A lot of Mythmoot V was recorded on video and will be posted to the Signum University channels on Twitch or YouTube, so I’m not going to do a full recapitulation this year.  I’m just going to mention some talks where I have something to say.  The Sunday morning paper session is one such.

Luke Shelton – Young Readers’ Receptions

Luke walked us through one of the survey methods he’s using in his dissertation research.  He’s studying how young readers respond to The Lord of the Rings. One example of his methods is called “diamond-ranking”. You can see a diagram in the video, but essentially it’s a way of measuring readers’ reactions that takes account of the fact that people are generally pretty clear about the best and worst of a group, but don’t make such big differentiation in the middle.  His example question was “Which members of the Fellowship do you feel positive about, and which negative?”

He passed out cards with the names of the Fellowship of the Ring on them, and split us into two groups to do the ranking. Interesting debates ensued, where “interesting” is defined as in the apocryphal Chinese curse. Judging from the decibel level, I suspect these groups were rather more opinionated than average.  Both put Sam at the top.  Luke noted that children never put Sam at the top. It’ll be interesting to see what conclusions come out of this.

Arthur Harrow – Isaac Asimov and the rise of the Nerd Hero

Arthur began by surveying the dismal landscape of his childhood. Tom Swift books were just about the only good books for boys before Asimov came along. Then the Nerd became the target for science fiction. Not only are the heroes of Foundation mathematicians, psychologists, and disruptive students who are too smart for their teachers, but the whole trilogy assumes that the reader is widely read in history, math, physics, and psychology. Which is to say, us.

Then the talk veered away from nerdhood to talk about the role of women in SF. As far back as the 1930’s, Doc Smith’s Lensman series took tantalizing steps toward making women real characters, but they fall short – the only woman who could become a Lensman was “some kind of freak”. But mostly, space-opera sopranos spend their time screaming and being rescued. Doc Smith elevated them a bit.

Then came Asimov to the portrayal of women as heroes, just as he did for male nerds.  In I, Robot, the hero is Dr. Susan Calvin, inventor of the positronic brain. She drives the plots of the stories, in the mid-1940s, ahead of the rest of SF, and far ahead of less forward-thinking genres.

Dom Nardi – How game theory solves the paradox of foreknowledge in Dune

If a writer is going to put knowledge of the future into a book, it’s going to be necessary to take a stand on the question of free will vs determinism.  Frank Herbert put the sentence “Dreams are predictions” right up front in Dune.  Do the characters still have free will, if someone can predict the future?

Usually, the author dodges.  The Oracle at Delphi got around this by being incomprehensible.  Hari Seldon resolves the problem by not telling people what he foresaw.  Herbert’s characters grab the bull by the horns.  Dom says this works because of game theory.

Towards the end, Paul sees branching possible futures in some cases, but in others its definite.

Other critics haven’t quite understood this. Lawrence Luton (“The Political Philosophy of Dune.” [1979]) applies a type of Heisenberg principle, saying that seeing the future makes it change.  There’s no such thing as “The” future.  This is only correct in Dune itself. In the sequels, characters can use their foreknowledge.  Sam Gates-Scovelle (Nicholas, J. [2011], Dune and Philosophy: Weirding Way of the Mentat) says there’s a difference between knowledge and prediction. But we don’t see the difference in application.

In Dom’s view, prescience is a form of computation. The paths in the future that Paul sees are the same thing as the outcomes of a game in mathematical game theory.  He gave us an example of a very simple game: Paul vs the Emperor.  If everyone has all the information and both make rational choices, we see the emperor abdicate.  But of course, Herbert was writing an interesting book, not a dull one.  Imperfect information and bounded rationality are at the core of the difference between Dom’s simple model and the actual plot.

In this view, where any actor can make any move with some (unknown) probability, prescience is a power Paul can use to torque the game’s outcome because he has better knowledge of the probabilities than someone who’s not able to see the future.  When Paul sees a single path, it’s because there’s a clear choice for both players.  When he sees branching futures, it’s because the payoff is indifferent among some of the choices.

David Maddock’s comment got at the core of how clever this is. In computer jargon, he noted, prediction is an NP-hard problem.  Translating into human language, that means that if you’re trying to test out possible futures, you do it by building a simulation, changing the inputs according to a model you’ve thought of, and running the simulation to see how it comes out.  For a complicated system, though, the computation gets so big that it takes more time to run the simulation than it does to just wait and see how things come out.  So prediction is impossible, and you can have free will and determinism at the same time, if you’d like.

Here’s the best thing about David’s observation:  it means that the power of the Mentats can be thought of as a way to address NP-hard problems such that they’re solvable in a reasonable time.  I’ve never been comfortable with the Butlerian Jihad, because if a science-fiction story is going to have a high-tech world with no computers, it should explain how a human mind by itself can be faster than a human mind plus a computer.  This is a good way to do that.

(And congratulations on your new degree, David!)