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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
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[X] Action Plan: Don't Frivolously Precommit
Look its not gonna happen ok? Guarantee we get the chapter and Hazo is like "I will travel back in time... now" and nothing happens. If we were going to time travel we'd just show up at the BOTG or such.
Also I kinda don't want to commit to researching this rune. We have many pressing problems that have to be solved via rune.
Look its not gonna happen ok? Guarantee we get the chapter and Hazo is like "I will travel back in time... now" and nothing happens. If we were going to time travel we'd just show up at the BOTG or such.
Also I kinda don't want to commit to researching this rune. We have many pressing problems that have to be solved via rune.
Iris-Iven-Ibis
Interested-Idiot-Immortal
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[X] Action Plan: Precommitting is the Winning Plan
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
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- United States
If that happens I'm fine with it. But we'd be silly not to check.
The thing is we can check after we do other important things we'd also be silly not to do.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
The alternate plan does none of that, though. And also it's two lines and a mental motion more than something that takes time at all.
With respect, from my perspective it seems like your objection is more in the direction of not wanting this to happen, which is fair, than in the direction of thinking it is a bad use of time, which seems ill-founded as an objection.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
[X] Action Plan: Precommitting is the Winning Plan
- I am voting for it solely because it says it is the winning plan in the title.
- By doing so, I make this plan's victory a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- By causing a self-fulfilling prophecy into existence and making it come to pass, I increase the amount of self-fulfilling prophecies in our causal surroundings, and therefore I shorten the code that any efficient embedded agent would assign to the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy (as follows from the source coding theorem).
- For fairly clear reasons, efficient embedded agents are set up in a way such that the difficulty of recalling a concept is controlled by the length of the internal code assigned to it: if something happens around you often, it makes sense to make it easy to recall.
- Since the computational substrate on which the MfD universe is run consists of minds of approximate efficient agents, the likelihood of specific events happening in it is determined by how easily its simulators are able to conceive of the relevant event.
- Thus, the more often self-fulfilling prophecies happen around MfD's simulators, the more likely the simulators are to put them into the story.
- Thus, my voting for this plan because it said it will win directly increases not only the probability that it will win, but also the probability that it will work as intended.
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More A than B, that's fair, but to be clear you're overlooking OOC time and spoons. If our ability to make Hazo investigate stuff wasn't limited by scene space and QM spoons I'd be much more enthusiastic about this and a variety of other fringe theories, especially my own.
my objection is that binding ourselves to making time travel our #1 priority is not a free action. that's incredibly costly. We have other important projects/goals, including necromancy.
And if we precommit, then just giggle and move on and don't follow through on our commitment at all, we will have importantly damaged Hazou's ability to precommit.
Hazou consistently taking precommitment really seriously has historically been our defense against social-specs and coercion. This is a real cost.
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Can't use XP if we're dead, but that would be glorious
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
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- United States
While true -- I do not think that time travel, as a means of combat effectiveness, aside from strategic-level uses like we're thinking here in particular, are a dead-end, so I have little problem with pursuing it. Additionally, the plan does not say to make it our #1 priority. Just to some day work as hard as we can on it, which is... a reasonable precommitment to make, in my opinion? What about it seems unreasonable to you?
Erm. I don't think we should, actually, be constraining our solution space for the Problems Of This Quest to Solve by QM spooncount -- that strikes me as something they would prefer we not do, even if it inconvenient for them. (They are welcome to correct me, of course!) And, having said that...
How do you envision time travel being limited by QM spoons?
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[X] Action Plan: Don't Frivolously Precommit
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Well, it requires them to figure out how time travel works for one. And making a good time travel system is notoriously difficult. And then from that point on, since time travel was demonstrated once, it is now always a option. They must always consider the possibility of time travel happening at any given time, without prior warning or input on our part, because time travel.
Actually, even beyond that, I'd argue that time travel like this is kinda hard unsimulationist, and so can't be in the quest by default. What happens if Future Hazo steps out of a portal in front of us and hands us the plans to a rift opener seal, and then the next day on the run over to the Rift we trip over a chakra bear and die? Or we make a plan that gets us killed? Where is future Hazo? How did that happen?
If Future Hazo exists at all, that's a ironclad guarantee that our actions only partially affect the future. Our success is guaranteed, not dictated by how well we plan. If we could change the future into anything else, then it wasn't Future Hazo, it was Interdimensional Hazo.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I, uh, don't really see creating the time travel system to be especially problematic. As an example, that is my usual belief as to how it works when mentioned in any story:
Time travel backward cannot change the past. Attempts to do so will, at best, result in you either fulfilling the event you intended to change or being prevented from doing so. This is only relevant when actively trying to change an even that you know happened -- acting in the past, outside of that, creates the extant-timeline. Nonetheless, clever action can do something that looks similar to first approximation -- for instance, time-travelling-Hazou might join the yakuza and make sure his dad survived the fight that he was 'killed' in and make sure word of that doesn't get out until after present-time. Stable time loops also function perfectly well in this system, even when interacting with things in the past, such as the aforementioned idea. Time traveling forward at a speed faster than one second per second is not possible.
However, there are a number of ways that this could be done that do not run into any of those problems. If, for instance, you may only time travel backward within the area of a rune's effects for a set duration and cannot leave that area, say. This would essentially turn it into a fancy hyperbolic time chamber.
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I disagree, separately, with your arguments as regards simulationism. It is correct that someone resembling Hazou has to live long enough to research (or use someone else's means of) time travel and send it back to his past self. This does not preclude dying (in a world where necromancy is on the radar) or being given something by an agent that disguised themselves as him after reading his mind, or being genjutsued to be convinced of this having happened. In the case where it actually is Hazou: All we know is that at some point in the future, someone with continuity with Hazou came back to give him his goody pack.
This plan doesn't do that. Don't know where this meme came from. It ain't true.
How is this binding ourselves to making time travel our #1 priority?
A reasonable reading of this is that after we figure out Necromancy we invent time travel and then come back to this moment to help Past-Hazou.
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Actually, the QMs have already had that conversation. This precommitment plan started floating around the thread years ago.
That's one model of time travel, true, but there are others. A simple one is the [layman's version of the] Many Worlds hypothesis: the cosmos contains an infinite number of universes where all possible choices have been made. Time travel backwards is impossible *in your own universe*, but it's possible to jump sideways to a universe that is identical to a past instant of your own universe. Your actions in that universe will cause it to progress differently so you can cause what look like changes to your own past.
The hard part comes when you want to travel back to whence you came; there's a few ways to handle that. (Note: in the following, "at the point when you left" and similar phrases can have an implied "or one Planck time after" in order to resolve some concerns.) Some of the options include:
- You return to your own universe at the point from which you left. So far as you can tell, nothing has changed and your trip to "the past" had no effect.
- Time progresses at the same rate in all universes, so if you spend N hours in another universe then you return to your own universe N hours after you left. There will be changes but they will not be due to anything you did in the other universe.
- When you "travel forward" N hours what you are actually doing is converting yourself to a non-conscious, non-aging form and then changing back after N hours with negligible losses. Possibly this can include shifting to an alternate universe in the process so that you return to a continuity based on a different past than the one you inhabitated at the moment you traveled.
- When you "travel forward" you simply convert to energy and are lost.
[X] Action Plan: Don't Frivolously Precommit
I hadn't paid attention to that, but it's actually really interesting. Probably it's the clan they were after, not the location, since the dragons that emerged after they were kvthss didn't go that direction, otherwise I'd say to go there again and investigate... Maybe we could ask around about the Archaeopteryxs more at some point, see if we can figure out why.
Not Stompy, but weighing in anyways, I find Reverse Dampener Seals very promising, but Infinite-Element seals seem underspecified for attempting a difficult check
I hadn't paid attention to that, but it's actually really interesting. Probably it's the clan they were after, not the location, since the dragons that emerged after they were kvthss didn't go that direction, otherwise I'd say to go there again and investigate... Maybe we could ask around about the Archaeopteryxs more at some point, see if we can figure out why.
Not Stompy, but weighing in anyways, I find Reverse Dampener Seals very promising, but Infinite-Element seals seem underspecified for attempting a difficult check
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Time travel can also be made more difficult for no reason by applying Homestuck rules. It has the known side-effect of making people start by saying "wait, it's not that hard" and end by losing their grip on sanity. It's great (but not a good idea).
Reverse Dampaners seem cool. I'll try to stuff them in before voting closes.
The other two are weird/esoteric enough that I'm not feeling it rn. Maybe if we had a better idea of what we were willing to work on in Oro's basement?
I doubt we'll ever get Dimensional Fortification runes as specified since they would trivialize sealing failures, but getting something to reduce the severity of sealing failures by some amount seems prudent.
And the Infinite-Element seals just seem underspecified. I don't think your proposal actually says what these ones are supposed to do.
Reverse Dampeners
Paper seal
A seal that decreases the inertia of the thing its applied to - the opposite of a Dampener. The reduction in inertia is quite significant and can be set during scribing. Can be applied to living things.
Paper seal
A seal that decreases the inertia of the thing its applied to - the opposite of a Dampener. The reduction in inertia is quite significant and can be set during scribing. Can be applied to living things.
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IMO if something has to be dropped, one of the strobe variations would make sense, since having either reduces the marginal value of getting the other. The next-lowest priority in my mind is the severing field, since skyslicers fill the same niche, if in a much more limited fashion.
Not sure if this matches CaramilkThief's intent, but as a concrete suggestion, perhaps a "N-seal barrier" based on the five-seal barrier, where the strength just scales with the number of active seal components without a hard upper limit of five.
Do we know if dampeners can be applied to living things, for that matter? Wouldn't be surprised if that part was very hard and the rest very easy.
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Almost certainly not. Most seals like that work on "objects" which is shorthand for "discrete, contiguous, non-chakra containing" so adding the functionality of application to living things is necessary to do what @CaramilkThief wants the seal to do.
Nah it's two words, it's already done.
Sure, but 5SB is already inviolable, what's the point? Also there are stiff limitations on seal placement with the 5SB and I don't know what he wants to do with those.
I am not going to spend a prep day on something that's a proof of concept for a novel seal that is worse than the original.
Networking explosives? Now you're talking. I'd still rather do Explosives 2.0 first though.
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Like with explosives that can be delivered with the ranged weapons skill or use a fixed TN, defensive perimeter seals like LBF can either be used in tandem with the trapmaking skill or set a static TN.
The current amount of information Hazou receives is appropriate. Perhaps if he were a little more skilled in sealing, he'd be able to differentiate these seals that are far beyond what ordinary sealmasters would dare reach.
You cannot imagine the extent of the smile on my face as I invite you to Try It And Find Out.
That's just a name change in the system translation, I think, no content change.
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I know nothing about Homestuck except that it was mixed-media, very long, and involved trolls with weird relationship terms.