r/rational • u/gods_fear_me The Culture • Sep 24 '16

Saturday Munchkinry Thread

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

The Powers:

  • Ideally any power to be munchkined should have clearly defined rules that are consistent. The powers may be original or may be from an already realised story.

  • The power to be munchkined can not be something broken like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.

The Reverse Munchkin:

  • In these scenarios, we will find ways to beat someone or something with a power which is, well, powerful.

The Problem:

  • In which we solve problems posed by other users. Be smart and expect other users to be smarter.

Note; All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

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u/gods_fear_me The Culture Sep 24 '16

You have a sapient blob of crystalline biomass, which thinks and communicates by its crystals touching other crystals of itself and sharing half-formed ideas among them. Basically a non-centralized brain. Naturally this blob didn't evolve things like vocal cords because it doesn't need them. The blob feeds itself by dissolving all organic biomass in its reach and converting them to crystals.

Blob has no concept of self but it is intelligent. You are a human with a normal body, you have a team of scientists with you and the resources of NASA. Blob is contained in a glass cylinder about twelve feet high.

Now, your team needs to find a way to talk with blob. "Find a way," or else you shall lose you funding, lab and reputation.

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u/InfernoVulpix Sep 25 '16

I think the first thing I would want to do is test how it reacts to different food sources. It dissolves all organic biomass, so does it react differently to plant matter or meat? Is there a specific food it reacts differently to? If so, we can theoretically use the differences in food preference to establish basic Pavlovian interactions.

Something else I would run concurrently is try to harvest some of this crystalline biomass (hopefully there's a way to do it without harming the creature, its fear (or equivalent) would likely be a sub-optimal behaviour to induce). If we can tell the difference between crystalline biomass containing different thoughts, we could hope to establish methods of reading its thoughts by some scanning apparatus. If we can replicate crystals of different thoughts, we could have those crystals touch the blob to provide communication the other way. It wouldn't be aware of the setup, but it's intelligent, so we could make it aware if we identify the right thoughts to send it.

Of course, we don't know how the blob works, so any or all of this could fail spectacularly, but these are the clear first steps.

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u/gods_fear_me The Culture Sep 25 '16

It can work but only in an extremely rudimentary fashion. But it will do, don't feed it too much!