Remove ads

Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Reader mode
Quote on Casino seal difficulty, edited for clarity:

OliWhail said:
Can we expect to take a similar amount of time to decode, convert, and produce our versions of the casino seals as we took for the storage and explosive seals?

You had help from Kagome on storage and explosive seals, which reduces TNs significantly (even more so than research notes), so it will likely take longer to reverse-engineer the casino scrolls. Barring more sealing failures, however, it should take an amount of time on roughly the same scale (weeks of concerted effort rather than months).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

This was way back in January 2017. I don't remember Hazō's sealing skill improving much since then?
 
Last edited:
Adept_Woodwright said:
If we want Kurenai to advance, should return their personal seals. Likely won't get credit for the ones they have if the are eliminated from the event.

@MMKII
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah, gotcha.


Likewise if EJ accepts the proposed distribution we would still have a supermajority.


Noumero said:
Hmm.
  1. Assumption: three teams were so incompetent as to need to turn in their word-halves to get to E2, in addition to the brilliant young person who gave their word-half to the proctor.
  2. E2: 2/8 of bottom-half of Leaf genin were eliminated. Assumption: their eliminators stole their word-halves. Assumption: this percentage is true for all genin. 25% of word-halves of the bottom-half contestants are now in upper-half contestants' hands.
  3. SuperTeam Leaf, consisting of four teams from upper half of the scoring, captured 12 word-halves during the break. Assumption: this is much better than average for all upper-half teams. On average, only half of them stole one word-half. (less powerful, less successful, some targets already lost word-halves, some upper-half teams were busy with other things...).
  4. Assumption: E3 was thrice-harder to find than E2. 10% of contestants turned-in word-halves of bottom-half contestants (their own if they're bottom-half, or the stolen ones otherwise).
  5. E3: No word-halves change hands.
  6. Eliminations 1: 150 contestants are eliminated: all word-halves not in possession of upper-half teams are lost.
  7. Then Team Gai and that random team is eliminated; 15 more word-halves are lost.
  8. E4: 10% more of contestants turn-in word-halves to find the event. During E4, no word-halves change hands.
  9. Eliminations 2: Assumption: 30% of remaining word-halves are lost. (After Swamp, there was no heavy redistribution for the strongest teams, which means that most of word-halves were in "upper half", not "upper quartile". Top 25% were more successful than Top 50%, but not overwhelmingly so.)
  10. E5: Three word-halves are turned-in to find the event. Team Uplift takes everyone's personal word-halves save their R1 teammates' and ISC's Blue Team's.
Now to calculate it. BHW = "word-halves in possession of bottom-half contestants", UH = "word-halves in possession of upper-half contestants", WH = "word-halves", BQW = "word-halves in possession of bottom-quartile contestants", UQW = "word-halves in possession of upper-quartile contestants".

1. 300-3x3-1 = 290 WH. UHW = 150. BHW = 150-10 = 140.
2. UHW = 150 + 140/4 = 185 WH. BHW = 105 WH.
3. UHW = 185 + 150/6 = 210 WH. BHW = 105 - 25 = 80 WH.
4. UHW = 210 x 0.9 = 189 WH. BHW = 80 x 0.9 = 72 WH.
6. UHW = 189 WH. BHW = 0.
7. UHW = 189 - 15 = 174 WH.
8. UHW = 189 x 0.9 = ~170 WH.
9. UHW = UQW + BQW. UQW = 189 x 0.7 = 132 WH. BQW = 0.
10. UQW = 132 - 3 = 129 WH.

Conclusions: By E5, only 129-72 = 57 word-halves of disqualified contestants were in play.
Team Uplift: 3 (personal) + 3 (stolen pre-E5) + 54 (stolen: E5) = 60 word-halves.
Everyone else: 54 stolen word-halves.
+ Team Uplift's R1 teammates & ISC's Blue Team: Personal word-halves (15 of them).

How many word-halves Katou conned out of people? How many word-halves Team Kurenai and Team Gensou stole? I think you're better positioned to answer these particular questions, which influences the distribution of the 54 stolen word-halves.

(@MMKII, @Adept_Woodwright, what do you think?)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I dont really like this, because this is just guesstimating what world halves get removed based on who has them and removing them from the pool from each step.


Its a lot more complicated than that. The nature of the events were sufficiently complicated that besides us, the top 12 rankings could have varied tremendously overall the first few events.

Then we have an extinction event that kills half the population.

Then we have Event 4.

Ill point out here, that if the events being uniformly difficult on average by design wasnt enough to make this a pretty random process, you CERTAINLY need to take into account the big rampaging ball of chaos that was Team Uplift at this point.

(In the swamp you could have justified that our fort and economics play with the seals changed the dynamic by introducing more random behavior as well: ring of death and trading seals.)

In Event 4 we DQed a solid fifth of the event with the Tipserator bullshit. After that a big pile died to Wind Release:Siracha Sauce. We werent necessarily aiming for bottom quartile teams here, this could have eliminated a uniform swathe of people with some decent variance TOWARDS eliminating more bottom rank guys though.

Then people get Eliminated based on scores again, another population bottleneck.


So what I've done in some sense (if you look at my edits in fhe previous page) is essentially just assume these are going to be uniformly randomly distributed at the end of the day and start cutting down by 1/2 for each Elimination and then manually refilling the pool with ~15 word halves each time for some pessimistic variance towards "They should be on the larger side."

In practice this is what it comes out to be.


I dont like doing it with back of the envelope arithmetic like you and @Adept_Woodwright where because I find this insufficient to accurately describe the true clusterfuck of interplay going on.
 
Last edited:
[X][WH] Took all the WH, except those of Team Downfall and Kurenai, and kept them for Uplift
[X][WH] Took all the WH, except those of Team Downfall, and kept them for Uplift
 
If casino seals will take weeks to research, we may not have it ready in time for the tournament.

I recommend looking for alternatives to casino seals from Konoha library or from Jiraiya, especially since they will have either sealmasters who know it, or research notes.
 
Kiba said:
If casino seals will take weeks to research, we may not have it ready in time for the tournament.

I recommend looking for alternatives to casino seals from Konoha library or from Jiraiya, especially since they will have either sealmasters who know it, or research notes.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
*cough*Jiraiya*cough*

Honestly, why not get the finished product from the sealmaster Kage?
 
faflec said:
*cough*Jiraiya*cough*

Honestly, why not get the finished product from the sealmaster Kage?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

We let Kagome research alertness seals that will take us too long to figure out like casino seals.

And we research or learn how many sensory seals that's doable for us.

Edit: I very much wish that we can increase our sealing skill. But 42 XP to get to the next level?
 
Ah, by the way:

That EJ is asking about word half stuff at 12am or so is significant evidence that they are in fact worth something.

Who coulda guessed?

faflec said:
*cough*Jiraiya*cough*

Honestly, why not get the finished product from the sealmaster Kage?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Thatd be ideal if we could do that, really

What do we think of a jutsu that throws paper like shuriken?

Say its limited to one zone, and 2-6 paper shuriken depending on how much chakra you feel like pumping into it.

Is this relatively mild by itself?( As in, if you do not try to game this with throwing seals or something, is it OP for some reason?)
 
[X][WH] Took all the WH (54 total) and kept them for Uplift
eaglejarl said:
In round 2, ISC took all the word halves of the people that they defeated. Therefore, anyone who still had WHs at the end of round one will only have them at the end of round two if they are:
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Wait, did ISC took word-halves of Uplift's R1 teammates and their own R1 teammates? In this case Uplift has 60 word-halves and ISC has 3 (personal) + 6 (Uplift R1 teammates) + 6 (ISC R1 teammates) = 15 word-halves.
MMKII said:
I dont like doing it with back of the envelope arithmetic like you and @Adept_Woodwright where because I find this insufficient to accurately describe the true clusterfuck of interplay going on.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Hmm. Fair point. I don't think it was as random a process as you're saying, but maybe I'm not pessimistic enough.

@eaglejarl, the below fits my intuitive understanding of how many word-halves should still be in play as well:
MMKII said:
Having a second bottleneck event for word halves in play at the Event 4 mark is basically just cutting the available pool in half.

In this case: We'll use N/2 + sqrt(N). With N=~150 (as above)

This gives 75 + 12 = 87 word halves in the wild. Ours, Shikas, the other dudes, and a few leftover.

View this as:

1) Apply the above to get the "In Play" amount as of elimination #1. Then cut it in half (bit more than half of the contestants were eliminated) since the word half pool "in play" was cut down by 1/2 on average. Add sqrt(N) in to account for better teams still having a few extra.

or
2) Apply the sqrt cancellation twice.

Our first N is 300. We know this gives us ~150.

Second N =~150

Double (add the ghosts in), plug in. sqrt(300)*log(300) =~99

These give the same answer roughly, so this seems to be right.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
In this case ~90 word-halves remain in play: 60 with Team Uplift, 15 with ISC, 15 with others. Nobody except Team Uplift and ISC still have their personal word-halves.
 
Last edited:
I just wanted to drop in and say, even though I don't follow this thread post-by-post, I'm still having a lot of fun reading this story. Thanks eaglejarl, oli, and all the posters that make hazo's elaborate plans!
 
The votes are becoming a mess. We need to fix them.
Adhoc vote count started by Kiba on Aug 21, 2018 at 9:21 AM, finished with 614 posts and 17 votes.
  • 34
    [X] Loose Ends
    [X][Mist] Go
    [X] Do not give away any word-halves unless explicitly instructed by Noburi/Keiko and Jiraiya
    [X][Mist] Stay
    [X][WH] Took all the WH, except those of Team Downfall and Kurenai, and kept them for Uplift
    [X][WH] Took all the WH (54 total) and kept them
    [X][WH] Took all the WH (54 total) and kept them for Uplift
    [X][WH] Took all the WH and gave some of them to your teammates on Red Team One
    "[X] (lethal) Yes" is to "[X] Armageddon Initiative" like "Kill it with fire!" is to "NUKE IT FROM ORBIT".
    "[X] Armageddon Initiative" is a meme of similar usage, but different caliber.
    [X] Do not give away any word-halves unless explicitly instructed by Jiraiya or Noburi AND Keiko
    [X] (lethal) Yes
    [X] Action Plan: One More Day in Mist
    [x] (mist) Stay
    [X][Activity] Plan Socialization and Sealing Week One
    [X][Train] Whatever Jiriaya et al Deemed Important
    [x] Interlude: Zabuza reacts to our performance in Exams
    [X] Interlude: the Pangolins react to the world halves
    [X] Interlude: team Downfall reacts to our performance in the Exams
    [X] Interlude: the Kages react to our performance in the Exams
    [X][Minor] Post-mortem of the Chūnin Exam (Invites all participants)
    [X] If we ever find a telescope merchant, kill them.
    [X][WH] Took all the WH, except those of Team Downfall, and kept them for Uplift
Click to expand...
 
@MMKII, my belief that the process of word-halves' redistribution wasn't very random is based on our personal experience with them. We didn't get any in the swamp, barely got any even with STL's help, got knocked out and didn't even have ours stolen, and that's it. No other interactions until E5.

My model assumes that most of the contestants basically ignored them, only turning them in and (sometimes) picking them off from incidentally-defeated teams. What do you think?
Kiba said:
The votes are becoming a mess. We need to fix them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I killed my vote for Interlude. I suggest people kill their votes for interludes and [actions] as well.
 
Last edited:
Noumero said:
[X][WH] Took all the WH (54 total) and kept them

Hmm. Fair point. I don't think it was as random a process as you're saying, but maybe I'm not pessimistic enough.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Well, its not truly "random", its more "chaotic".

If it really was mixed up very well, then the heavy duty ergodic theory should tell me we get square root cancellation with a pile of variance added in. Maybe with a multiplicative factor too. There is some error for applying this estimate with small numbers too I think. Add in another dozen.

Generously, that gives no more than : ~70 overall available word halves. No way , bit too low. Especially if there are other word halves in play.

The log factor im stapling on to the square root comes from a significant contribution to the mix in the form of "People are REALLY going to try hard at keeping these in play, and they will be mostly successful, relatively speaking."

(Doubling the pools in the calculation from 300 to 600 amounts to adding a slight multiplicative factor on that on the order of sqrt(2)~1.4, and then adding in another ~1/2 term worth of variance or so, by the way )

So as far as I see it, that should account for the expectation of "Good ninja are going to probably get some of these" fairly well. While balancing all the myriad other factors playing for and against "Word halves are being conserved."
 
Last edited:
Tua said:
[X][WH] Took all the WH, except those of Team Downfall and Kurenai, and kept them for Uplift
[X][WH] Took all the WH, except those of Team Downfall, and kept them for Uplift
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Good point. I've added options for Team Kurenai.

MMKII said:
As in, if you do not try to game this with throwing seals or something, is it OP for some reason
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I have learned that any question which starts with "if you do not try to game this" is not worth asking. This crowd WILL try to game it, for any value of "it".
 
eaglejarl said:
I have learned that any question which starts with "if you do not try to game this" is not worth asking. This crowd WILL try to game it, for any value of "it".
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Its more like I need to first judge "How broken is this in a vacuum?" So i can fix if needed.

Then I ask "How broken is this?go nuts!" and then try to fix if *possible*.

My personal estimate: even being able to throw ~2 seals as Shuriken (unless we somehow invent long timers, this is limited by action economy. You still need to activate, etc.)

1)Is only marginally more effective than just plopping one on a kunai and throwing it.You just get two instead of one , since you only have max two supplementals to activate them anyway.

2) That that effectiveness is heavily offset by "One costs chakra and the other does not."

BUT I have learned I am not sufficiently pessimistic. So I will consult the expert.

@Radvic , whatdya think?
 
MMKII said:
Its more like I need to first judge "How broken is this in a vacuum?" So i can fix if needed.

Then I ask "How broken is this?go nuts!" and then try to fix if *possible*.

My personal estimate: even being able to throw ~2 seals as Shuriken (unless we somehow invent long timers, this is limited by action economy. You still need to activate, etc.)

1)Is only marginally more effective than just plopping one on a kunai and throwing it.You just get two instead of one , since you only have max two supplementals to activate them anyway.

2) That that effectiveness is heavily offset by "One costs chakra and the other does not."

BUT I have learned I am not sufficiently pessimistic. So I will consult the expert.

@Radvic , whatdya think?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Well, if you've got 6 paper shuriken, that's six aspect bonuses you can grab via seals, and thus a flat +30 to Hazou's dice. Seems broken?

Edit: though, I suppose you'd also need to activate the seals, which means you'd need a lightning jutsu to grab additional supplemental actions. So the +30 only applies once Hazou learns the lightning element.
 
Last edited:
Did I miss something? Were we asked to do a separate vote for the word halves? If not, its making the tally look pretty messy.



Noumero said:
@MMKII, my belief that the process of word-halves' redistribution wasn't very random is based on our personal experience with them. We didn't get any in the swamp, barely got any even with STL's help, got knocked out and didn't even have ours stolen, and that's it. No other interactions until E5.

My model assumes that most of the contestants basically ignored them, only turning them in and (sometimes) picking them off from incidentally-defeated teams. What do you think?

I killed my vote for Interlude. I suggest people kill their votes for interludes and [actions] as well.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Let me put myself in the lens of your simulation for a bit and see if I would do something differently.


Okay, I think I have found the difference.

I think the core differences is that you assign that ~30% of the word half mass dies off after Event 4 eliminations. IMO it should be more like ~45 %give or take a percent or two. Basically, I think youre being really generous here.

Assuming no significant word half redistribution between first eliminations and second due to Event four, and given that Event 4 killed off roughly half, I would expect closer to 55-60% of the remaining mass to be present afterwards.

Probably a bit less than 60%.

Besides the above numerical reasoning, Event 4 was a bloodbath for combat specs. I expect these guys to have more word half mass due to Swamp. Should come out closer to half lost than not. This event basically distinguished between people who are only good at more combat oriented stuff and people who are more well rounded.

In addition to that, it became a straight up slaughterhouse near the end. Partly due to us, and partly due to the Wind Release: Siracha Sauce and all the social nins posting fliers everywhere


This splifs the ~20-30 word half differential between our two calcs. Give or take a couple.
 
MMKII said:
Hmm. Fair enough. I'll see if I can balance.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Like, there's precident to this given that paper arts exist, presumably the counterbalance is that you need either a lightning element to activate all the seals in one round, or fancy time-delay seals and 2 or three turns of buildup, and you'd also need ready access to seals. It seems as plausible to be an exploit that the world hasn't taken yet as any.

It's also worth noting that you don't actually need a jutsu to do this. Just tape a half dozen seals to a moderately sized rock and throw it at an enemy.
 
Radvic said:
Like, there's precident to this given that paper arts exist, presumably the counterbalance is that you need either a lightning element to activate all the seals in one round, or fancy time-delay seals and 2 or three turns of buildup, and you'd also need ready access to seals. It seems as plausible to be an exploit that the world hasn't taken yet as any.

It's also worth noting that you don't actually need a jutsu to do this. Just tape a half dozen seals to a moderately sized rock and throw it at an enemy.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Well, yes. If we have timers.

You cant actually activate more than ~2 seals even if you have them all prepped, in a given combat round. You have two supplementals.

The point of this is that it shoves the "attaching to weapon" supplementals to the Jutsu. So if you have a pile of seals in a pouch or in a holster or something, you just activate them and cast, and it will skip ~two supplementals, one for each seal youre throwing. And at the same time it fits the "Throw" actions into one.

Instead of having to fit:

2x

Attach seal to kunai
Activate
Throw

Its:

Activate
Activate
Jutsu.

Basically, I just want this to work in a way that skirts the action economy in that way, while being a nice way for us to throw multiple seals out as a ranged attack. Throwing more than 2 is only viable if we have help, or invent Hecatonchieres no Jutsu
 
Last edited:
MMKII said:
Did I miss something? Were we asked to do a separate vote for the word halves? If not, its making the tally look pretty messy.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Retroactive vote. We're choosing what we did with word-halves during R1: either we took everyone's, or didn't take Team Kurenai and/or Team Downfall's, with an additional option to give some to Red Team One. I think it makes the most sense if we took everyone's (it's what we would've done then), but I could be convinced to leave Team Kurenai's.
Okay, I think I have found the difference.

I think the core differences is that you assign that ~30% of the word half mass dies off after Event 4 eliminations. IMO it should be more like ~45 %give or take a percent or two. Basically, I think youre being really generous here.

Assuming no significant word half redistribution between first eliminations and second due to Event four, and given that Event 4 killed off roughly half, I would expect closer to 55-60% of the remaining mass to be present afterwards.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Fair. That seems correct?:
Noumero said:
Assumption than only 30% of word-halves were lost during second Elimination probably was too optimistic. Distribution was likely more uniform, and E4 eliminated most of combat-focused teams, who took most of word-halves in E2. 45% seems to be a more accurate estimate.

Subsequently, that means only ~104 word-halves were present after E4, of which 32 belonged to disqualified people. After E5, Team Uplift has 60, ISC has 15 (3 personal + 12 from Team Uplift's R1 teammates), and the remaining 29 are split among the 66 other contestant.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
In this case we (Uplift+ISC) have (60+15)/104 = ~72% of all word-halves. If we divide them evenly among Team Uplift, Team Asuma, and Team Kurenai, each of us will have ~8% of all word-halves. Would people realize our cunning plan and try to funnel all their word-halves into the hands of top-scorers, to deny Team Kurenai a spot?
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top