Accusations so far:
The above diseases have never been cured without the associated character present.
Other diseases do not have as strong an association with a character's presence, so presumably they are the work either of multiple characters or of nonlocal effects.
Observations:
More accusations:
Observation:
Rumblepox is almost 10 times less likely to be healed when Averill is in the city. Is he keeping someone else busy?
Making some charts of mage location x disease location:
The only new accusation I add is Tehami Darke curing Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome. It seems to only ever be cured when she is in the same district as the cure or when she is in district 6.
Azeru's healing seems to affect the districts adjacent to him, while Dankon Ground affects the opposite side of the city.
There are some weird things going on with the Problems Disorder/Parachondria/Disease Syndrome triad. Many mages have a lot of zeros in the mage location x heal location matrix. Maybe whatever Boltholopew and Moon Finder are doing pulls in more people to make it work, or maybe there is some selection effect on when it happens.
The question is ambiguous. Is an "accusation" "this mage has illegally healed" or "this mage has done this specific illegal healing"?
You get scored based on the number of mages you correctly accuse; and a valid accusation requires you to specify at least one kind of illegal healing they've done. (So if you've already got Exampellius the Explanatory for healing Chucklepox, you don't get anything extra for identifying that he's also healed several cases of Rumblepox.)
My current accusations of which wizards have been causing[1] disease.
VERY SIMPLE LINKAGES:
INTERMEDIATE LINKAGES:
COMPLEX LINKAGES:
Obviously, no-one would be this offended by people curing disease for free! Rather, it seems clear that the Calderians have some customary circumlocutions around speaking of spreading plague, in order to not bring down the attention of the Pallid Princess, She Who Arises In Filth. We should interpret this whole dataset as about problems caused rather than problems healed, but we shouldn't say that directly to the Calderians.
There seems to be some pattern in when these mages affect the clockwise sector and when the counter-clockwise, but I don't know what it is. It might match e.g. phase of moon, but not neatly enough that I can easily work it out.
I've now had multiple people tell me that I shouldn't have released anything game-shaped during what is apparently Silksong week. Accordingly, I'm changing the deadline to Sep 22nd; apologies for any inconvenience, and you're welcome for any convenience.
(I wish to register that I didn't miss this scenario, and intend to get around to playing it this weekend...it's just that you made the awful indie-game blunder of releasing your game the day after Silksong came out, and my free time has been somewhat spoken for for the past few days).
The wording does not explicitly say that all instances of magical healing in the logs were criminally below market rate. Should we assume that every listed instance is a below-market-rate instance?
Accusations so far:
For each mage is a specific heal UID I think is safe to accuse them of, followed by what I suspect them of healing.
Observations:
Some additional accusations:
Danny Nova is also healing many cases of Rumblepox, but I haven't figured out who's healing the rest.
Edit: It's Averill. I accuse Averill of heal UID 53. They show up one day at a time with a gap of at least 6 days in between, and the remaining cases of Rumblepox always get healed in the sector where Averill was last seen, but never on a day when they're actually present.
My accusations, at least so far:
Danny Nova for curing:
Azeru for curing Bumblepox, Scramblepox (see Danny Nova)
Lomerius Xardus for curing Chucklepox (see Danny Nova)
Boltholopew and Moon Finder, collectively, for curing Disease Syndrome, Parachordia, Problems Disorder (each one positioned in different adjacent sectors to the curing event)
Tehami Darke on weak evidence (see below) for curing Disquetingly Serene Bowel Syndrome
Dankon Ground for curing;
Zancro for curing Scraped Elbow, Scraped Knee (always present in same sector)
Nettie Silver for curing Smokesickness (always present in same sector. It seems she is always present in Calderia, but her location and the Smokesickness curing location, when it occurs, do vary)
I have not figured out The Shivers.
Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome seems tricky. Cures only started on Day 390. Tehami Darke came to Calderia on Day 162, Lomerius Xardus first arrived on day 494, Zeledin Zura first arrived on day 427, Gouberi first arrived on day 397, Ricewined first arrived on day 994. None of which is particularly suggestive of a causal connection though the p-values would be very low assuming (falsely) that each day was independent. Cures seem more likely to occur in the sector where Tehami Darke is present, which is pretty weak without further investigation (e.g. is he hanging out in some sector where it's more likely to occur anyway? I haven't checked). Conditioned on day 390+, the average number of cures is slightly higher on days when Danny Nova is present, also weak, but the prior for Danny being involved is high, so might as well accuse him as well. (edit: no, seems there is no upside to this accusation given the scoring rule and the high confidence Danny Nova has been curing other stuff)
Only about 3/4 of healings had a mage present in the sector at the time, so either we have cases of mages healing in sectors other than the one where they are in, or there is some other source of healing.
A mage is only reliably present when Babblepox, Scraped Elbow, Scraped Knee, and Smokesickness is cured.
Nettie Silver was always in the sector where Smokesickness was cured, so accuse her of this.
Zancro was always in the sector where Scraped Knee and scraped elbow was cured so accuse him of these.
Danny Nova was always in the sector where babblepox is healed so accuse her of this.,
There are a couple of instances where a mage is always present when a disease is cured in a specific sector. This is always sector 4, 5, or 6. It is probably not a coincidence that there is a special building in each of these sectors. Most of them only occurred a small number of times though, so they might be a statistical fluke. The two exceptions are chucklepox in sector 5 and Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome in sector 6. Tehami Darke is always in sector 6 when a case of Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome is healed in that sector, so accuse him of that. I can't see anything obvious for sector 5 though.
Mildly But Persistently Itchy Throat is always cured when Dankon Ground is on the opposite side of the city, so accuse him of this.
Tehami Darke is always in sector 6 when a case of Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome is healed in sectors 1,2, and 12. He is always in the city when a case of this is healed. This is enough to provisionally assign all the other cases to him.
Both Boltholopew and Moon Finder are always in an adjacent sector when Problems Disorder, Parachondria, and Disease Syndrome are healed. There appears to be no obvious way to discriminate between them. Maybe they are collaborating to make it more difficult for the authorities to discover them? Under the principle of innocent unless proven guilty I can't accuse either of them of it though. If I was trying to maximise thr profit I made I would accuse both of them as it seems more likely that both of them would be involved than neither of them.
Nettie Silver is always in the city.
Either one of Azeru or Cayn are always in the city.
Either Archiwise the Bald or Boltholopew are always in the city
When the above are excluded the only pair of mages where at least one is present in the city when Bumblepox and Scramblepox are cured are Azure and Danny Nova are always in the city. So accuse them of those.
When Chucklepox or Gurglepox are cure there are two different pairs where at least one was in the city. Danny Nova and Dankon Ground look the most likely culprits for Gurglepox. Lomerius Xardus and Danny Nova look like the most likely pair for Chucklepox.
This is a D&D.Sci scenario: a puzzle where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.
Thank you to aphyer for the original concept. (NB: The concept was general enough that aphyer can play this one without an unfair advantage.)
Intended Difficulty: ~2/5, on average
The people of Calderia have a problem: magic-users have been surreptitiously and nonconsensually healing[1] citizens’ minor illnesses and injuries, without charging market rate. In the name of justice, their leaders have tasked you with hunting down these vile rightdoers, so they can be forcibly compensated for their time and effort.
(You hadn’t dared to hope that the problem they wanted help with was “we built our city-state around the rim of a volcano”[2] or “our entire society is based on an inconsistent and demented concept of justice”, but you’d held on to the possibility it would be at least somewhat sensible; no such luck.)
To help you, the Calderians offer a dataset listing the time and location of all confirmed incidences of miraculous healing over the last few years, another listing the locations of all magic-users[3] over the same time period, and a map of their fair city. Using this information, whom will you accuse of what?
Notes:
I’ll post an interactive you can use to test your choices, along with an explanation of how I generated the dataset, at 10pm GMT on Monday 15th 22nd September. I’m giving you nine days, but the task shouldn’t take more than an evening; 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 choices in advance, feel free to do so in the comments; however, please use spoiler blocks or rot13 when sharing inferences/strategies/decisions, so people intending to fly solo can look for clarifications without being spoiled.
By ancient convention, mages make a habit of casting a few free and anonymous low-level healing spells wherever they go; some hold to this convention even for populations which would prefer they not do that.
The leading theories as to why the Calderians did this are split between “they wanted to ensure no-one would feel left out by not living in the city center” and “they thought it would be unjust if the volcano erupted and some citizens were in more danger than others”. (Calderian historians, of course, know the answer, but refuse to elaborate, as they fear this might leave incorrect theorists at an unfair disadvantage.)
Calderians believe that people who get to break the laws of physics should, to even things out, be subject to arbitrary and restrictive rules: accordingly, mages are only allowed to be present in one sector of the city per day, and have their locations consistently recorded.
You inquire why they don’t just use whatever means they have of determining accusations’ truth and leave you out of it; the Calderians answer that it works too well and would therefore be unfair to the criminals.