D&D.Sci June 2022: A Goddess Tried To Reincarnate Me Into A Fantasy World, But I Insisted On Using Data Science To Select An Optimal Combination Of Cheat Skills! — LessWrong
This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.
“So I expect you know what this is about . . .” says the strange woman, as you both float gently in the void between worlds.
You find yourself tongue-tied, but your expression successfully communicates that you have no idea who she is, why you’re here, or how her hair manages to keep that shape.
“You know, the thing where someone dies, then a goddess gives them superpowers and sends them to another universe to defeat a Demon King?” She examines you quizzically. “It’s pretty common.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” you say, uselessly. “I was just cycling to the office . . .” You trail off as the implications of everything she just said hit you like a series of trucks (a comparison which, as your recent memories return, you realize you’re extremely qualified to make).
The apparently-goddess looks at you with a little sympathy and a lot of impatience. “I know you’re going through a lot right now, but like I said, there are a bunch of other people in your situation. So how about you just pick your cheat skills, let me move on to the next hero, and process all this later?”
As most of your mind continues to bluescreen, a hardcoded habit from your dayjob assumes control and starts running on automatic. “A . . . bunch of people, you say?”
“Yes. So I-”
“How big a bunch? Hundreds, thousands?”
“Hundreds of thousands. It’s a big multiverse.”
“So in other words, you have access to a data source from which we could plausibly derive statistically significant results, and thereby inform my decision?"
“. . . huh?”
After some explanations, some pleading, and a promise to share any insights she might find useful, the goddess leaves you in the care of one of her lesser angels, who has been taking notes on her previous heroes’ characteristics, choices and successes.
(As she departs, she expresses surprise that you’re making your decision based solely on win rates, and not considering how fun the various abilities could be or how well they match your personality. You reply that while you might have taken fun into consideration if you’d been more confident in your success, right now you’re just doing whatever gives you the best odds of winning: leaving a Demon King undefeated seems like it could be really bad for the world you’ll be reborn into.)
The angel provides you with a dataset detailing the goddess’ first 307641 champions, and clarifies some key points:
Every hero gets two cheat skills. (He patriotically informs you that most reincarnation goddesses provide just one, but his patron believes in going the extra mile.)
You can’t pick the same skill twice, pick fewer than two skills, delay the decision until after you reach your new world, take the goddess with you, or do anything like that.
Early in her career, the goddess needed to partner with other gods in order to provide two skills per hero. Her collaborators were an eldritch abomination (who agreed on the condition that every hero it helped with can only have Monstrous Regeneration and Anomalous Agility), and a chaos deity (who agreed on the condition that every hero he helped with have their cheat skills selected randomly instead of chosen by them). Rows where she was supported by each of these entities are marked as such, and the only thing a collaborator changes is which cheat skills are taken.
The goddess’ experience of time is orthogonal to that of the worlds she summons her champions from and to; as such, there should be no relevant time trends aside from changes in collaborators.
In his taxonomy, you have the following traits[1]:
NOT a Sociopath (worried what would happen to strangers if the Demon King was left undefeated)
NOT an Otaku (needed the isekai premise explained)
A Nerd (knows how to do Data Science)
An Office Worker (had a job in an office . . .)
NOT a Hikkikomori (. . . which required a cycle commute)
The abilities on offer are as follows:
Shapeshifting
Barrier Conjuration
Enlightenment
Uncanny Luck
Temporal Distortion
Hypercompetent Dark Side
Rapid XP Gain
Mind Palace
Monstrous Regeneration
Radiant Splendor
Anomalous Agility
Which skills will you select? And what thoughts will you share with the goddess on her return?
I’ll be posting an interactive letting you test your decision, along with an explanation of how I generated the dataset, sometime on Monday the 13th. I’m giving you nine days, but the task shouldn’t take more than an evening or two; use Excel, R, Python, prophetic dreams, or whatever other tools you think are appropriate. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about the scenario.
If you want to investigate collaboratively and/or call your decisions in advance, feel free to do so in the comments; however, please use spoiler tags (type >! at the start of a paragraph to open a spoiler block) when sharing inferences/strategies/decisions, so people intending to fly solo can look for clarifications without being spoiled.
I did some basic analysis to start this one off. I'm not a data scientist, but I'm curious how people's optimisations compare to my baseline.
I wrote a quick Python function to filter for our specific combination of character traits, then wrote up a dictionary of how often each combination won. I treated (Skill 1, Skill 2) and (Skill 2, Skill 1) as identical for our purposes. The top three here were ['Enlightenment, Radiant Splendor', 0.943], ['Anomalous Agility, Temporal Distortion', 0.918], ['Monstrous Regeneration, Temporal Distortion', 0.9]. Our winner is Enlightenment/Radiant Splendor with a total win rate of 230/244 or 94.3% among non-sociopath non-otaku nerdy office working non-hikkikomori heroes. Looks good!
But then I thought - what if the 94.3% was "People who would pick these choices" and not the skills themselves? So I took a look at the results for our personality that were picked by the Chaos Deity. Enlightnment / Radiant fell to 50%, and the top 3 now were ['Anomalous Agility, Temporal Distortion', 0.95], ['Barrier Conjuration, Mind Palace', 0.923], ['Monstrous Regeneration, Rapid XP Gain', 0.917]. The problem is...now our sample size is vastly reduced! 0.95 is actually just 19/20.
The clear winner from this analysis so far appears to be Agility/Temporal, but I haven't done any probability analysis on it, nor do I have the maths to confidently do so, AND the sample size is low. When picked at random, there's a 95% chance that Agility/Temporal wins. When someone specifically selects it, it's still 91.8%. This is still pretty high, and we're not worrying so much about what kind of person we are since we intend to pick purely on the data, but I'm still curious if this matters. Does it matter that the kind of person who selects Agility/Temporal from the list loses more often than chance, or have we sidestepped that with our data science approach? We have selected for our own personality as best we can with the data available, after all.
So, it seems we have a strange setup here - do we pick the low sample size items that seemed to give us the most victories, or do we pick the thing that people like us were most likely to win with?
Even so, I gave myself only an hour or two on this problem, and that's what I've come up with so far - Agility/Temporal should give us a 95% chance of victory with high error bars, Enlightenment/Radiant is 94.3% if we trust that we are sufficiently similar to the subset of our personality archetype that would have picked E/R without the data science approach.
I think Agility/Temporal is better. I think we should be taking both possibilities into acount. If the strategy of "Select the skills that won the most among our personality archetype" is correct, selecting A/T reduces our winrate from 94.3% to 91.8%. If the strategy of "Select the skills most likely to win if they are randomly assigned to you" is right, selecting A/T brings our winrate up to 95% from 50%. These are not equal payoffs. In the absence of more evidence, I'm selecting A/T, since I'm confident our win-rate with it should be above 90%.
Looking forward to see how people improve on this!
This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.
“So I expect you know what this is about . . .” says the strange woman, as you both float gently in the void between worlds.
You find yourself tongue-tied, but your expression successfully communicates that you have no idea who she is, why you’re here, or how her hair manages to keep that shape.
“You know, the thing where someone dies, then a goddess gives them superpowers and sends them to another universe to defeat a Demon King?” She examines you quizzically. “It’s pretty common.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” you say, uselessly. “I was just cycling to the office . . .” You trail off as the implications of everything she just said hit you like a series of trucks (a comparison which, as your recent memories return, you realize you’re extremely qualified to make).
The apparently-goddess looks at you with a little sympathy and a lot of impatience. “I know you’re going through a lot right now, but like I said, there are a bunch of other people in your situation. So how about you just pick your cheat skills, let me move on to the next hero, and process all this later?”
As most of your mind continues to bluescreen, a hardcoded habit from your dayjob assumes control and starts running on automatic. “A . . . bunch of people, you say?”
“Yes. So I-”
“How big a bunch? Hundreds, thousands?”
“Hundreds of thousands. It’s a big multiverse.”
“So in other words, you have access to a data source from which we could plausibly derive statistically significant results, and thereby inform my decision?"
“. . . huh?”
After some explanations, some pleading, and a promise to share any insights she might find useful, the goddess leaves you in the care of one of her lesser angels, who has been taking notes on her previous heroes’ characteristics, choices and successes.
(As she departs, she expresses surprise that you’re making your decision based solely on win rates, and not considering how fun the various abilities could be or how well they match your personality. You reply that while you might have taken fun into consideration if you’d been more confident in your success, right now you’re just doing whatever gives you the best odds of winning: leaving a Demon King undefeated seems like it could be really bad for the world you’ll be reborn into.)
The angel provides you with a dataset detailing the goddess’ first 307641 champions, and clarifies some key points:
NOT a Sociopath (worried what would happen to strangers if the Demon King was left undefeated)
NOT an Otaku (needed the isekai premise explained)
A Nerd (knows how to do Data Science)
An Office Worker (had a job in an office . . .)
NOT a Hikkikomori (. . . which required a cycle commute)
The abilities on offer are as follows:
Which skills will you select? And what thoughts will you share with the goddess on her return?
I’ll be posting an interactive letting you test your decision, along with an explanation of how I generated the dataset, sometime on Monday the 13th. I’m giving you nine days, but the task shouldn’t take more than an evening or two; use Excel, R, Python, prophetic dreams, or whatever other tools you think are appropriate. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about the scenario.
If you want to investigate collaboratively and/or call your decisions in advance, feel free to do so in the comments; however, please use spoiler tags (type >! at the start of a paragraph to open a spoiler block) when sharing inferences/strategies/decisions, so people intending to fly solo can look for clarifications without being spoiled.
Spoilered in case you want to try deducing your character’s traits from the text.