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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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MadScientist said:
Copying in from discord:

Ok. So basically, we make a three-party deal:

The Gouketsu make the pangolins aware that we can make skywalkers, and that we are willing to trade them to the pangolins in exchange for a garunteed-enforceable agreement that they will treat conquered people with respect and make them full pangolin-empire citizens. We also make them aware that in order for such a deal to take place then they need to create a method of binding themselves to honour the agreement (and no, a sense of honour is not enough, "My uncle, who creates the seals, assumes your words mean nothing. He's paranoid like that.").

The Nara are called in to be solicitors and make sure the enforcement method works. The pangolins must pay the Nara clan for each enforcement method they want the Nara clan to test, meaning the Pangolins are incentivised to create a working version first time so as to spend as little as possible. The Nara clan also want to maximise their payout, so they're incentivised to find out if it doesn't work.

At the end of the day, The Gouketsu get a non-horrible seventh path, the Pangolins get military supremacy, and the Nara get a payday. As far as I can see, no one is incentivised to rebel.​

Thoughts?
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My issue with this solution is that it only solves half the problem. Unopposed Pangolin conquest of the Seventh Path is going to bite us hard on the Human Path. The most straightforward consequence of this is that every summoner, all of whom Jiraiya essentially declared to be S-rankers or close to it, suddenly has a very strong incentive to murder Keiko. It gets worse, though.

Summoners are strong ninja, and strong ninja are very likely to be part of some organization, be it a hidden village, Akatsuki, or what have you. And what so those organizations see, when they look at the state of global politics on both Paths?

An emerging superpower in the form of the Leaf-Sand-Mist alliance, with the newly formed Goketsu Clan in the center of it, and the extremely aggressive and expansionist Pangolin Empire rapidly conquering the Seventh Path with the help of unknown and revolutionary seals. You know Goketsu Keiko is the Pangolin Summoner; you've attended the Chuunin Exam tournament and seen her brother, a kid barely out of the academy, casually produce massive fireballs using his own seals, while complaining about being denied use of his full arsenal. What conclusions do you reach? And how do you act upon them?

I feel like this trajectory inevitably leads to the Fourth Great Ninja War. And while I'm sure some of us would jump on the opportunity to force Pax Konoha upon the world, I'd rather crawl out of the hole we're in right now before digging further down.

Incidentally, this is also why I oppose hunting summoners for their scrolls. Putting aside the moral aspect, I strongly doubt we'll find many who we'd just be able to kill without major political consequences. Unless you want to try to steal the crows from Itachi, I suppose.
 
TaliesinSkye said:
Say, which branch of the Yaks had the people on the ship and would have hired the assassin, anyway? (All jokes that it was Jiraiya aside.)
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Jokes? It was clearly Jiraiya via Mari/Genjutsu and a macerator full of dragonfly paralytic toxin. Otherwise we probably would hunted them down by now, the support of the Minimi are important, and if anyone has the intelligence network to figure out who they are it's Jiraiya.
 
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Roomba said:
My issue with this solution is that it only solves half the problem. Unopposed Pangolin conquest of the Seventh Path is going to bite us hard on the Human Path. The most straightforward consequence of this is that every summoner, all of whom Jiraiya essentially declared to be S-rankers or close to it, suddenly has a very strong incentive to murder Keiko. It gets worse, though.

Summoners are strong ninja, and strong ninja are very likely to be part of some organization, be it a hidden village, Akatsuki, or what have you. And what so those organizations see, when they look at the state of global politics on both Paths?

An emerging superpower in the form of the Leaf-Sand-Mist alliance, with the newly formed Goketsu Clan in the center of it, and the extremely aggressive and expansionist Pangolin Empire rapidly conquering the Seventh Path with the help of unknown and revolutionary seals. You know Goketsu Keiko is the Pangolin Summoner; you've attended the Chuunin Exam tournament and seen her brother, a kid barely out of the academy, casually produce massive fireballs using his own seals, while complaining about being denied use of his full arsenal. What conclusions do you reach? And how do you act upon them?

I feel like this trajectory inevitably leads to the Fourth Great Ninja War. And while I'm sure some of us would jump on the opportunity to force Pax Konoha upon the world, I'd rather crawl out of the hole we're in right now before digging further down.

Incidentally, this is also why I oppose hunting summoners for their scrolls. Putting aside the moral aspect, I strongly doubt we'll find many who we'd just be able to kill without major political consequences. Unless you want to try to steal the crows from Itachi, I suppose.
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Now this is a legitimate argument against it.

My instinctive response is "WW4 is coming anyway, because Leaf-Mist alliance is coming anyway", but I'm not sure the exact degree to which Leaf-Mist on its own makes WW4 unavoidable, so I'm going to think on this for a while, and speak up if I think of anything useful.
 
Roomba said:
I'd rather crawl out of the hole we're in right now before digging further down.
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I'm all for being the wetworks secret agents keeping the world from exploding for a few more years while we desperately try to figure out a way to save the continents population from extinction.
 
traverseda said:
Jokes? It was clearly Jiraiya via Mari/Genjutsu and a macerator full of dragonfly paralytic toxin. Otherwise we probably would hunted them down by now, the support of the Minimi are important, and if anyone has the intelligence network to figure out who they are it's Jiraiya.
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Are we remembering the same thing? My recollection was that it looked like the ninja who did it would have killed Hazou if he hadn't gotten under the air dome in time, and scrawled 'Don't fuck with the Yakuza' on the wall in blood.

The ninja might not have been hunted down yet because it's a hard thing to do and because all of Leaf's search and destroy assets are tied up looking for Naruto.
 
MadScientist said:
I disagree. P and NP, it's easier to verify or falsify a proof than it is to create it, and we can hire some smart civilians from minor nations (accountants or whatever) to do that verification/falsification step for us.

As to BATNA... Ours is to say "oh well, that plan didn't work" and then continue waiting until we've got enough money to be able to snub them, instead of halting the genocide immediately.
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Complexity theory nitpick, Not all problems are easier to verify than to find solutions , and the p vs no thing is about if all problems verifiable in polinomial time are solvable in polinomial time .
Also verifiying real world things is a different kind of problem altogether whith people having acces to different information and inteligent adversaries trying to ensure you misidentify stuff.
 
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Roomba said:
My issue with this solution is that it only solves half the problem. Unopposed Pangolin conquest of the Seventh Path is going to bite us hard on the Human Path. The most straightforward consequence of this is that every summoner, all of whom Jiraiya essentially declared to be S-rankers or close to it, suddenly has a very strong incentive to murder Keiko. It gets worse, though.

Summoners are strong ninja, and strong ninja are very likely to be part of some organization, be it a hidden village, Akatsuki, or what have you. And what so those organizations see, when they look at the state of global politics on both Paths?

An emerging superpower in the form of the Leaf-Sand-Mist alliance, with the newly formed Goketsu Clan in the center of it, and the extremely aggressive and expansionist Pangolin Empire rapidly conquering the Seventh Path with the help of unknown and revolutionary seals. You know Goketsu Keiko is the Pangolin Summoner; you've attended the Chuunin Exam tournament and seen her brother, a kid barely out of the academy, casually produce massive fireballs using his own seals, while complaining about being denied use of his full arsenal. What conclusions do you reach? And how do you act upon them?

I feel like this trajectory inevitably leads to the Fourth Great Ninja War. And while I'm sure some of us would jump on the opportunity to force Pax Konoha upon the world, I'd rather crawl out of the hole we're in right now before digging further down.

Incidentally, this is also why I oppose hunting summoners for their scrolls. Putting aside the moral aspect, I strongly doubt we'll find many who we'd just be able to kill without major political consequences. Unless you want to try to steal the crows from Itachi, I suppose.
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I'm...not entirely sure that this is as big an issue. Jiraiya's actions during the Fifth Event (breaking OPSEC on Summons having nature chakra) suggests that he thinks the other Kages don't really know/care much about the Seventh Path, so I don't feel that they would care about the goings-on in there. I mean, Grandmaster F is supposed to be Cloud's equivalent of Jiraiya...but she rarely uses the scroll at all.
 
traverseda said:
Can you give me some examples?
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Well first maybe p=np and all problems verifiable in polinomial time are as easy to verify than to solve.
(not all problems are in polinomial time though)
Even if they aren't there are problems like factoring in quantum computers that we know are as easy to verify than to solve (well both in polinomial time )

There are problems that are harder to verify than to solve (found this one in Are there any problems that are easy to compute but hard to verify?)
Given a positive integer n in unary, answer a satisfiable 3CNF formula in nBoolean variables.

You can find a valid formula easily, but validating a specific one can be very difficult
 
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I mean, I have already pointed out how summoner + Wakahisa = Unlimited trade goods, food, and money for everybody. If you want to distract the pangolins, give them the chance to loot the human path of its hated chakra monsters instead of invading their neighbors.
 
faflec said:
I'm...not entirely sure that this is as big an issue. Jiraiya's actions during the Fifth Event (breaking OPSEC on Summons having nature chakra) suggests that he thinks the other Kages don't really know/care much about the Seventh Path, so I don't feel that they would care about the goings-on in there. I mean, Grandmaster F is supposed to be Cloud's equivalent of Jiraiya...but she rarely uses the scroll at all.
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Right now, the Pangolins haven't done enough for most summoners to really take notice, I think. And said summoners probably jealously guard any Seventh Path exclusive information. However, once their power is directly threatened by the Pangolin Reich, and it becomes obvious this aggression is enabled by the Hokage, they will absolutely inform their own Kage, out of self-defense if nothing else.

I think it's incredibly optimistic to assume the Pangolins can conquer the entirety of the Seventh Path without anyone on the Human Path caring.
 
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Roomba said:
Right now, the Pangolins haven't done enough for most summoners to really take notice, I think. And said summoners probably jealously guard any Seventh Path exclusive information. However, once their power is directly threatened by the Pangolin Reich, and it becomes obvious this aggression is enabled by the Hokage, they will absolutely inform their own Kage, out of self-defense of nothing else.

I think it's incredibly optimistic to assume the Pangolins can conquer the entirety of the Seventh Path without anyone on the Human Path noticing.
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I actually think it might not be quite as bad as you imagine even. Their kage will know, sure... but would those kage tell anyone else? It's the same problem that happens with the Jinchuuriki. They're getting kidnapped, but how do we know that Naruto and the former Mizukage are the only ones, that the other nations haven't lost theirs too?
 
Cariyaga said:
I actually think it might not be quite as bad as you imagine even. Their kage will know, sure... but would those kage tell anyone else? It's the same problem that happens with the Jinchuuriki. They're getting kidnapped, but how do we know that Naruto and the former Mizukage are the only ones, that the other nations haven't lost theirs too?
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Will the other summon clans be able to find out, maybe? Allied clans would probably tell each other (assuming they aren't afraid of being backstabbed). The capybaras and the maras are noted to be infiltrators and manipulators, I think, so they likely have ways to learn how other clans are doing (As a side note, they probably also have an un-grued henge analog, otherwise they wouldn't be able to infiltrate very well among clans that look so completely different from them). Those clans could certainly discover which other clans are being attacked and either create an alliance or let the information slip so that others can create one.
 
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So, what should we do about our match up with Keiko?

I'm partial to the good ol' Five-finger Slam-and-Jam, but I am open to more complex strategems.
 
This is completely and utterly off topic, but I just finished binge-reading HPMOR again. I've just come to the conclusion that there's a FANTASTIC line that our QMs should use whenever they're prompting us to write up a new plan.

If a viable solution is posted before (TIME) on (DATE), the story will continue to Chapter (CHAPTER).
Otherwise you will get a shorter and sadder ending.
 
It's kinda funny that Kagome declared Sage and Dummy to be dumb about their ideas. Yet we fucked up on a simliar yet smaller scale, truly Hazou is some kind of reincarnate of those people (Sage,Dummy,Indra,who the fuck knows).

No wonder the Nara want to contain Hazou:
Velorien said:
"Genius is not enough. A bright spark independently arrives at a vision for a peaceful utopia, and his first world-changing act is to create a weapon that heralds a new scale of destruction. This is not an anomaly, Gōketsu. Every genius ends up drunk on their own brilliance in one way or another."
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little late, but I just got back from errands -
MadScientist said:
I disagree. P and NP, it's easier to verify or falsify a proof than it is to create it, and we can hire some smart civilians from minor nations (accountants or whatever) to do that verification/falsification step for us.

As to BATNA... Ours is to say "oh well, that plan didn't work" and then continue waiting until we've got enough money to be able to snub them, instead of halting the genocide immediately.
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This is not a mathematical proof, this is a Geneva Accord that we trying to enforce on the Pangolins, and that is a lot harder than you're making it out to be.

Though I think we're in agreement about simply acquiring money and then snubbing them, I think your plan has too many steps with hostile or nonaligned actors to justify the costs we'd need to even attempt the ploy: e.g the secret that we can produce skywalkers, Jiraiya knowing that the Pangolins have something worth the cost of skywalkers (or if there isn't, Jiraiya is going to flip and/or figure out what the hell to do with us), etc.
 
Seriously, the summon path has a surplus of murder machines in need of things to kill, and the human path has a surplus of chakra beasts in need of killing.

Summon pangolins. Point towards the wilderness and tell them to haul back everything with more than two legs. Wakihisa drains the beasts and summoner uses the chakra to summon more pangolins. Humans chop off spines or other valuable bits while the summons eat what they like or trade with other summons who like the yield. Even get other summoners involved to facilitate trade and pan-universal cornucopia alliances.

Keep the summon military busy.
 
MadScientist said:
Or the QMs just say "yes, the pangolins came up with a working solution, and the Nara gave you a proof that it worked, and the proof was verified, and no, Hazou didn't understand it, and no it will never be discussed explicitly on-screen".
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I don't think it works quite that way, giving the premises of this quest.

A social system that works would need to be understandable by us mere mortals.
 
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