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'm unlikely to put in much more time, so my presumably-final answer and a summary of findings for the goddess:
My powers: Temporal Distortion and Barrier Conjuration
(I see very little to choose between the three physical powers for my second choice. Agility has a n=20 sample of people exactly like us vaguely suggesting it might be better for us, Barrier Conjuration has a smaller effect in a larger sample vaguely suggesting it might be good for non-Sociopaths. Since some other people have done Temporal + Agility I'm letting hipster-ism steer me to picking something different. Monstrous Regeneration is also an equally-good pick, but has no real evidence towards being better, and if it involves getting hit and then regenerating rather than not getting hit it might be much more painful.)
Key takeways for the Goddess:
Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration and Monstrous Regeneration are Defense powers. Never give someone more than one of these.
Enlightenment, Radiant Splendor and Uncanny Luck are Mental powers. These tend not to be very good, but Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor work extremely well together for a subset of people (the subset is not readily identifiable by your Angel's trait system, but may be discoverable with more work). That subset of people already tend to choose to take them/you choose to give them. Keep giving Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor to anyone who you would have given it to before, but don't try to spread it more broadly.
All other powers are Utility powers. Most heroes should take one Utility power and one Defense power.
When picking out Utility powers, you can do this based on personality classification (ask your Angel for his list of traits):
Nerds do well with Temporal Distortion. They should take Temporal Distortion plus a Defense power of their choice.
Sociopaths and Otaku do well with Shapeshifting. They should take Shapeshifting plus a Defense power of their choice.
Someone who is both a Nerd and a Sociopath/Otaku can either take both Shapeshifting and Temporal Distortion, or take one of those plus a Defense power, both seem okay.
Hikkikomori do appallingly badly with Mind Palace. Never let a Hikkikomori take Mind Palace.
Hypercompetent Dark Side does poorly with Enlightenment or Radiant Splendor - this shouldn't matter if you're following the 'one Utility and one Defense' plan, but keep it in mind if people request something else.
If you found this information helpful, are you hiring? Since it looks like my winrate is probably only 80-90% even with the best-chosen powers, I might prefer a position as your new Data Angel over being a hero, depending on what the benefits are like.
Some additional takeaways for me in my new life:
Otaku do extremely well (~30% better winrate than anyone else). This suggests that this world is going to 'behave like a story' in some way, or reward people for acting in story-like ways. Even if I'm not as good as an Otaku at identifying these things, I should try to behave like one. If I see a damsel in distress, I should go try to rescue her and not think too hard about it. Even if it seems like a stupid decision, empirically the Otaku who are likely to do that end up succeeding at extraordinarily high rates.
Temporal Distortion does much better than most powers for Nerds, but much worse than most powers for non-Nerds. It probably requires careful nerdy thought to get the most out of it, I should make experimenting with it a high priority and see if I can figure it out faster than most other Nerds.
The amount of benefit gained from having a single defensive cheat power rather than not having one suggests that I am likely to be at risk of death from early physical attack. Be on the lookout with Barrier Conjuration early on, in case the Demon King can try to assassinate me before I level up.
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.