Part 39 (1/2)
”Could you keep ma.s.saging my scalp while I do?”
”All right.”
”I mean sometimes you stop ma.s.saging when you're thinking.”
”I promise I won't think.”
”Very amusing.”
”Can you start explaining?”
”It's all about uncertainty.”
”Mmm, all right, go on.”
”You've switched off already, haven't you?”
”No, but I know you're using the word uncertainty in that way you always use words. I'll bet it's not the way most of us use the word.”
”OK ... think of it like a bet. You know how, in a horse race, you can never be absolutely certain of what horse will win?”
”Unless the race is fixed and I'm in on the fix.”
”OK, unless the race is fixed. Can we a.s.sume it's not fixed?”
”Of course, it's your race. So we can't be sure of what horse will win?”
”Yes, we don't know anything for certain, but people who know what they're doing a.s.sign odds of winning to each horse.”
”So do people who don't know what they're doing.”
”Are you going to let me continue?”
”You're not telling me anything I don't know, Daniel.”
”I'm trying to simplify it.”
”For my slow brain.”
”I told you I've never said you have a slow-”
”Look, Daniel, just go on.”
”Well, the escape-time algorithm I've been working on comes down to writing a computer program into my chair that uses the uncertainty in the four-dimensional extension to the Mandelbrot set principle I've been extrapolating.”
”I see.”
”A horse race is based on mild randomness. Things like height and weight also have a mild random distribution. You're not going to come across a twenty-meter-tall person all of a sudden, for example. Mandelbrot setlike behavior is based on wild randomness.”
”So in the Mandelbrot world twenty-meter-tall people are common?”
”Not exactly, but there are lots of examples of Mandelbrot setlike distributions in the real world. Nearly all human-made variables are wild. Wealth, for example, is a wild variable. We have a number of individuals that have millions of times more wealth than the average person. We live in a winner-take-all world of extremes.”
”See, this is why I like hearing about your work, Daniel.”
”Can you keep ma.s.saging?”
”Sorry, you caught me thinking.”
”Look at Babble, it controls ninety percent of the cloud traffic. And who's the latest best-selling enhanced fiction author?”
”It's probably-”
”Never mind, it was a rhetorical question. I'll guarantee you that whoever she is, she earns millions more than the vast majority of enhanced fiction authors. And she won't be millions times better than those other authors.”
”No, but she's pretty good.”
”Are you deliberately sidetracking me?”
”Yes, sorry.”
”Anyway, what I'm doing is using wild randomness to accelerate myself into an extreme future time period. And because of the wildness, I can't be absolutely certain what the Mandelbrot setlike variables will do to me.”
”So, it's sort of like a Mandelbrot bet?”
Voice notes to self on the development of the escape-time algorithm-Daniel Rostrom I've found what I've been overlooking. Possibility theory. It describes the uncertainty that I've been missing. It's the only way to deal with extreme probabilities and partial ignorance. I need to look at both the possibility and necessity of the event. If the universe is finite (which we know it is) and every subset of it is measurable (which is what everything we do in science is based on), then the universe describes all possible future states of the world. Obvious now. Outcomes aren't self-dual. I need to stop thinking with two-valued logic and start thinking with multivalued logic.
”N tngdng ma?”
”What?”
”We're sorry, our records say Mandarin Chinese was the most common language in your s.p.a.ce-time period. It was a statistical guess that you would understand it. Shall we proceed with mid-twenty-first-century English? Is that convenient for you, doctor?”
”Doctor?”
”That is the correct form of address, is it not, for a scientist from your s.p.a.ce-time period?”
”I don't have a doctorate. My name is Daniel Rostrom. What ... what s.p.a.ce-time period am I in?”
”It depends what scale you use. Allow me to elucidate, Mr. Rostrom.”
”Please do.”
”You understand something of the life cycle of stars?”
”Yes, of course. It's not my major interest, but I know my cosmology.”