Friday, April 27, 2018

Giving Clerics Their Due

In the DCC RPG ruleset, many have noted that Wizards are given an extraordinary level of awesome, whereas Clerics sort of get shafted.  A huge amount of space is dedicated to Wizard corruptions, spells, how they find spells, and Wizard patrons.

Clerics have fewer official spells, all the deities get a single line in a table with just their name and alignment, and all Clerics for all deities are given a single Disapproval table that they always roll on.  This contrasted with pages and pages of example patrons with complete flavor text descriptions, invoke patron results, patron taints, and patron spells.

In a recent episode of Spellburn, one of the hosts went so far as to say Clerics are useless, suggesting that they should just be combined with Wizards.

All of this is massively unfair to the Cleric class.

Monday, January 29, 2018

Roko's Basilisk and why people were afraid of it

I'm really late on this one, but I wanted to explain Roko's Basilisk, for all the people who heard about it a while ago and never really "got" it.

The idea first started going around the internet a few years ago, and apparently was seriously freaking out a number of people in the Less Wrong forums.  I think I first heard about it from this Slate article, maybe, then spent time trying to find somewhere to explain why this idea was considered so horrfying.  The RaionalWiki explanation likewise failed to shed any light about why anyone would actually be scared of the thing.

The concept builds on a number of premises that float around the Less Wrong community that relate to the technological singularity, namely "friendly god" AI, utilitarian ethical calculus, and simulated consciousness.

The Basilisk is a superhuman AI from the future.  The abilities of this AI are essentially infinite, even up to traveling backwards in time.  The idea of the Basilisk is that it wants you to contribute your money to helping it be built, and if you refuse to help it, it will create a simulation of you and torture the simulation forever.

And so I think a normal person quite understandably has trouble understanding why anyone would even think this is a good B-list villain for Star Trek, much less a cause for existential dread.

But it's actually not that silly.  And once you understand the background to it better, it all makes sense.  So let me explain to you what the Basilisk is in clearer terms, so that you too can experience the angst.   (That was your warning)

Monday, January 15, 2018

The Monty Hall Problem, Bayes Theorem, and a fault in Numberphile

I watch a lot of educational videos on YouTube, in particular the awesome channel Numberphile.  I recently saw their video on the Monty Hall Problem, and was kind of disappointed at what seemed to be a rather pointless calculation that didn't really show the result, and instead showed something that was already kind of obvious.

The video can be found here and explains everything, but let me explain it again for completeness.



The Monty Hall Problem is a classic apparent paradox in probability, named after gameshow host Monty Hall from Let's Make a Deal.  In the show, the contestants are shown three doors and told behind one of the doors is a brand new car.  Behind the other two doors are "worthless" prizes; anything works, but traditionally the problem says the other two doors hold goats.  The player gets to pick any of the three doors, and whatever is behind the door is what they win.  If they pick right they get a car, otherwise they get a goat.

To add tension, after the contestant picks, Monty Hall would walk to another door, a door that the player did not pick, and show them what was behind it.  And look!  It's a goat!  The car is still out there!

In the Monty Hall Problem (not necessarily the show), Monty then asks if the contestant would like to change their mind.

The question is, what is the probability of the player guessing correctly if they swap their pick?

Monday, December 25, 2017

Richard Feynman and the Message of Christmas

I often come across as a Grinch during Christmas.  It isn't that I don't like the holiday, it's that I find the actual celebration of the holiday so small compared to the actual ancient reason for celebrating.

The phenomenon of Christmas, as it exists today amongst moderns,  is largely a commercial platform to sell you movies, toys, electronics, and honey baked hams.  We sing about snow and various foodstuffs eaten and herd animals, we share some presents, spoil our children, and eat a lot of food.

To most modern people, this is what it's about.  Its about time with family and the magic of Santa and having fun singing Christmas songs.

I don't think modern people really understand Christmas.  I don't think they get it.

To explain Christmas, then, let me begin with a quote by Richard Feynman (from this video interview):
I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large. They seem to be… too simple to conn- too local, too provincial! The Earth! He came to the Earth! One of the aspects of God came to the Earth mind, you. Look at what’s out there! It isn’t in proportion.
Richard Feynman gets Christmas.  In his own way, as a nonreligious Jew, Feynman understands the celebration of Christ's birth better than most people alive today.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Alternative to the d20 System

Early D&D used to be a mishmash of various different rules. Roll this die for this, that die for that, look on a table for this other thing. Thieves rolled a percentile die (two d10s with one treated as the "tens" place) and compared to a table on thieves skills; fighters rolled a d20 and looked up their result on a table organized by their level and the targets AC; later fighters rolled a d20 and compared THAC0 and AC to the result; some traps you rolled a d6 and found it on a 1, some doors you rolled a d8 and forced it open on a 1, some checks you rolled a d20 and tried to get under your ability score like STR.

It was kind of a crazy, scattered mess.

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Advanced Berenst#in Bears Theory - Complex Euclidean Space

I wrote a blog post several years ago about the Berenst#in Bears that, somehow, against all odds, managed to get picked up on the internet.  It's been posted on Reddit and other outlets several times, and accounts for about 95% of all traffic to my blog.

The post is of course intended to be silly, but part of the silliness is that hidden inside this ridiculous proposition of universes merging over children book names is a very mathematically complicated thesis about the nature of space and time.

I don't think I did a very good job explaining what that thesis is, because I often see my blog being referenced as claiming either time travel, the many-worlds hypothesis, or something else about quantum mechanics are responsible for us finding ourselves in this piteous state of being in the wrong universe with the wrong cartoon bears.

In this post, my goal is to outline what exactly it is that I was "claiming," so that if the story gets picked up again (unlikely now that more major outlets have picked it up), maybe people can actually at least summarize what I'm saying correctly.

TL;DR the theory is about changing the geometry of spacetime by allowing all four dimensions to be general complex numbers.

Let me start with what the theory is not.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

A Rule for Shields from Descending Armor Class, Applied to Ascending Armor Class

I've been playing 'D&D 'ever since I was a young boy and found my dad's Dungeon Master's Guide on his bookshelf (the original, by Gygax).  I was still too young to understand a lot of it (Gygax opens with a discussion of uniform vs binomial probability distributions...), but I spent hours of days flipping through the pages, looking at the pictures and reading the descriptions of a fantastic world.  It inspired me to make my own games about exploring through planned dungeons with friends and having them use ability scores to get through.

By the time I was old enough to try to really figure out the rules, version 3.0 was out, which made a lot of changes.  One of the biggest was replacing the original Descending AC and THAC0 system with the slightly more intuitive Ascending AC system.  This system always just made sense to me, whereas DAC and THAC0 always seemed weird and complicated.  I never understood how DAC worked, and never really saw a good explanation of it, and so just never used it.  It was only recently, when getting into old school tabletop RPGs, that I decided to look up an explanation of how DAC and THAC0 used to work.