PORTAL GET THE CAKE DOWNLOAD

So much so that we can feel that we have been ‘Blessed by the Algorithm’. I’ve written elsewhere about what happens when we trust ‘the algorithm’ too much when we hand over so much of our agency that it becomes something we see as holding sway over our fate. But the cake was a lie.Ĭhants of “fuck the algorithm” as a speaker talks of losing her place at medical school because she was downgraded.

They’ve played the game, been promised cake at the end of it if they work hard enough. Go to a school with a history of lower grades and there’s no way you could really deserve that A you were predicted. Go to an already high-attaining (likely Private or Public school) and the algorithm marks you upwards. Others have written detailed explanations of where this decision-making system has gone wrong, not only in its mathematical standardizations but also in how it makes assumptions about this school year on the basis of previous years. Just as we’ve been watching an AI guiding, and lying to, a test subject, around 280,000 A-level students have had their grades adjusted downwards by an algorithm. I don’t think it’s a complete coincidence that we downloaded Portal 2 now, just as a whole generation in the UK have been tested and are now receiving their results, either for their Scottish Highers, A-Levels, and soon Scottish National 5 qualifications and GCSEs. She does indeed return in Portal 2, with even more test-rooms. GLaDOS then sings over the credits, letting us know that she’s Still Alive. But with the release of Portal 2, the original ending was retconned to show Chell being dragged away, back into the facility, with a robotic voice thanking her for lying on the floor and assuming the “party escort submission position”. We defeat GLaDOS at the end of Portal 1, ending up lying on the ground outside the facility gates, surrounded by the remains of the AI. Although, we also see graffiti from a lab worker, Doug Rattmann (the ‘Lab Rat’) warning that the cake is a lie. GLaDOS’ passive-aggressive comments on your progress, and on your pathetic humanity, also come with promises of a reward at the end of the testing process: a cake. So far, so psychotic femme-voiced killer AI. We find out during the course of the tests that GLaDOS turned on the scientists of Aperture, releasing a deadly neurotoxin that has wiped them all out.

Using continuous momentum you can fall into one hole to get launched to previously unobtainable areas and doors, and move on to the next room and eventually, maybe, your freedom.Īll the while, your efforts are being assessed and snarkily commented on by GLaDOS, (‘Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System’, a homage to MS-DOS), an AI built by the creators of the Aperture Science labs. The portal gun you find enables you to create two distinct portal ends, blue and orange, which you can walk through to come out somewhere else. In Portal 1, you play as Chell, a subject in the numerous testing rooms of the Aperture Science Laboratories Computer-Aided Enrichment Center. If you aren’t familiar with either Portal 1 or Portal 2, here’s my TL: DR version of their game mechanics and plots (spoilers ahead of course).

PORTAL GET THE CAKE DOWNLOAD

There are many good reasons to download a Portal game (Portal 2 has a genuinely brilliant local co-op game), but of course, as soon as GLaDOS got her first mention I started thinking about AI. This morning the other parental unit and I downloaded Portal 2 on the Xbox One for the child unit, who has now completed the minimum eight rotations around the sun necessary to understand the tricky quantum tunnelling mechanics at work in the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, or ‘portal gun’.

Portal get the cake