Inner Peace (Through Superior Firepower) – Episode 008

[ParsonIsOP]

At every moment in time in Erfworld, the world is rolling a dice for every action that is occurring at that moment, all at once, and dolling out the results to everyone in the universe.

Sorry, but no dice. (pun intended)

There has been no in comic proof at all that there is any behind the scene dice rolling in Erfworld at all. In fact for human actions, Clay flat out said that dice do not determine a persons actions. A persons actions is translated into a dice roll, (the inverse of a game.)

here are some quotes
______________
Something about it struck Wanda as terribly wrong. “The Titans...play dice? And we must do what the dice say? We flourish or perish at random?”

Clay was shaking his head. “No, no...I think it’s the opposite.”
------
Clay - - In real life, you are real, but the dice are imaginary. The dice that describe your choices.
_____________

Mathamanacy in Erfworld would be like watching football in real life, looking at how good the players did with every move, and then determining what their dice rolling would have been if it was a role playing game. Then it turns all of that into statistical probabilities . 'Dice' is a theoritectical word in Erfworld, used to put numbers behind peoples actions.

The word Luckamancy is a misleading term. It causes a person to make better reflexive choices, and that is all. It is the real world equivalent of giving someone Ritalin, or some mind enhancment drug. A person boosted would attack better because of it, and defend better because of it. But it does not cause the envirnoment to go their way, or anything like that. The spell does seem to come at the cost of causing those around the boosted person of becoming less good at intuitive decisions. Luckamancers do not understand the mechanics of their spells, so they do not know why.

Well to put it another way, if you were to mathematically model two people swordfighting, the models to predict the probable outcome would be so complex as to be impossible to achieve. Never mind that even if you did, it'd probably be too specific to generalize to other people under other conditions.

In Erfworld, math for that sort of thing is easy because the "natural magic" of the setting just feeds neat integers into your brain that accurately models everybody's capabilities. Likewise, it's absurdly easy to model complex war scenarios with dice. And all this before we even consider that Mathamancers might have idiot-savant type capabilities that does the calculations and collates all the data for them at the expenditure of Juice.

What Clay is also saying is that he is rearranging events.

That said, kiyote is using dice here as an explanatory abstraction the same way that Clay is.

[kiyote]

At every moment in time in Erfworld, the world is rolling a dice for every action that is occurring at that moment, all at once, and dolling out the results to everyone in the universe.

Sorry, but no dice. (pun intended)

There has been no in comic proof at all that there is any behind the scene dice rolling in Erfworld at all. In fact for human actions, Clay flat out said that dice do not determine a persons actions. A persons actions is translated into a dice roll, (the inverse of a game.)

here are some quotes
______________
Something about it struck Wanda as terribly wrong. “The Titans...play dice? And we must do what the dice say? We flourish or perish at random?”

Clay was shaking his head. “No, no...I think it’s the opposite.”
------
Clay - - In real life, you are real, but the dice are imaginary. The dice that describe your choices.
_____________

Mathamanacy in Erfworld would be like watching football in real life, looking at how good the players did with every move, and then determining what their dice rolling would have been if it was a role playing game. Then it turns all of that into statistical probabilities . 'Dice' is a theoritectical word in Erfworld, used to put numbers behind peoples actions.

The word Luckamancy is a misleading term. It causes a person to make better reflexive choices, and that is all. It is the real world equivalent of giving someone Ritalin, or some mind enhancment drug. A person boosted would attack better because of it, and defend better because of it. But it does not cause the envirnoment to go their way, or anything like that. The spell does seem to come at the cost of causing those around the boosted person of becoming less good at intuitive decisions. Luckamancers do not understand the mechanics of their spells, so they do not know why.

When you play a table top RPG, like Dungeons and Dragons, you have control over the moves you make, but you don't have full control over the outcome of the moves, a lot of which is left up to chance. I can pick the perfect move that would destroy the enemy, but if I botch the attack roll, it won't mean anything, and if I crit a weak move, it can potentially do a lot of damage, but that part is outside my control.

In this case, the actions of the warlord are still his, as are his attackers. It's just when buffed by luckamancy, those moves are always at the height of their effectiveness, while the attacker's are at the weakest. A desperate kick happens to hit the perfect place to break an enemy's kneecap, while a crit arrow glazes off a rock to fall helplessly are all examples .

And there may or may not be a titan rolling the luck dies, but the mechanics of Erfworld make it work functionally the same as if it were, so it makes a good mental analogy for the luckamancer discipline's view of the world.

[Sir_Dr_D]

Actually, I was just about to post back to say that after carefully rereading updates 7 and 8, I now agree with you guys. How you interpret those updates, depends on which sentences you pay attention to. And actually the following sentence means a lot. "I boosted his roll to a 4! I changed his odds, chose a way to describe the outcome of his choices" So the outcome of the choice changed, and not the actual choice.

I now see it like this:

Under normal circumstances the persons theoretical "roll" does represent their choices. With choice meaning small decisions in how they attack. Parry. countstrike, slice, as in Clays example.1's mean poor choices, 4 mean good choices. In this case 4 does not mean they got lucky, but just that they had a good atack.

But with luckamancy in the mix, it would seem as if some unseen force interferred with what would have normally happened. So that bad choice represented by a one, suddenly works as if it was 4. But the choice iteself did not change. Or something could go wrong, and that 4 doesn't have the effect that it should. This is exactly what happened in that Artemis battle.

[BLANDCorporatio]

No, I don't think that model is backed by Delhpie's response to Wanda's questions. She couldn't answer if an attack on airspace could be defended. All she could do was say that airspace would be attacked... eventually. She didn't even get when. Predictamancy does not appear to be that specific.

Be that as it may, I was answering a question from name lips that went: "if a Predictamancer could foresee the outcome of a coin toss, is that coin toss still random?". For the sake of providing an answer, "for argument's sake", it makes sense to grapple with the scenario that the question puts forth, and accept the assumption that Predictamancy is specific.

Incidentally, Bland, the policy of the Bayesian Conspiracy on the treatment of Frequentists is not murder.

Oh shit. It's even worse isn't it?

[drachefly]

Only if you consider conversion worse than death.

[BLANDCorporatio]

Only if you consider conversion worse than death.

So, you're saying resistence is futile? I think not.

[kiyote]

Actually, I was just about to post back to say that after carefully rereading updates 7 and 8, I now agree with you guys. How you interpret those updates, depends on which sentences you pay attention to. And actually the following sentence means a lot. "I boosted his roll to a 4! I changed his odds, chose a way to describe the outcome of his choices" So the outcome of the choice changed, and not the actual choice.

I now see it like this:

Under normal circumstances the persons theoretical "roll" does represent their choices. With choice meaning small decisions in how they attack. Parry. countstrike, slice, as in Clays example.1's mean poor choices, 4 mean good choices. In this case 4 does not mean they got lucky, but just that they had a good atack.

But with luckamancy in the mix, it would seem as if some unseen force interferred with what would have normally happened. So that bad choice represented by a one, suddenly works as if it was 4. But the choice iteself did not change. Or something could go wrong, and that 4 doesn't have the effect that it should. This is exactly what happened in that Artemis battle.

Exactly. There's a random element to every action in Erfworld, as there is in Stupidworld. If you have a luckamancy boost, that random value becomes a controlled high value (at the cost of someone else's high value). Most likely, though, a correct choice with a luckamancy boost would be more effective than an incorrect choice, though the incorrect choice would still have an effect.

[drachefly]

Only if you consider conversion worse than death.

So, you're saying resistence is futile? I think not.

Before checking the link, I would like to point out that I was speaking of policies... as such, 'attempted' should be assumed to be prepended, and thus no claim was made on the futility of such resistance.

[raphfrk]

In game terms, I think it should work like this: Mathemancers should be able to tell you the odds, and tell you after the fact if Luckmancy was used to skew the odds. (This is detecting out of order rolls, or streaks, or whatever.) Depending how good they are, they might be able to do this real time, or it they're not so good possibly only after a battle was finished.

A really good Mathemancer should be able to pick up on enemy Luckmancy during a fight and tell their Overlord "Oh, they're using Luckmancy here to boost, those rolls are way messed up. Let's disengage from that battle and play defense to limit our loses. Over here now, their Luckmancy is costing them, so let's push ahead and cause some damage." This might require a level 12 master class Mathemancer, or it might require something a lot less, depending on how Rob sees his world.

Parson's bracer is seen as almost a Tool, since it can do mathemancy so effectively. Charlie calls it an artefact.

It would be interesting if mathemancers were able to do real-time calculations. Is knowledge of the underlying mechanics of Erfworld fundamental to mathemancers. Would they be more like physicists (but without needing the experimental side of things) than mathematicians.

For mathemancy to work at range, they would need lookamancy. Maybe mathemancers are front line troops for that reason.

It would be possible to make them pretty weak if they can only do calculations after the fact. They would also need some mechanism to collect data for the initial conditions of their models.

[gameboy1234]

Parson's bracer is basically where I got the idea. I believe he does "real time calculations" several times during Jetstone's assault on GK back in book 1, all on one side's turn.

[Housellama]

Exactly. There's a random element to every action in Erfworld, as there is in Stupidworld. If you have a luckamancy boost, that random value becomes a controlled high value (at the cost of someone else's high value). Most likely, though, a correct choice with a luckamancy boost would be more effective than an incorrect choice, though the incorrect choice would still have an effect.

This is precisely it. Choices are choices, but there's still chaos and random events and the ever popular "hidden variables" that factor into the result of every choice. Let's say you're picking a lock, or even more simply turning a lock with a key. Even if you have exactly the right key in exactly the right lock (ie, exactly the right choice for exactly the right situation), there's still a chance of failure, as anyone who has ever broken a key off in a lock can tell you. Things like metal fatigue, air currents, random vibrations or any number of other circumstances can change a success into a failure and vice versa.

That's what Luckamancy manipulates. It doesn't make your choices better or worse. It makes your choices more or less effective.

[Housellama]

Okay, so I get that Luckamancy is just mathematical slight of hand. That's how it doesn't mess up Mathamancy, because all the Numbers are still there, just rearranged. Everything is preserved, just in a different place. Mathamancy accounts for Luckamancy because it's most likely a probabilistic system, telling what could happen and might happen, rather than what will happen. Luckamancy just moves things down to the edges of the bell curve by swapping Numbers.

But is Mathamancy infallible? What about Predictamancy? Can predictions be changed? Gah. Need more information on those two disciplines.

[Kreistor]

Okay, so I get that Luckamancy is just mathematical slight of hand. That's how it doesn't mess up Mathamancy, because all the Numbers are still there, just rearranged. Everything is preserved, just in a different place. Mathamancy accounts for Luckamancy because it's most likely a probabilistic system, telling what could happen and might happen, rather than what will happen. Luckamancy just moves things down to the edges of the bell curve by swapping Numbers.

But is Mathamancy infallible? What about Predictamancy? Can predictions be changed? Gah. Need more information on those two disciplines.

Mathemancy is about probabilities. When you have a two outcome event with a 17% chance of one and 83% of the other, and the lower probability result happens, no one can tell you that it was really 25%/75%.

So, no, Mathemancy can never be right or wrong because it does not deal in absolutes, and so cannot be infallible.

Since Predictamancers whose Sides fall are considered failures, then you must be able to change the future that Predicts a Side's fall, so yes, it is not infallible.

[BLANDCorporatio]

Mathemancy is about probabilities. When you have a two outcome event with a 17% chance of one and 83% of the other, and the lower probability result happens, no one can tell you that it was really 25%/75%.

For one single event, that's true. What a Mathamancer might do, in the case where the same (type of) event happens several times is to check whether indeed the probability of the various outcomes is as expected. "Our Pikers have 60% odds of survival", a Mathamancer may declare. Somehow, 50% survive. Depending on how many pikers there were to begin with, a Mathamancer may calculate the odds of this happening, assuming the chances of an individual Piker were indeed 60%.

[Kreistor]

Mathemancy is about probabilities. When you have a two outcome event with a 17% chance of one and 83% of the other, and the lower probability result happens, no one can tell you that it was really 25%/75%.

For one single event, that's true. What a Mathamancer might do, in the case where the same (type of) event happens several times is to check whether indeed the probability of the various outcomes is as expected. "Our Pikers have 60% odds of survival", a Mathamancer may declare. Somehow, 50% survive. Depending on how many pikers there were to begin with, a Mathamancer may calculate the odds of this happening, assuming the chances of an individual Piker were indeed 60%.

The thing is, he doesn't... calculate, that is. He uses magic. The magic does that work... well, one would hope that somewhere magic comes into play. If he gets the wrong answer, it's probably because someone asked the wrong question.

But even if he reports a 60% survival rate, but 50% die, that is not outside the realms of normal statistical results. There is a finite chance of 50% surviving or 30%, so any result is not wrong because even 100% survival is not impossible (though highly improbable). That's where a lot of people go wrong with statistical analysis. They think it's about absolutes like other branches of math, but it simply is not. It deals with possibles, not inevitables.

[Housellama]

Mathemancy is about probabilities. When you have a two outcome event with a 17% chance of one and 83% of the other, and the lower probability result happens, no one can tell you that it was really 25%/75%.

For one single event, that's true. What a Mathamancer might do, in the case where the same (type of) event happens several times is to check whether indeed the probability of the various outcomes is as expected. "Our Pikers have 60% odds of survival", a Mathamancer may declare. Somehow, 50% survive. Depending on how many pikers there were to begin with, a Mathamancer may calculate the odds of this happening, assuming the chances of an individual Piker were indeed 60%.

The thing is, he doesn't... calculate, that is. He uses magic. The magic does that work... well, one would hope that somewhere magic comes into play. If he gets the wrong answer, it's probably because someone asked the wrong question.

But even if he reports a 60% survival rate, but 50% die, that is not outside the realms of normal statistical results. There is a finite chance of 50% surviving or 30%, so any result is not wrong because even 100% survival is not impossible (though highly improbable). That's where a lot of people go wrong with statistical analysis. They think it's about absolutes like other branches of math, but it simply is not. It deals with possibles, not inevitables.

Actually, that's the problem. We don't KNOW what Mathamancers do. We don't have enough information. What we know is what Parson does. Parson is not a Mathamancer. Parson has an artifact. He 'cheats', using something that is created outside the agency of man. We have yet to find out any information about how the actual magic of Mathamancy as used by Erfworlders themselves work. So we have no idea what actually goes on when an Erfworlder does Mathamancy.

That's why I said it's most likely a probabilistic system. We don't actually know. Is it possible for Mathamancy to predict something that has a zero probability? We don't know. We know virtually nothing about actual Mathamancy. Don't confuse what Parson does with what a Mathamancer does. Similar effect does not equal similar cause.

As for Predictamancy, we know boop-all about it as far as actual solid information. Everything we say is speculation because we have yet to see a Predictamancer that is a reliable source. Every single one of them we have encountered in the story so far is a shifty, untrustworthy little git.