Oh! Branch-Loop Analysis is much different than I expected. Good to know.
Did we not record which resonance each pilot actually used each time? Usually it's clear
and holistically it's even more clear, but
it'd be nice to have confirmation in those cases where we have all the counterfactual EFS's and I'm pretty sure that data should be available.
Feedback:
"please don't shitpost and when you engage with me please avoid all attempts at humor because these pattern-match to ways I am abused and if you do those things even if in good faith it will only hurt our communication, perhaps disastrously, never help" would, I think, cover basically everything you want to cover without also signaling that it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you.
OTOH if it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you then you have successfully signaled that.
Possibly this isn't fair but I'm pretty sure it's an accurate reading.
I also live with an immunocompromised individual who cannot be successfully vaccinated. After research including reasoning very similar to yours, we concluded that if she wore a mask, we felt safe enough with vaccinated folks who had not had any obvious infection opportunities within the past 12 hours to be indoors for substantial periods of time with known-vaccinated folks not wearing a mask. This tracks almost exactly with your guess of "MIGHT be roughly 1.5 days[...] Maybe hours?"
I know about 16 vaccinated people I who I expect would have noticed+told me about easily noticeable >3 days side effects if they had occurred. 0/16 told me. Most mid-30s, two 60s. 40% W, 60% M. 80% basically healthy, 20% with significant health issues. Several groggy/sore/etc for a day, three very much so. Not sure about type distribution, though predominantly Pfizer.
The single most important thing I got from PJ Eby was the "what's good about that?" question.
The Jewel Beetle was weird. It was what, like 8% to auto-win everything by winning the Beetle? Except there was just one roll, overall. So in each group of four, one person auto-wins, and then it becomes a cross-group auction where whoever got the Beetle for way less ends up winning. Seems like with very few people participating overall, going for the Beetle caps your odds of winning at 8%, which is not great. With very many people participating, like 100, going for the Beetle caps your odds of winning at the chance there is not a cohort with pure non-beetlers, otherwise whichever of them wins the beetle probably just wins.
What I wrote to abstractapplic:
Vague price sense > guessing how others might bid > guarding against someone aiming for significantly higher ROI than you did > exact price sense, I think?
Here are the average profits and win rates if we re-ran the sim many times:
| bidder | avg_profit | prob_win | bids |
| A | 2 sp | 0.5% | [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1] |
| B | 2 sp | 0.5% | [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1] |
| C | 49 sp | 18.4% | [76, 36, 13, 26, 21, 51, 18, 13, 9, 12, 9, 18, 102, 21, 26, 31, 13, 41, 13, 36] |
| D | 43 sp | 7.0% | [50, 36, 13, 25, 19, 62, 17, 13, 1, 11, 1, 19, 85, 20, 20, 20, 13, 10, 13, 20] |
| E | 52 sp | 25.6% | [73, 34, 15, 21, 17, 57, 16, 15, 6, 11, 6, 15, 8, 17, 28, 31, 15, 42, 15, 34] |
| F | 37 sp | 18.1% | [73, 35, 14, 22, 14, 63, 16, 7, 5, 10, 2, 18, 4, 14, 29, 29, 10, 44, 14, 34] |
| G | 59 sp | 20.0% | [71, 33, 16, 24, 20, 51, 19, 16, 9, 15, 9, 18, 12, 20, 26, 31, 16, 42, 16, 33] |
| NPC | 42 sp | 9.9% | [] |
I am bidder E. Whoever bidder G is, they make more profit than I do on average, but I win 25% of the time and they only win 20% of the time.
My method was to interleave two bidding strategies, trying to either spend 300sp at a decent ROI, or spend less on an ROI high enough to beat whoever ended up spending 300sp at a not-quite-as-good-ROI-as-my-original-target.
I am favored to win all heads-up matches, but I never am never favored to win a 4-way with real players. G wins all but one of those, and F wins more 2nd-place finishes in those than I do. So I'm heavily reliant on A/B/NPC being present to make the matchups look more like head-to-head than 4-way.
I am liking this one a lot. There are enough hints, some obvious and others more subtle, that indicate many resonance strengths are simpler than they appear at first. TBD: whether I'm reading too much into the data and seeing more hints than actually exist.