Caion @ Tasna

Hello, I have questions.

Yes, hello! I may have answers.

I am reliably informed that you discovered a way to communicate with something by performing “comically large numbers of random rolls” and would like to know the details of your experimental protocol and be informed of your unpublished results! I am the Acting Academician, I get to pull rank on you.

Oh, First Principles

Hang on

Pulling rank, that’s cute, I remember when your teachers weren’t cleared to authorise their own lunch. Anyways, sit down and raise a Bubble.

So, I was a terror at Tavli when I was a student.

In the course of being a terror at Tavli, I developed no small amount of skill with statistics and probability, and no small amount of interest in its study; in the course of its study I came quickly to understand that I was going mad. I’ll spare you the years I spent attempting to uphold my own eidesis against results which contradicted all established theory and skip to the part that should interest you as a methodologist rather than as a sympathetic ear.

Protocol: gnosis-fired dice array, purpose-built, throws in the hundreds of thousands per run, because anything under that’s noise wearing a fancy hat. You take what pure chance owes you and subtract what you actually get, and for lumens at a stretch the answer is zero, nothing, exactly the boring null result you’re sick of, until it isn’t. And then it’s the same shape it was last time, offset by a constant. And the next time. Across runs sharing nothing - not equipment, not operator, not weather, I checked all of it obsessively because the null hypothesis was “you are losing your mind” and I preferred that one.

It does not use words. It uses which grains land where. Which side comes up marginally more frequently than a well-behaved number ought. Timing gaps. That is the entire vocabulary on offer and it got fluent, on me specifically over about a decade, fluent in a language where the only sentence permitted was “heads or tails” and it had time and nothing better to do with it. Coordinates, eventually. A glacier, a door, a walk-there-and-see location, handed over by something biasing the long tail of a distribution until an Irós I hired could read a map out of it.

Here’s what I actually want from you, since you’re pulling rank instead of just being nosy: mine never surfaced under six sigmas. Hundreds of thousands of isolated, independent trials before anything coherent climbed out of the static. You now run an institution that watches a different aggregate do precisely that. Frightened, uncoordinated minds, past some threshold nobody has ever cleanly defined for me, and something climbs out of that noise too, and it is considerably less polite about it than mine was. I am not telling you they’re the same mechanism, but I am giving you a hypothesis to test. I have done the arithmetic twice, hoping it would stop rhyming and it hasn’t. Replicate my experiment, and then see if it has any application to the damn thoughtstorms. I need to know.

Bring your own dice or use mine. I have plenty. There’s a lab in the 12th tower that’s probably still locked; you’ll be able to open it.

What the fuck?

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. WHY DID YOU HAVE THIS MANY DICE AND WHY WERE THEY ALL PRECARIOUSLY STUFFED INTO A STOREROOM AND THE DOOR SHUT ON THEM. WAS THIS YOUR IDEA OF A PRACTICAL JOKE FOR YOUR DOOMED SUCCESSOR.

Ah, I see you found my aleatorics lab. Have fun!

Aw, they taught you to say ‘fuck’, I love that for you.

I am strongly tempted in this moment to use many other words recently added to my vocabulary!

Okay, so…

I found your research notes and have read them thoroughly and I have questions, comments, and concerns.

Oh, good, I love getting that reaction to a white paper.

How could this behaviour fail to exhibit itself at macroscopic scale? How could the laws which govern the orderly procession of one moment to the next contort themselves specifically in the presence of a living observer deliberately querying random chance?

And now you know why I thought I was going mad.

Did you ever try making dice that would report their result via gnosis-pulse so you didn’t have to manually read them all? Or had Scholar-Artificer Imssaal not done his seminal work on miniaturisation of the pulse array pattern yet? My brain is dripping out of my ears.

Fuck, that’s brilliant. They can fit them inside of dice now? That’s going to save you so much time.

I have not agreed to finishing your unfinished project.

Yeaaaah, but you’re gonna, aren’t you?

Given that I’ve barely spent any time thinking about it and I’ve already drastically improved upon your protocol I suppose it would be a crying shame not to.

That’s the spirit, Academician!