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[RT] [D] On the Death Note and Conditional Statements
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u/Hormel_Chavez:
It's really interesting but I don't think it's right. Rule #1: "The human whose name is written in this Note **shall die**." Rule #2: "This Note will not take effect unless the writer has the person's face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected." That's it. If your name is written while Light is thinking of your face, you die. No matter what. You can't use "if" statements the way you're describing. The only conditional statements Light can use are things like "Hideki Ryuga [performs this action] and then dies [at this time] and [in this manner]." Ryuga dies no matter what: If any of these conditions are impossible, Ryuga simply dies of a heart attack. Writing "Hideki Ryuga dies if [statement] is true," would just kill Ryuga. I also get the idea the Note uses information from its user's and victim's minds only. Before the FBI stunt, Light tests the Note on prisoners to determine the extent of his control. He is able to make them write phrases and perform actions of his choosing, but he is not able, for example, to have them travel to Paris or draw a picture of L's face. As the prisoners lack the information or ability to perform these actions, they die of heart attacks. If the Note is all-knowing and this information was being introduced, the prisoner would've drawn a face. In "Encounter," L is actually being pretty sharp, introducing himself as someone so well known that the user of the Note would have trouble NOT picturing his face as he wrote the name (like introducing himself as "Tom Cruise"). Light is smart enough not to try; he knows he will probably accidentally picture the actor and kill him, immediately revealing himself as Kira. That was more than I meant to write. Sorry, this is by far my favorite anime and manga and I've read/watched it dozens of times. I know it pretty well and would love to argue about it more!-
u/696e6372656469626c65:
> That's it. If your name is written while Light is thinking of your face, you die. No matter what. You can't use "if" statements the way you're describing. The only conditional statements Light can use are things like "Hideki Ryuga [performs this action] and then dies [at this time] and [in this manner]." Ryuga dies no matter what: If any of these conditions are impossible, Ryuga simply dies of a heart attack. Writing "Hideki Ryuga dies if [statement] is true," would just kill Ryuga. This is pretty easily fixed a la [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/6v7ubi/rt_d_on_the_death_note_and_conditional_statements/dly9b45/) (man, we've got some link-ception going on here); all you have to do is vary the *method* of death rather than the death itself.-
u/Alden_:
That's true. Damn, Yudkowsky sure is thorough. I didn't even consider that possibility of using cause of death instead of mortality. -
u/ghost-pacman4:
This could work, but only if the methods of death did not include the default method of heart attack. There is always the possibility of the Death Note just defaulting to heart attack if it doesn't understand the conditional statement or can't possibly figure it out. For instance, someones writes this in a death note "Bob dies in a car accident if the Goldbach Conjecture is true, or Bob dies of a stroke if the Goldbach Conjecture is false." Bob then dies...of a heart attack. A non-answer, that would have been a false positive or negative if heart attack was used for one of the options.
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u/696e6372656469626c65:
> Can the Death Note reveal facts via its operation? What are the limits of what it can reveal? E.g, "Bob dies of a heart attack if the Goldbach Conjecture is true, or Bob dies of a stroke if the Goldbach Conjecture is false." "Bob dies after jotting down a critical insight into proving the Riemann Hypothesis." [-Eliezer Yudkowsky](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/29qonq/q_what_would_you_ask_about_the_death_note/cioylzf/)- u/Alden_:
Damnit. I'm 3 years too slow.
- u/Alden_:
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u/Alden_:
Just came up with this. I'm interested to find out what you guys would want to check for if this use of the death note was possible.-
u/aeschenkarnos:
It's a sound idea, for sure. Have to use people we'd want to get rid of anyway, of course. Fortunately they're not in short supply. On that note, it may be possible to algorithmically establish a utilitarian morality - if we're *wrong* about someone deserving to die, we'd want the Death Note for them to fail. "Alien lifeforms with human-level intelligence" is probably already covered as a "yes" by the Shinobi. Heart attacks are not a good choice of test death, since (1) while they're fairly rare, they have a non-zero chance of occurring anyway; (2) they're the default method specified if death can't occur any other way, it's like programming an error-finding subroutine to return a 0 if an error is found, it might return a 0 because there's an error in the subroutine. I wonder if "else" statements are permitted? Binary searches are also useful. I wonder if information can be sent backwards in time by subsequent Death Note writings, eg "<person> will die of rectal impalement on a cargo boat anchor iff the next question will not result in a death", then wait to see if he dies in the specified manner, then write something else.-
u/Alden_:
> I wonder if information can be sent backwards in time by subsequent Death Note writings, eg "<person> will die of rectal impalement on a cargo boat anchor iff the next question will not result in a death", then wait to see if he dies in the specified manner, then write something else. I wouldn't think so, since this implies the Note's ability to—borrowing a term from Yuval Noah Harari—predict second order chaos (i.e. changes in the system resulting from the arrival of a prediction of the system itself). Unless what you mean is time travel, in which case if the note could do such a thing by those means then the note has just solved whether or not the world is deterministic. > Binary searches are also useful. What do you mean by this by the way? I'm sorry, I'm illiterate in computer science.-
u/aeschenkarnos:
Binary searches work like this: divide the data in half; determine whether the sought-after data point is in A or B; repeat. For example: "<person> dies of an oxytocin overdose iff the lost ruins of Atlantis are in the northern hemisphere." "<person> dies of spider bite iff the lost ruins of Atlantis are between 0 and 180 degrees West longitude." and so forth. Basically it's a round-about way of performing the ancient art of sacrificial divination. You could use it to determine Donald Trump's Twitter password character by character, or anything else you might want to know.-
u/Alden_:
Ahhh! I see! Yes, that was what I was trying to get at when I said that we would need an infinite supply of human beings. > You could use it to determine Donald Trump's Twitter password character by character While I'm not american, wouldn't we all love to know... even only if it was to delete his account.- u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN:
> While I'm not american, wouldn't we all love to know... even only if it was to delete his account. Don't be ridiculous - you use it to post hilarious yet insane comments. What's Trump going to do, call it fake news again? He's lost all credibility in that regard.
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai:
Omniscience via the usage of death notes, with 1 human death needed per bit? @_@ This will need a lot of deaths. I want the code for a friendly super intelligent AI that will solve all our problems, but that will probably need more than 7 billion bits... Ok, step one would be to use a relatively smaller amount of Death Note kills to figure out how to crank up the birth rates of humans really high so we can kill them off for more data... so asking things like the formulas for optimal fertility drugs... which we then force-feed people to make them make more babies... which we then murder with the Death Note as soon as possible... No wait, make that step two instead. Step one would be the figure out how to conquer the world and force humanity into slavery to stop them from trying to kill us to stop us from forcefully breeding them and killing them for data... and various mind-control/paralytic drugs to stop them from killing themselves... Erm... I think my soul is turning black. Help.
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u/ShannonAlther:
Unfortunately, the complete rules for the Death Note ([read here](http://deathnote.wikia.com/wiki/Rules_of_the_Death_Note)) more or less rule out variable causes of death based on impossible things. So using different types of death as an n-ary answer system only works for things that are sort of plausible. Finding out whether intelligent aliens exist is right out. However, something like "Bob dies in six minutes, suicide by gunshot, just after writing down a proof of the Goldbach Conjecture," would plausibly work if a) the Goldbach conjecture can be proven true and b) Bob is theoretically capable of doing so, i.e. he's a mathematician whose mental corpus is sufficient to assemble a proof, plus the proof can be written in the time allotted before he's slated to die.- u/LupoCani:
It's not quite that simple. Victims can be made to do even more unlikely things than spell out L's name. For example, write out a whole letter to L from Kira. And, the death note does seem to have unlimited knowledge for determining whether something is possible. For example, if the Goldbach conjecture is true, it is possible to die while the Goldbach conjecture is true. If it is not true, it is impossible to die while it is. Then, "dies by suicide while the Goldbach conjecture is true" will result in suicide if it is true, or default to a heart attack if it's false.
- u/LupoCani:
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai:
Before that, there's one rule of the Death Note that really bothers me: If the death of the target causes more people to die (because of the extra conditions of death you wrote), the target simply dies of a heart attack (without causing those extra deaths). That makes no sense to me because of the butterfly effect. The slightest change anywhere is extremely likely to cause a tons of deaths, way down the line. And death is a pretty massive change, since you are literally truncating the timeline of some person. Every thing they would have done after the specified time, all erased. This is the plot of basically every time travel story, you go back and just kill Hitler, and suddenly Nazis own the white house, or Stalin takes over the world, etc etc. Unless the target person is utterly insignificant, like a hermit living in the middle of nowhere, you just can't kill them without causing a lot of additional deaths. Unless of course... the Death Note has some kind of fate-like power that determines destiny, wiping out the butterfly effect. This might actually be true, after all, owners of death god eyes can see people's lifespans. If Death Notes don't have destiny power, Misa should be seeing the lifespans of people wildly fluctuating all the time, especially when she uses the Death Note. Since she makes no such observation, I assume the Death Note strictly keeps the lifespans of non-targeted humans exactly the same, even if circumstances around them change. They will live even if subjected to lethal conditions and die even if kept on life support and with artificial hearts pumping blood through their bodies. This brings us to another way of abusing the Death Note, which actually doesn't even need the note, just the eyes: making people with long lifespans do the impossible. For example, you can send someone with a long lifespan on a one-way rocket to Mars with only small supplies of food and oxygen. Since they can't die before their lifespan is up, and the Death Note's destiny power ensures their lifespans don't change, they will inexplicably find food and oxygen on Mars. Maybe by meeting aliens. Maybe by unearthing an underground biome. Don't pack parachutes in the rocket, and make sure to surround the rocket with lots of fragile unprotected humans with long lifespans. That way the rocket can't explode without killing them all, which is impossible since the Death Note's destiny power says they still have lifespan left.-
u/xavion:
Or that path would lead to early deaths, so something goes wrong preventing your plan to send to Mars from ever succeeding. Your assumption is that you can force the person with a long lifespan into a scenario where the seemingly impossible would happen to keep them alive, but it's very possible things go wrong first to prevent that scenario arising under these rules. It's also possible that since death notes can cut someone off early in a setup where they manipulate things to preserve lifespans they might have a different death note become responsible for killing you in order to prevent these scenarios. Generally just don't assume your plans will work, and don't assume the incredibly powerful pseudo-sentient device can't get mad at you for trying to abuse it.-
u/ShiranaiWakaranai:
> Or that path would lead to early deaths, so something goes wrong preventing your plan to send to Mars from ever succeeding. Your assumption is that you can force the person with a long lifespan into a scenario where the seemingly impossible would happen to keep them alive, but it's very possible things go wrong first to prevent that scenario arising under these rules. Hmm, this actually sounds like an interesting experiment. You could engineer situations where the only possible way for a participant with a long lifespan to survive is for one of two highly improbable events to occur, and look at which event occurs. Presumably, the one that is more probable should happen. In this manner, you could check the probability of various improbable outcomes, like finding life on Mars, by pitting them against other improbable outcomes, like a continuous series of non-lethal rocket failures. > Generally just don't assume your plans will work, and don't assume the incredibly powerful pseudo-sentient device can't get mad at you for trying to abuse it. Sound advice, but if we take this into consideration, then this entire thread is moot since any suggested usage of the Death Note would be countered by saying the Death Note kills you for trying to use it that way.- u/xavion:
Edit: This seems like it gets a little long, I blame having written it on my phone making judging the length of my half rant half musings hard. Who says it has to make it that far? If it's manipulating fate at a global scale I was thinking you'd be dealing with more subtle problems. Financial difficulties, manufacturing problems, stubborn politicians failing to approve things, manned flights to mars would take a lot of steps. Hell, it might just end up swept out of control and actually meeting safety standards so nothing has to go wrong and you don't need anything crazy happening. Stop you from arranging the situation with an incredibly improbable method of survival in the first place, or someone else writes their name in a death note so they can die anyway. It doesn't inherently counter things to need caution, but it does need delaying. Plus there's how the Death Note seems to have an awful lot of rules, and don't forget we know there is actually beings behind the whole thing with the shinigami, and if it's similar with something like Ryuk doing this for entertainment? Well then the death note being potentially dangerous is abused isn't really the problem, it's keeping Ryuk appeased. Shouldn't be too hard, but Ryuk is perfectly capable of writing your name in a death note if they decide they don't want you alive anymore. It's a tricky problem, but it's the kind of thing that should be looked at, the conditions and circumstances surrounding it make it more interesting in my opinion. Knowing that you don't have the only death note, that there are a race of spiritual beings that created them and only they know all the rules to their usage. Your only knowledge of the rules comes from someone that is doing this for their own entertainment, and who will kill you if they think the situation deserves it. This means you've got to take a totally different approach from the simplistic omniscient wish granting device without any baggage, it makes for a better story too. A story of someone trying incrementally larger and more complex experiments to try and break open reality is going to be limited, you need the antagonizing force, and it's too easy to perform untraceable deaths. Anyone you know the name and face of? Social media and public obituaries break the challenge, the face is only an identifying system too so old images shouldn't matter. Get your hands on a yearbook and there's hundreds if not thousands of potential people with no link to you, of course killing of random people runs into ethical and moral issues but it does lead to trains of thought realizing just how easy it is to get info. Just choose your line for how far is too far and run with it, conflict based off the character murdering others for knowledge is going to harshly limit any story, even a real scenario that's going to be the primary conflict. Well that and trying to decipher the rules and loopholes in them.
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u/None:
I don't think that follows. Remember, if someone is supposed to do something implausible with the Death Note, like hitch a ride on an ICBM, they just die of a heart attack. I suspect the same would be true of trying to force impossible conditions: if there is no plausible way for a person to survive, they die of a heart attack.- u/ShiranaiWakaranai:
To clarify, I wouldn't be using the Death Note to make them do the impossible. So the "heart attack if impossible" rule doesn't apply, they haven't been marked for death. I would be using normal, mundane methods, to make people do the impossible. In this scenario, there are two possible outcomes: 1) Their lifespan changes. This seems unlikely, because if lifespans could change based on mundane actions, then their very concept is meaningless since they would be fluctuating all the time from all the mundane choices that people make and all the butterfly effects from them. 2) They do the impossible without dying, since they still have lifespan remaining.
- u/ShiranaiWakaranai:
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u/MagicWeasel:
> making people with long lifespans do the impossible Unfortunately the series states that the lifespan numbers are incomprehensible to humans, so unfortunately you cannot determine who has a long lifespan or not (they are all effectively random)-
u/ShiranaiWakaranai:
Hmm, but surely there's some way to decipher them? In the anime, the lifespan of a human is just a short sequence of numerical digits floating above their head. While yes, that isn't in a nice year/month/day format, it shouldn't be too difficult to experiment and crack the code when there seems to only be about 100 million different permutations (8 digits seems to be the most anyone has above their head). Seeing as you can literally set a person's lifespan to a specific number (within the 23 day limit) using your death note, it shouldn't take too many experiments before patterns emerge that let you approximate the amount of lifespan people have left, for some small group whose lifespan numbers luckily match the codes you have deciphered.-
u/MagicWeasel:
I suppose it depends how complex the code is; perhaps it incorporates the subject's blood type and astrological sign into the calculations somehow. But it would definitely be worth some experimentation. (If you're willing to part with half of your life span!!!)- u/ShiranaiWakaranai:
> (If you're willing to part with half of your life span!!!) Eh, Light had the right idea here: get minions to take the eye deal for you. It wouldn't even be hard, plenty of people around would gladly trade half their lifespans for all kinds of goals. Go around orphanages, talking to kids and seeing if any of them are obsessed with vengeance against their parents' murderers. Offer them a chance to use your Death Note to kill those murderers, and they will likely be your loyal minions for life.
- u/ShiranaiWakaranai:
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u/Noumero:
A little late to the party, but I think I know another way to use the Death Note that no one mentioned^(1): steering the course of history through causes of death. u/ShiranaiWakaranai mentioned something similar, but focused on contradictory rules rather than practical applications. As everyone starting from Yudkowsky noticed, the ability to choose how someone dies is theoretically unlimitedly overpowered. It's limited by "physical impossibility" here, but what is "impossible" becomes less and less impossible as time passes. "Ryuga dies in two minutes of blunt force trauma caused by a hard drive containing the full code of a FAI falling on his head" leads to Ryuga dying of heart attack, because HDDs don't usually appear ex nihilo. Similarly, you can't have a Japanese prisoner dying in an hour in Paris. What you *can* do, I think, is have him die in Paris in a week. An ability to manipulate history to at least this extent opens many possibilities. If there's a plausible way for the history to go in such a way that what you want happens, then Death Note would allow you to force history into this. As easiest example, you could try writing, "John Doe dies in year 2430 of heart attack". If John Doe doesn't die in the next seven minutes, then you a) determined that there's a likely-enough way for him to survive until 2430s, and b) ensured that he will live until 2430s. You could add on conditionals, which become less and less unlikely depending on how far into the future you place his death. "... seconds before his mind is uploaded to a computer", "... on a business flight to Jupiter", "... in the capital of the eudemonic transhuman utopia", "... as FAI is taking control of humanity". If any of this is still "too implausible", you just add years. Year 2700? 3232? 5000? 10^(6)? Whatever works. The most useful way to manipulate this aspect of Death Note in short-to-middle-term is, I think, manipulating future statistics and news. "Y dies in year 2031, of heart attack after looking at truthful mortality and crime rate statistics which said [include desirable numbers]". "Z dies after reading news about political party S issuing statement A". And so on. As long as you write neither impossible nor implausible scenarios, you can do anything. It's still ludicrously powerful. ___ ^(1. Man, the Death Note is sure exploitable.)-
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN:
> > > As easiest example, you could try writing, "John Doe dies in year 2430 of heart attack". If John Doe doesn't die in the next seven minutes, then you a) determined that there's a likely-enough way for him to survive until 2430s, and b) ensured that he will live until 2430s. You could add on conditionals, which become less and less unlikely depending on how far into the future you place his death. "... seconds before his mind is uploaded to a computer", "... on a business flight to Jupiter", "... in the capital of the eudemonic transhuman utopia", "... as FAI is taking control of humanity". If any of this is still "too implausible", you just add years. Year 2700? 3232? 5000? 106? Whatever works. Death note can't have a death that's delayed by more than 23 days: >How to Use: XXVII >If you write, die of disease for the cause of death, but only write a specific time of death without the actual name of disease, the human will die from an adequate disease. But the Death Note can only operate within 23 days (in the human calendar). This is called the 23 day rule.- u/Noumero:
I'd say "phooey", but the next rule contradicts that: >*If you write die of disease like before with a specific disease's name, but without a specific time, if it takes more than 24 days for the human to die the 23 day rule will not take effect and the human will die at an adequate time depending on the disease.* — [How to Use: XXVIII](http://deathnote.wikia.com/wiki/Rules_of_the_Death_Note#How_to_Use:_XXVIII) I'm not sure how to reconcile those... Oh, wait, I already had this discussion! u/696e6372656469626c65 previously [speculated](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/619fo1/d_friday_offtopic_thread/dfdd1lf/) that these rules mean the *cause* of the death must occur within 23 days, i.e. the Death Note can influence reality according to any given entry only within 23 days of this entry's writing. I model it this way: each entry creates a death spirit capable of manipulating probability with 23-days long lifespan, and with utility function that implores it to carry out the entry. If we generalize it like this, it should still be possible to implement part of my idea: after all, the drop in crime statistics could be caused by influencing future criminals right now, for them to not commit crimes years later, rather than directly influencing them before crimes are committed. And the roots of a FAI development could be put down within this month, by causing a few researches to come up with a few insights. The tricky part is tying each death to each cause, but it's possible. But fine, let's assume it's impossible and the exception is only for diseases. I'm thinking we could lock a few people in sterile quarantined facilities, infect them with particular diseases, keep them alive, and stop medical treatment in the future iff certain conditions are met. We then write in the Death Note that these people die of disease, and watch conditions being met. Would need rather strict precommitments and security systems, so that accidental death is less likely than the fulfilment of our wishes, but it's doable, I think. **Edit:** Hm, Rule LVII says that the date of death cannot be set after the victim's original lifespan. Okay, so history-manipulation could only be done within this century. It's sad, but it's not a deal-breaker. Also, Rule LVIII confirms that it's possible to lengthen lifespans of people other than the victim.
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai:
In other words, the Death Note may also allow you to reverse entropy XD. Currently, we are stuck in a universe where everything is going from "what is possible" to "what is probable": like sandcastles turning into a disorganized mess of sand. But the Death Note says that if the conditions of death are "possible", it will happen that way. The question then is, what's the most efficient way of killing people to reverse entropy? I don't think there's an actual limit, since you can write the conditions of death before the name itself, and you can write as many conditions as you want. So just write "X dies after the occurrence of the following improbable but possible events a, b, c, ...". -
u/696e6372656469626c65:
> 1. Man, the Death Note is sure exploitable. Given the number of rules and restrictions there are, I'd assume the authors of *Death Note* much agree with you there! *** EDIT: What I mean is that of all the "munchkin this artifact" threads I've seen, the Death Note is the only one for which discussion consistently follows this pattern: > A: Let's try clever idea X! > B: Doesn't work; rule LXXVIII states that [something-integral-to-X] is disallowed. If that's not a compliment to the authors' anti-munchkinry instincts, I don't know what is.
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u/gwern:
I think this violates, like most of the ideas for extracting information using the DN, VI rule #5/6: > - The conditions for death will not be realized unless it is physically possible for that human or it is reasonably assumed to be carried out by that human. > - The specific scope of the condition for death is not known to the gods of death, either. So, you must examine and find out. It is not reasonable to imagine a dying human reliably solving NP-hard problems at random or otherwise serving as an oracle, so the Note would be well within its rights to simply kill the victim with a normal heart attack or make them take random actions once the conditionals or instructions get difficult enough, and if you are foolish enough to use any of the 'answers' without checking, well, neither gods of death nor death notes "has no obligation to completely explain how to use the note or rules which will apply to the human who owns it".- u/696e6372656469626c65:
Okay, real idea for munchkining the Death Note that might actually work (albeit a significantly less ambitious one than most of the attempts elsewhere in this comment section): The Death Note rules, page VII states that: > The instrument to write with can be anything, e.g. cosmetics, blood, etc. as long as it can write directly onto the note and remains as legible letters. Given the legibility requirement, one possible use might be to write someone's name down in the Death Note using invisible ink while visualizing their face. This would allow you to pull some deadman's switch-style tricks where you or someone else could then apply an agent to make the ink visible at a later date, thereby triggering the person's death.
- u/696e6372656469626c65:
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u/tokol:
Quick fix: the link in the opening paragraph to Just Write's video analysis has a time stamp in it, so it goes straight to near the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvOIQbHx2Xc&t=486s -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvOIQbHx2Xc- u/Alden_:
Oh shucks! Thanks!
- u/Alden_: