64 KiB
Here are your powers, should you choose to accept them... [BST]
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Author: u/TwoMcMillion *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3kqzf1/here_are_your_powers_should_you_choose_to_accept/
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Score: 22
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Created: 2015-09-13T04:44:48
Post:
You are a wizard in a standard urban fantasy universe. Here are the rules:
- You start with four million joules of magical energy, which exists on a mysterious magical plane which apparently has no purpose but to store magical energy.
- You are able to identify who else has a store of magic around them, and, thus, who else is a wizard, by looking at them. (pictures and video don't count) You will also know if magic causes an effect within a quarter-mile of you, and what the effect is.
- You can convert this magical energy to any others kind of energy with 99.99999... percent efficiency, and get it to do useful work for you.
- You make the magic work by concentrating on what you want it to do, and then speaking a trigger word to make the magic work. The magic will attempt to carry out your instructions, drawing on your available stores of energy to do so. There is a gap of about an eighth of a second between when you speak the trigger word and the magic begins the task.
- Magic has computational power, but no intelligence. It can do math, but cannot create solutions to problems on its own.
- Using magic to do a task uses exactly as many joules of energy as doing the task any other way, times a variable for distance between you and the object affected. At distances less than about a quarter mile, the extra energy for distance is negligible; after that it follows something like an inverse square law (magic at half a mile requires twice as much energy, magic at a mile eight times as much, etc).
- Information which travels through magic, without passing through any other medium, travels at the speed of light.
- Once you have begun a task with magic, the magic will continue to work until it does what you want or it runs out of energy.
- Your store of magic refills if less than full at a rate of one million joules every six hours, except while you are actively using magic.
- You can temporarily increase your store of energy through meditation. After fifteen minutes of meditation (no benefits for more or less time spent), you will gain an additional two million joules, which will be fully available for another fifteen minutes before beginning to drain away at a rate of hundred thousand joules every minute. This can't reduce to zero joules of stored energy. You can only meditate once every twenty-four hours.
- If your store of magic ever drops to zero, you die.
- If you eat the brain of another wizard within eight hours of their death, the total energy they had available at the moment of their death is permanently added to your stores.
How would you break this universe?
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+21] Time flies like an arrow (55 minutes later)
- Gain more power. This means eating the brains of other wizards. There's some aspect of diminishing returns here, because the recharge rate doesn't scale with the size of the the energy store, but that's alright; getting more power is a good first step to breaking the universe.
If possible, get into friendly cooperation with other wizards. Brain-eating is just "after death", the only reason to kill other wizards is if you want it immediately. So we can have a culture of ritual consumption of other wizards brains post-mortem, if other wizards are amenable to that.
Assuming other wizards aren't amenable to that (for example, if wizardkind has descended into an irrevocable war with each other) then I start killing some wizards. The biggest problem is finding them, and not being found in return. Experiment with other ways of "looking". Figure out why photographs and video don't work. Try to make some sort of outfit that would disguise me.
Investigate how magic triggers work. Can I make them conditional? For example, "at 4:00PM do
X"? If they can do computation, I might be able to rig a counter of some kind, even if it won't respond to a strict time. Conditionals are really powerful; they would allow for shields, for example, by saying "expend energy to counteract energy over a certain threshold that passes through this shield". If I can set up conditionals so that I never go over my energy store, causing spells to fail instead of killing me, all the better.Investigate computation. How much energy does computation use? How fast is computation? Can I make a magical interface with a computer somehow in order to make a supercomputer? If possible, I interface my magic with my smartphone. There are lots of potential applications I'd like to run if I'm relatively unbounded by the need for computing power.
Start running a bunch of low-energy spells. 4 MJ isn't all that much; the handy [orders of magnitude (energy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)) page on Wikipedia informs me that it's about four thousand bullets, which is a good starting point. Magic bullets (or their equivalent) don't seem like the way to go; instead, I would go with things like remote viewing (extremely powerful even if restricted to a quarter-mile, for stealing things like passwords or grabbing sensitive information). It would probably be possible to make a whole bunch of money really quickly with just that, until I get to the point where money doesn't matter.
u/GaBeRockKing [+13] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (an hour later)
So we can have a culture of ritual consumption of other wizards brains post-mortem, if other wizards are amenable to that.
Well, now we know why no such culture exists. Prion diseases are nasty enough when you don't have access to cosmic powers beyond mortal ken.
In all honesty, though, that's probably pretty easily solvable- if you know the structure of a prion, it wouldn't be incredibly hard to eliminate them with this magic system.
u/Transfuturist [+7] Carthago delenda est. (2 hours later)
I believe your math is wrong, it should be about two thousand bullets. 4×10^6 J / 1.8×10^3 J = 2,222 bullets.
Figure out why photographs and video don't work
I presume it is simply a crude patch to approach the intended rule of line-of-sight.
It would probably be possible to make a whole bunch of money really quickly with just that, until I get to the point where money doesn't matter.
Rig the lottery. Bingo balls are much less than two thousand bullets. The problem is that other wizards will probably be in range to do just that.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
I didn't do any math, so I'm not surprised. The wiki page is giving the numbers for a specific type of bullet fired from an M16, which I just wily-nily adjusted down because I thought it would probably be a bit high for what I think of as "the destructive power of a bullet". (An actual list of muzzle energies can be found here if you want to do an actual comparison. But you'd pretty much never use the wizard power for firing bullets in the first place, so it's just for the purposes of concretely visualizing the abstract numbers.)
Rig the lottery.
I worry that this would be too conspicuous, though I'd have to look into how anonymous you can be when you win the lottery. Winning the lottery seems to be the sort of thing that draws a lot of attention even if you're not a wizard?
u/None [+1] (7 hours later)
The lottery varies across states (and States). Some allow you to claim it through a representative or trust and not pose for the big-ass check...some don't.
So you have to either be in luck or willing to travel. Being lucky is preferable I imagine, you don't want fly into a state, win the lottery and fly out soon after, if you're the paranoid type.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (13 hours later)
You don't have to reveal yourself to the public at all. Reddit probably has like three different guides somewhere on how to accept winnings.
u/None [+2] (10 hours later)
[deleted]
u/iamtrulygod [+2] (a day later)
Or have a chain of people: Wizard A (4 million joules) has their brain eaten by person B, who meditates (6 million joules), and then is killed, who then has their brain eaten by person C, who meditates (8 million joules), and so on.
u/Jiro_T [+1] (an hour later)
Rule 12 says that when you eat a wizard's brain, the energy is added to your store, not that it increases the size of your store. So eating a brain doesn't gain you any more than waiting 24 hours.
u/alexanderwales [+8] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
Why is the word "permanently" there then? (Also, if it's not permanent then that's pretty worthless/pointless.)
u/Jiro_T [+1] (11 hours later)
Because it's mentioned right after gaining energy by meditation, which is not permanent? (It drains away if you don't use it up.)
u/Transfuturist [+12] Carthago delenda est. (2 hours later)
Magic has computational power, but no intelligence.
This needs to be quantified, along with the efficiency rate of converting other kinds of energy to magical energy (or how magic may detect variation in nonmagical energy levels, whether through conversion to magical energy or magically abstract information, as in 7), because these are the most important parts. This determines the costs of remote viewing and automatic analysis, as well as other computation in general, and replenishment of a spell's individual power or your own through ambient means.
In addition to this, saying that it has computational power but no intelligence is an oxymoron, as intelligent processes are a computation, and would be achievable in this system regardless.
You need to specify whether replenishment occurs not at all while spells are in effect, or at a reduced rate, possibly inversely related to the current energy drain. Your rules 9 and 10 seem particularly artificial in their limitations, and I would recommend a less contrived ruleset for a story based in this setting. I am wondering what is so special about the brain here as well, and this would be something my character experiments with, as upload is a very highly-rated instrumental goal.
You need to clarify how the detection of magic works. What is an "effect," and how much information do you have about the effect? Can you sense magical energy levels or detect them through magic with any amount of accuracy? This question in particular is important, as my immediate reaction to 11, despite the contradictory 8, is to always run a spell either alerting me when my energy levels approach 0 or shutting down all of my spells for me. Another possible interpretation of 8 in light of 11 is that spells are at least able to determine your own reserves, or there is the capacity to build in cost limiters into the spell itself.
An accurate form of magic detection is necessary to answer any of these questions in-universe. I would require answers for these out-of-universe to know my character's capabilities, and how quickly I would be able to determine those answers in-universe through experimentation. You also don't specify how much of this information is given to the character, so I would assume the entire contradictory text is given to every wizard simultaneously. Even with these rules, there is not enough information to proceed, and an accurate form of magic detection is the largest prerequisite to even approaching breaking this universe. At the current level of information, with no other way to gain more (besides research to find a magic detector), there is very little I could do other than participate in the global cannibalistic deathmatch these rules would inspire.
Research into safely eating brains would be required regardless of answers. I want my life bar to be as large as possible.
u/None [+5] (15 hours later)
In addition to this, saying that it has computational power but no intelligence is an oxymoron, as intelligent processes are a computation, and would be achievable in this system regardless.
That's not at all an oxymoron. It just means that while magic can implement arbitrary Turing machines, it doesn't implement anything intelligent by default: if you want a mind, design it.
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (15 hours later)
True. However, this effect is reading your intentions out of your brain, so I'm not entirely sure how unintelligent it can even be. I will admit that the spells themselves have no intelligence by default, though.
u/pizzahotdoglover [+1] (11 days later)
relevant username
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+4] (10 hours later)
Has anyone else pointed out the extreme negative health effects of eating human brains yet?
u/Rhamni [+3] Aspiring author (11 hours later)
Hopefully with all that magical energy we can counteract any diseases we might get.
u/Transfuturist [+5] Carthago delenda est. (15 hours later)
What if the prions are the source of magical power? :o
u/Rhamni [+2] Aspiring author (15 hours later)
Then clearly the only rational move is to brush up our knowledge of the brain and see what we can do to maximize powers and minimize side effects.
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (16 hours later)
only
I object to this uncalculated generality.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+11] Godric Gryffindor (2 hours later)
If the goal is just to break the universe, I can do that very quickly given unlimited computing power.
u/Magnap [+5] (7 hours later)
Break in this context implies in your favor, I think.
u/None [+0] (19 days later)
[deleted]
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+3] Godric Gryffindor (19 days later)
Just run AIXI and it will eat its future light cone. It'd be around one page of Python code given unlimited computing power.
u/None [+0] (19 days later)
[deleted]
u/itisike [+3] Dragon Army (20 days later)
After massive amounts of googling, and getting distracted reading hpmor, I think that I finally understand how to control reality with a snap of my fingers, and a lot of mental calculation.
... that's not how it works ...
u/ulyssessword [+12] (31 minutes later)
Magic has computational power, but no intelligence. It can do math, but cannot create solutions to problems on its own.
Does the computation cost anything? If not, you can get a lot more power out of it by telling your magic to do something like "push all the colder atoms to the right, and all the hotter atoms to the left," making a temperature gradient, and getting power from that.
You make the magic work by concentrating on what you want it to do,
How precise and detailed do you have to be? Can I say "produce photons that act like a television screen tuned to channel 10" or would you have to specify each and every transistor and pixel in order to do that?
You start with four million joules of magical energy
How much magical energy does it take to levitate something? Theoretically, it should be zero (as you aren't adding any energy to the system) but that seems incredibly broken.
EDIT to add:
What kinds of sensory powers does magic intrinsically have? Can it follow normal human definitions of what an "object" is? Can it take inputs within the 1/4 mile (eg. "produce photons going away from this sphere, as if all of the incoming photons had reflected off of a perfect mirror.")? Can it take inputs from outside the 1/4 mile for free (eg. produce photons coming out of this surface that are identical to the ones passing through that distant object/location.")?
Killing people is obviously very easy within a few miles, so I won't go into too much detail there.
u/GaBeRockKing [+6] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (37 minutes later)
"push all the colder atoms to the right, and all the hotter atoms to the left,"
It would still take energy to accelerate the atoms, and you'd lose energy overall because you wouldn't get a perfect conversion of energy into some other format.
How much magical energy does it take to levitate something? Theoretically, it should be zero (as you aren't adding any energy to the system) but that seems incredibly broken.
It would take energy to levitate an object up to a certain level. You probably don't lose energy for just holding something in place (assuming you can base magic off a planetary reference plane) though.
u/glowingfibre [+2] (2 days later)
If it's magically sensing the temperature of the atoms and that sensory ability doesn't itself cost as much as it usually would, there's still a net gain (since you've essentially created maxwell's demon)
u/GaBeRockKing [+1] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (2 days later)
You can (?) get a net gain of total energy, but you still need to spend energy from your stockpile. And doesn't that just reduce entropy, and not energy? you spend energy to change the potential energy of the atoms.
u/iamtrulygod [+1] (a day later)
Teleportation may be free though, if the object arrives at a location with a similar temperature and altitude. The change in angular momentum might be an issue, depending on the frame of reference the magic functions in. And teleportation can easily break a lot of things.
u/GaBeRockKing [+1] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (a day later)
Sure, but how could you get teleportation by the application of energy, without spending energy?
u/DCarrier [+0] (an hour later)
It would still take energy to accelerate the atoms
Only if you accelerate them in the direction they're moving. If you accelerate them at a right angle, it's free.
u/GaBeRockKing [+9] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (an hour later)
It's still acceleration. If you change the kinetic energy, you've done work.
u/DCarrier [+0] (10 hours later)
That's what I mean. As long as you only accelerate them at a right angle, kinetic energy is constant. Also, if you accelerate them against their direction of motion, they slow down and you've done negative work, but you were never clear on what happens if you do that. Do you gain magic? Do you destroy energy? Is it just impossible, and the closest you can do is convert energy to heat?
u/GaBeRockKing [+2] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (11 hours later)
That shouldn't be possible, as magic only works in terms of converting magic into energy. If you're not adding energy to the system, you're not doing anything with magic.
u/DCarrier [+0] (11 hours later)
What if you accelerate them almost perpendicular so you're adding a very tiny amount of energy?
u/rineSample [+3] (4 hours later)
How do people become wizards? Maybe start some sort of wizard-generating farm, and quickly absorb the 4 million joules per person as soon as possible after their initiation as a wizard (I'm assuming you immediately start with the 4 million joules). Which should be easy, given that brand-new wizards shouldn't normally be able to skilfully control their magic.
Also, given enough time, magical computers, and then a magical Internet. Although I imagine the interface would be a pain to use, since you'd have to manipulate individual bits.
u/DCarrier [+6] (an hour later)
Your store of magic refills if less than full at a rate of one million joules every six hours, except while you are actively using magic.
That works out to 46 watts. A human uses about 100 watts on average. It's possible that you're a perpetual motion machine, but it's not clear that that's the case.
After fifteen minutes of meditation (no benefits for more or less time spent), you will gain an additional two million joules
That's over 2 kW. Much more than a human consumes. Now you can be a perpetual motion machine. You can cause a population explosion that never ends since you can support yourself on magic. And you can levitate for free, so physical area isn't much of a problem either.
u/MugaSofer [+1] (13 hours later)
You can only meditate once every 24 hours, though.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (13 hours later)
It's possible that you're a perpetual motion machine, but it's not clear that that's the case.
You do not run on magic.
That's over 2 kW.
Actually, it's 23.15 W due to the weird-ass limitation.
u/DCarrier [+1] (14 hours later)
But you can turn it into any form of energy, right? You could turn CO*2* and water back into food.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (14 hours later)
Back into sugar, but man cannot live on sugar alone. Sugar is only food for plants. To become self-sustaining, you'd need to find all the chemical reactions that turn your shit into food, and catalyze those with magic. You'd need to capture your sweat and piss, and all of those particles leaving your body when you exhale.
It's possible that you can use spells like nanotechnology. I would definitely work that angle, but only after I had researched all of the ways to gain and lose magical energy, since "spells work until they run out of energy" yet "if your store of magic drops to zero, you die." See my comment below yours.
With a nanotech angle, I would work not on self-sufficiency, but efficiency of digestion. I couldn't in good faith mimic respirocytes with spells due to my own requirement of complete shut-off when nearing zero energy, and I would most definitely die a fizzy death with that many bubbles in my bloodstream. Using magic to construct nanotechnology, however, is a much better way to go about things.
u/DCarrier [+1] (15 hours later)
Or you could take the easy way out and turn magic into light. I'm not sure how efficient that is though. More to the point, someone else pointed out that I missed the fact that meditating only works once a day. You only get 70 watts. Although it's still probably possible to live on that.
Using magic to construct nanotechnology, however, is a much better way to go about things.
How do you figure? Nanotech is really complicated. There's a big difference between knowing exactly what chemical reactions need to be done and knowing what arrangements of atoms would fold up in such a way as to do that on its own. Nanotech isn't like macrotech. You have quantum physics to deal with.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (15 hours later)
knowing what arrangements of atoms would fold up in such a way as to do that on its own
That's organic nanotech. I'm talking about Drexler's mechanical nanotech, which is more desirable in the first place. I'm not saying it's not an extended research project, it's just an avenue that is very desirable.
Consider the capability of magic to read instructions and adhere to protocols and data formats. You could make spells that run off of data given through USB! You don't have to hold precise nanoscale designs in your head, you have a computer that can do it for you. Even with the complexities of those protocols and data formats, you can simply build a bootstrapping spell.
u/DCarrier [+1] (15 hours later)
I don't think mechanical nanotech is possible. Mechanical systems require a certain assumption of precision that simply stops being possible. It's going to be bombarded by air or water molecules constantly. Whenever it absorbs energy, it will start vibrating and have no good way to stop. It can't just convert the energy to heat. It already is heat.
If you can make spells that run off of data given through USB, why do you even need nanotech? You could make the spells do whatever it is you wanted the nanotech to do.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (16 hours later)
Because magic is dependent on your life force and has to be shut off to allow replenishment of your stores. Meanwhile, I want nanotech such as respirocytes in my body, which, if done with magic, would leave a fatal amount of air in my bloodstream upon deactivation.
As for the feasibility of mechanical nanotech, I respectfully disagree. Vibration is not a categorical problem in mechanical components of hundreds to thousands of atoms, and you're assuming it isn't running in vacuum in the first place, which is very possible for devices external the body. There are additional options for cooling as well, through laser and through the thermoelectric effect. Mechanical catalysis is very different from organic catalysis.
u/DCarrier [+1] (16 hours later)
Right. I forgot magic doesn't replenish while you're not using it. You could still have several wizards that work together so only one has to be active at all times.
u/philip1201 [+4] (4 hours later)
Experiment how magic works at molecular scale, as a catalyst. Kickstarting an exothermic reaction with a catalyst uses no joules of energy, other than the creation of a catalyst and the start of the first exothermic reaction. The start of the reaction is utterly minuscule on a Joules scale, but it's the "creation of a catalyst" which is vague. Magic seems to usually act as a 99.9999999...=100% perfect thermodynamic engine, so by extrapolation it should be free.
If exothermic reactions can in fact be catalysed using magic, as the rules seem to indicate, all terrestrial matter other than Fe-56 is now susceptible to nuclear detonation, at minimal magical cost.
I'm not sure how to use this knowledge without risking global extinction. There are so many actors in this world that MAD is unsustainable. What I need is knowledge. Experiment with building an autonomous magical detection system; one which can recognise casting and some to-be-determined authorisation system. If that works, set up the following global rule, or one like it:
(while 0) If [someone who isn't authorised] uses magic^1 , trigger a small nuclear explosion in their voice box (disabling their ability to cast magic while hopefully keeping them alive).
This should serve to keep me anonymous while eliminating all threats other than non-exploded wizards who happen to see me in person. Since any magic is invariably suicidal, it is hopefully almost impossible that someone would stumble on a functional magical machine capable of significant damage within this system.
I would also try to invent a system which allows me to incapacitate a wizard before I have to vocalise a trigger word. Most crudely this would be destroying someone's voice box if I snap my fingers while I look at them, and most sophisticatedly it would read my^2 thoughts, pick up the "that guy is a wizard" signal, and use that as a trigger to destroy their voice box.
So, GM volente, this would serve to make me and people I authorise the only people capable of magic. It would leave me anonymous, except perhaps in the distribution of wizard fatalities which may be higher in my wake (solution: stay indoors until the number of people whose throats mysteriously explode starts dropping).
I would then go about making the world a better place. Crank up particle accelerators, make fission/miniature black hole reactors, threaten world leaders into good governance, blow up terrorists, rapists and murderers, detonate all unauthorised chemical and nuclear weaponry, burn smallpox and cocaine, threaten to destroy the entire planet with my dying breath if it ever comes, etc.
edit: magic as a nuclear catalyst
Quantum tunnelling is a phenomenon by which an atom can 'hop' from one side of a potential barrier to another. This relies on the quantum wave-function being spread out over space, and not actually being blocked by potential barriers higher than the amount of energy available to the particle (which is in an energy eigenstate for purposes of this explanation), only decreasing at an exponential rate, going from "likely" to "pretty much impossible" in the span of femtometers. Quantum tunnelling is the key mechanism for all particle physics reactions, particles jumping from one energy eigenstate to another at nearly the speed of light and then staying there again for a much longer timescale.
Important for my idea is that the probability of quantum tunnelling never quite goes to zero. It's an exponential decay, but those never reach zero. Nuclear reactions are exothermal, so the quantum tunnelling probability is non-zero, so without adding extra energy it is possible for the hydrogen in water to spontaneously react in accordance to typical solar fission reactions, though the probability means it probably hasn't ever happened at room temperature in the history in the universe.
However, it can happen, therefore it constitutes "any other way" under rule 6. Since quantum tunnelling doesn't require outside energy, the magical reaction doesn't require energy either. Therefore you can catalyse nuclear reactions for free.
[1] Better yet, "is a wizard". If the trigger word is the same for everyone, that would do it.
[2] "me" being identified by having certain memories, having a certain toeprint (fingerprint on your toes)), or similarly hard-to-determine identifiers.
[3] This PC again being identified in an obscure manner.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (14 hours later)
"me" being identified by having certain memories, having a certain toeprint (fingerprint on your toes)), or similarly hard-to-determine identifiers.
Or much simpler and more robust, the source of energy for the spell...
I would also try to invent a system which allows me to incapacitate a wizard before I have to vocalise a trigger word. Most crudely this would be destroying someone's voice box if I snap my fingers while I look at them, and most sophisticatedly it would read my thoughts, pick up the "that guy is a wizard" signal, and use that as a trigger to destroy their voice box.
This would require a long-running spell. It wouldn't use any energy while it wasn't activated, but it would still block replenishment (with a naive interpretation of these rules).
Kickstarting an exothermic reaction with a catalyst uses no joules of energy
That requires conversion of energy into magical energy, which has not been specified. You can push two nuclei together so hard they'll fuse, but that doesn't give you magical energy to replenish what you've used (which is possibly enough to kill you outright, at least on the scale of attempting to create a detonation). It's much simpler to directly convert to heat to melt their vocal cords, or kinetic energy to shred them. I'm not optimistic on their chances of survival, whether by heat, kinetics, or nuclear detonation.
It would be much simpler and safer to melt the recurrent laryngeal nerves, resulting in a complete loss of speech and difficulty respirating during physical activity. To prevent whispering, you would also want to melt the facial nerves. Then you can recognize wizards not only by reserves, but by having the appearance of double stroke victims. You might want to leave the nerves leading to the upper face intact. It's hard to communicate with no verbal articulation as well as facial. Their eyebrow game will still remain.
Ideally, you would want to do this to every wizard who enters your perimeter. However, you deal with the extra risk that every wizard who enters your perimeter will immediately want to kill you. Fortunately, difficulty respirating during physical activity will make their task exceedingly difficult. Depending on the capability of magic to detect magic reserves or magical activity, you would want to extend your perimeter of voice-killing.
I would then go about making the world a better place. Crank up particle accelerators, make fission/miniature black hole reactors, threaten world leaders into good governance, blow up terrorists, rapists and murderers, detonate all unauthorised chemical and nuclear weaponry, burn smallpox and cocaine, threaten to destroy the entire planet with my dying breath if it ever comes, etc.
You would be exceedingly incapable of making good on destroying the Earth "in your dying breath." Your method of doing so is dependent on the unspecified conversion of natural energy to magical energy (which I doubt is intended), and with such miserably detectable tactics, you would be assassinated without ever knowing about it, and I doubt the OP intends spells to remain active after their master's death, considering rule 8.
u/philip1201 [+0] (20 hours later)
It sounds like you don't know what a catalyst is. It's a non-reactive component of chemical reactions which shapes the structure of potential fields to allow circumvention of energy barriers. You're not pushing an proton through the electrical repulsion barrier, you're tunneling through it, like quantum mechanics occasionally has happen for free. (E.g. beta decay).
me =the source of this spell's power
Fair enough.
standing rules block replenishment
Damn, didn't catch that. Oh well, just have the system work most of the time. The whole point of having it be a catalyst is that they're pretty much energetically free.
Limiting yourself to wizards inside your perimiter will quickly get you eliminated in one of various non-wizarding ways, when the police and/or military triangulates your position. I would try to make my autonomous magical network capable of recognising spellcasting (using its free computations) without relying on my mage-dar.
You would be exceedingly incapable ...
Using the magical general rules I keep on almost all the time, set up the following rules: "If my heart ceases pumping OR the oxygen content of my prefrontal cortex drops below so-and-so OR over 0.01 grams of brain matter is not attached to my body OR my voice box is blown up OR etc., catalyse the nuclear detonation of all hydrogen in the solar system.
Unless the very first definition of "death" included in this rule satisfied by the assassination attempt is the one magic uses, kaboom.
miserably detectable tactics
Meh, what I said so far doesn't seem to really identify me. You've got a fair point, though: my priorities do increasingly narrow it down. There's definite room for improvement.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (21 hours later)
It sounds like you don't know what a catalyst is. It's a non-reactive component of chemical reactions which shapes the structure of potential fields to allow circumvention of energy barriers. You're not pushing an proton through the electrical repulsion barrier, you're tunneling through it, like quantum mechanics occasionally has happen for free. (E.g. beta decay).
First of all, we're talking about nuclear reactions, not chemical reactions. I'll admit I don't know anything about nuclear physics, but cursory research reveals that quantum tunneling happens by default, lowering the energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier from classical predictions to what is predicted by the Gamow factor, which still requires high relative velocities to overcome the barrier, meaning you're still accelerating body-temperature atoms at each other. If you're talking about muon-catalyzed fusion, you still need to create muons, and muon-catalyzed fusion does not represent a return on investment even given natural to magical energy conversion. None of these methods represent zero cost on your magical energy reserves, and it is not at all clear that this means you will be able to create a sustained nuclear reaction with only four megajoules. You are massively overrepresenting your capabilities.
u/philip1201 [+1] (a day later)
First of all, we're talking about nuclear reactions, not chemical reactions.
Aye, but we have magic. Cold fusion research is an attempt to make a nuclear catalyst.
I'll admit I don't know anything about nuclear physics, ...
So, as a physics master student, let me tell you that I'm right, but that I'm just bad at explaining. (Or frankly didn't even bother to, because of careless assumption that people know how quantum tunnelling works).
Quantum tunnelling probability never goes to zero. It increases massively if there's less stuff to tunnel through, so giving particles higher momentum so they can get higher up the momentum bump and/or have small enough wavelength to even be capable of getting closer increases quantum tunnelling probability to macroscopically detectable levels and is one way to accelerate the reaction. But normal radioactive materials perform quantum tunnelling-assisted nuclear reaction often (though only within atoms, not between them), without requiring outside energy sources.
The kind of reaction I'm talking about - entire molecules being spanned by quantum tunnelling - wouldn't occur in all the hydrogen in the observable universe given a hundred trillion years, probably. But in a googolplex years it might.
Quantum tunnelling was just supposed to indicate that it's physically allowed (satisfying rule 6), though, not be the actual mechanism.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)
And how is this classically-defined source of manipulation supposed to help shape quantum fields? More importantly, how would it do so without any energy loss?
u/philip1201 [+1] (a day later)
More importantly, how would it do so without any energy loss?
Rule 6.
And how is this classically-defined source of manipulation supposed to help shape quantum fields?
It isn't classically defined. You might tend to read it classically, but that's because intuition is classical, not because the rules don't make sense in quantum mechanics.
I did talk about "experiment with catalysts" because I'm not sure this would work. The rules do seem written without regard for quantum mechanics, so if I can't explode the entire universe I'l have to come up with something else.
For example: if I had a lens or parabolic mirror in space, I could use it to focus light on a single point on earth. There would be some absorption losses in the intensity of the beam, but the lensing itself wouldn't cost outside energy (again, other than having to exist, which isn't a problem for normal magic). Therefore I can make an orbital kill sat which can strike anywhere on the planet for free.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
Right. This ruleset is incontrovertibly overpowered.
u/philip1201 [+0] (2 days later)
Right. And the point was to munchkin-leverage it into maximum utility. Taking over the world while removing all other wizards as threats seems to achieve that.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (9 hours later)
How much energy does information processing take?
u/ajuc [+5] (9 hours later)
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle 0.0172 eV for changing 1 bit of information.
Of course the system could use reversible computing, and not use any energy.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (14 hours later)
A point of this work is a broader principle regarding the fact that information erasure cannot happen without an increase in entropy, whether or not energy is expended.
u/Kuratius [+2] (12 hours later)
Actually, number 5 is not true, strictly speaking. The spell would just be horribly complex, or rather would eventually become very complex if you are building an evolving system. Might end up with magic AI, in fact. By the way, the fact that magic has a natural language understanding is fascinating. That's probably exploitable to hell and back. The Sparrow in Wiz Biz is a good example of what happens if your magic has computational power and are an expert in comp science.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (14 hours later)
It doesn't have natural language understanding, the process described in your brain (which for some reason is capable of elaborating on entire spells at once) is simply triggered by a vocal release.
u/Kuratius [+1] (2 days later)
So a magician has an intuitive understanding of advanced physics?
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
Ask the OP, who hasn't shown up in this thread to elaborate once.
u/Geminii27 [+2] (12 hours later)
I'd want to know more about the process of brain consumption. Is it enough for the entire mass of the brain to pass the lips? To enter the stomach? Given that it's presumably chewed or chopped up along the way, how pre-processed can it be for the magic transfer to still work? Can it be minced? Liquified? Dehydrated? Burnt? Ground into dust? Does it still count as eating if you throw it up after consumption? If you teleport it out of your stomach before it's fully digested (in any form)?
Essentially, what is the maximum number of brains you can physically strip the magic from in a given timeframe? (ie if you can dehydrate and grind them to dust, you can probably eat quite a few at once.) How many molecules or atoms can you remove before consumption? Can you use magic to speed up time for yourself (or even just speed up your metabolism), allowing you to eat an enormous number of brains in what the world would consider a short time period?
Can you extend the eight hour limit by freezing/preserving the brains? By magically putting them into a volume of slowed time? By accelerating them under thousands of gravities (see also the question about whether liquefying them makes a difference)?
In summary, if a thousand wizards all died at the same moment near you for reasons, how many of their brains could you salvage magic from using every loophole you could think of?
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (14 hours later)
If you teleport it out of your stomach before it's fully digested (in any form)?
Not possible.
u/Geminii27 [+1] (a day later)
That's rather intriguing. What prevents it?
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)
Um, not being physically possible? Teleportation doesn't exist, and no amount of joules will help you.
u/Sagebrysh [+2] Rank 7 Pragmatist (12 hours later)
Is it possible to convert regular energy back into magic somehow, or is it a strictly one way process?
If its one way, I would probably start by draining away a certain amount of magic each day to charge a battery to run all my stuff off of. If I can somehow store pure magical energy then I would do that as well to start accumulating a larger buffer.
I would probably not heavily use my own magic pool to do anything, I would just convert it into some other sort of energy pool and use that for everything.
I would definitely be interested in identifying what magic actually is and where it actually comes from. The mere fact that magic exists opens the potential to exploit it outside of the conditions people have naturally. The best way isn't to break the universe, its to carefully dismantle it and reassemble it to suit your desires.
u/Izeinwinter [+2] (3 days later)
"Information revolution". Computation is a physical process, this energy and efficiency level will let me run.. seriously good computer architectures purely in magic using buggerall of my overall budget.. The energy limits don't matter, because any violent conflict ends with magically induced grand-mal in whoever had the longest triggerword on their attack spell, but mostly fighting other mages is a terrible idea. Dangerous, and no real gain. If the local mages are actually using the eat brains strategy, that means the culture is horrifyingly dysfunctional. Should probably do something about that.
u/Nighzmarquls [+3] (4 hours later)
I am with most of these guys in needing more info. However if I understand these rules upon magically becoming a wizard I think my best tactic is to get away from everyone so that I can experiment with magic in preparation of leaving the planet after determining how to safely apply magic to sustaining my own existence.
Probably work on replacing sleep, food and breathing with "meditation".
After my own perpetual magic engine can be self sustaining I don't need to eat other people's brains. Probably I'll go build a garden on the other side of the moon or something. If some one is being uppity with magic and starts following I'll go further out.
u/Sagebrysh [+1] Rank 7 Pragmatist (14 hours later)
that kind of sounds like it would make for an awesome HPMOR fanfic.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (15 hours later)
Probably work on replacing sleep, food and breathing with "meditation".
u/FishNetwork [+4] (16 hours later)
I'd start with stuff that takes 0 work.
Cast, "hold rope" a bunch of times, and you've got a space elevator. Follow the rope up, cast "hold air bubble" and you've got a space station.
Magic can do math, so it should be possible to cast a "pull on object, tangent to its velocity" spell that uses 0 energy and do asteroid mining. (+ infinite energy if magic doesn't have a preferred reference frame)
At that point, you've got arbitrary money. You're out of other mages range, and have the ability to drop orbital-velocity rocks on anyone you don't like.
The other end of the scale would use very, very tiny amounts of energy to move precise things. Destructive stuff is easy if you can directly mess with chemical bonds.
For non-destructive things, it would be cool to make perfectly pure diamonds. If you're paying the chemical binding cost for c-c bonds, you can get diamond for 57 kJ/g. It's cheaper if you're transmuting hydrocarbons with some existing bonds.
Desalinization would be really cheap (exact numbers depend on how close magic can get to Maxwell's demon), and surgery would be amazing.
u/Rhamni [+1] Aspiring author (10 hours later)
Alright, let's see what a Bad Guy could do to break this.
At what point does a magician gain the magic storage? Is it at birth? Before that? During adolescence? Because if they get it at birth or earlier, sooner or later you will get a sociopath or military research panel setting up a rape dungeon with normal women continually impregnated by magic users who then devour the children.
Less nightmarishly, there are plenty of women willing to be surrogate mothers in poorer countries. The military of some country could easily set up magician agents to pose as couples looking for surrogate mothers. If even a small portion of those pregnancies result in magicians, some military or cult or business is going to do it, either to devour the children or raise them in isolation and indoctrinate them.
There are diminishing returns in that the rate of mana recovery does not seem to increase when your maximum reserve does, but still, a few magicians with a thousand times the base reserves would be incredibly powerful for a variety of purposes.
u/frodo_skywalker [+1] (15 hours later)
Soooo.... You've made a world full of Sylar from heroes?
u/Aabcehmu112358 [+1] Utter Fallacy (23 hours later)
Combat between wizards rapidly evolves towards who can gag the other first, given #4.
u/thefreegod [+2] (7 days later)
The first thing I would do is set up a spell to counter-spell magic done on me. Because I am closer to me then others I should have an energy advantage.
u/Geminii27 [+1] (a day later)
If you eat the brain of another wizard within eight hours of their death, the total energy they had available at the moment of their death is permanently added to your stores.
Geometric increase. Start with a thousand untrained, neophyte wizards (actually 1025 plus spares). Kill and eat the brain of one, making you (on average, and presumably you planned this) about twice as powerful as the other wizards. Use this power to either serially or in parallel arrange to pair the other wizards off, including pairing one with yourself (who will be less powerful than you). Kill half the wizards and have the other half eat their brains, ideally without them knowing they are doing it or being aware of the brain-eating method of powering up. You now have 512 wizards, including yourself who has approximately 3 wizard-power compared to their 2wp.
Repeat, killing half the living wizards and feeding their brains to the other half. Do this until there are only two of you left. Kill the other wizard and eat their brain.
You now have the power of a thousand wizards.
In all this, it would be best to be able to create/raise wizards who are unaware of their power, untrained in its use (or trained to suppress it for religious reasons etc), ignorant of both its true nature and how to increase it, and so on. It might even be a good idea to deliberately brain-damage them if that would not affect their ability to act as a magic container, so they wouldn't be able to realize their likely fate, wouldn't try and escape, and wouldn't be able to gang up on you. And use a very effective assassination method where the victim is unlikely to react in time, even when holding the power of a couple hundred wizards inside them.
(Oh, and while it would be efficient to eat the brain of a 500-wp wizard as a last step, it would be safer to eat wizard brains until you were at, say, 10wp, and then only let other wizards get to perhaps one quarter or less of your power reserves before eating their brains. It means you'll be eating a lot more brains, but it also means you'll have a far less likely chance of accidentally creating a personal nemesis with the same power level as yourself.)
Really, then, your only limit will be how many wizards are born/created/evoked per year on the planet, if you end up eating all their brains and magic (even by proxy).
u/Geminii27 [+1] (a day later)
Assume you have enormous magical power because you've eaten the brains of a zillion wizards. Given that power, is it possible to increase the number of wizards in the population, either by having more born per thousand births, or turning existing non-wizards into wizards?
Is magic stored or accessed in the brain? i.e. If a wizard was reduced (even if temporarily) to a brain in a jar, would they still have access to their magic pool? Would it still replenish at the normal rate?
Would it be possible for a powerful wizard to detect when someone had become a wizard anywhere within a large radius (either born or ascended), kidnap them and erase their existence from the memories of anyone who knew them, reduce them to a brain and stomach in a jar, feed the jars' contents to each other until they reach a certain level of magic storage, and then spend their days killing and snacking on the most powerful jarred brains?
u/what_deleted_said [+1] (a day later)
99.99999... percent efficiency
So...100% efficiency?
u/iamtrulygod [+1] (a day later)
Can you use external energy to preform magical effects? For instance, could you steal some of the kinetic energy from a waterfall, and use it to push a turbine? The theoretical energy usage for this should be near zero, and so this can increase your effective power immensely.
Given the ability to violate Newton's third law of motion, I can't help but think you'll be able to do something game-breaking with that. Reaction-less drives are the first thing that come to mind, making spacecraft powered by wizards far more efficient than normal. Hovercraft might work, but then can you create immovable objects for free? As you can apparently create infinite force as long as it doesn't change energy. The question is, does the magic exertion depend on the energy exerted on an object, or the change in energy in the entire universe due to the magic? Hm.
Also 4 million joules is about two pounds of tnt, which is more than enough to execute unstoppable assassinations from a terrifying range, even assuming you use your energy inefficiently. You can cook a human brain with 48kj. Or just impart the kinetic energy of a bullet directly to a portion of the human skull for 500-6,000 joules. Unless wizards have been around long enough, and are populous enough to have established protection procedures, radical political manipulation, and industrial espionage, would be trivial. Standard wizard wards should be pretty straightforwards to overpower, if you have more energy, which means the largest collection of power (in either one, or multiple wizards), will be able to kill whomever they want untraceably. They could make a killing shorting the stock market (pun intended).
If magic works faster than light, you can get FTL signaling, which can lead to time travel.
You may be able to transmute neutrons to protons for 1 x 10^-13 J. So move roughly 1-10 milligrams of a substance up one atomic number. Which doesn't seem super useful. Though you could make some exotic isotopes.
6 Sv of radiation (About 360 J for an average person) should be fatal if dosed all at once. 20 Sv (1,200 J) should create a nearly 100% risk of cancer (an untraceable killer), though you would have to dose over time, to prevent massive organ failure.
Alter a cell to become a malignant cancer. Energy should be nearly negligible.
Relatedly, you have a tremendous advantage in chemistry and materials science. You can probably construct nanowire and carbon nanotubes fairly easily from graphene. Nanobots are also viable, provided you have the designs for them. Nanobots in turn give you nearly unlimited manufacturing capabilities, chemical alteration of the human body (No need to eat, sleep, or catch a disease, possible intelligence upgrade and brain-machine interfaces), grey goo, genetically tailored nano-plagues, pollution control, etc, etc.
TL;DR World's best assassin. Nanobots.
u/Shadawn [+1] (2 days later)
Set out permanently working spell "If my reserves drop to 100 joules or below (for safety), disable all my magic IMMEDIATELY". This should overwrite any other spells.
Since killing people is very easy with this sort of magic, you should concentrate on researching defence first. Make a spell "I cancel all not-mine magic within X meters of my body", leave it up permanently. If it doesn't work, make a spell "If anything gets affected by magic within X meters of my body, affect it back with the same energy". If this doesn't work too, you're out of luck - any violent mage can rip your heart out in 1/8 second from VERY long range.
Btw, if it does work, you'll need bullet shield next. It can be formulated like "Stops (relative to my center-of-mass) any small (get working definition) object moving faster than (get bullet speeds) m/s when it comes within 2 meters of me". This shouldn't activate in rain and should be always active. You can try to refine this shield to be skin-tight and also melee strikes.
Research information magic. You SHOULD get some extra information from your magic, otherwise you won't be able to achieve much besides throwing lasers. If you know that there's your jacket in a wardrobe, and you try to summon it without knowing it's exact location - what would happen?
About lasers - GET THEM! Perfect lasers allow you to somewhat bypass your range, which may help you survive.
Start making money! If your information magic research bore fruit, game online casinos or currency markets. If it didn't, then enrolling into chemical study and doing synthesis of hard-to-get chemicals may net quick buck. Just don't overdo purity, you may rise suspicions.
While you're studying, learn AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE about mind-affecting chemicals. Experiment on people (synthesize it inside their brains; well rats may come first), THIS IS IMPORTANT. You want at least truth serum, but ideally find something that make a person extremely open to suggestions without damaging his brain. If you got information magic, classified CIA research can help.
Try to learn about computers too! Distances may be a bitch, but you can always fly to server's physical location, and changing several bytes of data may give you admin access. Actually, learning about it yourself may take too long, try to get in touch with some hackers. If your mind-affecting magic worked, it may help. Tell them some convincing lie, like you have connections, and do your magic tricks.
7.5) Magic can do math, but how fast? Can magic solve modern encryption in reasonable time? If it can, you just got free Wi-Fi and ton of other perks like money (from hacking banks), classified information from goverments and a lot of cool stuff. Your hacker friends can offer ideas, but they better be brainwashed enough.
Try to do some immortality/regeneration research. Will your magic allow you to patch damaged tissue without all underlying knowledge? What about halting aging? Get knowledge if you feel it helps. What about rising your dormant clone in a basement and making a spell that will transfer your consciousness into him if you suffer lethal damage?
Optimally with violence defence, mind-affecting spells, hacking friends and some safeguards you're ready to enter business world. Beware - your less scrupulous competitors are already there. Try to get in contact with some bio-tech start-ups, show your abilities with getting stuff done (mind-rapes, yay!). You want to get research team under your command. These people know about chemistry and biology MUCH MORE than you with your unfinished chem grad, and as a boss you get to ask stupid questions.
Start getting serious about immortality research. You want this done as fast as possible, because your brain is slowly dying every second! If you get any muggle-usable result, show it and get more people on the problem. If you meet other magi and can persuade them to cooperate, DO IT! You want to be able to do anti-aging spell ASAP.
Maybe this is time to research magic itself. What makes human a mage? Is it something in the brain? Clone yourself, would your clone be a mage? If yes, shit's too easy (you can also eat his brain). Can you make normal human into the mage? Probably not, but worth several weeks of research.
If You're alive, you should've made some magi friends by this time. Network among them, get to know prominent mages. Be extremely careful, they are DANGEROUS (especially if protective spells don't work. And even if they do, 4 Mj steel ball may very well be the end for you). Try to convince them that you only mean well. If you can create a perfect copy of yourself, you can offer it for interrogation (assuming you don't plan world domination).
Time to take over some African country! Persuade your magic-wielding allies, get there and brainwash a dictator or something. Get good political consultant so you won't do more harm. If you want, try your hand at stopping geopolitical crisis (like ISIS or Ukraine), credit may come handy.
Start rebuilding your country! Set up schools with magic-tests, get as much recruits as you can. Persuade your allies to teach the newbies. In several decades (assuming WW III: Magic Edition didn't destroy humanity) you'll have loyal following. You may try to opt for brainwashing army, but this may alienate your initial followers. And if they are brainwashed too... well, one of them may be faking it the whole time. Don't risk eternity for child soldier parades! Well, unless you got great safeguards.
Actually, one African country may be small potatoes. Spread your influence, maybe run for Presidency (there may be other mages willing, maybe join a coalition and become major supporter), maybe marry into Royal Family. Actually, with all your bio-tech research, you should be able to convincingly alter body appearances. Find adventurous friend/underling among ordinary people, kidnap Putin and make your friend look-alike Russian President. Don't forget to thoroughly interrogate Vladimir - KGB can be scary, maybe they have safeguards for this. Actually they probably already have mages on payroll, so this stuff is SERIOSLY DANGEROUS, do at your own risk.
Well, there are 3 scenarios after several decades. Either you're the only competent mage, and then it's time to bid for world. Or there are several, and they divided Earth between themselves and their followers. Try to mediate tensions and get magi to unite, or at least not slaughter each other. Or there is WW III: Magic Edition, and then your best option is to run as far as possible (Antarctica may be interesting, keep yourself warm with magic) and survive.
Assuming you can continue your research, get working nanotech, solve FAI and enjoy your Singularity! If you managed previous steps without massive screw-ups, you probably deserve it.
u/glowingfibre [+1] (2 days later)
Using magic to do a task uses exactly as many joules of energy as doing the task any other way, times a variable for distance between you and the object affected.
I can "break" this if you don't define the constraints a bit more. If you saying that the energy cost is proportional to the amount of energy I'm adding to the universe (that's what it sounds like) then breaking is pretty easy.
For example: Suppose I wanted to convert one form of energy into another (say, use magic to convert sunlight into electricity). If I had a solar panel, it would actually cost me zero energy to do this - just place the solar panel near the light. Does it cost me zero energy to do it with magic?
Or lets say there's a rubber ball hurtling towards me and I want to change its direction. I could exert force over the ball and expend energy... or I could say "if there was a giant slab of solid between me and the ball, the ball would just bounce away and no energy would be introduced into the system".
How do we calculate the energy cost of things like this? Obviously floating rocks or something have calculable energy costs in the form of how badly they violate conservation, but many useful actions won't.
In fact, all actions which don't actually increase entropy can be conceptualized as "free" under some interpretation. There's no distance limitation on that so....basically God already, I can put out the stars at my leisure.
u/Shadawn [+1] (2 days later)
I suppose you need to affect each atom individually. You can't "borrow" energy to transfer it somewhere else. If you're trying to cold the air, you're expending energy to stop molecules, not getting it back.
u/glowingfibre [+1] (2 days later)
That doesn't fix it, it only makes the problem on a smaller scale.
Take "levitation" for example. Should it be costless or costly, to levitate a bunch of atoms (hold them against the force of gravity) assuming they are not currently in motion, and why? The human intuition is that it takes energy to hold something up, but it doesn't really - we might get tired from keeping our arms stiff, but that's a quirk of physiology. A different physiology could stay rigid with no energy usage, like a stool. How on earth do we plan to calculate the cost of levitation?
Note that if you dis-allow costless bouncing, costless invisible walls, and so on, you'll have a fairly tough time justifying costless levitation.