I think everyone had got it the wrong way round. If you were immortal (and I’m going to assume you retained your faculties) then as soon as someone else works it out you don’t need to meet people, they would come to you…
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I didn’t think of that. Immortaly would probably allow them to acquire significant power. Imagine an immortal Genghis Khan or similar. Such a person might meet hundreds of new people per year, even in the stone age. Over 500,000 years, that could accumulate to a few hundreds of millions of people.
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Or they might
I don’t think historically people were necessarily favourable to things they didn’t understand 
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Would an immortal human learn many things and have many different experiences, or would he be bored with life?
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If you’re as good at forgetting things as I am, probably don’t have to worry about getting bored.
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I’d very much like to see that movie. Jerome Bixby was such a good SF writer, never to be forgotten for his classic story, “It’s a Good Life,” the basis of one of the best Twilight Zone episodes.
The idea of immortal survivors has a long history in SF and fantasy. Leaving aside the many “lost civilization” stories, and drilling down to the particular, L. Sprague De Camp’s “The Gnarly Man” (1939) is a notable story about a Neanderthal surviving and working in a sideshow as a “wildman.” It may have inspired Lester del Rey’s beautiful fantasy, “The Pipes of Pan” (1940), in which Pan, his last follower dead, goes to work as a jazz musician. Another definite imitation was Philip Jose Farmer’s “The Alley Man” (1959), also about the survival of a Neanderthal working in today’s world, later expanded into a novel of the same title.
A related idea appeared in a short-lived, comedy TV series in the late 1960s, The Second Hundred Years. It featured a young Monte Markham as an Alaskan Gold Rush prospector, quick-frozen in an avalanche and then revived decades later, who lives with his elderly son (Arthur O’Connell). As a young teen, I liked it a lot, but haven’t seen it since.
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I love the Protector theme in Niven’s SF novels.
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Here’s another spitball on the wall.
Suppose they appear 310,000 years ago.
For the first 250,000 years they meet avg. 4 ppl. / yr.
For the next 50,000 years they meet avg. 16 ppl. / yr.
For the final 10,000 years they meet avg. 64 ppl. / yr.
That’s 1,000,000 + 800,000 + 640,000 = 2,440,000. Call it two and a half million.
This figure is above my first estimate of 500,000 and inside gennan’s range of 1–3 million, but below jlt’s lower bound of 5 million.
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I wonder what would be the memory of, say, language.
If you became fluent in a language, eg. Latin, or Greek, or Proto-Indo-European, or Vedic Sanskrit, etc., would you ever forget it?
An argument of “it was a thousand years since you last spoke it” can be countered by “you might have been speaking it for centuries before it died out”.
So would one be continually becoming a greater and greater store of dead tongues?
My restriction on “early human” in this challenge is that you have to at least be able to speak at a conversational level, otherwise it’s boring.
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I forget words daily, so…
I think that certain expressions would stick for a long time, for example my guess is we all swear in the language we feel more comfortable in.
But we should take into consideration that any written language, especially if the immortal was the one writing it, would have a greater possibility to survive through revision and muscle memory.
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I don’t know that this is the best place for this question but, I’m a fairly new player. Been playing the bot, and recently on one of my games, at the end when the program is showing the end result, there was a small blue square over an intersection beside my apponents stone. I haven’t been able to find out what this means. Any help would be appreciated.
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That means dame, an intersection that is not scored for either side.
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Thankyou Conrad. That answers the mystery, and the bigger question of why the area that i surrounded wasn’t counted in my score. I assumed the two bot stones were dead so i passed, but in reality there were still moves i had to make to secure the area. Thanks.
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Really? I am just waking up and may have missed some humor. Trent Reznor may disagree.
[eta] I suppose I could just google it like a normal person… I rephrase my question to “how disillusioned am I with the Gregorian calendar?”. The answer is “slightly”.
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1 AD/CE follows immediately after 1 BC/BCE, without any year zero
Just like how 1 dan follows immediately after 1 kyu, without any zero rank
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I want too say how much i appreciate the analyze mode. There have been 3 games i can think of that i lost because of one stone, actually lack of one stone. Being able to go into analyze mode, correct the play, and see how it changes the outcome is almost as good as winning.
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You can still have analyze on in custom games, and it still works, I think, in all games after the game is over. So you can still analyze your games afterward.
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What happens if I cook microwave-popcorn in a pan?
Not asking out of curiosity, I’m just unsupervised.
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