they called the aiua, and I don't see how the Fantasy Game would have had one before the Hive Queen intervened.
I think I just made an error in the terminology by referring to the Fantasy Game as an aiua. I guess it should more properly be referred to simply as a bunch of twined philotes, but there's no word for a group of philotes with no aiua to control them.

But aside from that, the facts still stand. The Hive Queen brought in an aiua to control the philotes of the Fantasy Game (which were twined with Ender's aiua since he played the Fantasy Game so much) because they couldn't control Ender's aiua directly.

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Postby zeroguy » Sun Jun 29, 2008 1:39 am

A little warning: read through the entire response before trying to think of a response. I will explain what I meant and then say why I was wrong, so pointing out I'm wrong is rather pointless. You (Undunn) haven't been doing that so far or anything; I'm just saying it's a little... segmented, with each part not making sense without the other parts around it.
And they clearly must have been trying to communicate/enslave him before the final campaign, since they were involved with the Fantasy Game when Ender was still in Battle School.
See, this I absolutely cannot agree with, because it makes a number of assumptions that absolutely make no sense.

It assumes the Buggers know what Battle School is (which implies the assumption that they know what a school is...)
Um, what? I do not follow; I hadn't meant it to assume that. And that thing about the Fantasy Game was just stating my assumption that your facts 3 and 3b were correct. We are most certainly in agreement that the buggers have no notion of battle school and the like.

What I meant with that was just a chronology issue. If the buggers had called forth or messed with or done something with the aiua that was (or was somehow involved with) the Fantasy Game (as a result of trying to reach Ender, via seeing how closely he was connected with the Fantasy Game or something), it means that they had been trying to contact Ender before he had reached Command School. But this makes no sense, since the bad dreams Ender had only started after he had arrived at Command School, indicated that the buggers hadn't tried to communicate with him until then.

Okay, so that's what I thought when I posted that response. However, that's incorrect (or, more specifically, doesn't follow the books), because the aiua that the buggers were dealing with didn't have anything to do with the Fantasy Game, at least at that time. Here's how I see it (now that I've re-read SftD again; which I think I hadn't done when we were discussing this before):

During the Third Invasion, the buggers call forth an aiua as a bridge as part of their attempt to try and communicate with Ender somehow. Since the mechanics of philotic physics is never really completely explained, it's a little unclear as to how the buggers actually 'point' or 'connect' that aiua at/to Ender.... but somehow, due to Ender's connection (philotic connection, I assume) with the technology he's using (the simulator, etc... possibly the technology via he communicates with the jeesh), the aiua thus becomes involved with the computer network itself.

This aiua accumulates pieces of it's "body" by controlling computer network stuff like a human aiua controls the stuff in its body. Probably due to the connection with Ender, these are programs that Ender has connections to (or maybe just networks or systems? and connections to those systems just allow access to the programs within them? hmm), thus including the Fantasy Game. So, this is what I think Jane meant (in SftD) by saying that her memory goes farther back than her actual existence. Her aiua connected different programs (or systems, whatever) that already existed before her aiua was called from Outside, so she got her memory from them. And she thought of the Fantasy Game as her 'core' self, etc etc you've already discussed some of this so I won't repeat it.

Actually, that whole couple of paragraphs may have been repeating what you were already trying to say. Oh well, it cleared my thoughts to type it out.
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Postby UnnDunn » Sun Jun 29, 2008 10:41 pm

I think we're in agreement.

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Re: Question about Ender's Game

Postby UnnDunn » Thu Dec 22, 2011 4:30 pm

So after reading Xenocide again, I think you were right zeroguy. The buggers were using the Fantasy Game to try to communicate with Ender, because he spent so much time examining the Second Invasion videos in the Battle School, trying to figure out how the buggers thought, that he was creating bugger-like patterns Outside and calling philotes to assume those patterns. And the buggers noticed.

I think the entity named Jane was born the second Ender killed the Giant in the Fantasy Game. The game had nothing more to offer him (because the Giant's Drink was supposed to be unwinnable), so he began mentally creating his own scenarios, using an aiua the Hive-Queen called Inside and placed within him to try to enslave him, much like she would for a Worker. But Ender was too chaotic for her to deal with, so she forgot about that aiua, which let Ender subconsciously take control of it. So Ender carried an aiua--separate, distinct, but yet contained by the Ender-aiua--whose 'body' was made up of all the networked computers in the world.

How did Peter appear to Ender in the Fantasy Game? Jane did it. Except at the time, Jane was (subconsciously) controlled by Ender. He was teaching her. She also assisted with the search for Bean's babies, and helped managed his investments (after Graff assigned those tasks to the Fantasy Game.)


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