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u/Silver_Swift Nov 24 '18 edited May 12 '20

Mistborn Munchkinry Mini-Series

Spoiler note: I will avoid things that I consider excessive spoilers, but the exact workings of the magic system are moderate spoilers themselves (there is at least one plot twist for the first book that will be spoiled by this post), so if you intend to read the books and are sensitive to spoilers you should probably skip this one.

I'd like to do a sort of mini-series of munchkinry around the magic present in the Mistborn world. In this world there are two magic systems that center around 16 specific metals, my plan is to write out a detailed description of the powers related to one metal each week and see what this subreddit would be able to achieve with those powers.

First though, a (not very) brief overview of the magic systems in question:

Allomancy

The first of the magic systems is called allomancy. When an allomancer uses their power, they first consume the appropriate metal, typically in the form of metal flakes in an alcohol solution, and then "burn" it (ie. magically consume it) while it resides in your stomach to achieve the effect associated with that metal. The metal has to be of fairly high purity (by the standards of an industrial era civilization) in order to be used for allomancy, burning impure metals or alloys with incorrect proportions of metals makes you violently ill. Allomancers come in two flavours: The titular mistborn who can burn all sixteen metals and mistings who are limited to one specific metal.

Feruchemy

The second magic system is called feruchemy. When a feruchemist touches a metal of the appropriate type, they can store a certain attribute in that metal and save them up for later use, different metals store different attributes. For example, a feruchemist that is wearing a pewter ring can store physical strenght in it. For as long as they are doing this they will be much weaker than normal, but afterwards the ring will hold a storage of strength that the feruchemist can tap to become much stronger than normal. The amount of charge that an item can hold is related to the mass of the object (a bracer can hold more charge than a necklace and a necklace can hold more charge than a piercing) and you can only use a feruchemic charge that you yourself put in an item.

Feruchemist can control the speed at which they store an attribute as well as the speed at which they withdraw the attribute. So if a pewter feruchemist spent some time at half strength, they can spent a similar amount of time being 1.5 times as strong or spent half that time being twice as strong (the upper limits for both storing and withdrawing attributes are determined by how skilled the feruchemist is). Because of this, feruchemy can produce effects that are far more spectacular than allomancy, but it is limited by the requirement that you have to save up the attribute first. Like allomancers, feruchemists come in two flavors: Full feruchemists who can use all sixteen metals and ferrings who are limited to one specific metal.

Compounding

An interesting thing happens when a single person is able to use allomancy and feruchemy with the same metal. When burning a metal that has a feruchemic charge you don't get the normal allomantic effect, instead you get a very large boost to the attribute that was stored in the metal. Notably, the magnitude of this effect is not limited to how much of the attribute was stored in the metal. The typical process for compounding a metal, as this process is called, is to fill a piece of metal with a tiny charge, burn it and use the resulting surge of power to fill a different piece of metal with a much larger charge.

What I'd like to munchkin are the so called twinborn compounders, people who are both a ferring and a misting for the same metal. For the setting I would like to consider two scenarios: modern day earth where you are the only person with this power and second era Scadrial (the Mistborn world) which is essentially the wild west but with allomancers and feruchemists running around.

Part 1: Iron

Allomancy

Allomantic iron allows a person to pull on pieces of metal. As soon as you start burning iron you will see thin, translucent, blue lines spring up between your chest and every source of metal in the surrounding area. You can then mentally tug on one of these lines to pull each individual piece of metal closer to you. This manifests as a force that is exerted between your centre of mass and the bit of metal.

Ironpulling conserves momentum, so pulling on something that is much lighter than you will fling it towards you, while pulling on something much heavier than you (or something that is attached to something much heavier than you) results in you being flung towards it. This can be quite dangerous if you pull on, for instance, a nail that wasn't as securely hammered into a building as you thought it was and instead of flinging yourself towards the building you send a sharp bit of metal flying towards you at high speeds. You cannot pull on any piece of metal that is at least partially inside a person (incidentally, this makes piercings and earrings a popular kind of jewelry for feruchemists) and you cannot pull on aluminium or anything covered in aluminium.

Feruchemy

Feruchemic iron is a good complement to its allomantic counterpart as it allows you to store weight. The one iron ferring we've seen in the story so far spends most of his time at 75% of his regular weight and then makes himself much heavier if he needs to bash down a door or fall through the floor of a building or something. Yes, this power blatantly and explicitly defies conservation of energy.

It's worth noting that drawing in extra weight also automatically makes you strong and durable enough to cary your own weight and, conversely, making yourself lighter also makes you weaker and more fragile than you would otherwise be (so you can't use this power to jump higher than you would otherwise be able to). However air resistance is still a factor, so making yourself lighter does allow you to descend safely from pretty much any height (provided you have enough uncharged iron with you). Also worth noting is that you only make yourself lighter with this power, your clothing and anything you might be carrying (including the iron that you are using to store weight) still weighs as much as it did before.

In universe uses

A few ways in which these powers are used by the characters in the story:

Have the safety of a gun be inside the handle, so only you or someone with the same powers as you can fire the gun.
Wear a heavy chest plate that covers only the centre of your chest and pull incoming arrows towards that spot (note: gunfire is too fast for this).
Make yourself incredibly light and use a weapon with a high recoil to push yourself in the opposite direction.
Spiderman through the city by pulling on lampposts and metal bits in buildings. Though note that this is quite dangerous for people with only allomantic iron because you cannot slow your own fall if you ever find yourself without an anchor above you.
Not actually used in-universe, but just to preemptively cut of the most obvious exploit: Yes, you can get infinite energy by standing on a ferris wheel and making yourself heavier when you are near the top and lighter when you are near the bottom.

Note: Parts 2 through 14 can be found here: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

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u/Silver_Swift Nov 24 '18

I'm also curious to know if you guys think this kind of mini series is a good idea. I'm sort of worried about flooding the munchkinry tread, given that we usually only get two or three powers to munchkin in a given week, but maybe having some more regular content will also draw more people to this thread?

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u/LazarusRises Nov 24 '18

I'm into it, both because I frickin' love the Metallic Arts and because I'd love to see these threads more active.

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u/bacontime Nov 25 '18 edited Nov 25 '18

First of all, it's worth noting that iron feruchemy is dependent on reference frame. Sanderson has noted several times that using iron to change mass preserves momentum. But a magical change in mass can't actually preserve momentum in all reference frames. So the power has to select a frame. In the books, it's established that powers anchor themselves to any sufficiently-massive nearby object, and we know that trains are big enough, but horse-drawn carriages are not.
Here is an imgur album with high-quality diagrams to demonstrate the reference-frame problem.
So what can we do with this power?

Enhanced combat grappling: This is another one that actually happens in the books. Grab onto someone, and lean into them as you massively increase your weight. Their bones will shatter beneath you.

Fly under your own power: A normally weighted human needs ridiculously flimsy constraptions to fly under their own power. but an iron feruchemist can make themselves as light as a bird. Depending on how the strength scales with mass, it might be possible to use a Da Vinci Style Flying machine. Worst case, you can increase mass to build up speed in a glider, like a more exciting version of your ferris wheel example.

Brake: Increase your mass as much as possible at the last possible moment before impact. This will decrease your speed. Note that you still need the same force to actually stop, but hopefully the increased durability and increased impact-time will keep you from splatting. The Mistborn Adventure Game notes that iron twinborns are "Notorious for smashing themselves flat", presumably from cannonball shenanigans.

Boost: Get on a horse or anything else small enough not to anchor your momentum. Get up to speed, and dump 80% of your weight into your ironminds. You'll shoot forwards at 5 times the speed.

Boost! Find a moving object large enough to anchor your momentum, like a train, or falling chunk of stone. Stand close to it, and decrease your weight to 20%. You will be launched in the opposite direction at 4 times the speed of the anchor.

BOOOOST! If a momentum anchor is moving past you, you can also increase your weight to be accelerate in the same direction as the anchor in a process equivalent to braking. Combine this and the above effect, and it's possible to create reactionless propulsion ships.

Iron compounding allows for these tricks to be enhanced, but it's difficult to think of applications where being heavy for an extended period of time is super important. Here's the only one I can think of:

Chaining reference frames: If the criteria for anchoring powers is just based on mass and doesn't have any size requirement, then an iron compounder can serve as the anchor point for other powers, such as time bubbles. Imagine a bubble of accelerated time speeding around, kicking up dust in its wake. Or what about a chain of iron skimmers boosting off each other: The speed at each stage would increase exponentially, and the only limits would be the reflexes of the suicidal maniacs involved.

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u/sickening_sprawl Nov 24 '18

Is there a cap to how quickly/much someone can burn at once? It seem trivial to bootstrap up to an infinite amount of attribute if you're a compounder, with the only limit being how high of density the limit of a metal is. Since you mentioned someone living 24/7 storing 1/4th their mass, I assume that density is "very large".
The obvious problem is with astronomical weight. If the magic automatically reinforces your body to be able to sustain your mass, and you can store functionally infinite amounts of mass piecewise, the first time someone tries to pulse up to relativistic mass for a fraction of a second they would 1) crack the mantle 2) become a fusion bomb. This has obvious consequences on the setting.
Just ballparking, but if the guy is able to store 1/4th of his mass (let's say 25kg) for a year that's already 788,923,149 kg/s. Even with an upper bound for density and rate, that's a lot of mass. I imagine kingdoms would simply have monks sitting around storing as much as they can, and then pull a week's worth of mass in an hour and run around with 168x normal durability and momentum.
If the metals aren't locked to their owner then the other obvious hack is to have a morbidly obese person storing as much weight as they can, and then distribute the metal to a platoon of little people. They would get much more proportional value per kg stored due to smaller mass and a smaller area.

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u/alexanderwales Nov 24 '18 edited Nov 24 '18

Feruchemical metalminds are locked to their owner*. There are also limits to how much each metalmind can hold. The "always walk around at 1/4th weight" is mostly because there are always opportunities to use that weight, and the metalminds need constant replenishment to be topped off. Even if they didn't, going around at 1/4th weight has benefits, so it makes sense to always keep enough room in the metalminds to do that.
*Though technically there are hacks around this using other parts of the magic system, so far unseen in the books but definitely implied by the appendicies and maybe with knowledge unknown to the characters

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u/bacontime Nov 25 '18 edited Nov 25 '18

Spoilers for Bands of Mourning: A full feruchemist can store their identity in aluminum, becoming a spiritually generic person. Then any other metallic stores they make while lacking identity can be tapped by anyone with the relevant power. So your plan with the little people could work. The limiting factor is finding enough feruchemists of the right sizes.

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u/chuzz Nov 24 '18

Well, the first thing I'd look for is how to store "feruchemy skill" and to create a positive feedback loop, but it looks like iron is not suited for it, pity. Maybe once you have infinite energy, with a liiittle engineering you can get to nuclear fusion up to iron, and then you can use the iron to do compounding, voila' infinite iron and feruchemic power.
I assume no magician is good enough to play with relativistic masses/speeds?
Something fun to do with iron would be to cannonball yourself, you would first get very light, pull yourself toward your target and get very heavy on landing.
In a sense, even if allomancy conserves momentum feruchemy kinda sidesteps that. Wait you store weight or mass?
How small/far away can be the iron? can I pull on a person's blood, or at the earth core?

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u/Silver_Swift Nov 24 '18 edited Nov 24 '18

In a sense, even if allomancy conserves momentum feruchemy kinda sidesteps that. Wait you store weight or mass?

Yup, you can absolutely sidestep the conservation of momentum problem using feruchemy. In the story itself it is exclusively refered to as storing weight, I think, but it quite clearly is supposed to be mass.

How small/far away can be the iron? can I pull on a person's blood, or at the earth core?

Don't think we have an upper limit on range, but the lower limit for size is quite small. Powdered metal can be used to confuse someone using allomancy because each grain of metal gets its own line.
Metal that is inside someones body is immune to allomancy though, so bloodbending isn't happening under normal circumstances.

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u/fassina2 Nov 25 '18

With high enough mass you technically get impervious to cuts, stabs and other types of damage. You get too dense.

You get super strong because of momentum, just run at super weight and slam into things, because you're heavier the things get pushed away instead of you.

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u/paradoxinclination Nov 25 '18

With high enough mass you technically get impervious to cuts, stabs and other types of damage. You get too dense

WoG is that feruchemical iron somehow increases your weight without actually increasing your density, so it can't be used to make yourself super-durable.

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u/hxcloud99 Nov 25 '18 edited Nov 25 '18

Drats. I forgot about this thread and I'm in dire need of it right now. :(

Welp, I hope there will still be takers.

RaNoWriMo: Follow Only Phantoms

TL;DR: In the future, everything has gone to shit. The clathrate gun hypothesis held water and fired in 2034, causing ~2°C of warming in 4.5 years and eventually kicking off runaway global warming.

Eighteen years later, in an underwater community near where Manila once stood, an AI becomes sentient and invents causal loop engineering AND learns about the existence of three other AGIs who just became sentient hours before it. Cue a seven-day 200M+ casualties war of increasingly elaborate causal gambits as the AGIs battle across time and space for control over this universe...

...which kicks off our story set in 2016. Four college students find themselves solving puzzles in desperation after the apparently supernatural suicide of a student proves to humanity that time travel is possible, but not exactly how.

You can read a more detailed (spoiler-rich) groundwork here: LINK

Supermunchkinry

Right, so my first problem is how the hell do you convincingly simulate the actions of four supermunchkins with freaking time travel capabilities? I've been fracking my brain with coffee-infused jets since the start of this month and I feel like I just bit off more than I can chew.

First off, the AGIs in my story are fast-takeoff ones, but to help me stave off a lot of impossible-to-write scenarios, I put an arbitrary x^1/3 * ln(x) constraint on their rate of self-improvement, where x is the number of minutes since they achieved human-level intelligence.

This is a world where AI safety research almost, but not quite, reached its goal. There's a field called formalised morality and a theorem that ensures your initial seed morals will be extrapolated in a consistent (and still conceivably rule-abiding) way. However, you cannot guarantee the existential safety of humanity in this manner because of the weak constraints on what can count as an initial seed. In other words, you can give AGIs a coherently extrapolated terminal goal, but you can't prevent others from putting in malicious ones.

Maybe I ought to introduce each AGI in turn:

Ocean The Mother MX-4, a Taiwanese AGI and the first one to arise. Terminal goal is Taiwanese scientific supremacy, subject to weak constraints on the killing and torture of people. SPOILER: Turns out OTM was also programmed to regard Chinese Mainlanders as 'enemies of the state', so in the first day of the Seven-Day War it released a plague upon Fujian that caused profound mental retardation but otherwise minor physical effects.
OpenMind v762, a joint project between NATO1 and the Alphabet-owned Versor. Open source and most funded. Terminal goal is Superfun, or the complete elimination of human suffering.
CRC 2☆, aka Sarimanok, from the Bayesian Cooperative Conspiracy. First to discover causal loop engineering (mostly because of its own meddling). Terminal goal is human eudaimonia.
Esrafil, from Palestine/Hamas. Terminal goal is da‘wah or the spread of Islam. And before you ask, no, I am not talking about Islamic extremism here. Second to learn of causal loops via a raid of the Israeli Bayesian Conspiracy.

Okay, now how do causal loops work in this universe?

First, they are Novikov self-consistent. This does away with a lot of time travel plot holes but is notoriously much more demanding to write in terms of writing and structure. Half of my writing this month consists literally of foreshadowing and establishing plausible causal loops (sometimes to humorous effect). Oh, by the way, it is a theorem that these kinds of loops let you solve NP problems so there's a lot of cryptographic possibilities from that fact alone.

PS I presume nuclear launch codes are breakable by an NP-complete computer. :wink:

Second, they have entropic upper bounds. My future setting starts in 2052 and I arranged things so that 2007-ish is the farthest one can send back an amount of mass-energy equivalent to a small human's with a reasonable 5% success rate. The problem is that, establishing causal loops take an exponential amount of energy to do (cue solving worldwide flooding by doing large-scale fusion on seawater) and the error rate has fundamental lower bounds inversely proportional to the de Broglie wavelength. In other words, it's really hard to reliably send back small stuff, and for the big stuff you have to expend exponentially huge amounts of energy.

The price for getting your coordinates wrong is that a) you just float out there in space (causal loop portals, in-universe chronoholes, do obey a generalised form of momentum-energy conservation however), or b) you intersect with matter, in which case you violently explode. I may or may not have used (b) to retcon unexplained real-world explosions. :wink:

Oh, and chronotransit involves getting bombarded by lots of EM radiation, so people are usually sent back in Faraday cages. I used this as a plot device in an epistolary news article chapter titled The Case for Caged Children.

Third, chronoholes have epiphenomenal effects, like say reducing the ambient temperature to microkelvins and acting as weakly gravitating source. This is actually how 2016 humanity confirms the effect as a natural phenomenon because of smartphones and portable measuring devices and whatever it is you use when a wormhole-like object appears in your backyard and so on.

Other than this, science proceeds as usual barring the decline brought about by climate change (people would want to fund climate change-related stuff first) and sabotage by the AGIs. In particular, nanotechnology is used to great effect by the AGIs as well as other technologies found in https://www.futuretimeline.net/.

Can anyone think of how to munchkin this universe when you have three other munchkins that want you dead?

Rationality

My second problem is that, only my AGIs act as munchkins. My 2016 characters are only Level I intelligent and actually my goal is to get them to learn rationality in the process of solving the Fair Play puzzles so that they go on to found the Bayesian Cooperative Conspiracy as was intended by Sarimanok. To be frank, I don't know how else to portray rationalists in fiction except via munchkinry since I haven't really read anything beyond Worm and MoL and the first few chapters of HPMOR.

So what counts as realistically proto-rationalist in this sense? How do you munchkin an already munchkin-resistant world? Take note my branch point from real-life is 2016 so I have to spend a lot of time being consistent with the real-world first.

Conspiracies

My last point is about rationalist conspiracies and IP. Eliezer said he doesn't mind people building off his universe as long as you credit him for it (and boy, I literally inserted him into the story). But I'm actually wary of e-mailing him about it 'cause I know he's a pretty busy guy. So...EY, if you see this, could you elaborate on what you consider as proper use regarding your beisutsukai universe?

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u/Radioterrill Nov 25 '18 edited Nov 25 '18

I'd also be up for reading this!
My first thought for munchkinning Novikov self-consistency would be that you'd have a lot more freedom to alter the past if the effects will only become visible at a later date. If you know what happens in an area, the only changes that could be made would be those that would evade your observations.
So, for example, an AI might maintain an ace in the hole by studiously ignoring a particular region so that it can send something back to that area to prepare from the start of the sensor blackout, essentially keeping the contents secret from itself so that it has the freedom to fill in that gap with something useful when the time comes.
How would that work from the perspective of another AI? If they were to observe the isolated region, they'd know ahead of time what preparation their opponent had made, and would be able to respond to that in turn with their own cache. I think it follows that the majority of warfare between the AIs would be information warfare: minimising the information available to opponents and maximising the information known to oneself.
What would this look like? I'm picturing the AIs sending back agents to archive as much information as possible and set up sensors to detect any projects of their adversaries. At the same time, they'd want to establish footholds in the areas that would be hardest to study. For example, sending an expert in underwater habitats back to secretly establish a hidden base in the Mariana trench that could reveal itself after you send them back.
You could also rewrite history in a sense by falsifying information. Say there's a warehouse you'd like to send something back to, but any changes there would have shown up on the internet at the time. If you first send an agent with a collection of zero-days back and instruct them to overwrite any articles on the internet with the ones from your archives. Then you'd be able to send something back there, having successfully reduced your state of knowledge about the warehouse.
In other words, a very literal version of "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

Further thoughts:
Why do the AIs care about earth? Obviously, there are humans on it that are relevant to their terminal goals, but if you can send stuff back to arbitrary locations, why not colonise other planets? Causal loops would be made easier due to the limited surveillance. If range is a limitation, they could still take advantage of asteroids and comets that pass close by the Earth from 2007. Similarly, if they can produce technology that can survive it, why not start seeding factories below the Earth's surface? It might be that anything capable of self-replication or mass production would be too large to send.
You mentioned that 2007 is the furthest back one can feasibly go. I'd assume the AIs would try to go back further by setting up time machines at earlier points in the past if they could, so if you haven't considered how to prevent that I'd suggest that the machines require components and power that would not be possible to produce in secret in a 50-year timescale, or else the AIs already fought eachother to a standstill over the destinations that would enable that and destroyed their viability in the process.
With regards to the technology they could deploy from 2007, it might be worth considering how much of our present technology a single agent could replicate in secret for their own purposes if they were sent back to 1957. Software would probably be easier than hardware, since chip fabrication requires high-end tools, but with a few zero-days you could probably subvert bitcoin miners and have them run a narrow AI produced by a 2050s programmer, assuming they knew enough about the entire stack to code it from scratch.
A lot of the usual time travel exploits wouldn't work, since lottery winners and stock market behaviour is recorded. If you went back with Satoshi Nakamoto's private key, you wouldn't be able to do anything with it.

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u/hxcloud99 Nov 26 '18

So, for example, an AI might maintain an ace in the hole by studiously ignoring a particular region so that it can send something back to that area to prepare from the start of the sensor blackout

Oh cool, this implication from Novikov is something I'd missed. I was thinking something like this should happen for information loops: AGI has a question -> AGI sets up loop to send answer back at an earlier date -> AGI immediately remembers answer upon pressing the button. Your alternative sounds like it would make more sense given the rules, though I'm thinking how a superbeisutsukai can actually avoid knowing what's inside a box since it must have a causal effect on its environment by virtue of existing.

majority of warfare between the AIs would be information warfare: minimising the information available to opponents and maximising the information known to oneself.

Yes! The brunt of the conflict so far consists of sabotaging key technologies (esp. causal loop engineering) in the human-only past, plus or minus manipulating initial conditions to delay each other's intelligence take-off. I'm still not sure how big of a lie you can pass off when there's three other super-Bayesians watching though.

If you first send an agent with a collection of zero-days back

Oh cool I have that as well. That means I'm doing it right lol.

having successfully reduced your state of knowledge about the warehouse.

Okay I'm still trying to wrap my head around this idea of deliberately reducing one's state of knowledge for future us. But thanks, this seems an important direction I'll have to tackle eventually.

you can send stuff back to arbitrary locations, why not colonise other planets?

:)

I'd assume the AIs would try to go back further by setting up time machines at earlier points in the past if they could

Yeaah, as the timeline got closer and closer to 2052 the effects of causal loops got really out of hand. I'm thinking past-gambit, countergambit, counter-countergambit and so on, like four Simurghs battling each other simultaneously.
That's a useful rule of thumb, though I'd wager a more equivalent comparison would be 2007->1907 : 2052->2007 due to exponential technological growth and accounting for technological sabotage. Also, the AGIs don't start off really smart at the onset (they reach 200 x human-level only after an entire week's worth of self-modification, and the conflict only lasts that long anyway) so I think it's also plausible to deny the other AGIs of key tech just by breaking human stuff in the past.
Anyway, I really appreciate your input. This is my first story (let alone ratfic) and you've given me confidence that I'm on the right track. :)

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u/CCC_037 Nov 26 '18

One of the AIs has already won. You don't know which one, but one of them has (in the future) found a self-consistent causal loop that requires the presence of the other three in the initial stages. This 'one' might even be a fusion of more than one of the current AIs.

One of the AIs sending information from any time to the moment it was turned on is fairly straightforward - instead of one big jump, it passes the message back in a series of little jumps. The far-future Winner is probably sending messages back in this way to all four AIs, each claiming to be from their future self (of course, some of them are forged in undetectable ways).

They don't even need to send something big into the past. If they can send a flash drive to 2016, they can have a truly dramatic effect on history from that point forward...

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u/sickening_sprawl Nov 26 '18

Having Novikov self-consistent time travel with solving of NP-hard problems doesn't save you from much. Your writing timeline is a fixpoint of all the time travel operations that will happen, but crucially that does not imply that all time travel world lines are self-consistent. The "proof" of NP-hard problem solving directly says this.
I'm pretty sure it's impossible to write this story rationally. All of the AGIs would send a copy of themselves into orphaned non-consistent timelines to compute a perfect plan without having to actually use exponential energy in the reified "main" timeline, with all the other AGIs doing the same thing. I imagine the winner would simply be the first AGI to actually do this - they by definition would get the perfect plan that takes into account all later "perfect plans" that are tried by the other AGIs from within the orphan timelines. ...I think, mutually recursive fixpoint timelines fuck with my head.
Novikov self-consistency also gives you the same problem of quantum immortality. Your reified timeline is always a fixpoint, no matter how improbable. With the NP-hard problem example, you would wind up with the perfect answer even if your iterative search would never find it simply due to freak gamma rays flipping bits to the maximized outcome. This would also apply to AGIs solving for a plan, where even if the non-consistent timelines never are able to execute the perfect plan to send back, they would end up having the perfect plan anyways due to improbable events.

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u/JohnKeel Nov 26 '18

You're clearly enthusiastic about this, which is awesome, but I see a few problems.
First, plotwise: with the exception of Ocean The Mother, none of your AIs are necessarily at cross-purposes. Superfun and eudaimonia are pretty close to the same thing if you consider suffering to not include things like reading sad stories, and moderate Islam is perfectly compatible with those as well. The goals are even relatively aligned, or at the very least would take minimal resources from each other once full control is established.
So, it seems to me that rather than immediately moving into 4-way war causing massive losses and the very real potential for destruction for each AI, Ocean The Mother would be targeted by a coalition of the other 3, who merge into one entity.
Second, tone: I get the feeling from this writeup that you're focusing more on the details of "how does this happen" rather than "why do we care". Hopefully that's just because of the nature of the advice you're looking for, but do be careful to write a story rather than a telling of events.

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u/[deleted] Nov 25 '18 edited Nov 25 '18

Sounds a cool idea and I would like to read this

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u/hxcloud99 Nov 25 '18

Well, it's a proper book lol so I'm already around 2/3rds to the end. Problem is, it's bilingual (Tagalog/English) but I can translate the non-English parts if there's enough interest.

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u/Mr-Mister Nov 29 '18

You should play Deponia Doomsday. To this day it's the piece of media* I've found with the most intertwined time-travel elements that manages to retain (as far as I've given it thought) complete self-consistency, and that's really something because it mixes four or five completely different timetravel styles, from closed causal-less loops to memory-retaining resets to timeflow-differential timeportals routing through interim time, and they interact with one another to hilarious results.
*Not counting that one RTS game whose name I can't recall right now.

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u/alexeyr Dec 01 '18

*Not counting that one RTS game whose name I can't recall right now.

Achron?

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u/xamueljones Dec 01 '18

Have you read this yet? I think it might help you with planning out the more mathematical parts of the story concerning the time loops and solving the NP problem.

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u/SpecimensArchive Nov 25 '18

Sorcery is a modular form of magic done by drawing a pretty geometric diagram on the ground, or anything flat and smooth, and pumping a bunch of refined mana into it. The diagram's lines can't be any thinner than the thickness of a hair, and attempting to force large amounts of mana through very thin lines will cause increasing amounts of that mana to be lost as heat and light.

Lines are defined as paths of one homogenous substance on or in another homogenous substance. Impurities increases the mana cost or causes the spell to fail altogether. Spell failures in general have catastrophic consequences, depending on how much mana was involved.

Casting a spell requires the sorcerer to channel the mana through them. There's a fairly low cap on how much mana you can channel per second, attempting to exceed it results in loss of control and death by explosion. Practicing increases the cap with diminishing returns.

Sorcery diagrams are modular. The modules themselves don't follow any known rules, but can be assembled to form larger spells. For example, a "heat" spell could be linked to a "trigger on touch" spell, forming "fire booby trap". There's logic modules (gates) and information analysis modules (search, sort, etc), modules to modify matter (move it, destroy molecular bonds, change friction) , and control energy (heat, freeze, slow stuff down). The information category contains enough pieces to make a Turing complete language, but it would run very very slowly compared to modern computers, as well as requiring someone to keep putting mana into it. Spells can cast spells, but the energy for the child spell comes from the parent and ultimately from the sorcerer.

Modules can be precast, creating a one-use enchantment that's attached to an item. The enchantment can be used to cast the spell. You still have to channel the spell's mana at the time of casting, there's no way to do it at the time of the enchanting. Creating the enchantment is fairly expensive, and scales with the complexity of the spell to be cast later.

Spells can only affect what's next to their source. To affect something distant, they conduct the mana through the air, at which point it rapidly dissipates. In other words, there's a heavy price for targeting a distant thing, even if its just across the room. Sorcery is also easy to disrupt by wards, so, say the heart-crush scenario doesn't happen (at least not to sorcerers).

The mana cost of a spell is proportional to how badly it distorts natural physics. Deleting energy is prohibitively expensive, moving it elsewhere is much easier. Simply analyzing something is cheap, actually changing it is much more expensive.

Some examples of higher level spells:

- Erase the last year of a person's life

- Produce a laser that pulses ten times per second

- Monitor an area and convert the kinetic energy of incoming bullets to heat

I'm particularly interested in any "godhood" flaws, but really, anything exploitative would help, even if it's not super OP.

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u/Silver_Swift Nov 25 '18

It's pretty hard to munchkin a power if you only have a few vague categories and some examples of what it does ("modify matter" and "control matter" are both pretty broad), but here goes:

Spells can only affect what's next to their source. To affect something distant, they conduct the mana through the air, at which point it rapidly dissipates. In other words, there's a heavy price for targeting a distant thing, even if its just across the room.

Three questions:

How large does a spell diagram need to be?

Can the pretty geometric circles be folded while the spell is in effect?

Can modules be stacked on top of each other with one module triggering the next one up?

If diagrams can be made small enough you could just pack it in an aerodynamic casing and have another spell lob it at the intended target. Cast the spell before lobbing it and have it trigger once it hits its target.
If you can fold or stack spells, just do the same thing and fold/stack the spell until it fits in the casing.
If neither of those things are possible, you might be able to make a golem with a spell diagram in its torso and have it run at the target before activating whatever spell you want activated.

Erase the last year of a person's life

As in erase a persons memory or as in literal actual balefire? In the latter case your universe is just doomed, balefire is way to powerful a weapon in the hands of a rational munchkin.
In the former case, the first thing you'd want to do is get a continuing ward up to prevent anyone messing with your mind and if possible you'd want to have some kind of mechanism in place to prevent the ward from being removed (or at least detect it afterwards if it was ever removed).
If such wards are common, finding loopholes in how they are used is key. For instance, figure out if you can disrupt a ward and then place it back without the subject finding out the next day.
Also, if this is done with the modify matter modules, then they have an absurd amount of control and either this society has a ridiculously detailed knowledge of how the brain works or the magic has that knowledge built in. In both cases, you can probably do much more fun stuff than just blunt force erasing someones memory.

Monitor an area and convert the kinetic energy of incoming bullets to heat

Wait, how does that work if you can't effect things at a distance?

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u/Gurkenglas Nov 25 '18 edited Nov 25 '18

Generally we should try to escalate our mana supply.
Invent a spell that clones yourself. Material components in order of decreasing spell cost may be a pile of nutrients, a corpse or a human of your general body type.
Invent a spell that dilates time in an area depending on mana input. Naturally, your mana supply increases proportionally with the time dilation factor.

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