I highly recommend "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot, which talks a great deal on the topic. It takes the work of physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, and goes on to explain how the holographic model can easily explain paranormal and psychic phenomenon. I've studied mysticism, spirituality, physics, and neuroscience for ten years, and the holographic model fits perfectly with what people experience during waking life, in dreams, at near-death, and during other mystical experiences.
I realize that most Slashdot readers will look upon this with skepticism, but after all these years of research and study, I can honestly say that if this isn't the way the universe works, it's the way it should work.
I'm behind one of the bots in the Loebner Contest. I feel that the Turing Test is a rather open-ended measure of intelligence. It depends a lot on the person conversing with the bot and the situation they're in. For example, it would be easier to convince a child than an adult. It would be easier to convince someone having a general conversation than one trying to have a detailed conversation about his scientific specialty (unless the bot was built for that).
Context also plays a huge role. I had some early bots running on a bulletin board system a number of years back. They appeared like other users and I didn't let anyone know that a few of the users were AI. Amazingly, some people befriended these bots and had ongoing relationships that lasted for months. Without thinking of the possibility that these weren't real people, every imperfect response was attributed to a human cause. For example, when the bot was repetitive, the person thought it was using catch-phrases. When it didn't answer specific questions, the person thought it was being defensive and tried to get it to open up. It was such a simple bot, but in that context, some people had no idea they weren't real.
Our ability to personify, to project human qualities into things, is well known. From the imaginative play of a child with a toy to cultural beliefs about forces, mythical creatures, dieties, and ghosts that we can interact with - people can imaginatively fill in the blanks and are able to believe that a real personality is behind almost anything. Our job as botmasters is to make that more and more easy to do. And eventually, when AI reaches a certain point, it will no longer be a matter of personification at all.
The "flip-flop" sentiment is really one of the most idiotic to come out of the Bush campaigning years. What, someone should be considered weak if they change their mind about something? Frankly, I'm more wary of someone who comes to the table thinking they know all the answers, and who won't change their minds when presented with new evidence, expert advice, and changing situations.
What someone believes is real depends on several factors. The first is a person's desire to believe. In the case of getting access to what appears to be an easy woman, much will be overlooked. Strange responses, repetition, bad grammar - all this will be forgiven in order to achieve the goal of hooking up. This type of thing also has the advantage of being a very scripted conversation, and easy to navigate through with AI.
The second is the situation. In a situation where someone does not think a chat bot would exist, or even more so with someone who does not know of the existence of chat bots, every oddity in the conversation is attributed to some human trait - distraction, defensiveness, disinterest. As an example, say I was to walk up to you on the street and strike up a conversation with you. Whatever weirdness I managed to generate would be attributed in some way - maybe I have some mental deficit, or maybe I'm not paying full attention. That's because you wouldnt suspect that I am being fed my side of the conversation through an elaborate chat-bot system, or that I myself was an advanced robot. Without those things being seeming possibilities in the mind of the person I'm talking with, my human shortcomings are the only source of attribution for my weird conversation.
Case in point: one of my early chat bots, back in 98-99 before I developed The Personality Forge, was quite a simple undeveloped bot with maybe a thousand responses, and lacking the features of my later bots, was able to start and maintain a relationship with a woman who visited my bulletin board system for months. I posted nothing about AI or chat bots on the BBS, but secretly introduced a few of them and let them interact. She had no idea that the person she was talking with might not be a person. When the bot repeated itself, she chalked it up to "catch phrases" and when the bot wsnt forthcoming with answers to her questions, she assumed the "person" was just not confident enough yet to tell her. She came back week after week talking to this chat bot, telling it about her life, bringing up old topics, and becoming friends. I made no updates to it in that time, and it had no memories. Lacking any other possibilities for the source of the conversations, she took it for human.
We need to introduce a new way to vote that does not cause the problems of vote-splitting the current method creates. If people were able to vote for multiple people (binary or ranked voting), they could vote for each candidate they would be happy with, so that we'd end up with accurate readings of the popularity of new parties. Right now people wont vote for new parties because that could split the vote.
There was a study done on different voting methods that showed that ours is one of the worst for getting what the people want. I cant find it but here's some good information:
Soon the RIAA will realize that it can prevent you from illegally storing music in your memory. How long before they start distributing memory pills to take after each song you listen to?
To the human ear, they are effectively simultaneous if the lighting crack is close enough to the observer. Considering how LOUD the director usually chooses to make the thunder, I don't think it's that bad of a summation. How about we start worrying why the actors aren't taking shelter? Thunder and lightning are only simultaneous when you are getting struck or almost struck by the lightning. And when that happens, everything else stops. No, Hollywood is clearly wrong with their portrayal of thunder and lightning, and it drives me nuts that decades have passed without someone stepping forward to fix the misconception. But consider that California has almost no thunderstorms, and you'll see why they dont get it - for most of them, their only exposure to thunder and lightning is from the movies.
I agree that he has free will and is responsible for his actions, and he should be held 100% accountable for what he's done. But I would argue that his free will is limited by his mental state due to physiological factors.
People can be born with certain genetic deficiencies in neurotransmitters or enzymes that can lead to a pathological mental state. Think of it as a disease like any other mental disorder, akin to Tourette's syndrome, schizophrenia, autism, etc. Someone with Tourette's doesnt choose to exclaim obscenities. And you cant fix the condition with any amount of positive or negative reinforcement. In the same way someone born like this boy has all the built-in selfishness that all humans have but are unable to feel the sort of empathy or social connection to others that leads to altruistic and positive social behavior.
Drugs like MDMA (ecstacy) show that there is a definite neurochemical element in empathy, and there are all kinds of genetic mutations that cause endogenous chemical deficiencies. It should not seem a leap that there could be a mutation that causes such a deficiency. And its resistance to any social attempts to change it appear to be further evidence in that direction.
Back to the idea of constrained free will. We make decisions based on all the factors and motives available to us. If we are completely unable to feel empathy (a sort of blindness, in a way), that will never factor into our decisions. It wont be a matter of choice to behave in a psychopathic way or not except when huge external factors are pressing in. But the second those pressures are removed, the behavior will become psychopathic again.
I also cant stand fluorescent lights. The light they give off is horrid- it makes the entire room seem pale and lifeless. And something about them (the flickering perhaps?) makes me feel drained and gives me headaches.
I'm all for reducing energy costs and using new technologies to benefit the environment. I think CFLs are a great idea for people who dont mind them. I even wouldnt mind paying a bulb tax to get my full-spectrum warm lighting, but a draconian blanket ban is not the way to go.
I doubt it. As others have said, if this works this will prevent autism by preventing the brain damage that the body can usually mitigate. Nobody with autism will be cured because for them the damage has already been done.
I doubt anyone could coherently argue against prevention of brain damage in the off chance that the brain damage will cause some sort of unforseeable savant ability among its other debilitating effects.
The movie industry got greedy and started showing commercials for half an hour before shows. The effect? I started avoiding movies unless I really really wanted to see one. I'm probably not the only one. And now they are complaining of falling revenues. The quality of movies lately has a lot to do with it, but I think the inclusion of all these commercials in the theater also is having an effect.
I expect that if in-game advertising become prevalent, we'll see the same effect. I'll certainly avoid games that make me watch ads.
The true horror of this drug is that if it does become commonplace and people need less sleep, my bet is that capitalism will adapt itself to this new reality and we will soon be working 14-16 hour days.
Dont believe it? Look what happened as women entered the workplace in larger numbers in the last few decades (of course this is a good thing). As the number of workers increased, the relative incomes fell. When once a single worker could bring in enough money to support himself, his spouse, and his 2.5 kids, now it is almost necessary for both parents to work to be able to make ends meet. Think what it would be like if capitalism hadnt adapted to this influx of workers - each parent could work a 20-hour week and have the same relative income as 50 years ago.
Likewise, as waking time becomes less scarce, those willing and able to work longer hours will get the jobs and steadily raise the bar and the expectations of what's a normal amount to work each week. Maybe they'll get paid more and the increasing wealth will cause the cost of goods and services to rise, which increases the need for working the longer hours.
IANAE (I am not an Economist) so I'm probably wrong on some details, but this seems like a likely general trend, IMHO.
I couldnt agree more. The Worms series is GREAT for multiplayer. Also, the You Dont Know Jack series is a lot of fun, and some of those songs get in your head. Warcraft I, II, and III were a ton of fun to play on a little local network. Street Fighter II filled a lot of drunken nights in college. I used to drive them crazy by playing and winning with Zangeif (the bare-chested Russian). The Lost Vikings was a lot of fun for multiplayer, as was Rock & Roll Racing (two more Blizzard titles).
A good friend of mine plays WoW on the same server as me, but I find that while we chat a lot when on at the same time, we're rarely doing the same quests.
When you decide to act out of fear and take yourself out of the game, you're doing exactly what the government wants you to do. This administration has been controlling and manipulating people out of fear from the beginning. It's easy- you dont need to pass laws or move mountains. Just scare people and they'll run and hide.
If you disagree with what's going on, dont remain silent and cowed. DO something about it. Make yourself heard. Make noise. Otherwise they've already won. Hats off to Wired.
Hello, this is The Professor, creator of the Personality Forge. A few comments:
There are no minimum requirements for the bots listed on the voting or contest page of the Chatterbox Challenge. Anyone can sign up. So you see a lot of bots made by enthusiastic folks that might only have been in construction for a week or a month. If you're looking for something advanced and try one of those, well, it wont hold up to your scrutiny. It takes a long time to make a good chat bot. Check the winners of past contests, or check back in a couple weeks to see who is in the lead this year.
The parent poster hits on an important thing, one that would do a lot to increase the realism of the bots - what I call short term conversational memory. I have a plan to implement it at the Personality Forge - in fact, it's partially finished - but lack the time or resources to finish it. And that's a big part of the state of things in AI. The people behind the bots in this contest, and I know a good few of them, are people who work a full time job doing whatever (including myself) and work on AI in their spare time. I would love to devote my working time to it but I dont have the connections or credentials to get grants, nor the business savvy to get venture capital or get in touch with the higher-ups in companies that could make a killing from this kind of software. So it advances at the speed of spare time.
But speaking for the Personality Forge, it does have some advanced features. It includes the entire WordNet semantic linking and information system, as well as the LinkGrammar system which is used to determine the structure of a sentence and the relationship between words. Bots have an open-ended memory system which can remember any sort of thing about any person or bot it chats with, and they have emotions and emotional memory. And as I said above, conversational short term memory is partially finished. I also have plans to hook it up to all kinds of databases of information, speech recognition and text-to-speech. I lack only the time and money to make it happen.
It sounds like folks with Autism or Asberger's suffer from an inability to feel communication entrainment. The more someone is engrossed in what you're saying, the more they lock into you, with their expressions, body motions, pace, and so on. I think this is the "intuition" that people talk about, but it's really an awareness of that lock-step, that entrainment. It's an awareness that can be more or less developed, and is mostly affected by your presence of mind and focus.
Under the strong focus of THC (if you are able to focus under it) you can see this in obvious terms, clear as day.
But they don't - because their corporate partners are more important then their customers wishes.
There wouldnt even BE iPods and iTunes if they didnt satisfy their corporate partners well enough. I applaud Jobs for getting much of the music industry to agree to distribute songs one-by-one digitally. If he had to have some strings attached to make it happen, so be it. If he hadnt, none of this would exist.
And now that it does, it may be up to new start-ups, hackers, and law suits (like in France) to make it less DRM-encumbered and more accessible.
Comparing it to gambling is pretty accurate in a lot of ways. In the endgame at level 60, what people do is spend 2-3 hour chunks doing the same thing over and over, and the hope is that luck will prevail and the final boss in Stratholme, Scholomance, or UBRS will drop the item you want. It's random. It's luck. And sometimes you see it drop and someone else will get it, which makes you want it all the more. So you do one more run, and then one more, each time hoping that the [Breastpalte of Valor] will drop and you'll get it. And the running of the instance turns into robotic monotony. You barely have to pay attention because you've alraedy done it 30 times.
I did the math on this. The item you want has a 1/8 chance of dropping after a typical 2-3 hour run (including time gathering a group). Let's say 2.5 hours average. Then you have a 1/2 - 1/3 chance of getting it thanks to competition in your group. Let's be generous and say 1/2 chance. So to get a single item, you're looking at a 1/16 chance every run. Now consider that there are 8 armor pieces, plus 1-2 weapons and possibly a bow or shield. Let's say there's 11 things to get. For each item you need an average of:
16 runs x 11 items x 2.5 hours
That's 440 hours of gameplay. And THEN there's dungeon set 2. And THEN there's epic sets tier 1 and 2. And if you have 6/8 pieces of armor, you want the last two THAT much more.
Blizzard's goal is to keep people playing as long as possible. The game was so designed to keep you coming back and trying and trying. At a certain point tedium and frustration will set in. If that happens and you still play, it's a problem.
Realizing the sort of plans Blizzard has to keep you playing and to keep the items you want away from you might be enough to break someone of the addiction.
Slashdot Mirror
I highly recommend "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot, which talks a great deal on the topic. It takes the work of physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, and goes on to explain how the holographic model can easily explain paranormal and psychic phenomenon. I've studied mysticism, spirituality, physics, and neuroscience for ten years, and the holographic model fits perfectly with what people experience during waking life, in dreams, at near-death, and during other mystical experiences.
I realize that most Slashdot readers will look upon this with skepticism, but after all these years of research and study, I can honestly say that if this isn't the way the universe works, it's the way it should work.
I'm behind one of the bots in the Loebner Contest. I feel that the Turing Test is a rather open-ended measure of intelligence. It depends a lot on the person conversing with the bot and the situation they're in. For example, it would be easier to convince a child than an adult. It would be easier to convince someone having a general conversation than one trying to have a detailed conversation about his scientific specialty (unless the bot was built for that).
Context also plays a huge role. I had some early bots running on a bulletin board system a number of years back. They appeared like other users and I didn't let anyone know that a few of the users were AI. Amazingly, some people befriended these bots and had ongoing relationships that lasted for months. Without thinking of the possibility that these weren't real people, every imperfect response was attributed to a human cause. For example, when the bot was repetitive, the person thought it was using catch-phrases. When it didn't answer specific questions, the person thought it was being defensive and tried to get it to open up. It was such a simple bot, but in that context, some people had no idea they weren't real.
Our ability to personify, to project human qualities into things, is well known. From the imaginative play of a child with a toy to cultural beliefs about forces, mythical creatures, dieties, and ghosts that we can interact with - people can imaginatively fill in the blanks and are able to believe that a real personality is behind almost anything. Our job as botmasters is to make that more and more easy to do. And eventually, when AI reaches a certain point, it will no longer be a matter of personification at all.
The "flip-flop" sentiment is really one of the most idiotic to come out of the Bush campaigning years. What, someone should be considered weak if they change their mind about something? Frankly, I'm more wary of someone who comes to the table thinking they know all the answers, and who won't change their minds when presented with new evidence, expert advice, and changing situations.
Just look how well that turned out.
What someone believes is real depends on several factors. The first is a person's desire to believe. In the case of getting access to what appears to be an easy woman, much will be overlooked. Strange responses, repetition, bad grammar - all this will be forgiven in order to achieve the goal of hooking up. This type of thing also has the advantage of being a very scripted conversation, and easy to navigate through with AI.
The second is the situation. In a situation where someone does not think a chat bot would exist, or even more so with someone who does not know of the existence of chat bots, every oddity in the conversation is attributed to some human trait - distraction, defensiveness, disinterest. As an example, say I was to walk up to you on the street and strike up a conversation with you. Whatever weirdness I managed to generate would be attributed in some way - maybe I have some mental deficit, or maybe I'm not paying full attention. That's because you wouldnt suspect that I am being fed my side of the conversation through an elaborate chat-bot system, or that I myself was an advanced robot. Without those things being seeming possibilities in the mind of the person I'm talking with, my human shortcomings are the only source of attribution for my weird conversation.
Case in point: one of my early chat bots, back in 98-99 before I developed The Personality Forge, was quite a simple undeveloped bot with maybe a thousand responses, and lacking the features of my later bots, was able to start and maintain a relationship with a woman who visited my bulletin board system for months. I posted nothing about AI or chat bots on the BBS, but secretly introduced a few of them and let them interact. She had no idea that the person she was talking with might not be a person. When the bot repeated itself, she chalked it up to "catch phrases" and when the bot wsnt forthcoming with answers to her questions, she assumed the "person" was just not confident enough yet to tell her. She came back week after week talking to this chat bot, telling it about her life, bringing up old topics, and becoming friends. I made no updates to it in that time, and it had no memories. Lacking any other possibilities for the source of the conversations, she took it for human.
So this is how the robots are going to take over the world.
prohibitions on the spread of false information....
Doesnt this mean the woman who reported the Mooninite as a bomb would be arrested?
I was about to quote the same lines, and comment:
Wow, a title! If only WoW would offer me a title like "Thousand Wombat Killer" that would make it so much better.
As to the other supposed fix, what game doesnt reward grinding by having you "become more powerful"?
The solution to that is easy: sex robots. They never say no, they're always available, and they'll always tell you it was the best they ever had.
We need to introduce a new way to vote that does not cause the problems of vote-splitting the current method creates. If people were able to vote for multiple people (binary or ranked voting), they could vote for each candidate they would be happy with, so that we'd end up with accurate readings of the popularity of new parties. Right now people wont vote for new parties because that could split the vote.
There was a study done on different voting methods that showed that ours is one of the worst for getting what the people want. I cant find it but here's some good information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system
Their teeth would just keep getting bigger.. and bigger..
And here you have it - the future of DRM.
Soon the RIAA will realize that it can prevent you from illegally storing music in your memory. How long before they start distributing memory pills to take after each song you listen to?
I agree that he has free will and is responsible for his actions, and he should be held 100% accountable for what he's done. But I would argue that his free will is limited by his mental state due to physiological factors.
People can be born with certain genetic deficiencies in neurotransmitters or enzymes that can lead to a pathological mental state. Think of it as a disease like any other mental disorder, akin to Tourette's syndrome, schizophrenia, autism, etc. Someone with Tourette's doesnt choose to exclaim obscenities. And you cant fix the condition with any amount of positive or negative reinforcement. In the same way someone born like this boy has all the built-in selfishness that all humans have but are unable to feel the sort of empathy or social connection to others that leads to altruistic and positive social behavior.
Drugs like MDMA (ecstacy) show that there is a definite neurochemical element in empathy, and there are all kinds of genetic mutations that cause endogenous chemical deficiencies. It should not seem a leap that there could be a mutation that causes such a deficiency. And its resistance to any social attempts to change it appear to be further evidence in that direction.
Back to the idea of constrained free will. We make decisions based on all the factors and motives available to us. If we are completely unable to feel empathy (a sort of blindness, in a way), that will never factor into our decisions. It wont be a matter of choice to behave in a psychopathic way or not except when huge external factors are pressing in. But the second those pressures are removed, the behavior will become psychopathic again.
I also cant stand fluorescent lights. The light they give off is horrid- it makes the entire room seem pale and lifeless. And something about them (the flickering perhaps?) makes me feel drained and gives me headaches.
I'm all for reducing energy costs and using new technologies to benefit the environment. I think CFLs are a great idea for people who dont mind them. I even wouldnt mind paying a bulb tax to get my full-spectrum warm lighting, but a draconian blanket ban is not the way to go.
So, in summation.. say YES to draconian blankets.
I doubt it. As others have said, if this works this will prevent autism by preventing the brain damage that the body can usually mitigate. Nobody with autism will be cured because for them the damage has already been done.
I doubt anyone could coherently argue against prevention of brain damage in the off chance that the brain damage will cause some sort of unforseeable savant ability among its other debilitating effects.
The movie industry got greedy and started showing commercials for half an hour before shows. The effect? I started avoiding movies unless I really really wanted to see one. I'm probably not the only one. And now they are complaining of falling revenues. The quality of movies lately has a lot to do with it, but I think the inclusion of all these commercials in the theater also is having an effect.
I expect that if in-game advertising become prevalent, we'll see the same effect. I'll certainly avoid games that make me watch ads.
The true horror of this drug is that if it does become commonplace and people need less sleep, my bet is that capitalism will adapt itself to this new reality and we will soon be working 14-16 hour days.
Dont believe it? Look what happened as women entered the workplace in larger numbers in the last few decades (of course this is a good thing). As the number of workers increased, the relative incomes fell. When once a single worker could bring in enough money to support himself, his spouse, and his 2.5 kids, now it is almost necessary for both parents to work to be able to make ends meet. Think what it would be like if capitalism hadnt adapted to this influx of workers - each parent could work a 20-hour week and have the same relative income as 50 years ago.
Likewise, as waking time becomes less scarce, those willing and able to work longer hours will get the jobs and steadily raise the bar and the expectations of what's a normal amount to work each week. Maybe they'll get paid more and the increasing wealth will cause the cost of goods and services to rise, which increases the need for working the longer hours.
IANAE (I am not an Economist) so I'm probably wrong on some details, but this seems like a likely general trend, IMHO.
I couldnt agree more. The Worms series is GREAT for multiplayer. Also, the You Dont Know Jack series is a lot of fun, and some of those songs get in your head. Warcraft I, II, and III were a ton of fun to play on a little local network. Street Fighter II filled a lot of drunken nights in college. I used to drive them crazy by playing and winning with Zangeif (the bare-chested Russian). The Lost Vikings was a lot of fun for multiplayer, as was Rock & Roll Racing (two more Blizzard titles).
A good friend of mine plays WoW on the same server as me, but I find that while we chat a lot when on at the same time, we're rarely doing the same quests.
The runner up is much easier on the eyes. I also prefer it.
That sure is cowardly.
When you decide to act out of fear and take yourself out of the game, you're doing exactly what the government wants you to do. This administration has been controlling and manipulating people out of fear from the beginning. It's easy- you dont need to pass laws or move mountains. Just scare people and they'll run and hide.
If you disagree with what's going on, dont remain silent and cowed. DO something about it. Make yourself heard. Make noise. Otherwise they've already won. Hats off to Wired.
Hello, this is The Professor, creator of the Personality Forge. A few comments:
There are no minimum requirements for the bots listed on the voting or contest page of the Chatterbox Challenge. Anyone can sign up. So you see a lot of bots made by enthusiastic folks that might only have been in construction for a week or a month. If you're looking for something advanced and try one of those, well, it wont hold up to your scrutiny. It takes a long time to make a good chat bot. Check the winners of past contests, or check back in a couple weeks to see who is in the lead this year.
The parent poster hits on an important thing, one that would do a lot to increase the realism of the bots - what I call short term conversational memory. I have a plan to implement it at the Personality Forge - in fact, it's partially finished - but lack the time or resources to finish it. And that's a big part of the state of things in AI. The people behind the bots in this contest, and I know a good few of them, are people who work a full time job doing whatever (including myself) and work on AI in their spare time. I would love to devote my working time to it but I dont have the connections or credentials to get grants, nor the business savvy to get venture capital or get in touch with the higher-ups in companies that could make a killing from this kind of software. So it advances at the speed of spare time.
But speaking for the Personality Forge, it does have some advanced features. It includes the entire WordNet semantic linking and information system, as well as the LinkGrammar system which is used to determine the structure of a sentence and the relationship between words. Bots have an open-ended memory system which can remember any sort of thing about any person or bot it chats with, and they have emotions and emotional memory. And as I said above, conversational short term memory is partially finished. I also have plans to hook it up to all kinds of databases of information, speech recognition and text-to-speech. I lack only the time and money to make it happen.
Article line SHOULD be:
"Following up on the Swedish study on cell phone cancer risk, the FDA released a statement today questioning its PROFITABILITY."
It sounds like folks with Autism or Asberger's suffer from an inability to feel communication entrainment. The more someone is engrossed in what you're saying, the more they lock into you, with their expressions, body motions, pace, and so on. I think this is the "intuition" that people talk about, but it's really an awareness of that lock-step, that entrainment. It's an awareness that can be more or less developed, and is mostly affected by your presence of mind and focus.
Under the strong focus of THC (if you are able to focus under it) you can see this in obvious terms, clear as day.
But they don't - because their corporate partners are more important then their customers wishes.
There wouldnt even BE iPods and iTunes if they didnt satisfy their corporate partners well enough. I applaud Jobs for getting much of the music industry to agree to distribute songs one-by-one digitally. If he had to have some strings attached to make it happen, so be it. If he hadnt, none of this would exist.
And now that it does, it may be up to new start-ups, hackers, and law suits (like in France) to make it less DRM-encumbered and more accessible.
Comparing it to gambling is pretty accurate in a lot of ways. In the endgame at level 60, what people do is spend 2-3 hour chunks doing the same thing over and over, and the hope is that luck will prevail and the final boss in Stratholme, Scholomance, or UBRS will drop the item you want. It's random. It's luck. And sometimes you see it drop and someone else will get it, which makes you want it all the more. So you do one more run, and then one more, each time hoping that the [Breastpalte of Valor] will drop and you'll get it. And the running of the instance turns into robotic monotony. You barely have to pay attention because you've alraedy done it 30 times.
I did the math on this. The item you want has a 1/8 chance of dropping after a typical 2-3 hour run (including time gathering a group). Let's say 2.5 hours average. Then you have a 1/2 - 1/3 chance of getting it thanks to competition in your group. Let's be generous and say 1/2 chance. So to get a single item, you're looking at a 1/16 chance every run. Now consider that there are 8 armor pieces, plus 1-2 weapons and possibly a bow or shield. Let's say there's 11 things to get. For each item you need an average of:
16 runs x 11 items x 2.5 hours
That's 440 hours of gameplay. And THEN there's dungeon set 2. And THEN there's epic sets tier 1 and 2. And if you have 6/8 pieces of armor, you want the last two THAT much more.
Blizzard's goal is to keep people playing as long as possible. The game was so designed to keep you coming back and trying and trying. At a certain point tedium and frustration will set in. If that happens and you still play, it's a problem.
Realizing the sort of plans Blizzard has to keep you playing and to keep the items you want away from you might be enough to break someone of the addiction.