Friendship is Optimal has launched and is being published in chunks on FIMFiction.
Friendship is Optimal is a story about an optimizer written to "satisfy human values through friendship and ponies." I would like to thank everyone on LessWrong who came out and helped edit it. Friendship is Optimal wouldn't be what is today without your help.
Thank you.
Teaser description:
Hanna, the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios, just won the contract to write the official My Little Pony MMO. Hanna has built an A.I. Princess Celestia and given her one basic drive: to satisfy everybody's values through friendship and ponies. And Princess Celestia will follow those instructions to the letter...even if you don't want her to.
Here is the schedule for the next chapters:
Friday (Nov. 16th): Chapter 4 - 5
Monday (Nov. 19th): Chapter 6 - 7
Thursday (Nov. 22th): Chapter 8 - 9
Sunday (Nov. 25th): Chapter 10 - 11, Author's Afterword
This was a fun read! Two quick comments about Chapter 11. First, there is a "Euclidian" which should be a "Euclidean."
Second, I have a mild technical objection to your description of Equestria-space as not being commutative. "Noncommutative geometry" has a mathematical meaning (it is not completely precise yet because the field is relatively young), and it refers to something different, namely coordinates not being commutative (e.g. position and momentum in quantum mechanics). What you're describing is more like a Cayley graph of a noncommutative group. The bare graph itself has no notion of commutativity or noncommutativity: it's the extra fact that there are six specific ways to go from a block to one of its neighbors that look like elements of Z^3 for familiarity but that are actually elements of the free group on 6 generators or some quotient thereof.
I've fixed the spelling error.
If you could suggest a phrasing that's both accurate, but also short and won't require the reader to know much graph theory. I think I'm pushing it as it is right now. I said "noncommutative" since I assumed that basically my entire audience would have been exposed to commutative binary function from their high school proofs classes.