We want Madoka to feel useful...
Sabrinaaaaa!
On the other hand, this is kind of why we're here...
Taking after our mother.
Puella Magi Adfligo Systema
- Thread starter Firnagzen
- Start date
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- Tags
- puella magi adfligo systema puella magi madoka magica be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist bad decisions dating mami tomoe (tomoe mami) diabolical laughter friendship is the best ship handholding identity crises microwaving tea gets you put in the bad place names are important the body is the fursona of the soul this is not the baked goods thread we don't talk about rionna what could possibly go wrong? who in the world is azure sanfrancisco?
Taking after our mother.
To be fair they were working with a seriously unknown situation. Unknown potential for gain with unknown levels of risk. In such a situation there isn't really a rational way, as far as I know of anyway, to determine whether or not to take the chance.
My bet for the Incubators taking the chance is that at the end of Episode 13 (I haven't actually seen the movies yet...) Kyubey seemed rather dissatisfied with the demon hunting system. It's possible that it wasn't actually generating enough grief to meet their needs. Which would make taking an unknown risk for the chance at any kind of gain understandable.
What I suspect is that if we can arrange a known set of risks and rewards and balance them such that the rational action is to avoid upsetting the existing system we can force the Incubators into doing what we want.
Cannongerbil
I came here to nep at you
- Location
- Soviet Lunar Base
Yeah, but they did abandon the earth after Homura did her goddess ascension thing. Well, they tried to, at any rate. Do bear in mind that they had no idea that was even possible before the experiment. Their worst case scenario was "Nothing happens, experiment fails", not "Create reality warping goddess opposed to their species". If they were given advanced warning that the latter was a possible outcome it most likely would've changed their risk assessment.
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If...
But that was an extreme, out of nowhere reaction from what'd been a very useful experiment up to that point, as you pointed out, and while it's nice that their self preservation kicked in that late in the game...I don't see us successfully manipulating the collective older than the human race that way without something at least as scary on hand.
Except that talking to the bunnycat is a sucker's bet because it can and will ask questions we SHOULDN'T answer- and is trying to get us killed. Look at what happened with Homura. It gathered information, drew conclusions, and manipulated events based on that so she'd fail, as part of its larger goal to get a Madoka contract.
Remember, the bunnycat wants us dead, at least for the near future. Talking to him and answering his questions is just giving him ammunition to use against us.
Crasian01
Insane Incubator
You're not wrong, but that's a question of connotation versus denotation. The motivation of an actor is important for the sake of dealing with them. We can't treat Kyubey the same way we treat Mao, because Kyubey doesn't get a boner when he sees he wields ultimate power over something.
----
@Ugolino
For now. The key is that this is true for now. We need to keep an open mind in case things change later.
Also mobile typing is suffering good God.
Gadjo
Doka
So, I see this is getting a little heated (may want to calm down after Firn posted that bulletin) so let's just take a moment to understand each side's position (at least as far as I see it)
1. Full opposition: oppose the incubators at every turn, and refuse to work with or talk to them under all but the most extenuating circumstances.
Pros: difficult to be tricked by the incubators, don't have to work with group of mass-murdering psychopaths.
Cons: All out war likely untenable with the Incubators, since they can just go home and prep whatever they like while we sit on our hands and wait. No intel from incubators
2. Long-term cooperation: Work with incubator intel to create a system so efficient that they'd abandon the current one.
Pros: Incubator knowledge is quite tempting to work with, no wars, and possible new age for humanity.
Cons: Incubators cannot be trusted so betrayal at some point is likely unless the system is truly perfect, working with incubators provides more opportunities to be tricked. Very large amount of research likely needed to form new system
3. Short-term cooperation, followed by betrayal: Work with the incubators to weasel out as much intel as possible without showing too much of our hand, betray when enough intel is gathered.
Pros: Incubator knowledge, eventual defeat of the incubators on earth. Possible new age for humanity if enough intel is gathered
Cons: working with incubators means we can be tricked. Nature of incubators means that all intel will need to be tested later, requiring a decent amount of research. Possible betrayal backfire.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what I'm seeing. It looks like all sides are entrenched for the moment, so let's get back to the present and come back to this later, hm?
[]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[]Madoka? You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
This vote looks about right for now. Any ideas?
1. Full opposition: oppose the incubators at every turn, and refuse to work with or talk to them under all but the most extenuating circumstances.
Pros: difficult to be tricked by the incubators, don't have to work with group of mass-murdering psychopaths.
Cons: All out war likely untenable with the Incubators, since they can just go home and prep whatever they like while we sit on our hands and wait. No intel from incubators
2. Long-term cooperation: Work with incubator intel to create a system so efficient that they'd abandon the current one.
Pros: Incubator knowledge is quite tempting to work with, no wars, and possible new age for humanity.
Cons: Incubators cannot be trusted so betrayal at some point is likely unless the system is truly perfect, working with incubators provides more opportunities to be tricked. Very large amount of research likely needed to form new system
3. Short-term cooperation, followed by betrayal: Work with the incubators to weasel out as much intel as possible without showing too much of our hand, betray when enough intel is gathered.
Pros: Incubator knowledge, eventual defeat of the incubators on earth. Possible new age for humanity if enough intel is gathered
Cons: working with incubators means we can be tricked. Nature of incubators means that all intel will need to be tested later, requiring a decent amount of research. Possible betrayal backfire.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what I'm seeing. It looks like all sides are entrenched for the moment, so let's get back to the present and come back to this later, hm?
[]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[]Madoka? You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
This vote looks about right for now. Any ideas?
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Cons of the cooperation include needing to have something on hand as an incentive for them to go along with said system at all, but other than that, looks about right.
...Forgot to spell out that Madoka'd be via telepathy too.
[]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
[]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
1. No, actually, that's false. What we need is to be able to prove that there isn't a more efficient method than our own that's sustainable within a closed system. Sort of like thermodynamics. (Arguments against unsustainable methods are more complicated than I want to get into here.)
2. If his assertion about being unable to lie is true, then that is trivial to account for.
3. They did not kick Kyuubey out. He was there the entire time, observing them; they simply couldn't see him. However, "magic bullshit" is a potential solution to a great many things — including enforcement of the cooperation, for that matter.
4. I'm not trying to comfort you. I'm trying to make sure your arguments are well-formed. If you base your reasoning on a faulty premise, you tend to get faulty conclusions.
5. He is well known to be averse to volunteering useful information. He has always been quite candid when answering direct questions.
6. And the exact same could be said about any solution that aims to kick them off the planet or whatever. They designed tech to pull someone's soul out of their body. They designed tech to allow them to observe the actions of a goddess, and fully expected that the provided information would allow them to design tech to control the goddess herself. The assumption that we could design anything that they could not work around if given proper motivation seems laughably arrogant. (Not that magic bullshit might not be able to pull it off, but there will inevitably be consequences, and you better be real sure you didn't leave any loopholes.)
1. Unless we have unlimited power, the nature of the Incubators mean that they can and WILL try and go for the bigger payoff if it even seems theoretically possible. That's one of my main objections to Plan 'Hug the QB'.
2. I really, really don't place much stock in his 'can't lie' given lies of omission and the need to out-think Kyubey for this to work. It's many things, but it's not trivial.
3.Okay, they didn't kick him out. Point retracted. Even so, that's a starting point, and we can look into magic bullshit.
4. He'd still want us DEAD. That is not a workable position for a potential ally.
5. When said answers are phrased to benefit him, or as part of his goals. Also, there's no guarantee that said answers are accurate.
6. If we kick them off and make the price of breaking in sufficiently high? We can. They're only here for the energy, so we can make it more trouble than its worth to break in. And even in that case? It's far, far preferable to try a difficult solution to get rid of them for good than one where we have FAR less control over how things turn out and a lot more reason to expect things to go belly-up when our 'partner' finds it more profitable to backstab us.
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CompassJimbo
Where’s Your North?
- Location
- The former Rubber Capital of the World
[X] Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[X]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[X]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[X]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
[X]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[X]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[X]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
Cannongerbil
I came here to nep at you
- Location
- Soviet Lunar Base
You're conflating the means and the ends again, Ugo. Seriously, take a step back and think about why Kyubey would want us dead.
Uh, you do realize that this is impossible, right? Earth is functionally a perpetual energy generator, you cannot make it prohibitively expensive to gain access to a perpetual motion machine, by sheer virtue of it being a perpetual motion machine.
Gadjo
Doka
Pack it in, you guys. You're just going back and forth with "the incubators can never be trusted" and "we can't fight the incubators, we have to work with them". Time is likely the only thing that'll change either position on that, and the current vote is far away from that situation.
[X]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[X]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[X]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[X]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
Shall we add in the "tell Mami that we're still hiding things from her" bit to this vote, or do it next update?
[X]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[X]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[X]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[X]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
Shall we add in the "tell Mami that we're still hiding things from her" bit to this vote, or do it next update?
Muramasa
Best Girl
Maybe next update. Mami's still reeling from the last bomb.
[X]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[X]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[X]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[X]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
[X]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[X]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[X]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[X]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
- Location
- spinning
It does look a bit short, and we did promise that we'd talk yesterday. I'm for it, but I'd rather try to get more Homura in, because Mami can be done after they've left.
I'm well aware of why, but his motivation for his goals doesn't change that it'll remain that way unless we have a completely functional system to show him that makes witchbombing unambiguously obsolete. Which we don't have and are unlikely to discover until after extensive research into the soul/reversing witchification, making the suggestion of allying with the Incubator premature at best on top of all the other issues.
We're not their only perpetual motion machine. Alien magical girls exist, and it's implied in the series itself. Kyubey was willing to abandon Earth given a certain quota, so the Incubators do have a 'price' at which Earth isn't worth the cost-benefit.
[X]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[X]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[X]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[X]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
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Maybe later, but no reason to shoehorn it into this vote?
Two coments.
First, if we want to have a conversation with Kyubey and reduce the risk, we can attempt that precog exploit. Have Oriko observe a future conversation that may or may not happen and relay that info to the past. We can simply repeat things out loud if it's telepathic, to pre-empt that concern.
Second, there's a plethora of information already available, both in the series and in this very quest, about Kyubey and the Incubators. Enough that I can think of one viable solution off hand. I would not get so wrapped up in game theory and payoff matrices, personally.
First, if we want to have a conversation with Kyubey and reduce the risk, we can attempt that precog exploit. Have Oriko observe a future conversation that may or may not happen and relay that info to the past. We can simply repeat things out loud if it's telepathic, to pre-empt that concern.
Second, there's a plethora of information already available, both in the series and in this very quest, about Kyubey and the Incubators. Enough that I can think of one viable solution off hand. I would not get so wrapped up in game theory and payoff matrices, personally.
moonstne
[x] Bandwagon
[X]Change the subject. Have they got any plans for the next few days? Any ideas for things to do?
[X]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[X]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[X]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
[X]How about an amusement park? Maybe bringing Nagisa along?
[X]Telepathy Homura. Does she want to talk later? She's walking Madoka home, right? She should talk to her.
[X]Telepathy Madoka. You're helping more than you know, just by being our friend. Talk to Homura, okay?
You seem to be forgetting what the "limits of thermodynamics" means. The Incubators may have broken the laws of thermodynamics with gaining access to magic, but the system itself is still going to be constrained by similar boundaries, because the system is not defined by magic. Unlimited power means breaking the system in the same way that the Incubators broke the laws of physics.
And now taking a slight detour, based on the above rabbit trail and some of its implications:
So, some of you may have stumbled on the population dynamics page on the wiki, where it shows that the magical girl/witch populations seem inherently unstable.
I tried plugging some stuff in and revising the formulas and found that it's quite easy to have a stable population. The only thing that really breaks it is having a familiar growth rate that's too high (generally, over 1.0 familiars-turned-witches generated per witch per day).
Code:
// BASIC MAGICAL GIRL-WITCHES MODEL
// This file has been produced for Scilab 5.5.1
//
// If you want to modify the constants, please bear these restrictions in mind:
// -C should be an integer
// -D, Ws, We, F, H, and Hb should be values in [0,1]
C = 100; // Amount of Magical Girls contracted by Kyubey, per day
D = 0.01; // Proportion of girls that die fighting a witch, on a per-fight basis.
Ws = 0.50; // Proportion of girls becoming witches due to starvation, per Days/2 increment
We = 0.003; // Proportion of girls becoming witches due to emotional breakdown, per day
F = 0.25; // Proportion of familiars maturing into witches, per day
Days = 10 // Average rate of grief seed use, in days
Hb = 1.0/Days; // Minimum (base) hunting rate to survive
H = Hb // Actual hunting rate. Max of 2 hunts per day.
M(1) = 0; // Number of magical girls at first
W(1) = 0; // Number of witches at first
totalW = 0; // Total number of girls that became witches
totalF = 0; // Total number of familiars that upgrade to witches
steps = 1000; // Number of iterations for the simulation
for t=1:steps
H = max(Hb, min(W(t)/max(M(t),1), 2))
deltaM = C - D*min(H*M(t),W(t)) - Ws*max(M(t)*Hb-W(t), 0)/(Days/2) - We*M(t);
deltaW = min(F*W(t), 15*M(t)) + Ws*max(M(t)*Hb-W(t), 0)/(Days/2) + We*M(t) - (1-D)*min(H*M(t),W(t));
totalW = totalW + Ws*max(M(t)*Hb-W(t), 0)/(Days/2) + We*M(t)
totalF = totalF + min(F*W(t), 15*M(t))
M(t+1)=max(M(t)+deltaM, 0);
W(t+1)=max(W(t)+deltaW, 0);
end
title('Evolution of the Magical Girls population over time')
xlabel('time')
ylabel('number of magical girls/witches')
plot(M, 'g-')
plot(W, 'r-')
legend('Magical Girls', 'Witches')The step time interval is 1 day.
The contract rate (C) is the number of girls Kyuubey contracts with every day. This can be scaled up and down based on region of interest, and experimenting with sustainability within the human population.
Days is the number of days per grief seed use, on average, and influences the rate at which magical girls need to hunt witches.
The death rate (D) is the chance that a magical girl will die in a battle with a witch. I'd use a default of 2%, or one in fifty fights, which applies to each fight that occurs each day. Can drop this to 1% if it's assumed most girls join groups for safety.
Witchouts from starvation (Ws) is the rate at which girls become witches due to grief seed starvation. The baseline hunting rate is 1 hunt per Days days. Any magical girls that have a need to hunt, but don't have any witches to hunt (ie: hunters > witches available), have a chance of starving at the rate of Ws% per Days/2 (half a hunting increment). The current default is 50%.
Witchouts from emotional breakdown (We) is the rate at which girls become witches due to emotional breakdown, independent of anything else. It's given a default rate of 0.3%, which means a typical breakdown will take about 1 year. Dropping that to 6 months (such as from Kyuubey interference) notably drops the sustainable magical girl population (by about 20%), but does not significantly increase the number of witches per day (only increases by about 1%). Given the value of a large magical girl population in encouraging new recruits, there doesn't seem to be any real motivation for Kyuubey to interfere in this, as a general rule.
F is the familiar conversion rate. With a value of 0.25, it means that any given witch will have one of its familiars upgrade to a full witch every 4 days. The higher this rate, the larger the sustainable magical girl population, until it passes about 1.0 (essentially doubling the witch population every day), at which point the witch population becomes explosively uncontrollable. This is capped at a maximum of 15x the magical girl population, estimated based on the number of people each familiar needs to kill.
Hb is the base hunting rate. It's based on the average number of days it takes to use up one grief seed.
H is the current hunting rate. It varies between the base hunting rate and 2 hunts per day, depending on the ratio between the witch population and the magical girl population. This allows magical girls to vary their hunting rates depending on witch pressures.
Changes in the magical girl population per day:
1) Add new contractees
2) Subtract deaths from hunting
3) Subtract witchouts from starving (insufficient witches to meet the needs of the current magical girl population)
4) Subtract witchouts from emotional breakdown
Changes to the witch population per day:
1) Add new witches from familiar upgrades
2) Add new witches from starvations.
3) Add new witches from emotional breakdowns.
4) Subtract witches that are killed by hunting.
There's a fair amount of variation that can be done that affects the stable population values, but I don't see much justification for varying much off of what was given in the above explanations.
The general turnover rate (ie: average lifespan of a magical girl) is the stable magical girl population divided by the contract rate. With current parameters, that works out to a turnover rate of 85 days, or about 3 months. Dropping the hunting death rate from 2% to 1% (ie: banding together in groups) only increases the turnover rate to 86 days. Increasing the grief seed usage rate from 1 every 10 days to 1 every 7 days drops the turnover rate to just 50 days — less than two months — so 10 days (the average between Mami and the UG reported values) seems decently stable.
A few other tweaks can be made, but overall, 3 months seems to be the most stable and believable (based on parameter changes needed) average lifespan.
Interestingly, the stable witch population needed to support the magical girl population is remarkably low (partly because it needs to use the starving magical girl population to replenish the witch population). With 100 contractees per day, the stable magical girl population (using the above parameters) is 8615, while the witch population is just 133.
90% of all magical girls have been converted to witches after the population stabilizes (so 90,000 out of 100,000 for the 1000 day marker, with 100 contracted per day), and 30,000 familiars have converted to witches (representing another 120,000 to 150,000 deaths). 210 to 240 deaths per day, all told.
To keep that death rate unremarkable — roughly 1% of the overall death rate and birth rate — 8600 magical girls can be supported by a human population of 438 million, or about 1 magical girl per 50,000 people.
Scaling that to the world's population, that means a total number of about 138,000 magical girls in the world. To reach that level as a stable population, Kyuubey needs to contract about 1600 girls per day, giving a stable witch population of just 2133 worldwide.
Doubling that, to 1 girl per 25,000 and a 2% population death rate, just means doubling the contract rate, giving 276,000 total magical girls in the world. At that level, there are 2900 witchouts and 3900 grief seeds collected per day.
The main takeaway is that for every 1 magical girl that gets noticed and sticks around, there are probably about 9 that quickly fall. It also at least gives us a guess on the worldwide grief seed production, though we still don't know how valuable each grief seed and each witchout is.
This is what that graph looks like (nothing special; just noting that it stabilizes pretty quick):
Main conclusion is: The population dynamics of magical girls and witches is not unstable, as the wiki would lead you to believe. While we can't know what model Firn is using for his world, the above numbers are still pretty well within commonly reasoned estimates.
CompassJimbo
Where’s Your North?
- Location
- The former Rubber Capital of the World
This attitude is what allowed 4Chan to crack the witch runes. I'm kinda impressed, here.