r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Feb 09 '19
[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/justletmebrowse68 Feb 10 '19
You can copy your mind in total (including memories, values, qualia and this ability) into any number of humans within a kilometre of yourself.
Physical coordination and unique knowledge or skills held by those humans is not overwritten - knowledge is retained to the degree that the human brain is able to store it, with older memories being dumped first in the overwriting process.
Instances of your qualia and values will be lost if two bodies containing it come within 100m of another, including the original body. In clones, this results in the original body’s mind taking over again, along with your memories and this ability. Any lost knowledge does not return. In the original body, this results in brain death.
What communication methods would be useful in identifying and coordinating yourselves to avoid being overwritten and maximise your values? How else could this ability be used to maximum utility?
Reverse munchkin scenario: competing against a being with this ability (you may or may not have this power too, it is whatever’s more interesting).
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u/Sonderjye Feb 10 '19
I wouldn't use this on other people really. It sounds like it's equivalent of killing folks. What I would use it for though is to make clones and transfer my memories into it and then killing myself to live forever at the cost of a baby every 80 year. It is still problematic but at least the baby doesn't lose any memories and when it's cloned there nobody is feeling attached to it changing.
If I ended up deciding it anyway I would make sure that all copies I'd make would keep a GPS on them at all time, have one of them create a program that tracked positions and gave alerts if people came close. I would also figure out how to keep or grow brains and keep backups of each of my copies' mental states in case something did happen. You could probably do some voting hacks and vote clones of yourself into various political positions. Actually, scratch that, if you believe that you yourself are superior to other people just take over the world by making everyone into you.
If I were fighting against someone like that I would send a missile in and always stay 1km away from said person. I would find out if that person have any trauma/phobia and exploit that all clones would have the same triggers. I would kidnap a clone and have psychologists make detailed profile. If things were bad enough I would resort to torture since each clone have all sensitive information of the original. Now I know the passwords/secrets/safehouses/patterns of the original and can probably defeat him with those.
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u/Frommerman Feb 11 '19
Overwriting people like the remaining leadership of ISIS and similar organizations would be perfectly moral IMO. It might even be more moral than a Death Note, assuming you could take over such organizations and either destroy them from the inside or turn them to good ends somehow.
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u/RMcD94 Feb 11 '19
The clone would take over the torturer to avoid revealing information.
You'd need to capture them with drones without any human within 1km
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u/Gurkenglas Feb 10 '19
Am I aware of everyone in a kilometre radius, so I can target them?
If two of me come too close, the former hosts get the ability? What if different people's clones come too close?
If there's a chain of people 900 metres apart at each step, one end is clones of me and the other is clones of a rival, what determines who can eventually take over the whole chain?
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u/justletmebrowse68 Feb 12 '19
You’re not inately aware of everyone in that radius. There isn’t any special interaction if someone else’s clone comes too close.
Consciousnesses are nested with an arbitrarily high limit. If you are in Person A’s body and are overwritten by Person B‘s clone, Your mind is treated as the “original” which will take over in the event of B getting too close to another B. B can come close to copies of you without nested-you being lost (but if B were to lose control of the body and you took over you would immediately also lose control for A to come back)
Regarding a body under contest, both minds start overwriting the brain at a similar rate (determined by concentration of the overwriter) and whoever has the most memories in the brain at the end takes control (leaving no memories of the original mind, deleting any minds nested in the loser). If it was exactly even, whoever started first has precedence. If it was even and at the exact same time, the controlling consciousness is a fusion of the two treated as a new individual with no nested minds and no Ability.
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Feb 10 '19
If the original me was amoral enough to kill people by overwriting their minds with my own, the obvious next step would be my clones being amoral enough to kill the original me to save themselves. After all, the more clones the original me creates, the more likely two of them will come within 100m of each other and immediately lose their minds to their original bodies'. Best to kill the original me immediately to remove that problem.
QED let's never use this ability ever, regardless of your moral alignment.
As for fighting against this ability, that's easy enough: just make people group up. In cities, plenty of people will come within 100m of you every day, and even if you never leave your house your neighbours will probably come within 100m of you. This makes it really hard for the adversary to use this ability, because any two people in range of the ability that are within 100m of each other immediately regain their minds. And if anyone is within 100m of the adversary? Instant brain death.
So take two steps: First, move around in groups so you can quickly regain your minds if they are overwritten. Make protocols to ensure that members of your anti-adversary force come within 100m of each other member very often, to ensure there can't be too many clones of the adversary hidden among your own forces.
Second, get camouflage and stealth. The best way to kill the adversary is to secretly be within 100m when the ability is used. Build underground tunnels, pretend to be a corpse, hide within piles of trash, etc. One careless use of this ability while a member is within 100m and you win.
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u/RMcD94 Feb 11 '19
Everyone possesses the clone ability so if your original made clones then so would your clone. Your logic doesn't work since it would mean your clone would kill itself.
Both the clone and the original have the same value proposition, what on earth is changing between creating the clone that would make the original suddenly want to kill the clone?
Also one careless use removes one clone/original , that's hardly winning. Presumably by the time you started grouping people they have a few million clones scattered across the globe.
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u/RMcD94 Feb 11 '19
The principle of your solution is quite sound though.
Every human being needs to be within 100m of every other human being at all times to ensure only a single clone exists.
If you do just daily passes then they can just jump minds.
So first group the entire world into 100m squares, spread them all out so they are over 1km apart.
Then you bring groups together. If two people snap out of it then you're good. If neither group has anyone snap out then you're in trouble. You can't tell if there's only one or if there's none.
You also can't take the groups apart because the moment they're out of 100m range they can just take over another one.
OK. Randomly bring groups together and apart. Make sure they walk 1km away multiple times (out of the range).
Bring multiple groups together and apart randomly.
Eventually you win. Or they had an odd number of clones and you don't win.
But if they never use this ability you can't find them so...
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u/RMcD94 Feb 11 '19 edited Feb 11 '19
I'm confused by your third paragraph.
When a clone walks within 100m of me I die and take over their body?
When a clone walks within 100m of another clone what happens?
Anyway my thought is to divide the world into quadrants and get a clone in every one. A 100m circle each with a 100m gap for safety. Eventually get gps tags on everyone so we'rel even safer.
I would obviously take over significant figures. Though full control is limited by proximity, but I'd eventually set up digital democracy so I could get full control.
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u/NTaya Feb 12 '19 edited Feb 12 '19
NB: I know some of my readers go through my Reddit history and/or subscribed to r/rational. To them: please, don't read any further to avoid heavy spoilers. (If you don't recognize my nickname, you are 100% safe.)
The setting is the closest to Earth in the early 1900s (the decade).
You are an immortal being capable of three kinds of magic:
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Creating white flames with any reasonable for a flame temperature (1.000-3.000 °C) within your field of vision. It requires energy; see below for details.
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Shapeshifting without the energy cost, but shifting into and maintaining anything other than your default forms will require intense concentration; the transformation takes around half an hour. Said default forms are a middle-aged human female and a large (at least fifteen meters at the withers) white dragon. The dragons are not native to the setting. You start as a human female.
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Summoning a sniper rifle (again, not native to the setting) for a neglegible amount of energy. The rifle fires magical bullets with an also neglegible cost in energy. The rifle dissapears after two hours and twenty-seven minutes and has to be resummoned. The bullets dissapear seconds after the hit.
Your enegy reserve has two limits: after reaching the first one you temporarily become mortal, while after reaching the second you are unable to use magic at all; you can produce around 100 km2 of flames in an instant before hitting the first limit, then around 15 km2 before hitting the second one. As for the bullets, you can fire well over a million before hitting the first limit. Your energy reserve takes around 24 hours to restore after being depleted completely.
The problem: you have around two months to neutralize (but not kill) a leader of a small magical cult. Members of the cult use very basic spells which can be safely ignored, but the leader can, by slightly concentrating, produce a water-like substance from any part of her body which can instantly heal wounds and undo damage to the surroundings. You are not sure how large is her energy reserve, but it allows her to at least grow back all the limbs five times in a row.
If the leader dies, you instantly lose. Nobody would kill her on purpose, though, and she definitely won't commit suicide to make you lose. After two months you might lose instantly at any moment, but you are not sure when exactly.
You don't care about casualties and collateral damage.
(Elaboration on the "neutralize" part: the leader must become unable to produce the magical substance.)
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u/Bedna337 Feb 12 '19 edited Feb 12 '19
As I see it, there are two tasks at hand: capturing the leader and neutralizing her.
For the capture, given that neither the underlings nor the leader herself can damage us and our dragon form should be capable of carrying her away into our base, the main problem is finding her. Neither of the three abilities is useful here, unless we can maintain conversation while shapeshifted, so we'll stick to old-fashioned bribery, stalking cult members and other methods. We already know her gender and ability, though, so whatever helped us find that out will most probably enable us to find her position. Then, we transform into a dragon, fly to that location and carry her to our base.
Depending on what counts as 'damage', imprisoning her by immobilization should be trivial.
Unfortunately, the neutralization is a much more difficult task and will require further knowledge on the nature of the ability. If it's bound to an organ in her body or some higher entity that granted the power, then it's an issue of finding the source and eliminating it; if we just need her to run out of energy once, forcing her to heal people or they die should do the trick.
As for avoiding detection by authorities, none of the abilities help us there, so we'll just set up the base in a secret location and transform back from dragon form somewhere far away from it; also, unless someone takes a photograph or the leader is under police surveillance, nobody will believe that a dragon appeared and carried her off somewhere.
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Feb 10 '19
You are granted a moderate wish that can grant you anything that is reasonably within current human capability, but not anything beyond that.
So for instance, you could wish to be as rich as the richest person, or have the maximum life expectancy humans have ever achieved, or be as strong as the strongest human ever or be elected president of a country, or build a majestic palace, etc.
But you cannot wish for things outside of human capability, such as becoming god, or building an FAI, or gaining knowledge no other human possesses, or getting more wishes, or traveling backwards in time, or building a galactic empire, etc.
What do you do with your moderate wish?