Move 17 (Chapter 1.17)

[yhlee]

Year 361, Month Three, Day Seventeen (Monday), ~05:00

Mikodez finds himself treed by Alaric (bearing "sleep aids") in the corridor outside Medical. In whatever confrontation happens, the much-adorned mothling known (among other things) as Crowned-with-Eyes (henceforth CWE) wriggles free of the Andan cloth and flutters straight into one of the nearest examination rooms, humming joyously. Several medics can be heard exclaiming in fear and/or annoyance at the intruder. One of them squeaks, "Is that another of Magistrate Gerae's pets?"

(...pets?)

Alaric, EDIT: Iawa, and Sulen can take advantage of the distraction to get by Mikodez and into Medical. The triage nurse will recognize them as the recent visitors and direct them toward a pallet where "Imsayed" (Istradez) is lying; he is apparently now sleeping rather than knocked out, but has yet to wake from his ordeal.

Sasha is in the midst of oxygen recycler diagnostics and reading through the maintenance logs. Around this time, Yehan (running as NPC), who has actually gotten some sleep, stops in and asks if Sasha could use some breakfast and/or assistance.

Ashari is enjoying a restful sleep in preparation for what's to come. They can, if they choose to get up early, check in on the others, or determine what to do with Gerae of the mysteriously weaponizable lockpicks. [NOTE: If smokedetective doesn't respond to this move, I'm going to put Ashari on inactive status and run as NPC as necessary to move forward.] Virmad is a likely candidate to either volunteer or be asked to look in on Gerae. Among other things, Gerae is still awake and is (if anyone checks on him, whether through camera surveillance or by persuading Sasha to open the room) scratching messages onto the wall with a stylus that was left in the room.

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CURRENTLY INACTIVE, running as NPCs: Ankat, Kaliyan, Yehan, Istradez

Comments

jeng-zai shuffles

[zuhrovet]

[Possibly, but now that you mention it, here is even more of a tangent! One can approximate a perfectly random shuffle of an n-card deck using 1.5 log₂ n riffle shuffles. For a 52-card deck, that works out to around 8 shuffles. Mathematically, splitting the deck and shuffling 8 times is equivalent to cutting into 8 piles and then recombining, which is why I used to have a probability textbook with an octopus shuffling cards on the cover.

For a 78-card Tarot or jeng-zai deck, you need approximately 9.428 shuffles for near-random mixing. Rounding up to ten, that means we want a decapod for our ideal shuffling: perhaps a crab, or a crayfish.]

Re: jeng-zai shuffles

[yhlee]

[Is this that Dave Bayer & Persi Diaconis riffle shuffling paper? I read it like six years ago and don't remember any details, but it's on my HD somewhere. XD I'm all for h*archate crayfish!

Speaking of textbook cover illustrations, David Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics has, or had in the edition that Joe used back in undergrad, a live cat on the front cover and a dead cat on the back cover. Joe kept telling me that the cat was asleep, not dead, but that's not the version of Schrödinger's Cat I heard...>:[ ]

Re: jeng-zai shuffles

[zuhrovet]

[Yes, definitely Bayer-Diaconis, though I knew the result from a textbook. (I met Bayer once, after he gave a memorable talk about consulting for A Beautiful Mind. He was moderately annoyingly star-struck.)

I was always annoyed that nobody counted the cat as an observer!]