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[Armok]

... of all simple transforms to our brain, you manage to hit on almost the only one who wont work? yez.

I'm working on it, on multiple fronts, but making a biological brain smaller like that while not changing functionality is just... *facepalms*

What we're most likely going to do is somehting very similar to what we did with the laptop: virtualize it, and run it a billion times faster than normal using the divkits evaluator. Or running a billion copies in parallel, but most likely some kind of intermediate like running 9 copies at 100 million times the speed* and one million copies at 100 times the speed, all with synchronized memories and bits that we add which are not part of any specific brain.

Also, one billion is just an example number. Depending on how the divkit works we might be able to run a trillion, or only 1000, times what is required for one brain in realtime.

*at 100 million X speed, they'd experience a little more than 3 years every second.

Edit: and no this is not overpowered for the simple reason our foes are most likely doing the same thing, so we'd still be interacting with them in "realtime". Also they most likely have some kind of time travel which entirely circumvents the speedup anyway.

[Supercharazad]

No, I was trying to explain it in a way I could explain :/


I meant it like how humans make processors smaller  and smaller, so they can fit bigger ones in which have a shitton more power. That's what I meant.



Also, can we write a malicious script that will severly screw up a divkit? Because that might be useful.

[Armok]

We almost certainly can but it's not top priority at the moment. We need better general capabilities first.

[Gigalith]

Update possibly tomorrow. Questions answered for now.

The question-o-tron: You don't know for certain it works. You've only tried it with trivial questions so far.

Reflectivity: It's an active magic effect. The danger from supernatural powers is both that they attract attention (DOG BITES MAN, IS INCINERATED BY UNEARTHLY GLARE) but also are inherently detectable simply because they are magic.

Crystals: You can manipulate the crystalline structure of things. Your crystal pen is actually a giant ice crystal, magically kept stable at room temperature. So you can't create diamonds out of thin air, but you could turn a big lump of carbon into a perfect diamond.

Range: The divkit works on distant objects by sending a self-propelled packet of power. Since it always takes one unit of power to send one unit of power one unit of distance, a simple relay wouldn't work that you know of. There's nothing stopping you from creating a crystal battery though, or a secondary Pure Stream access, which can get power at a one-for-two deal, but with increased detectability.

[Armok]

So we can't even actually influence the reflectivity of things, just put a magical effect on them that mimics it? Wow, that is even MORE useless than I though.

I'm thinking we should go for common minerals or salts for crystals. Ice requires being magical, and diamond is rare enough to attract to much attention.

Unless specified otherwise, from now on I suggest it should be assumed that any crystal is NaCl (aka ordinary table salt) covered in a thin layer of crystal wax (similar to the epicuticular wax many plants have for the same reason) to stop them from dissolving. This means they do not require magic to maintain, are reasonably durable, seem like they may be natural if slightly eccentric home made jewellery, can be easily broken and then thrown into water where they will dissolve and be disposed of and the raw materials can be easily obtained. If nothing else, assume so for any crystals I suggest the making of.

Range: distance relative to what frame of reference, at what speed? Could power be "loaded" onto a bunch of neutrinos, which are sent to a crystal that picks them up? For that matter, exactly how long is that unit of distance, and thus the halving rate. How short does a distance need to be for further reduction of it no longer to matter? What about suspending microscopic crystal batteries in liquid and pumping them through hollow tubes at ludicrous spread for nearly free power transfer over arbitrary distances? Does transmiting information betwen two crystals consume any power?

> make a crystal circlet to wear on your head that will house the actual power used for any interactions with your brain. Might as well run the programs on it if it isn't any convenience to reduce latency and such.

Also, I'm starting to think maybe we should get actual numbers for the power amounts, and how much is needed for various things, and exactly how much was consumed by any given action.

[Gigalith]

Mini-update because I'm sick today.

You research the specifics of Power. Power is measured in the metric Hiero, equal to one watt second or newton meter. It takes one Hiero to move one Hiero one meter.

On further research, you find that the use of metric units aren't approximations. They're exact. This can neither shock nor surprise you, but you make note for future contemplation.

You design an addition to your power passive sensor to measure both power use and detectability. The distance at which magic use can be detected is approximately the square root of the power in hiero used, in meters. Note that is IN USE, not while being stored.

Accessing power from intermensional streams is the power in hiero used squared, in meters.

For reference, your... uses... and can be detected from up to...:
Eyes - A few milliheiro - Too small to be statistically significant
Supernatural Supercomputer - One EHz = One Hiero... 2x2GHz a billion times faster = 4PHz (your current use) = 8 millihiero - too small.
Holodrive - Several centihiero - Barely noticable if you hold the sensor right next to it.
Thought/Pen interfaces (while near) - several hiero - a meter or two.
Question-answer - One Heiro passively (may be more when answering question, but there's no way to know before hand) - One meter.
Divkit - One heiro (more when active) - One meter.

Your total use is approximately ten heiro a second, all of which is draining from a megaheiro battery included in your divkit. If you were to switch all of this to interdimensional streams, you'd be detectable from one hundred meters away. You still have enough for a whole day, even without that.

[Armok]

So, if we switched all our current usage to computing that'd be... 10^19 floating point operations per second, correct? That's enough to simulate a human brain at at least 1000x speed by conservative calculations. Most likely by making better use of the divkit than crude digital computation and instead something more specialized we could get it significantly faster than that.

Is there any limit to how much serial computing power we can get, or do we eventually have to switch to an increasing number of virtual cores? What is the cost of uncomputable things, like quantum computation or working with exact real numbers?

Is there any limit to storage?

Does creating mass take hiero exactly according to E=mc2? how much does destroying take? Does movement, inducing electric currents, shining light, heating things, etc. use the amount of energy you'd expect, and if so at what efficiency?

Why does accessing information from our brain take so much H? how much H does say teleporting something take?

Why is hiero a different unit than energy? is it some pesky thing like not being able to convert to it from other types of energy?

[Gigalith]

Converting Hiero to normal physical energy is lossy both ways, yes. It's not very much. Converting matter to Hiero isn't very efficient, as it creates a huge amount of heat

((Also, don't worry about trying to get energy things exactly perfect. As long as it's in the ballpark, it's OK.))

Discovering the option to store data in nihilo using Power, you create a far more efficient Divinedrive at 1 Hiero equaling one exabyte. With some further work, you create an entirely non-physical interface to your divkit.

You continue experimenting with your brain. You are able to acquire images from your brain, and also project them back on. However, even when you create a Crystal Circlet for near instantaneous transfer, you still are unable to get anything less than at least one Hiero for brain interactions. Fatigued, you decide to leave your half-finished brain-sound library for later. You also order some more table salt and crystal wax for future use.

That night, you dream again.

"Listen." says the Messenger, still a balloon animal. "Now that you have the power, you must--

*BOOOOM*

You wake up from a humungous, earth-quaking explosion. Investigating news sites, you discover that a humungous, unexplained explosion has occurred in the outskirts of Pittsburgh, destroying it. You are flooded with empathy for the thousands dead.

[Armok]

Look for traces of what could have done it! Presumably there's either a hostile.

Images and the transcript... this should be enough to implement a complete mental interface for your computer, projecting the screen into your brain, visualizing the mouse onto it, and using simple image recognition to read the mouse position. Change it's colour or something to do clicking. With a screen and mouse you can use a virtual keyboard, which is chunky but that's not really a problem because anything long you'll just copy from the though log instead.

With that, copy everything needed for the computer into the Circlet, making it work standalone. Also make it invisible by changing reflectivity and use a weak glue or something to keep it from falling of or moving by mistake. Then, once you've confirmed this works, destroy all the eye catching stuff.

Look into what exactly is needed for a working divkit; what size is needed and what kinds of shapes can it be made into, and what materials. Is there any disadvantages to certain configurations of or is it an all or nothing thing?

Also see if divkits and crystals can be made from existing crystals at a small distance. Specifically I'm thinking of the calcium in your bones. If everything works out you should be one step away from moving exactly everything into your skull, literally.

###

What happens if you input an image into your brain with much higher resolution then your eyes can register?

You NEED to figure out how to access individual neurons. Just make a map updating in realtime of the electric charge in your skull and zoom in until you can see it, bypassing the info libraries entirely and reading it by raw physics. Then make a script that can do that automatically, and get a point for tapping each synapse, very much speed over quality here since missing some small fraction of synapses or counting some twice is not a problem.

Record the firing sequence of some randomly chosen neuron for a few seconds and then do an info search for that sequence. The previous paragraph is still equally important even if this doesn't work it's just testing an hypothesis.

Make a spherical reflective crystal, make sure it's a PERFECT sphere, and durable so that it stays that way. Maybe add somehting to keep it extremly clean. Sense reflections from it at very high resolution (at least terrapixels, probably petapixels), at every frequency from gamma radiation to radio. Process into image and feed into your brain. Ease it in, starting with a normal resolution and normal colour chanels and add more gradually to test how much your brain can handle, once you know the limits you can design a mental interface to move the window of attention around that window changing what frequencies you actually see and  zooming into the high resolution image, or out to get a panoramic view.

How much hiero did making/does maintaining that drive take? what is the exact nature of the nonphysical interface we made?

###
Important questions and tasks that are still pending:

> introduce a 50 millisecond delay on the though logger to make infinite loops impossible.

> huh? you actually CAN get questions answered that way? Well in that case there's one obvious thing to do: Set up automatic detection of questions in the though log, and automatically get an answer from the info stream and implant it immediately afterwards. That way, as soon as you even begin wondering about somehting, anything, you'll already have the answer, and the end result will be very similar to if you had memorized the entire stream since it's about the same ease of access as your own memories. Several aspects of intelligence are also likely to be effectively increased. (make sure to include failsafes for excessive power use or information overload)

> evaluate the feasibility of carving out some largish room deep underground and teleport everything there so you can do things more easily without being detected through mundane means.

> What would the power cost be of copying yourself be? Try to find ways to make it cheaper, such as finding suitable materials to re-arrange into the copy, reducing range, maybe using the matter printing functionality, etc. If there are two of you twice as much work could be done in any given time after all, and hopefully you'll find a way to sync memories.

Range: distance relative to what frame of reference, at what speed? Could power be "loaded" onto a bunch of neutrinos, which are sent to a crystal that picks them up? For that matter, exactly how long is that unit of distance, and thus the halving rate. How short does a distance need to be for further reduction of it no longer to matter? What about suspending microscopic crystal batteries in liquid and pumping them through hollow tubes at ludicrous spread for nearly free power transfer over arbitrary distances? Does transmiting information betwen two crystals consume any power?

[using 10 hiero for computation is] 10^19 floating point operations per second, correct?

Is there any limit to how much serial computing power we can get, or do we eventually have to switch to an increasing number of virtual cores? What is the cost of uncomputable things, like quantum computation or working with exact real numbers?

[Xegeth]

Now would probably be a very good time to check the passive sensors. Was the explosion divine in nature?

[LordSlowpoke]

Oh, heh. This sounds like the best time to a) look up the passive sensors and b) create some kind of device that turns all Power available into pure energy, that we can activate in a whim as a last resort. Here's hoping the other demigods that may or may not attack you have a physical form that can be destroyed by sheer energy flooding from every direction.

[Armok]

power won't really be our problem. We have a battery we're barley using and we can turn it exponential t a moments notice.

... what IS the doubling time on that anyway? a second?

[Draxis]

What Armok said, and also try to figure out a way to quickly redirect large amounts of Power.  If someone is magically blowing up things in your area, it could be useful.

[Gigalith]

Update up late due to bizarro forum outage yesterday.

>Check passive sensors

Checking the the passive sensors is of immediate priority. The sensors did register significant power use at the time and location of the explosion, but some after some mental calculations you decide the explosion could not have been completely magical. Also, an active sensor* from somewhere in northwest Canada briefly scanned the Pittsburgh area afterwards. 

You surmise that divine conflict has already begun.

* Think magical radar. You can see magical things that even aren't using that much, but you can be easily seen yourself.

>All the mental interfaces requests.

You create a complete mental-computer interface. Along the way, you realize you can efficiently solve the input/output problem by XOR'ing your output with your input. You almost slap your head before realizing the futility of such action, as you cannot feel frustration towards yourself. Nevertheless, you note that your reflexive actions continue though your emotions have stopped.

You embed your passive sensors into the Crystal Circlet. You can now mentally call up a map of Power emissions, as well as detect Power in whatever you are looking at. It will also play audio alerts should another sudden Power burst occur.

As you work on the finishing touches, you realize that this virtual computer has no internet connection. This reminds you of the interdimensional information stream and the question-answerer, which you also incorporate, along with failsafes, limits, and dead-demigod's switches. By thinking "QUERY" you can question the stream.

This stream is an aggregate of interdimensional data sources. It is not guaranteed to be accurate. Use at your own risk.

That answers many questions. You discover that it can also double as an internet connection (QUERY: What is at "http://bay12games.com/"?) which you kludge into your browser.

For additional security, you make the circlet invisible and glue it to your head.

At noon, you have finished the Crystal Computation Circlet. While eating lunch, you find that directly imaging a virtual computer into your mental view is seriously distracting, and add an ON/OFF switch afterwards. You doubt that this will be an issue in normal, but you may encounter trouble if you must use your CCC while doing something else.

>Examine feasibility of Skullcomp.

Your divkit can create and destroy crystals at a distance, including in your flesh. However, it is indiscriminate on what exactly it crystallizes. It would be counterproductive to create a crystal blood clot and kill yourself in an attempt to improve ease of use.

Crystallizing your enemies, contrarily, would be. You develop simple scripts to crystallize and shatter targets at a distance. You are now not totally defenseless.

>Investigate divkits.

Divkits can come in many shapes and sizes. A bare Celestial Compiler can be nanometers across, but it won't necessarily be useful. Larger divkits have whole arrays of Compilers to work faster. Also, internal batteries/capacitors, as well as Power Stream accesses, are necessary to work spells on higher scales than the nano-scale. The Power used must be stored somewhere while the divkit works.

Investigate Power.

A few questions answered:

* The doubling time on Power Stream Accesses is exactly a second.
* Should a Power battery, capacitor, relay, or other thing be destroyed, the Power will be released as physical energy, most likely as light. A Power bomb is therefore exceedingly easy to make, whether you desired it or not.
* You can redirect as well as cancel out Power with Power, but it takes as much Power as the target. There are several simple counterspells scripts in the examples of the standard divkit, you add them to your CCC for ready access.

Speaking of Power...

>Investigate Power situation

There are 86,400 seconds in the day. You are using around 10 Hiero a second. Therefore, you are using around 0.8 of your 1 Megahiero battery a day.

You still have several hours left before your divkit switches to the interdimensional stream, but you consider that you should probably do something about this before embarking on further projects... or, more efficiently, you could create and attach the example divkit electric power cord.

The rate of 100 wattseconds to one Hiero is so inefficient you think it must be a mistake or a deliberate crippling, but powering all your works and recharging your battery adds up to about an additional air-conditioner. Considering the likely future of the Earth, you assign a higher consideration priority to the destruction of your local power company than future higher electric bills.

Now, additional projects:

>PROJECT NEURO-EXPERIMENTING

Your mind's eye has no concept of "resolution". If you project an absurdly large image into your mind, you simply forget the details you're not interested in.

Though the concept of electricity appears to be too high-level for your divkit, you can use reflectivity technologies to measure electromagnetic activity. You create a crude Magical Reflective Imager (MRI), and after some further tinkering you are able to access individual neurons, more or less..

You are able to count individual firing sequences, but when you search for them again you find a flood of apparently unrelated neurons all over your brain. Statistically, any pattern you find is likely to be duplicated several hundred million times elsewhere.

>PROJECT SECRET UNDERGROUND LAIR

You could teleport huge swathes of dirt outside to hollow a hiding place, but it would not necessarily be stable. You would also need somewhere to put the dirt. Additionally, you would need some sort of ventilation or you will asphyxiate. Until the air problem is fixed, there is little use in further consideration.

>PROJECT INCREMENT IZRETAL POPULATION.

The main cost of copying yourself is the sheer complexity of the human body. You have approximately a hundred trillion cells of a hundred trillion atoms each for a grand total of 10^22 atoms. By using biomass to start with, such as a goat of roughly equivalent weight, you estimate you can get the total hiero cost to the single digit PH (Petahiero) range.

Alternately, you could severely reduce the cost by creating millions of parts in parallel and discarding defective parts, similar to modern microchip manufacture. You envision kilometer-long assembly lines and vats of half-completed Izretals. For now, they remain visions.

>PROJECT LIQUID CRYSTAL RELAY

You could create a neutrino-based power relay, though converting to and from matter would be inefficient.

You could also suspend battery crystals in liquid, pumping them through tubes. As a side effect, the liquid may be highly explosive.

Currently, though, you have no use for relays, as you have yet to step outside your apartment since you got the divkit.

[Armok]

First the brain stuff, because it's absolutely time critical and by far the highest priority:

> unless you used a stupidly short sequence, there is something else going on than statistics. According to statistics, there are no more than 500 trillion synapses in the brain, and that's identifiable by 34 bits of information. If you read a kilobit from one it's extremely unlikely it'd reoccur even in any brain of anyone on earth for centuries assuming it's random. Most likely the "flood" was the few hundred synapses connected to the same neuron and thus firing the same sequence.

> it doesn't matter. You managed to get direct access to a neuron by searching for it. Now read out evry last bit of information abaut any one single neuron and try to create an accurate simulation of it. Try to make it reasonably optimized, roughly a gigaflop per second should be analogue for an entirely accurate simulation

> Now do the same to EVERY neuron in your brain, and hook the simulations up to each other in the same pattern as they are in your brain.

> See if the API can connect with the simulation and apply the same interface for controlling the virtual computer as you already use, being controlled by the simulation.

> check the computing power requirements. If you've done even an adequate job it should be between 1 and 100 petaflop per second of simulation.

METANOTE: should any of these steps fail, pause the turn so they can be worked around rather than having us waste hours doing other stuff. When we have a working simulation likewise pause the turn for further decisions depending on power requirements for the simulation. The stuff below this metanote is mainly for when we're waiting for this main task to compile or if scanning takes a long time or something like that. We'll very soon be experiencing time orders of magnitude faster meaning working on anything else would be senseless as we'll soon be able to do in seconds what currently takes hours.

### Now for other random stuff:

Still pending:

Make a spherical reflective crystal, make sure it's a PERFECT sphere, and durable so that it stays that way. Maybe add somehting to keep it extremly clean. Sense reflections from it at very high resolution (at least terrapixels, probably petapixels), at every frequency from gamma radiation to radio. Process into image and feed into your brain. Ease it in, starting with a normal resolution and normal colour chanels and add more gradually to test how much your brain can handle, once you know the limits you can design a mental interface to move the window of attention around that window changing what frequencies you actually see and  zooming into the high resolution image, or out to get a panoramic view.

How much hiero did making/does maintaining that drive take? what is the exact nature of the nonphysical interface we made?

[using 10 hiero for computation is] 10^19 floating point operations per second, correct?

Is there any limit to how much serial computing power we can get, or do we eventually have to switch to an increasing number of virtual cores? What is the cost of uncomputable things, like quantum computation or working with exact real numbers?

> would making a crystal outside, then teleporting it in be less dangerous? You could use the MRI to check so it dosnt overlap anything other than bone tissue, such as blood velsels or marro runing throguh said bones.

> sounds like it'd be very quick to integrate an independent divkit with the circlet, do that. Just engouh to do basic things and reconstruct your current divkit given time. Once you've done that there should be no other tool needed for anything

> some basic augmented reality could make the computer thing less distracting.

> what kind of power can batteries store before they explode; that is how large a bomb can we make.