So what is Siobhan’s power? We have Del’s actions to confirm that she has one, but what evidence did Carlisle have that he was so convinced? If Carlisle only saw Siobhan herself carrying out her plans, then it could be that Siobhan is simply of the mindset that puts together elaborate plans in a way that emphasizes fallback positions, and her actual power is something like a supernatural talent for Indy Ploys. However, if Carlisle saw others carrying out Siobhan’s plans, and they still worked well enough to convince him that she was a witch and not merely a good planner, then that power must affect others as well as herself, invalidating the theory that Siobhan is simply supernaturally competent at achieving her goals in a way unrelated to plans. The obvious conclusion is that her power is the mode of thought that attempts to put together plans with great regard for the possible holes therein; the alternate hypothesis is that her power somehow contaminates plans she devises with Essence of Success, or something, which is really reaching and not consistent with how witchcraft has so far worked here.
alethiophile
Assuming that the needs of the narrative were taken care of, could she? Would she have to already be good at calculus herself to do so? If she was, but it took her entire concentration, could making a Math sub-agent allow her to do it ‘in the background’?
I’m still wondering about the ‘arbitrary numbers of sub-agents’ aspect of Elspeth’s power. She found Magic there the first time she meditated, but apparently created Memory intentionally for the purpose of dealing with her Del-induced memory banks. Could she create other sub-agents with particular purposes? Could she create a ‘Math’ sub-agent that was really good at calculus? If she creates multiple sub-agents that then explicitly argue the truth of a point, could she become noticeably better than usual at discerning the truth from opposing clever arguments? This is the sort of mental power that seems like it could do just about anything (inward-directed), depending on the constraints.
I really can’t wait until the next army fight, and I hope it’s described rather than just alluded to. Be interesting to see whether the intuition of the others is correct that his mental upgrade will make him even better at mock battle, or whether his new focus will simply make him not care.
I just thought of something. Given Alice’s precog, could she, for instance, guess passwords? Assuming a numeric entry code, could she do something along the lines of 1. decide to press 0 first; 2. if she sees the door opening in her precog set, press 0 and then go to 1; 3. if not, then try 1 with the number 1 instead, etc. (i.e., does her precog give her a set of possibilities based on future decisions, or does it give her only one possibility based on what she has in mind at the time?)
If the latter holds, and hence the above algorithm won’t work, then how long a password is it feasible for her to guess by exhaustive mental search of the command space (i.e. resolve to type 0000, then if she sees door opening type it, otherwise go to 0001, etc.) with vampire mental speed? The advantage of this over simply trying each password is 1. that it’s likely to be faster, with physical bottlenecks removed, and 2. it doesn’t trigger anti-brute-force alarms in the system.
One imagines that, if he was doing something akin to Elspeth’s heuristic, immediate feedback on what Chelsea’s doing to him would be very useful. This is contingent, of course, on him caring, which at the moment he probably doesn’t (though, if he’s smart enough to put together a Xanatos Gambit instead of just going ape when he finds the memory, it might well be very useful then).
A side question: If Marcus became aware of Aro’s part in Didyme’s death, could Chelsea snip the emotional bond based around hatred and revenge that resulted? Or is that too tied up with the mate bond to be vulnerable?
Very much agreed. He’s kind of badass. I especially like his casual death threats to Chelsea. Does this imply that Marcus is functionally immune to Chelsea, since he can see what she’s doing in real time?
Chapter 22.
Addy has run off without consultation after taking Siobhan’s power. That could be bad. I’m having visions of a supervillain Addy running around.
Siobhan has asked the crucial question. They now have a really dandy weapon against the Volturi, can they inject it into the collective knowledge at the right time. This, of course, assumes that no Volturi come across the knowledge beforehand, in which case the effect is not likely to be as drastic, but still interesting.
Did Marcus himself receive the memory dump? If so, I recall reading that he spent most of his time brooding, presumably over Didyme. Would this cause him to immediately look for all the information available about Didyme in the memory dump? If so, he’s already found it and gone ape, off-screen. Which would be kind of disappointing, unless we get a meanwhile later on.
Wow. Arbitrary numbers of sub-agents.
I think this officially qualifies as the most awesome superpower ever.
My commendations, by the way, for updating even on Christmas Eve.
It seems to me that simply breaking the homomorphic encryption would be the most likely outcome here. Note that we’re relying on a human-created code to provide security against a superintelligence, and breaking code systems (or at least determining routes of attack that provide a method that has a certain chance of breaking the code system within a certain number of cycles, et cetera, et cetera) is something we do fairly routinely. I think it’s far more likely that the AI will simply deduce the method by which we have confined it and break the code. If we’re positing an AI that could destroy the universe through the heat output of the processor it’s running on, the only real answer is “don’t run it”.
Chapter 19.
Interesting.
Since it took Elspeth a day to recover, how long would it take the vampires of the guard? Half the time? Less? I’ve never seen a hard number for how much more mentally able a vampire is than a half-vampire.
If Addy can be convinced to join a full rebellion against the Volturi, she could be quite a powerful asset. For one thing, she can copy Chelsea and break the enforced bonds; that would certainly cause enough havoc for a while, especially if Chelsea herself can be incapacitated beforehand. For that matter, how is Chelsea at self-defense? Could Chelsea!Del affect her in the same way so as to force her to their side, without her counteracting it? Somehow I doubt it; I would be surprised if Chelsea wouldn’t just undo what was done immediately.
There’s no real range limit on the wolves’ telepathy, right? Previously it was mentioned that a test was conducted from the reservation to somewhere unspecified in Canada without any degradation in quality; can we assume from this that Jake is still in contact with the pack? Does Chelsea work on intra-pack membership bonds (i.e. could she make Jake’s pack no longer his?)
Chapter 18.
Wait, what? Has she just been hit by Alec or Alec!Del? That’s all I can think of. Why?
It’s also worth noting that the letter does not only provide several orders of magnitude jump in the prior for whether magic exists or not, but also provides a method of testing its existence that is much lower-cost than before (beforehand, Harry would have had to do some fairly strenuous things to break The Masquerade; with the letter in hand, he merely needs to send a reply.)
Is it just my imagination, or is the chapter for this Friday missing?
In the absence of a pattern of such random crackpot letters, I would probably call a single letter sufficient evidence to make it worth testing. If that one didn’t pan out, or the next few, it stops being so. A specific oddity—such as an eleven-year-old receiving a letter purporting to be an invitation to attend a school of magic—is more evidence than an entry in a continuing pattern. (What would have happened, I wonder, if Mrs. Figg had not been present, and Harry had simply thrown out the letter as junk? Probably someone would have come anyway when no reply was received.)
I should think that wandless magic, while possible, is at least far less powerful than wanded; presumably with that advantage, as well as anti-Disapparition jinxes, and perhaps other pre-cast defensive spells, a competent Auror should be able to hold and defeat any wizard. It might well be possible, for instance, to have an ongoing magic-triggered overpowered Somnium enchantment cast on the prison, that ignores the wands of specifically keyed-in wizards. Or something.
I would say that while there are hypotheses with such low priors as to make it irrational to expend the effort to check them (and Harry would probably have assigned such a low probability to the existence of HP-style magic, and magical Britain, before he got the letter), one of these hypotheses being promoted specifically to your attention in the manner of the letter probably raises the prior to the point where it’s worth testing, at least.
I think there are some places where it is rational to take this kind of bet the less-expected-value way for a greater probability. Say you’re walking along the street in tears because mobsters are going to burn down your house and kill your family if you don’t pay back the $20,000 you owe them and you don’t have the cash. Then some random billionaire comes along and offers you either A. $25,000 with probability 1 or B. $75,000 with probability 50%. By naive multiplication, you should take the second bet, but here there’s a high additional cost of failure which you might well want to avoid with high probability. (It becomes a decision about the utilities of not paying the mob vs. having X additional money to send your kid to college afterwards. This has its own tipping point; but there’s a rational case to be made for taking A over B.)
I really want to see what Elspeth can get her power to do. (Is Magic, the pseudo-personal entity, actually running Elspeth’s powers? Or is Magic just some kind of personification and Elspeth in control?)
So does this extend as well to other people carrying out her plan? It could be some sort of generalized psychic ability that tries to make events go as she wills them to, but requires a level of concentration achieved by planning it out in detail. Whatever; it seems that the results are well enough defined, even if the implied method is odd.