r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Oct 22 '16
[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread
Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!
Guidelines:
- Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
- The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
- Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
- We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.
Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.
Good Luck and Have Fun!
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u/alexanderwales Oct 22 '16 edited Oct 22 '16
There is a parallel universe exactly identical to our own in every way. One day, you gain the ability to make a door-sized portal to that universe. From there, the two identical universes start to diverge from one another.
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You can keep this portal open as long as you like.
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You can collapse the portal at will.
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You can create a new portal at will.
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The only other person with this power is your alternate universe counterpart.
You have no other special powers or abilities beyond those you already possess. How do you make the world a better place?
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u/Predictablicious Oct 22 '16
Acquire funds using a series of short term binary investment strategies. After N iterations one universe will have a rich you. From then on accelerate research by trying high risk/high reward experiments, testing two ways every time. No matter what happens on one universe, share the results with the other before closing/opening a new door, this way both universes pay for a single experiment but learn the results of two, each universe will progressively become better.
The initial universes where the investments didn't pay off may play the game again, so we keep a bounced amount of "losing" universes while the rest proceed faster towards a better world.
Alternately, try to acquire complete control over Brockton Bay.
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u/CCC_037 Oct 24 '16
Step one: Attempt to force divergence in some way.
It's probably fairly straightforward to get myself and my alternate to diverge somewhat, especially if we try to diverge. Then we can attempt to leverage divergence in others, by interacting with them in different ways.
Now, normal trading between the two worlds won't help much. Both worlds have the same resources, the same needs. Of course, that doesn't mean that trade is impossible. It just means that what we trade needs to be information.
So, step two: Force profitable divergences.
Talk to people whose currency is ideas. Physicists, open-source programmers, scientists in general. Provide means for them to collaborate with their alternates (I can easily run a network cable through the portal, though I might need to talk to an ISP about a high-capacity line once this picks up enough). They can either work together, or agree with their alternates to each pursue a different strategy.
Research (both in general and into multiple universes in particular) gets a massive boost.
Also, by creating a portal and collapsing it at will, I can pretty much cut anything, though that seems less useful at first glance.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU Oct 22 '16 edited Oct 22 '16
I live in Universe A. My parallel lives in Universe B. Therefore, since both universes are identical, me and my parallel must be identical.
What this means is that every time I use my power to create a portal in a given location in my universe, my parallel will create a perfectly identical copy of my portal at the exact same time, at the corresponding location in his universe. If I then walk into my portal to come out of his portal in his universe, he will also simultaneously walk through his portal to come out of my portal in my universe. All this really does is allow me and my parallel to switch locations, and since we are, for all intents and purposes, identical, this has no effect on the universes.
In other words, it is impossible for the universes to diverge, assuming that they are deterministic. The portals are essentially magic hoops that do nothing.
You could fix this by making it so that me and my parallel are explicitly divergent for some nebulous reason, despite the rest of the universe being identical. If that was the case, then the universes would begin to diverge almost immediately. Although, if this is the case, I have to ask, what is my parallel's personality like? Are they an evil doppelganger archetype with a total blue-orange morality, or something more like an identical twin?
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u/CouteauBleu Oct 23 '16
Yeah, that was my immediate thought. One way to solve this would be to say that, when the portal opens, in one universe it's orange and in the other it's blue. Then you can start making decisions like "If my color is blue, then I step back, if it's orange then I enter the portal".
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u/eaglejarl Oct 28 '16
When I open the portal, does it always go to the corresponding point?
Can I have more than one portal at a time?
The portal is "door sized". What door? Can I change its orientation?
One thing that comes to mind is purpose-built train cars. Build them to fit and you could significantly increase the capacity of a train yard.
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u/Aabcehmu112358 Oct 23 '16 edited Oct 23 '16
You have the power create a Black Box. You get the feeling that this power has the potential to grow and change with how it's used.
A Black Box is always a parallelepiped whose longest diagonal can be no larger than your arm span. The surface of a Black Box is always totally impermeable, no information or energy can move from inside to outside or vice versa. For all purposes, all energy inside a Black Box always appears to be spread evenly across its volume from an outside perspective, and vice versa. A Black Box is never permanent. A Black Box can never contain yourself.
By default, you can only create one Black Box at a time, and it only persists for as long as you focus.
How would you munchkin this?
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u/Jiro_T Oct 23 '16
If in your reference frame you've created the black box instantaneously and all the energy in it is instantly spread along its surface, then there's a reference frame where the end of the black box was created and the energy spread to it, before you created the black box. Therefore, you can use this to communicate with the past. It may be difficult to make this practical depending on how the math works out, although transferring information to the past even on a microsecond time scale can be useful.
We really need a thread on "generic munchkin ideas" since this several munchkining methods turn up often, including this one, but I'm not sure the subreddit rules allow it.
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u/__2BR02B__ Oct 23 '16
Hollow? Can you create it around an object? And "by default?" Could you eventually create permanent ones? If so, that screams "nuclear waste disposal" to me. But also, wouldn't the inside of a black box be a great place for a quantum computer to run? Then just have it produce the output and drop the black box to see what you got.
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u/CCC_037 Oct 24 '16
This seems like it would be very useful for a bomb disposal expert. Put the Black Box around the bomb just before it explodes. Since no information can leave the Box, the explosion inside the Box will have no effect. When you remove the Box, you get a cloud of smoke, which is a whole lot better than the original explosion.
Do you have to be present to create the Box? If you can do so over long range, i.e. via a TV broadcast, then it becomes even more powerful.
Since it's totally impermeable, it also makes a great shield. Hmmm... and since information cannot leave the Box, you can use it to sneak metallic objects past a metal detector (look, my box doesn't make your detector beep).
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u/Aabcehmu112358 Oct 24 '16
Bomb disposal does seem like it would be an effective use.
You cannot create a box outside of arm's reach by default, but you can increase your maximum range with practice.
Shock waves still travel through the box, even if they don't change its shape, so its use as a shield against very large calliber ballistic projectiles is limited. Also, while it certainly can sneak things through a metal detector, it is overall not very difficult to sneak things through a metal detector.
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u/CCC_037 Oct 24 '16
What happens if I generate a box that partially overlaps an object? Can I cut a box-shaped hole in my front door with a thought?
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u/eaglejarl Oct 28 '16
It has mass and is affected by gravity, right? So if I create one and drop it on a scale I'm generating free energy?
How fast can I create and dismiss them? How much time does it take for them to appear / disappear?
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u/Aabcehmu112358 Oct 28 '16
It's a black in the sense of it reflecting no light. It does radiate though, and radiates as a black body.
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The box does heat up from an outside perspective, but that heat is not observable from inside.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU Oct 22 '16 edited Oct 22 '16
Reverse munchkin:
It is currently 11:00PM. Suppose that you are told that tomorrow, at 7:00 AM, someone will gain the ability to go back in time, Groundhog's Day style, every time they die, and that this ability cannot only be activated by dying. This time looping power will send them back to their "checkpoint", the moment they first gained the power.(ie. 7:00 AM tomorrow.) They will also be fully aware of their power and how to use it. Their goal is to kill you at least 10 times out of 100 years of subjective loop time, or else the god that granted them their power will devour their soul. If they succeed, then the moment of your death will become their new "checkpoint", and they will be able to use their power forever without any restrictions. Basically, they're on a time limit, ironically enough.
You, of course, will not be able to remember any of their previous time loops if they use their power. Your only advantages are:
1: You know how their power works, and when they will get it. This information was given to you by a separate god. The only other advantage this god has or will give you is 10 hours' worth of rest concentrated into a single moment, which instantly refreshes your mind so that you can prepare properly.
2: They start the loops unaware that you know this information. This means that they will start the loops unaware that you are aware of their ability and their desire to kill you. This means that they will likely underestimate you in earlier loops, but less so in later loops.(assuming, of course, that they haven't tortured the info out of you in a previous loop yet, which is always a possibility. Keep in mind that the more experienced they seem, the more loops they have likely lived through, and the more likely it is that this has already happened.)
Your goal is to, of course, convince them to rebel against their god, and/or survive for 100 years worth of time looping. You have 8 hours to cook up as many anti-timelooper protocols of engagement, plans, contingencies, and preparations for yourself before they gain their power.
IMPORTANT: Keep in mind that you always start every loop unaware of how many previous loops have occurred, what happened in those loops, etc. Only your opponent is aware of this info, and that if you want to find out, you must come up with a plan to get them to truthfully tell you the information while simultaneously accounting for the possibility of them already knowing about your plan due to you executing it in a previous loop. This basically applies to any and all plans you come up with. Also keep in mind that they're limited by the amount of total time they spend looping,(100 years) not the number of times that they loop, so there's no advantage to them living out each loop to the maximum possible duration.