AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 309
ARES III SOL 305
“You break one of those,” Fireball said, standing between Starlight Glimmer and the rainbow crystals, “over my dead body.”
“Will you just move over? Seriously.” Starlight snorted as she worked her way past the self-appointed guardian of beauty. “I need to get a close look at them. Besides, it’s not like they’re going to run out. According to Mark’s photos, they’re spreading.”
That was true. Careful examination of Mark’s photos of the rainbow crystals over the previous three or four days had shown that, somehow, whatever caused the shimmering colors that rippled through the crystal was spreading through the rest of the crystal- at a rate, more or less, of a row of crystals converted every three days. It wasn’t an even growth; large crystals, the size of Starlight’s barrel, took several days, but crystals the size of Mark’s thumb seemed to change overnight, possibly faster.
Mark had taken another photo just before Starlight activated the magic field projector for a three-minute dose of ambient magic. He’d take another photo afterwards to see if any crystals had changed visibly from the exposure. In the meantime, Starlight needed to probe the crystals to see if there was some sort of enchantment in the things, and time was running out. They needed to rebuild power in the batteries too badly to run over schedule on the projector.
Starlight gently pushed the cocoon aside so she could get right up next to the crystals. She noticed that the cocoon had left a sort of shadow of unaffected crystals behind it, although it had obviously shrunk since the day of the magic blast that created the rainbow effect. The infection, or whatever it was, spread inward as well as outward.
She took a deep breath, concentrated, and focused her vision into and through a crystal, looking for an enchantment array, if one existed.
And… well, there was something there, but it wasn’t any kind of array she’d ever learned about in her obsessive study of magic.
An enchantment array was above all orderly- usually a circle, but sometimes triangles or more complex geometrical designs were involved. Complex enchantments might have rings or layers of designs, intertwined or concentric, overlapping or entangled. But, if you were patient, you could see the sense of the design, and with knowledge you could work out what the thing was meant to do.
Staring at the enchantment within the rainbow crystals was like making sense of a restaurant-sized pot of spaghetti. Or possibly worms, since parts of it seemed to be moving just past the edge of Starlight’s focus. And when she looked at another crystal and then back to the one she’d been looking at before, it’d be all different.
It made no sense. Absolutely, positively, no sense.
And then the sight was taken away from her, as the magic field was shut down. She refocused, concentrating her reserves, and looked again… and the spaghetti lines were still there, mocking her with their disorganization, with…
… with their chaos.
“Hey, Starlight?” Mark’s voice cut through her thoughts. “Mind moving out of the way? I don’t think you want a photo of your ass in a scientific study.”
Starlight didn’t mind the crass comment. She had an epiphany and she was ready to use it. “Give me a suit,” she said. “Time to call home.”
AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, use suit SG for response, over.
ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, over.
AMICITAS: I need to talk to Discord, right now. Over.
ESA: Please repeat last message, over.
AMICITAS: SG - Repeating, I need to talk to Discord. Over.
ESA: TS – Are you crazy? You know we keep Discord as far away from any space center as possible!
DISCORD: And it’s so impolite of you. I mean, here I am, one of your dearest and truest friends, and you won’t let me help.
ESA: TS – How are you doing this, over?
DISCORD: Oh, Twilight, you really don’t want the answer to that question. It’d only irritate you. And Celestia knows you’ve been so busy of late, with the launch of Angel Eleven. It’s in all the papers, you know.
AMICITAS: Discord, there’s this weird enchantment or something here. Have you kept up with the news from here? Over.
DISCORD: Oh, Fluttershy tells me this and that over our weekly teas, and then there’s game night with Spike, Big Mac and Rainbow Dash, and of course the reforming tyrants support group with Queen Chrysalis.
ESA: TS – He made that last one up. Chrysalis is on Concordia performing retrieval duties for the Angel probes. Over.
AMICITAS: Fine. We blasted Dragonfly’s cocoon with all the raw magic we had to energize her enough to come out. It more or less worked, but it turned the quartz behind her into these color-changing crystals, and the effect’s slowly spreading. There’s a really ugly enchantment that looks like all the crawling worms in the world turned to mana and took over each crystal. Know anything about it? Over.
DISCORD: Sorry, not my work or my knowledge. I can’t even see the universe you’re in directly- Twilight already asked. All I can tell is that where you are order and chaos are the same thing. Dependence on initial conditions mitigated by quantum indeterminacy. Dull, dull place, literally deathly dull. But I could…
ESA: TS – Discord? Could what, over?
AMICITAS: Discord, comms check, over.
DISCORD: Would you like a guess?
AMICITAS: Affirmative, over.
DISCORD: Ask your friend what he knows about “emergent properties”. Not usually my field of chaos, but I do like to diversify now and then.
AMICITAS: Roger “emergent properties.” Thank you, Discord, we appreciate the help. Over.
DISCORD: Oh, it is so delightful to be appreciated! It’s something I get so very seldom. Well, must be back to my duty of spreading random acts and curious coincidences around the land! Ta-ta!
ESA: I think he’s gone, over.
AMICITAS: No, he’s not, over.
DISCORD: Yes I am. Over.
AMICITAS: Thanks to you both. Amicitas out.
“Dictionary,” Starlight said as she pulled her suit away from the mud puddle beneath it. “I need to make sure I have this word exactly right.”
Five minutes with the computer later, during which time the others sat and waited out of sheer curiosity, she said, “Chaos tells me to ask you about ‘emergent properties.’ That is right, yes? Properties that come out of something?”
“Um.” Mark shifted on his feet. “Where you come from there’s a person named Chaos?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Starlight said. “It’s more like there’s a person who is chaos. Chaos isn’t the right name, but one of his titles is ‘Lord of Chaos.’ He makes impossible things happen at random around him- really, really impossible things.”
“He’s evil,” Cherry Berry said, looking frightened. It occurred to Starlight, idly, that Cherry didn’t let herself look afraid that often during their stay on Mars.
“He’s a pest,” Spitfire grumbled.
“He’s scary,” Dragonfly whispered, crouching as if she expected him to come out of thin air at any moment.
Fireball shrugged. “Not meet him,” he said.
“Ooooookay,” Mark said, looking around him in total confusion. “But how much do you know about chaos as a force of nature?”
“What? Chaos isn’t nature!” Starlight insisted. “Chaos is… opposite of harmony? Chaos is broken! Ponies try studying chaos, and it drives them mad! Chaos even carries around little cards warning ponies not to study him anymore!”
“So, that’d be nothing,” Mark said. “Okay. I’ll try to keep this simple. Humans are the only species on my planet that can express abstract thoughts in the form of language and pass them down from generation to generation. There are a lot of other animals that are close- whales, some squids, elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, parrots- but they don’t quite get there. And for decades, human scientists wondered why.
“Then we figured out that, contrary to everything we’d expected, our brains weren’t specifically designed to be intelligent and self-aware. Conscious thought is a by-product of the complexity of our brains. Even now, we’re totally incapable of pointing to a cluster of neurons and saying, ‘That means he thought X.’”
“Okaaaaay… so are you saying the crystals think now?” Starlight asked.
“No, no, no,” Mark said. “I’m saying that consciousness and the ability for abstract thought are emergent properties. They’re unexpected products of an incredibly complex system. You can’t predict them based solely on the pieces of the system itself. It’s how the system works together that creates them.”
“I don’t see the point,” Starlight said.
“Let me give you an example,” Mark said. “About, oh, forty years ago, some scientists took a bunch of little robots with the ability to rewire their own internal circuitry- don’t ask me how, I’m not a roboticist. The robots also had a radio receiver. If the robots could accurately detect a broadcast at a certain frequency, it got a reward. But the scientists didn’t tell the robots how to do it. They just stood back and let the robots start guessing. The ones who came closest became templates for the next generation of robots, and so on. And by one hundred robot generations- they made new robots every other day or so.- the robots had become able to detect that signal ninety-eight percent of the time, without confusing it for another signal or detecting it when it wasn’t there.
“But here’s the thing. They looked at that last generation. The robots had about a dozen different ways to do the same job. Absolutely none of them were the way any human designer would have done it. A couple of them, so far as the scientists could tell, shouldn’t have worked at all. And for half of them, the scientists simply could not tell how it worked. The robots had created a solution by pure random chance- several solutions, all of them the product of guesses and misfires and junk program loops and a tangle of circuits and code nobody could figure out.”
Mark shook his head in frustration. “I’m mangling the story,” he said. “I haven’t heard it since college. But that’s emergent properties in action. Randomness leads to order, depending on how you look at it. But even the simplest of rules, allowed to run, can produce unexpected results. In fact, all life on my world comes from simple rules allowed to run for a very long time.”
The ponies all shifted their weight on their hooves enough for the sound of scuffed soil to crackle through the almost silent cave. "Are you saying," Starlight asked in a shocked whisper, "that humans- that your whole world- is based on chaos?"
"I told you," Dragonfly said, "a Free Forever universe."
"Well, it's based on a lot of things," Mark said. "Chaos is just one way we explain it." He cocked his head and added, “But what does that have to do with anything?”
Starlight told them what she saw in the crystal.
“Aaahhh,” Mark said, when the explanation was complete. “Your friend Chaos was explaining how the rainbow crystals work. Your blast must have accidentally laid a random enchantment on the crystals. And at least one of those enchantments is self-replicating.”
Starlight looked at the crystals again, a bit horrified. “They’re… they’re alive??”
Mark considered this. “Starlight, I don’t know about ponies, but humans have been discussing it for hundreds of years, and we’ve never been able to come up with a definition of life that satisfies everybody. But the crystals obviously aren’t alive. No respiration, no eating or excreting, no reproduction. The enchantment might qualify, but only if computer programs are alive.” He brightened and added, “We have sci-fi stories about that, y’know.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better!”
Mark shrugged. “The question is, will it do any harm?" He pointed to the light sources in the ceiling. “What happens to the sun lamps when the rainbows get up there?” He pointed to Fireball. “Can he eat rainbow crystals safely?”
“Not gonna try,” Fireball said firmly. “We go back deep in cave, cut all crystals I need through launch, take to Hab soon. After that, not a problem.”
“And finally,” Mark said, “will the rainbows have an effect on the plants? We know they don’t actually glow by themselves, at least not in the visible spectrum…”
Starlight nodded. “I see where you’re going,” she said. “This is a job for science.”
“Yep,” Mark nodded. “Magic science.”
Holy shit...
Oh, a constantly self generating and expanding spell... not a huge spell, but a constant expenditure of magic (one that is growing as well). I wonder if Twilight could use that as a beacon.
Oh. Crystals are inherently geometric and form in layered patterns. So maybe they are now arrays on the atomic scale. And now we get to create fun psuedo-science phrases like quantum enchantment and microthaumic processor.
Also reminds me a little of a certain book where a girl finds a whole planet that's essentially a giant semi-sentient blank circuit board, and proceeds to download her entire laptop / spellbook / galactic internet into it and accidentally creates a race of android wizards.
...Self replicating, self sustaining enchantment. Starlight had better grab a sample to take home, cause she just hit the holy grail and mother lode of enchantments. Purely by chance.
Discord, stop cackling.
And after a minute of thinking, is this how the ponies learn to terraform planets? Plant some plants near some crystals, fire a massive burst of power into the crystals, wait a century, ???, PROFIT!
Sweet magical science
Sounds like Starlight's accidentally created the magical equivalent of a nanite swarm. And one that can self-replicate, at that...
This could get real ugly. Tiberium, anyone?
9002005
This is how magical virus pandemics begin.
"We're botanists, SCIENTISTS! Now inject this stone with some SCIENCE! Beautiful, MAGICAL science!"
"Chaos even carries around little cards warning ponies not to study him anymore!"
Yeah, I can see Discord doing that. Easily.
So, now we've got an unbounded Mandelbrot fractal growing in the cave. Grey goo scenario in the future?
Twilight pressed a hoof to her forehead. "You broke the spaceship. You broke the human's spaceship getting back into orbit. You broke the spaceship we sent to bring you home. And now you're telling me you broke the planet you were on?!"
Well, there's no possible way that this could end badly..........................
I'm a little confused by the example you used though. I haven't read it, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that the science of discworld uses fictional examples that are explained using science, so Is Mark sighting a fictional experiment, or did the science of discworld site a real experiment, and if so, do you know where I can learn more about that experiment? It sounds really interesting if it actually happened (also sounds interesting if not, but you know what I mean).
9001253
Major Tom was talking to ground control, he wasn't part of it.
9002024
Unexpected TFS reference ahoy!
9002041 No. The Science of Discworld alternates between short chapters of the faculty of Unseen University (usually exploring their "Roundworld" experiment) and longer chapters of two scientist authors talking about actual Earth science, in some great detail. Unfortunately the specific example appears in the first book (or, rather, I can't find it in the second or third), and I have mislaid my copy, so I can't give any more details than Mark just now.
Oh. OH. A self-replicating chaotic enchantment. Wow. This just got a LOT more interesting.
That looks like a potentially runaway magical reaction and screams Bad Day(tm).
9002029
Could be nothing more than Conway's Game of Life writ large (I figure the odds are 50/50 at this point). And the Planetary Protection office will certainly be up in arms if the crystals get out of the cave (bad enough that no small amount of "live" soil was released when Airlock 1 blew).
I remember reading about that hardware evolution experiment! I think it was this one? IIRC my favourite thing that happened in it (not mentioned in that particular article) was when one of the experimental units "cheated": the devices intentionally had no system clock to rely on (which would have made their task easier), but one of them evolved a structure that received the faint radio signals from the system clock of a nearby running PC.
9002054
Oh ok, that makes sense. Thanks anyway, I'll see what I can dig up on the subject.
Anyways, thanks again, absolutely love this story, Reading this every night is always a highlight of the day for me. No idea how you keep up that sort of pace, but we all appreciate it. Keep up the good work!!!
Huh and here we see a distinct divergence in pony and human thought based upon the differing natures of their worlds.
Ponies see nature as orderly and that chaos has no place in it. Hence why the Everfree is such a bizarre nightmare to them.
Humans freely acknowledge that the universe is under no obligation to make sense to them but we try our best anyway.
So, we have a magic random crystal virus slowly spreading. What will it do to the plants?!? How about what will it do to the planet?!!!!!
Sounds like it could be a Semi-Fractal. Self repeating with "Flaws" based on the Fracture planes of the Crystals.
You would have to find the Primary Crystal.
But the replication works like a strait line drawn on crumpled then flattened piece of paper.
After the initial drawing, you spread the sheet out, then copy that onto another crumpled piece of paper. You then repeat, the last two steps for as many generations as you want. Do enough generations you end up with a piece of paper that is essentially grey-scaled with apparently random slash lines.
9002005
You mean, take a hitherto unknown magic self-replicating entity into a magic-rich environment? What is wrong with you? Did you miss the part where Mark explains that the end result is completely unpredictable? This is how extinction events get started, people!
9002029
To which Starlight replies, "Don't worry Twilight, I have a plan. Find a way to get me a scan of your castle and so help me I will grow a new ship out of this Celestia-forsaken planet! I'll turn this whole planet into a ship if I have to!"
9002105
Either that or she just invented the Crystal pony equivalent of primordial soup (in limited edition Martian flavor!).
About five years in the future ... “Why is Mars rainbow colors?” Mark “Opps”
If the random enchantment is growing what stops it from spreading out of the cave. Plus if it affects the plants they might hyper evolve to live on Mars.
I'm probably with Mark here. There are some weird humans that might get a hold of that picture and decide that picture is worth 'scientific study'
Suddenly imagining Mars as one giant mana battery, and humanity building magic devices that use it as a base.
Hopefully this is the beginning of a new arc.
He's not evil, silly Berry. He's Chaotic Neutral. You played D&D. You should know how this works.
The story you're describing sounds very much like an actual event I read about. I'm having difficult finding an original source, but the way I remember it, the radio wasn't the goal, it was the unexpected solution. They were trying to generate an efficient circuit for some particular task, and the evolutionary algorithm they were using eventually generated a design that was able to transmit a load across an open circuit. That is, ordinarily if you want to transmit an electrical signal, you need a wire going from point A to point B. And if you cut the wire, current stops flowing.
This algorithm generated a circuit that transmitted a signal across a space without a wire.
Which was absolutely baffling, on the scale of sitting inside a box and pushing on the box from the inside to make the box move.
Until eventually somebody noticed that the design no longer worked if you placed it inside a Faraday cage. And then they realized that the system was acting as a radio receiver and picking up transmissions from local radio stations. When the receiver was on, it would pick up a signal. When it was off, it wouldn't. Didn't matter that the signal it was receiving wasn't transmitted by any part of the circuit itself. It received a signal, and that was all it needed.
..... uhhhh what?
Transformative magic with emergent properties that self-propagates through a large cavern entirely made of crystal that just happens to contain the only non-mobile source of magic on the entire planet... I have a feeling that Cherry Berry's cherry trees are going to be surviving far longer than anyone ever envisioned. It would not surprise me if these transformed crystals end up functioning as a bio-dome. That being the best positive outcome. Although, I am concerned what may occur if the crystal happens to become self-aware early enough to take offense to the ambulatory magic sources trying to leave its confines?
Proof of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He has made His first presence felt by changing the magic with His Noodly Appendage; changing the result in His own image.
9002105
Here's infectology 101 for you.
1) Insulate shit.
2) Insulate yourself.
3) Poke shit with a stick.
4) Yell "Come out you lazy bug there's larva starving in Mareitania!"So is this going to build up to critical mass and suddenly do something once it reaches that point?
um.... this can ether go really well or really reall badly... and why the frick did my brain bring up "Sorairo Days" I wasn't even listening to it right then, and i really don't think this has anything to do with spiral power. (I was listening to Drop pop candy)
also the Maretian has officially invaded my dreams. last night I dreamed my bedroom door open up to the mars cave it want as weirdly as you expect
9002213
you deserves a funny for that but fimfiction doesn't have a funny button like SV so take a laughing rainbow instead
9002108 nevermind found out why I now got Sorairo Days suck in my head
9002029
Oh, the goo will be anything but grey.
9002029
"To be fair, the planet WAS actively trying to kill us every chance it got. So we took a page out of the Human's playbook and killed it first."
mars has now been infected with self replicating magic, may god rest that planets spirit it's going to have even more ponies spontaneously appearing on it soon
9002144
Well, not evil anymore, I suppose.
9002005
Mother lode, as in a vein of ore.
9002277
Just a huge a**hole.
I think DWK put it best. Don't let any innocent act he puts up fool you.
Traitor
A**hole
Horrible Singer
9001996
If it gets big enough, probably. I'm slightly concerned, only because Scifi is littered with such things, that it could lead to a Grey Goo scenario where the enchantment keeps replicating, unchecked and unstoppable, into every object that can be enchanted like the mana batteries and render them useless-- or worse, make them unstable as in "Where's the
EarthMars shattering kaboom?" The other thing I'm curious about it if this is a closed system now? The rainbow crystals take in the magic generated by the cave farm and in turn, provide a healthy environment for the plants which grow and produce more mana. Basically a miniature Everfree Forest growing in Mars-- minus the beasties.The flipside is that this was how Equis, the planet, was terraformed. Laying the basic building blocks of planetary magic. Would enough magic create a similar field like Earth's magnetosphere to keep the cosmic rays from shooting holes in DNA and the sun from blowing away the atmosphere a molecule at a time? Who knows. But jump ahead and it could look like an underground panoramic shot from Journey To The Center Of The Earth just below the surface of Mars where the cave farm is.
i.stack.imgur.com/JwIUl.jpg
(Prior to the events ofStar Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Carol and David Marcus had used the "Genesis effect" to transform a barren cave deep within the Regula planetoid into a lush environment teeming with life)
Starlight just rolls up imaginary sleeves, "Hold my cider, I got this."
Thank you, thank you, thank you for that article link. I heard about the evolution thing in Scientific American or New Scientist years ago, but they didnt have any numbers on how many logic gates were in the chip or being used, so when I started working out on paper by brute force the most efficint deterministic method I could to get the result, I didnt have anything to compare against.
I have used the terms here and elsewhere before over the years so a not repeating from the article.
Thanks to chaos oscilators, from a 1980s puzzles, Dr Brian May, prime harmonic chording, and maximal length generation of pseudo random sequences, I was looking at synchronous decoding of the recieved signal through local oscilation of result of prime multiplication of two or more sequence generators.
The logic generates a long duration PRBS, repetative sequence. If the state of the input changes before the sequence loops, then its a high frequency, if it changes after, its a low frequency. A Bistable can be made with a single logic gate wired as a Z gate.
Instead of needing 32 gates to form a loop 4 billion states long, chaos oscilators allow you to count the length of the generator, letting you get away with only 5 gates an decode. Its also far more resiliant and sensitive to selected conditions, which is why I was looking it up for research into P2P Mesh Wifi networking.
One set of solutions for the Crystal effect is the creation of propagation of connection reordering, which is really collourful when it happens as a Rainbow igraine in my eye, using Penrose tiling, which is 5 fold symmetry pseudo regular tiling, which according to the screen saver I have on Ubuntu, seems to be related to rotation of 4 dimentional regular polyhedra, and which either can have faults spread throughout, or if you force a seed point void of a given particular shape and finite size, forces the rest of the pattern to crystalise perfectly.
At least I can be happy that so far, my OCs trundling about Equestria ad delivery home vehicle is still unique. A trillion optical logic connections, as a many year long hobby, research project. Self organising, emergant design.
You think thats brain melting. Thats what was in public articles in the 90s. In the 2000s is been all Self stabilising dynamic plasma structures, Loop quantum Gravity, and gluons as (5,3) Universal Turing Machines.
Have fun with reality. And watch out for bumping into Pinkie in The Library.
Sir Terry did his best. Even with the specter that stalked him those final years.
I owe him much. He probably saved me from eating a bullet. Remind me to share the story with you sometime.
...Is the fourth Science of Discworld really that bad?
Loved the first three, but Raising Steam kinda broke my heart in how it barely felt like a Discworld book (writing & wit levels, not the steam stuff ) so I haven't really dared take a look at the even later stuff in the series yet.
9001629
I found a science paper on that robot research:
[PDF] An evolved circuit, intrinsic in silicon, entwined with physics.
It is short and doesn't use overcomplicated language, so don't be afraid to take a look :)
Mark should list off synonyms of "chaos" until he says "discord", and then Starlight can say "Yes! That's his name!"
If anyone is interested in the Programming explanation that Mark gave, there is an excellent book on how this is done using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Essentially it boils down to what is called a "Genetic Algorithm". The Algorithm creates a "random" assortment of the gates in the array (which essentially creates a piece of "hardware code" which functions in a particular way), and then the effects of the code are tested and those assortments which most "fit" the ideal result pass their "genes" to the next generation of the algorithm.
As Mark says, this typically results in emergent properties. This can be anything from using the electromagnetic properties of oscillating capacitors to increase transistor efficiency to even contain real-time adaptation of the system to environmental effects such as humidity. To anyone looking at the system with a critical eye, it might even be considered alive in the same sense that bacteria or cells are.
Welp, they're doomed.
A phrase that makes as much sense as ‘technology science’ or ‘emotion science’.
Grey Goo is out of control self-replicating robots.
Green Goo is out of control self-replicating organisms.
Should out of control self-replicating enchantments be classified as Rainbow Goo or Octarine Goo?
9002410 They are going to have to magic science the horseapples out of this.
Glimglim needs to read up on Langton's ant.
Also, spaghetti enchantments:
matthewkirshenblatt.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/papyrus-enthusiastic.png