March Madness and Definite Revisions · 4:12pm Apr 3rd, 2015
Alright... Definitely no new chapter from March. It has been a very hectic and busy month that ended with my internet deciding to die for hours at a time for the last week of it when I actually tried to work on the new chapter or at least some revisions as a consolation prize... Grumble... Grumble...
Anyways, during that mostly internet-less week I pondered things a bit and I think I shall go through some revisions before I post the third chapter. I've already got the majority of the revisions to the first chapter done. I cut some excess wordy-ness and modified the pacing and content of several scenes. In particular this includes 4 things that will make revisions to the 2nd chapter more major.
1) Giving Twilight the issue of having to deal with an instinctual/animialistic fear of changelings in addition to her more mental fear talked about Chapter 2. I felt she was a little too immediately accepting of Morpheus, so establishing the additional hurtle of a fear she knows is irrational but occurs anyway because of the predator/prey dynamic between changelings and ponies felt like a good start. She might still be too accepting of him from a realistic point of view, but it should hopefully be tempered now.
2) Trying to make Morpheus and the changelings a little more mathmatically oriented like I originally meant without boring people to tears. I'm starting small, but we'll see if I can find an appropriate balance. After looking into the suggested field of game theory a little it seems like a good basis of math to use without killing the audience, but I need to research it a bit more to A) accurately reference it and B) gain enough familiarity with it to present it in a reader manageable way.
3) Changing the final scene with Celestia's judgement to correct a small but major oversight on my part. Namely that Celestia leaves after immediately issuing an order to draft a new contract that happens to be an incredibly complex piece of magic. There probably was not enough time for the new contract to be made and signed as I had it (not to mention the sheer power I'd imagine needed to craft a contract this complex if you want to do it quickly), so I adjusted the scene a bit. Hopefully it shows the depths of Celestia's anger a bit more because I don't think I gave it justice before as I imagined it. Like Discord said, Celestia is wise enough to see what Morpheus did as an option, but it is almost anathema to her. She would eternally hate herself if she was ever forced to take that option. And, even if Morpheus is telling the truth, she cannot view it as a legitimate option for the changelings because she does not have the same sense of compassion and sacrifice for them that she holds for her little ponies.
4) The smallest but most significant change that only took adding a word or two. It is now only most of Morpheus' magic that is sealed unless given permission or being used in self defense. There are a small number spells I'm going to allow him to use without permission. For the most part these are the spells every changeling can use that are almost an integral part of them, akin to the telekinesis of all unicorns.
As to the revisions to chapter 2... When I finish them Chapter 2 should essentially be modified enough to be considered retconed into an almost new chapter. I need to address the few new implications from chapter 1. I need to continue to augment the mathematical and computer like aspect of changelings as it's told from Morpheus's point of view. And after debilitating on the matter I have decided to extend the chapter to contain Twilight's later fight with Spike that night from Morpheus' point of view. At first I thought the greater depth of information I could provide from Twilight's point of view would be better, but now I'm thinking the lack of specific information will provide a better narrative development. I could have put it into the next chapter like I was planning after chapter two evolved the way it did, but that would detract from the true purpose of what I want chapter 3 to be on.
Will you republish when that time comes?
2947994
Is that an option? I was going to simply modify the gdocs version then reimport them in the existing chapters because I thought republishing was against site policy?
2948312 Oh... that's about stories as a whole I think... Individual chapters likely don't count.
Game theory! Huzzah! Wanna PM me and chat about it? I have a ton of references to game theory concepts in my own fic, and I can recommend some published fiction that ties it into the story in neat ways. I don't like the Wikipedia pages or the "official" game theory website, because they're terrible at explaining things to someone who doesn't already know what they're talking about. Just trying to offer some help, because I found it exceedingly difficult to comprehend the resources I could find on the subject at first, and I like to think that I've made some progress.
2947994
2948312
You are not allowed to submit a new story which is just a revision of an old one, but the rules don't really care what you do to chapters within a story, last I checked.
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I would really appreciate some references to other pieces of fiction that use it. I still need to do some more research on it before implementation, but all I have for research right now are some books on theory. I myself have always been pretty good at math so I don't think understanding it myself will be too much of a problem, but I'm much more worried about how to phrase it for a story in a manageable way for the average reader. For the revisions I'm just sort of faking it right now and not really using what I've learned, but I can't really do that for more than a couple chapters if I'm serious about this.
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You should read Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's about the nature of sentience and intelligence, but you'll find game theory and a lot of other things that might inspire you.
Also, check this list of novels with game theory. This list of movies. Also check this article about the TV show Survivor and game theory.
I don't think that understanding the math of it is really necessary to implementing it in the story, actually. It's very likely that you'll have to leave the advanced concepts out anyway, because it's a story and not a treatise on game theory. The general principles should be enough to work with.
Sorta like how you don't need to invent a warp drive to have one in a sci fi novel. You can just say "it uses an unknown element to bend spacetime" and that's good enough for readers.
All you really have to do is drop some buzz words here and there, maybe explain a few games when the changelings would use them to calculate a decision. Pay special attention to how the games are abstractions of more general conflicts, the way they're brought up as ways to model phenomena in economics, psychology, and ecology. The stag hunt is a game of social cooperation versus safety. The volunteer's dilemma is a game of responsibility and sacrifice. It would be really cool if Morpheus (or other changelings) would mention these games, and it's a great opportunity to make them sound cryptic. "Ve would trust you to hunt the stag," or something.
Basically, don't get caught up in the advanced details. Using the games as analogies should suffice. Having the changelings mention algorithms and other concepts should suffice. "Ve have worked through the algorithms many times, and every one of our Markov decision processes arrive at the same state. This must be done." (Although, you might want to avoid human names.)
Hope that helps! Don't be afraid to PM me.