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Enemy HP: 72/104 

Fractionalist cast Reduce-4!

It succeeded!

Enemy HP: 18/26

I've procrastinated and prevaricated for the entire funding period, because, well . . . on the one hand . . .

  • Lightcone runs LW, runs Lighthaven, and does miscellaneous Community Things. I've never visited Lighthaven, don't plan to, and (afaik) have never directly benefited from its existence; I have similar sentiments regarding the Community Things. Which means that, from my point of view, ~$2M/yr is being raised to run a web forum. This strikes me as unsustainable, unscaleable, and unreasonable.
  • The graphs here say the number of monthly users is ~4000. If you disqualify the ~half of those who are students, lurkers, drive-by posters, third-worlders, or people who just forgot their wallet . . . that implies ~$1000, per person, per year, to run a web forum. (Contrast the Something Awful forums, which famously sustain themselves with a one-time entry fee of $10-$25 per person (plus some ads shown to the people who only paid $10).)
  • I suspect Rationality is one of those things you get less of as you add more money; relatedly, frugality is one of the more reliable defenses against Chapman-style capital-S Sociopaths, and Zvi-style capital-M Mazes.

But on the other hand . . .

  • It's a really good web forum; very plausibly the best that exists. This walled garden is impeccably managed and curated, and has an outsized impact on the rest of the world.
  • If just a handful of the mundane UI innovations prototyped here caught on in the wider internet, that could justify every penny being asked for and then some (I'm thinking particularly of multidimensional voting and the associated ability to distinguish "this comment is Good" from "this comment is Right").
  • LW has had a non-negligible and almost-certainly-net-positive impact on my personal and professional lives, and I think that should be rewarded.

I've decided to square this circle by giving $200 but being super tsundere about it. Hopefully the fact that this is about a fifth of what's implicitly being asked for, while being about five times what I'd consider sensible for any other site, serves to underline everything I've said above.

Typo in title: prioritize, not priorities.

Here's Claude's take on a diagram to make this less confusing.

The diagram did not make things less confusing, and in fact did the opposite. A table would be more practical imo.

10 chat sessions

As in, for each possible config, and each possible channel, run ten times from scratch? For a total of 360 actual sessions? This isn't clear to me.

Regardless: a small useful falsifiable practical result, with no egregious errors in the parts of the methodology I understand. Upvoted.

Oh, and as for

the Bonus Objective

if I'm continuing with my current paradigm I'd guess it has something to do with

an apparent interaction between Orcs and Hags which makes a path containing both less dangerous than might otherwise be expected

possibly such that

I could remove the Goblin in Room 7 without making the easiest path any easier

but

I have low confidence in this answer

and

I have no idea how I could get away with purging the second Goblin

Built a treebased model; trialled a few solutions; got radically different answers which I'm choosing to trust.

The machines seem to think that the best solution I can offer is

BOG/OWH/GCD

and I've

found a row which confirms the adventurers-scout-one-room-ahead paradigm is, at the very least, not both eternal and absolute

so I'm making that my answer for now.

Did some more tinkering with this scenario. It is remarkably difficult to be 100% confident when determining the basic mechanics of this scenario, i.e.

whether adventuring parties can see more than one room ahead.

And I'm beginning to suspect that

some adventuring parties always take the optimal path, while some others are greedy algorithms just picking the easiest next encounter.

( . . . and IQ tests, and exam papers, and probably some other things that are too obvious for me to call to mind . . . )

You might want to look into tests given to job applicants. (Human intelligence evaluation is an entire industry already!)

D&D.Sci, for Data Science and related skills (including, to an extent, inference-in-general).

"What important truth do you believe, which most people don't?"

"I don't think I possess any rare important truths."

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