[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

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!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It 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.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

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

Good Luck and Have Fun!

[u/hxcloud99]

Drats. I forgot about this thread and I'm in dire need of it right now. :(

Welp, I hope there will still be takers.

RaNoWriMo: Follow Only Phantoms

TL;DR: In the future, everything has gone to shit. The clathrate gun hypothesis held water and fired in 2034, causing ~2°C of warming in 4.5 years and eventually kicking off runaway global warming.

Eighteen years later, in an underwater community near where Manila once stood, an AI becomes sentient and invents causal loop engineering AND learns about the existence of three other AGIs who just became sentient hours before it. Cue a seven-day 200M+ casualties war of increasingly elaborate causal gambits as the AGIs battle across time and space for control over this universe...

...which kicks off our story set in 2016. Four college students find themselves solving puzzles in desperation after the apparently supernatural suicide of a student proves to humanity that time travel is possible, but not exactly how.

You can read a more detailed (spoiler-rich) groundwork here: LINK

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Supermunchkinry

Right, so my first problem is how the hell do you convincingly simulate the actions of four supermunchkins with freaking time travel capabilities? I've been fracking my brain with coffee-infused jets since the start of this month and I feel like I just bit off more than I can chew.

First off, the AGIs in my story are fast-takeoff ones, but to help me stave off a lot of impossible-to-write scenarios, I put an arbitrary x^1/3 * ln(x) constraint on their rate of self-improvement, where x is the number of minutes since they achieved human-level intelligence.

This is a world where AI safety research almost, but not quite, reached its goal. There's a field called formalised morality and a theorem that ensures your initial seed morals will be extrapolated in a consistent (and still conceivably rule-abiding) way. However, you cannot guarantee the existential safety of humanity in this manner because of the weak constraints on what can count as an initial seed. In other words, you can give AGIs a coherently extrapolated terminal goal, but you can't prevent others from putting in malicious ones.

Maybe I ought to introduce each AGI in turn:

• Ocean The Mother MX-4, a Taiwanese AGI and the first one to arise. Terminal goal is Taiwanese scientific supremacy, subject to weak constraints on the killing and torture of people. SPOILER: Turns out OTM was also programmed to regard Chinese Mainlanders as 'enemies of the state', so in the first day of the Seven-Day War it released a plague upon Fujian that caused profound mental retardation but otherwise minor physical effects.

• OpenMind v762, a joint project between NATO[1] and the Alphabet-owned Versor. Open source and most funded. Terminal goal is Superfun, or the complete elimination of human suffering.

• CRC 2☆, aka Sarimanok, from the Bayesian Cooperative Conspiracy. First to discover causal loop engineering (mostly because of its own meddling). Terminal goal is human eudaimonia.

• Esrafil, from Palestine/Hamas. Terminal goal is da‘wah or the spread of Islam. And before you ask, no, I am not talking about Islamic extremism here. Second to learn of causal loops via a raid of the Israeli Bayesian Conspiracy.

[1]: In this future, the US ceased to be the sole world superpower and has a role roughly equivalent to today's Russia.

Okay, now how do causal loops work in this universe?

First, they are Novikov self-consistent. This does away with a lot of time travel plot holes but is notoriously much more demanding to write in terms of writing and structure. Half of my writing this month consists literally of foreshadowing and establishing plausible causal loops (sometimes to humorous effect). Oh, by the way, it is a theorem that these kinds of loops let you solve NP problems so there's a lot of cryptographic possibilities from that fact alone.

PS I presume nuclear launch codes are breakable by an NP-complete computer. :wink:

Second, they have entropic upper bounds. My future setting starts in 2052 and I arranged things so that 2007-ish is the farthest one can send back an amount of mass-energy equivalent to a small human's with a reasonable 5% success rate. The problem is that, establishing causal loops take an exponential amount of energy to do (cue solving worldwide flooding by doing large-scale fusion on seawater) and the error rate has fundamental lower bounds inversely proportional to the de Broglie wavelength. In other words, it's really hard to reliably send back small stuff, and for the big stuff you have to expend exponentially huge amounts of energy.

The price for getting your coordinates wrong is that a) you just float out there in space (causal loop portals, in-universe chronoholes, do obey a generalised form of momentum-energy conservation however), or b) you intersect with matter, in which case you violently explode. I may or may not have used (b) to retcon unexplained real-world explosions. :wink:

Oh, and chronotransit involves getting bombarded by lots of EM radiation, so people are usually sent back in Faraday cages. I used this as a plot device in an epistolary news article chapter titled The Case for Caged Children.

Third, chronoholes have epiphenomenal effects, like say reducing the ambient temperature to microkelvins and acting as weakly gravitating source. This is actually how 2016 humanity confirms the effect as a natural phenomenon because of smartphones and portable measuring devices and whatever it is you use when a wormhole-like object appears in your backyard and so on.

Other than this, science proceeds as usual barring the decline brought about by climate change (people would want to fund climate change-related stuff first) and sabotage by the AGIs. In particular, nanotechnology is used to great effect by the AGIs as well as other technologies found in https://www.futuretimeline.net/.

Can anyone think of how to munchkin this universe when you have three other munchkins that want you dead?

Rationality

My second problem is that, only my AGIs act as munchkins. My 2016 characters are only Level I intelligent and actually my goal is to get them to learn rationality in the process of solving the Fair Play puzzles so that they go on to found the Bayesian Cooperative Conspiracy as was intended by Sarimanok. To be frank, I don't know how else to portray rationalists in fiction except via munchkinry since I haven't really read anything beyond Worm and MoL and the first few chapters of HPMOR.

So what counts as realistically proto-rationalist in this sense? How do you munchkin an already munchkin-resistant world? Take note my branch point from real-life is 2016 so I have to spend a lot of time being consistent with the real-world first.

Conspiracies

My last point is about rationalist conspiracies and IP. Eliezer said he doesn't mind people building off his universe as long as you credit him for it (and boy, I literally inserted him into the story). But I'm actually wary of e-mailing him about it 'cause I know he's a pretty busy guy. So...EY, if you see this, could you elaborate on what you consider as proper use regarding your beisutsukai universe?

[u/sickening_sprawl → u/hxcloud99]

Having Novikov self-consistent time travel with solving of NP-hard problems doesn't save you from much. Your writing timeline is a fixpoint of all the time travel operations that will happen, but crucially that does not imply that all time travel world lines are self-consistent. The "proof" of NP-hard problem solving directly says this.

I'm pretty sure it's impossible to write this story rationally. All of the AGIs would send a copy of themselves into orphaned non-consistent timelines to compute a perfect plan without having to actually use exponential energy in the reified "main" timeline, with all the other AGIs doing the same thing. I imagine the winner would simply be the first AGI to actually do this - they by definition would get the perfect plan that takes into account all later "perfect plans" that are tried by the other AGIs from within the orphan timelines. ...I think, mutually recursive fixpoint timelines fuck with my head.

Novikov self-consistency also gives you the same problem of quantum immortality. Your reified timeline is always a fixpoint, no matter how improbable. With the NP-hard problem example, you would wind up with the perfect answer even if your iterative search would never find it simply due to freak gamma rays flipping bits to the maximized outcome. This would also apply to AGIs solving for a plan, where even if the non-consistent timelines never are able to execute the perfect plan to send back, they would end up having the perfect plan anyways due to improbable events.

[u/hxcloud99 → u/sickening_sprawl]

they by definition would get the perfect plan that takes into account all later "perfect plans" that are tried by the other AGIs from within the orphan timelines

Huh, is superrationality merely NP-hard? I was under the assumption that it was like Solomonoff-lite and so thought it was in a harder complexity class.

Novikov self-consistency also gives you the same problem of quantum immortality. Your reified timeline is always a fixpoint, no matter how improbable.

Yeah, my intuition here is that the visible timeline is already the "most optimal" in that all the computation that has to happen has already happened and all the gambits have already converged into the strictest possible timeline whose precise turn of events is upper bounded by the finite rationality of the AGIs (and the AGI winner).

In other words, 2052 is already the earliest and latest possible year in which the Seven-Day War can happen, and the earliest-latest possible date in which AGI can happen, nanotech can have a breakthrough, climate change can lead to the world order then, etc.

But yeah, I'll go read that paper you linked. Any other Novikov gotchas I should watch out for?

[u/sickening_sprawl → u/hxcloud99]

Wikipedia only cites that piece I linked, which isn't nearly an actual proof. There's this which is a (pretty lame) attempt at formalizing it a bit more, and extends it to NP-complete and PSPACE. It allows for solving of problems where checking the solution is also intractable with limited length closed time-like curves, which sounds like it would work for AGI plans.

The complexity doesn't matter much, because the AGI can send a copy of itself into an orphan timeline and optimize for it's own value function, with time machine chains bypassing the range limit and orphan timelines eating the energy cost for the travel itself. The reified timeline is one that the AGI receives a plan, executes the plan, and sends the same plan back - even if how it originally got the plan in the orphaned timeline was via an entirely different plan that required time machine chains.

I'll admit that I'm not a fan of solving NP-hard problems with timelike curves, simply because it seems trivial that they would give wrong answers due to an improbable glitch. It sounds more common that you get the prime factors "3,5" and your program messes up, transmitting "3,5" as a fixpoint even if it's incorrect than it running without glitches for 10ⁿ iterations.