12 KiB
[Q][BST] How would you exploit the world of Flatland?
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Author: u/Darth_Hobbes Ankh-Morpork Guild of Assassins*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2v4h8r/qbst_how_would_you_exploit_the_world_of_flatland/
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Score: 19
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Created: 2015-02-07T20:42:59
Post:
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a book from 1884 which depicts a two dimensional world inhabited by shapes. In flatland, women are lines and men are polygons. Rain falls from the north, fog is common, and paint is outlawed because it allows one to disguise oneself as a higher-sided shape. A more detailed synopsis of the setting can be found here, although the e-book is free and fairly short.
So, how could you munchkin this universe?
Round 1: You are a many-sided polygon in Flatland's upper class with some amount of affluence.
Round 2: You replace the book's protagonist, Square, and have the aid of a three-dimensional Sphere in your plans.
Comments:
u/Muskwalker [+14] (4 hours later)
Flatland society is actually pretty horrible — at the level of advancement where the book is written especially. There'd be lots of things you'd want to improve, but I don't know if anything is particularly munchkinable... at least from inside.
The sphere, of course, can enter any locked vault, can be incredibly useful for surveillance using the third dimension, can read people's minds, can mirror the orientation of anything (e.g. make a left shoe a right shoe by rotating it through the third dimension), and can, as far as the Flatland perspective is concerned, change size...
So: have the Sphere become Chief Circle.
Not by hostile takeover or anything—that would be fought against—just have him masquerade as an ordinary person of Circular class.
Preferably from birth, appearing in a delivery room masquerading as a newborn Flatlander so he can have the benefit of a pedigree and so forth and "growing up" from there. By means of his talents (to be kept secret, of course, given their verbotenheit) he can become Chief Circle in time and start overhauling that backward society.
In particular: fund research at the Circular Neo-Therapeutic Gymnasium to make the process of enhancing Polygons into Circles safer and cheap enough that even an Isosceles could do it. Introduce that therapy as an alternative to execution for people born irregular (and perhaps eventually destigmatize irregularity altogether). Find ways to improve the condition of women...
u/CaptainLoggers [+7] (5 hours later)
Depending on how far sphere can see above Flatland, his ability to spot danger, incoming armies, or an errant member of the lower class or women (women are very difficult to see when head on, and very sharp as they are a point). Depending on how easily he can communicate this information, this could mean at minimum a prospering society with no injury that wins every war to at best a society that doesn't have to sequester women because the other shapes are safe from them.
His ability to discern a shape's true identity would mean that paint would no longer be a way of deceiving the upper class, and could be used to promote art in Flatland, as an alternative for war, and would also be a way to make women and other lower, pointier classes more visible, reducing accidents and prolonging lifespan.
Additionally, without the fear of the sharper (lower) shapes hurting a rounder (nobler) shape, thanks to the all seeing eye of the Sphere, research could safely be conducted to see to what extent these shapes (and women) are genuinely of lesser intelligence, of if that was simply a function of less education, social norms, and conditioning. This could revolutionize Flatland and is basically the endgame. Equality for all shapes.
Unfortunately, because sphere would have to give the illusion of growing larger as he aged (I think?), he would need to either start out with very little sight (with his point intersecting above him) or start out as a basically all seeing child genius and grow less and less able to see that which is hidden to Flatlanders as time went on. Because Flatlanders revere circles already, I don't think he'll need to use the 3rd dimensional vision he has to worm his way into power, so he's probably better off waiting to grow into it and then keeping it at medium power the whole time.
TL;DR: Use the third dimension to create a safety stopgap to diminish the danger of interacting with shaper shapes and women, use this opportunity to encourage the arts and research, eventually arrive at a flourishing democratic egalitarian artistic utopia that also wins every battle thanks to 3rd dimensional sight.
u/ishaan123 [+4] Sidebar Contestant (6 hours later)
because end-on they appear to be just a point, which is very difficult to see
Do flatlanders only have one eye apiece?
Any 2d being with two eyes would have depth perception and two points of reference, and thus could clearly make out a line segmaent and the direction she was pointing regardless of the angle just as well as we can make judgments about the directions of sticks and the positioning of walls and other planes...
u/xamueljones [+6] My arch-enemy is entropy (9 hours later)
Yes, they have only one eye placed at one of their vertices, or at the end of a line for the women.
u/Someone-Else-Else [+3] Anti-Spiral (an hour later)
What problems would I need to munchkin? Would I have problems with aging, or diseases, or AI when I'm literally a square?
u/Darth_Hobbes [+6] Ankh-Morpork Guild of Assassins (an hour later)
The shapes do age, and can be injured and die, as when punctured by a sharp angle or a woman's line. Also the government is far from egalitarian, as the circles believe that the more sides you have the more intelligent you are. Also, asymmetrical shapes are generally executed as soon as their irregularity presents itself.
u/E-o_o-3 [+7] (6 hours later)
Ha. Unless curves have a use, they must have been at least somewhat smart to gain power in a world where angles are the main weapon.
u/Klenth [+5] (3 hours later)
I've been meaning to read Flatland. It's interesting that the shape with the least sides believes that the more you have, the smarter you are...
u/Muskwalker [+5] (3 hours later)
The circles are actually polygons with very small sides. The idea that they're literally circular is a courtesy granted them for the sake of their status.
u/Muskwalker [+6] (3 hours later)
They actually have intelligence-enhancing surgery where they break you apart and rebuild you with more sides.
u/Someone-Else-Else [+4] Anti-Spiral (3 hours later)
Hmm... I might ask the sphere to carry people to different levels - with enough space in between levels for the sphere to comfortably fit between. I'd experiment with transplanting different demographics to different areas, and seeing whether more egalitarian social structures emerge once circles aren't in charge anymore.
The thing is, this seems more like being Jimmy Olsen than Superman. It's different to munchkin.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+2] Champion of Justice and Reason (7 hours later)
The lines are female and the polygons are male, and they can have kids? How do they reproduce? Copy-and-paste reflection of the male over the female axis? That would make the offspring a mirror-clone of the father. Or do they add their equations together and then take the derivative? That might explain why triangles don't reproduce with squares, etc, since the stigma against "deformed" or "irregular" shapes. Also, what do the merchants sell? If all the shapes and lines and dots are sentient, then how can anyone own any property? If it rains from the north, is the rain also sentient? Or are line segments and single points only sentient in their own separate universes?
u/xamueljones [+6] My arch-enemy is entropy (9 hours later)
They never go into detail about that because such talk is "improper" for the satire of Victorian society.
There is something about number of sides your male ancestors have influencing the male children, but whatever equation they use, irregular shapes are formed in scenarios when women from a family of squares marry a male pentagon or with some other number of sides other than four which is why they have classes based on number of sizes to avoid such deformity. Deformations get less common for larger number of sides with a loss in the quantity of sides occurring instead.
u/Muskwalker [+3] (20 hours later)
How do they reproduce? Copy-and-paste reflection of the male over the female axis? That would make the offspring a mirror-clone of the father. Or do they add their equations together and then take the derivative?
Each generation has one more side than the last: the son of a Square is a Pentagon; the son of a Pentagon is a Hexagon. (This is called "the Law of Nature".) With Isosceles triangles it appears this is not the case, but instead that the exercise of intelligence(!) can widen a triangle's angle and that of its descendants, and the eugenist society tries to breed wider triangle lines together—I believe this is the only point where the angularity of a woman's parents is suggested to have an effect—until they reach equilaterality, at which point Square sons are possible.
With women, there is no visible effect, and indeed no way to tell directly if a woman is "irregular" in an underlying way, so they keep detailed records of whether they or their ancestors have any history of giving birth to Irregular children. If they do, regular Polygons, out of fear of irregularity or relapses in angle size, tend to avoid them. (At the Circular level this is less of a worry in choosing mates, as they already have high status that doesn't need to be augmented by more-sided offspring, and as a result there are fewer viable births, though those that do may have dozens of sides more than their fathers.)
That might explain why triangles don't reproduce with squares, etc, since the stigma against "deformed" or "irregular" shapes.
More likely because they'd both be male. :=)
If all the shapes and lines and dots are sentient, then how can anyone own any property? If it rains from the north, is the rain also sentient? Or are line segments and single points only sentient in their own separate universes?
All the sentient beings in Flatland are polygons and lines, but not all such shapes are sentient. They have inanimate objects, they have writing, they build pentagonal houses.
In Lineland I don't believe there are any objects, only people, but that's a separate universe (which may in fact only be a dream).
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (3 hours later)
If it's a two dimensional world, how do 3-dimesional shapes like a sphere even fit?
u/Jace_MacLeod [+7] (4 hours later)
Flatland goes into this. Basically, it's like a 4 dimensional object would look in our 3 dimensional world: a constantly changing series of cross sections. In the sphere's case, it would be a point widening to ever larger circles and then shrinking to a point again.
But since 2 dimensional beings can only see in 1 dimension, the sphere looks to them like a point widening to a line and then shrinking back to a point.
u/Muskwalker [+5] (4 hours later)
Imagine that Flatland is the surface of a swimming pool. Three-dimensional figures don't squeeze into it, but they can pass through it in section.