Character Scramble II Sign Up Thread

[u/mrcelophane]

Welcome to the sign up thread for the second Character Scramble!

Don't know what the Character Scramble is? Well, aren't you in for a fun time?! To play, all you have to do is pick 5 of your favorite characters that fit this season's theme and enter them into the tournament. Then, the characters will be scrambled, and you will receive 5 random characters that will become your team for the remainder of the tournament.

Not enough description? Well here is the hub post from last season!. That contains every post for season 1.

Now, onto the rules for this season and how to sign up.

The Grand Champion of Season 1, /u/xahhfink6, has decreed that the teme for season 2 shall be Mid Tier Heroes. This has been defined as somewhere between the power level of Spiderman (last season's upper limit) and Aquaman. Only characters that are/would beat Spiderman and are/would lose to Aquaman should be submitted.

Rules:

• Each entrant will list 5 characters. Each character should have a link or two with information on them. These links should include Fan-wiki pages, Respect Threads, and anything else you think would help them out in learning all about them.

• Submissions are player policed. If you see someone outside the bounds of the power limits and caps, please explain to the entrant your views as to why they should not submit that character.

• Please be as specific as you can in terms of iteration of the character you are choosing, any modifiers (we had Deadpool without healing factor last season), and anything else you think is relevant.

• It is not against the rules to submit a character that has already been entered by someone else. It is encouraged, however, to make that person a different version of the character to make it interesting.

• After posting your character to this post, you will then go to this google form and fill it out. After that you are officially in the tournament.

• Please keep the link that lets you edit your post. Someone may convince you that one of your characters is too underpowered/overpowered and therefore needs to be changed. It is much easier for you to edit your post than for me to do it. This will save everyone time.

• Rosters will be rerolled until no one has more than one character that they suggested on their roster.

• Participants will receive the permalink to your post if they receive your character. That is why it is important to have a lot of information on it. They will be encouraged to reply to that comment to ask questions.

• Brackets/Pairings are randomly decided.

• Every week, you will have to explain, either through role play or arguments, why your team would beat the other one.

• Every week, the scenario may be different. It may change the way the fight is structured, or it may make it not a fight at all.

• The Scenario topic will be posted, and players are expected to argue why there characters would defeat there opponents.

• At least 48 hours later, the voting topic will be posted.

• Entrants must vote on all fights, and there votes count double. Not voting results in forfeiture. If you cannot vote due to time constraints, msg me and we can work around that.

• Voting will be done using Google forms

• The grand champion is allowed to pick the theme of the next tournament

And that is just about it! Lets have a ton of fun, guys! Sign ups close on Sunday sometime after NFL football, so tell your friends! If you have any questions, please ask away.

TO MAKE IT CLEAR, YOU ARE NOT IN THE TOURNAMENT IF YOU DO NOT FILL OUT THE GOOGLE FORM. DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT? THEN YOU DIDN'T READ THE RULES

[u/angelsrallyon]

Hermione Granger- Very intelligent, a powerful witch. http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Hermione_Granger

EDIT: She also get a Time turner. This allows limited time travel, but she is unable to change the past. EDIT2: mechanics of time travel are being discussed in the comments of this post.

Edward Cullen- #sorrynotsorry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Cullen

Toph Beifong-blind, but arguably the most powerfull earth bender in the series. http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Toph_Beifong

EDIT: Toph gets a suit of Armor made of (Marvel) Adamantium that she can bend in order to place her in a high enough Tier

Ryuko w/senketsu and scissor blades- insane regen and speed. http://kill-la-kill.wikia.com/wiki/Ry%C5%ABko_Matoi

Lelouch Lamperouge- can give you any command if he looks you in the eyes, and you have to obey http://codegeass.wikia.com/wiki/Lelouch_vi_Britannia

[u/TimTravel → u/angelsrallyon]

I'm skeptical on the first three beating Spider-Man but I could be convinced.

One COULD argue that Bumi or Ghazan are at Toph's level. I don't think it's true but it's not 100% obvious.

[u/angelsrallyon → u/TimTravel]

yea, the first three are on the edge. i think they would all put up a good fight though. I was hesitating putting in Toph... you think i should change her? thinking back now i don't think she could take on most people here.

True. "unarguably" is hyperbole. i will edit.

[u/TimTravel → u/angelsrallyon]

With Harry Potter wizards a lot of it is just a question of whether killing curses are effective, which is not terribly interesting. If killing curse is forbidden, maybe Mad-Eye? He might be able to take Spider-man if he has prep. Dumbles or Voldy might be overkill but I don't know Spidey well enough to be sure.

Toph is a little low, but bloodlusted Toph is a little cheap if burying people is allowed. I already threw in nonpacifist Aang with avatar state so we're talking heavy hitters. Maybe Vaatu or Wan.

[u/angelsrallyon → u/TimTravel]

as a buff for hermione, would give her a time turner be OP? i still don;t think it would elivate her past aquaman, and it could lead to interesting situations.

[u/TimTravel → u/angelsrallyon]

Copy+pasting an explanation of time travel mechanics and how they almost always make no sense.

TL;DR: The problem is you'd have to precisely state how time travel works and that's a LOT harder than it sounds. It's too much of a headache to do, and it would almost certainly make her too powerful. If she starts with a heavy loadout of potions and enchanted items it might buff her enough but you'd have to go pretty all out.

TimTravel's guide to time travel:

First, you can't have even a fictional universe where paradoxes can happen. You can have something that seems paradoxical but not a true paradox. I realize many dictionary define paradox as "blah blah blah or something that seems paradoxical" but that's dumb because applying the definition recursively means that anything that has any nonzero resemblance whatsoever to a paradox IS a paradox and whatever idiot stapled that definition on to the word clearly wasn't thinking about that even though it's a direct logical consequence of that definition. When I say paradox I exclude that definition. A paradox isn't just physically impossible, it's logically impossible. It is as meaningless to talk about a timeline of any fictional or nonfictional universe in which a paradox happens as it is to talk about a round square or a round square that exists or the billion dollars that I have and exist because I said these words or a triangle in euclidean space which is a counterexample to the Pythagorean theorem (a² + b² = c²). You can use words to talk about those things but those words don't refer to anything real, imaginary, fictional, hypothetical, etc: they refer to nothing.

Fundamentally paradoxes are a problem because under normal circumstances you can pull a trigger, but if you're back in time and pointing the trigger at your grandfather and the gun is working and loaded and you're close enough and aiming correctly and nothing's in the way and blah blah all the other implicit assumptions then you can't. The problem is coming up with a justification for this effect. There are a few ways to deal with the problem of paradoxes.

No time travel, or you can get information from the past but cannot be observed while there. Easy, simple to understand, no paradoxes. A weird alternative a physics major told me about is that it's never paradoxical to send matter or energy back in time unless you also send information back in time. It's hard to think of a way that could happen but if it's possible then it can't cause a paradox. It would be possible to compute the universe without rewinding or considering possible travelers from the future because the information of their arrival wouldn't exist, and even if it did it wouldn't affect the behavior of anything else in the universe so it's fine.

Another method. Altering the past just creates a new timeline, or the new timeline overwrites the old if you make a change. Star Trek uses this. It's easy to understand but in this model you can't get rich by sending yourself money from the future when you're rich and then investing intelligently so you can afford to do so at the appropriate time and still be rich unless the first you did it the hard way. In order to have self-causing events without first cause, you need to have a single nonchanging timeline.

There are silly things like the Back to the Future model but they imply a second dimension of time, which effectively means it's not a single timeline model because it's really a series of related timelines.

You could have a model where there's a guy (or just some nonperson physical process) who runs the universe, rewinding for time travel events, and if the universe becomes inconsistent he destroys the entire timeline or somehow intervenes to stop that person. A lot of people intuitively assume something like this, that "something bad" will happen if you cause a paradox but I find it silly.

In order for the laws of physics to exist, there needs to be a probability distribution of your universe. If not then your entire story becomes a series of suppositions. I explain what that means and why it's bad in excruciating detail in the massive wall of text I linked to earlier. The problem with time travel in a single timeline is that it is not a Markov chain: there are nonlocal effects. If you go back in time, you can't cause a paradox. The pulling of a trigger could cause a paradox, or it might not, and examining the state of the universe at one instant cannot tell you which is the case. Therefore we're not actually talking about describing the probability distribution of the next state of the universe given the current one, but describing the probability distribution over entire timelines of the fictional universe.

I say probability but it's fine for deterministic universes too. For deterministic universes we're talking about what sequences of instants of universe states are possible. To put it another way, for deterministic universes we're talking about what initial states are possible, namely, the ones that do not cause paradoxes.

The simplest way to deal with them (simplest design, not simplest to understand or simplest to work with) is to say any timeline in which a paradox happens is excluded from the set of possible timelines, or that things like killing your grandfather happen with the same probability as random matter popping into existence from random quantum noise in exactly the same configuration as someone from the future and by pure coincidence someone leaves the future with a body in that exact configuration.

To put it more precisely: there's some "prior" probability distribution of timelines. The true probability distribution is the prior distribution conditioned on there being zero paradoxes. This skews the probability of events in exactly the way we want. However, it does not skew probability in the way that many people think. A lot of people assume that the probability skewing has to happen during the loop: if you go back and time and try to kill your grandfather something will stop you. It actually means that it is impossible for you to succeed in the attempt of going back in time and killing your grandfather. You might try and fail but that's just one possibility. You might decide never to attempt to go in the first place. You might never gain access to a time machine. Your civilization might never discover time travel. Actually going back with the intent to cause a paradox doesn't cause those things to happen because it might not happen. It's just the mathematical truth that if you were to gain access to a time machine and go back in time and successfully kill your grandfather that that would be a paradox that causes them. Time travel doesn't have to happen in order for the "no paradox" rule to skew probabilities. This is a simple rule, but it is difficult to understand and difficult to work with. It also has the unwanted side effect that it might be true that it makes time travel essentially impossible to discover. Even simple loops, like going back in time and high-fiving yourself have a "no paradox" condition that is extremely specific: the next you has to go back and do the exact same thing. Since perfect loops are unlikely in the prior probability distribution, the discovery of time travel would be obscenely unlikely. People smart enough to do it would choose not to, or would die before they succeeded, or it would simply never occur to them to try, or the scientific experiments they did to learn about the method through which time travel is impossible would give results that are misleading enough to prevent its discovery.

I'm not sure how to fix this. One possibility is to make it so that probability is only skewed during time loops. I'm going to describe a simulator, and the probability distribution is just the distribution of possible outputs of that simulator. I emphasize that the simulator has to not be creating and destroying universes as it goes, it just has to mathematically exist in order to mathematically define the probability distribution of the universe. Any time someone goes back in time, rewind to the time they arrive and keep track of that arrival time and the departure time. Once you get to the departure time again, if the universe is still in exactly the same state it was when they left, mark it as a resolved loop and keep going. If not, then rewind to the most recent unresolved arrival time and try again until it does work. If you rewind and it causes a different time traveller to cause a paradox, then you'll rewind to his arrival time.

This prevents the universe from conspiring against time travel. The problem is that it reintroduces "first cause": you can't have an event cause itself unless it happened the first time without time travel.

[u/angelsrallyon → u/TimTravel]

Okay, i know what your fear is, but let me alieviate it... or at least try to. I have done a lot of thinking on time travel as well.

But here is how i thought it would work in this senario,

Mostly i thought it would be used is a hpMOR kind of way, meaning, it basically elevates Hermiones tier to Hermione+Hermione with 6 hours of Precog. This gives her kind of a "do-over" ability.

In hpmor, this gives harry an edge in many scenarios, but it is not always a garantied win.

I am going on a deterministic universe. No alternate time lines, no paradoxes. It will work in a "destiny" way. Kind of like bill and tedds excellent adventure.

Another way to describe it would be, if your plan is to go back in time and shoot someone, but that someone is still alive in the present there is no "i can do it" or "i can't" the fact is that you did not. It is a fact, not a limitation. A time turner gives someone flexibility to do multiple things at once, but it does not allow interfering with a timeline.

As Harry says in hpmor, it supposes a world that is not Turing compatible. It is a world where prophesies must be true, not because they are forced to happen, but because they were already written into the universe as a law. In the same way that avoiding the result of a prophesy still makes it happen, time turners cannot be used to create a paradox no matter how hard you try.

I hope that makes sense, or alleviates concerns. i don't think it makes her OP or gives too much power to her, or the ability to cause paradoxes.

EDIT: found a good link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle

[u/TimTravel → u/angelsrallyon]

I am going on a deterministic universe. No alternate time lines, no paradoxes. It will work in a "destiny" way. Kind of like bill and tedds excellent adventure.

Another way to describe it would be, if your plan is to go back in time and shoot someone, but that someone is still alive in the present there is no "i can do it" or "i can't" the fact is that you did not. It is a fact, not a limitation. A time turner gives someone flexibility to do multiple things at once, but it does not allow interfering with a timeline.

This isn't an answer of how time travel works unless you can describe a probability distribution over timelines. There's a consistent timeline where I send myself money from the future then invest it, double it, and send half back. There's a consistent timeline where I intend to send myself money from the future but it never comes. Which happens, or which is more likely? To make the question meaningful, are timelines in which the first happens more likely, or are timelines in which the second happens more likely?

As Harry says in hpmor, it supposes a world that is not Turing compatible.

Actually EY later realized it is. The model I described is computable if you have a program that can uniformly sample 3SAT solutions. Just encode "timeline that satisfies the laws of physics and has no paradoxes" as a 3SAT instance.

Suppose Alice has a bag of money with a dollar on it. If anyone steals it, she'll go back in time and see who did it. Bob wants to steal it. He knows she does this. He decides he'll check if a future copy of her is in the room and if she is he won't steal it. If these policies are followed then it leads to a paradox, so something must prevent them both from following their policies. Would Alice win, because Bob would see future Alice seeing future Bob? Would Bob win, because Bob would see the absence of future Alice and the presence of future Bob?

[u/MugaSofer → u/TimTravel]

This isn't an answer of how time travel works unless you can describe a probability distribution over timelines. There's a consistent timeline where I send myself money from the future then invest it, double it, and send half back. There's a consistent timeline where I intend to send myself money from the future but it never comes. Which happens, or which is more likely?

This depends on the odds of you failing to send the money back, vs. the odds of you never discovering time-travel.

So assuming time travel is based on sufficiently obvious physical/magical principles, and you are competent enough to realize you shouldn't try and cause a paradox, I think it works out.

[u/TimTravel → u/MugaSofer]

It might. It depends. There would certainly be a probabilistic force minimizing time travel more than you would expect by the prior laws of physics. It may or may not be enough to prevent the discovery of it. The longer the discovery of time travel is delayed, the less consistency constraints the universe has to satisfy. Even if time travel is known but people are nudged away from using it that's a continuous drain on the probability of the timeline until the end of that civilization. It seems like avoiding the discovery would be a more likely coincidence.

[u/TimTravel → u/TimTravel]

Furthermore, if there's "only one timeline" then there's no such thing as laws of physics or causation. You can't say that anything happened because of anything else. You can only say that two things happened or didn't. It makes the entire timeline part of the premise and therefore arbitrary.

[u/MugaSofer → u/TimTravel]

Furthermore, if there's "only one timeline" then there's no such thing as laws of physics or causation. You can't say that anything happened because of anything else.

How so? In a deterministic world with no time-travel, there's only one timeline.

Specifying that there's only one timeline doesn't itself specify an entire set of physical laws; but I don't see why it invalidates whatever laws of physics you were already using for your setting.

[u/TimTravel → u/MugaSofer]

What I meant is that if there's only one timeline in a fictional universe and there aren't even any counterfactual fictional timelines based on any other initial physical configurations then physics loses most of its meaning. Physics says things like "F = ma", which (in a Newtonian universe) are true for every physical process and even the counterfactual ones based on alternate initial conditions which may or may not be associated with a parallel timeline that exists in a meaningful way.

Physics is the successor function of instants of universe configuration. If there aren't even other counterfactual "timelines" then the successor function is just a finite lookup table which leads to weird things like "Bob saying 'hello' seven times in a row is physically impossible" merely because it doesn't happen in the only timeline. Bob saying "hello" seven times in a row is (usually) possible in a counterfactual fictional timeline even if it doesn't happen in the "only" timeline, so it's not really part of the counterfactual-invariant laws of physics in a universe that has any. If there are no counterfactual timelines then it's not meaningful to say that a physical law like "Bob cannot say 'hello' seven times in a row" or "F=ma" is counterfactual-invariant or not except that technically all such laws would be vacuously counterfactual-invariant over the empty set of counterfactual universes.

Causation is hard to define but I suspect if you nail it down precisely enough you'll run into problems there too.

Whew. That was probably a horrible way of explaining it but all the data should be there.

[u/angelsrallyon → u/TimTravel]

i edited my last post, i'm going by this theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle

[u/autowikibot → u/angelsrallyon]

Novikov self-consistency principle:

---

The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general relativity (solutions containing what are known as closed timelike curves). The principle asserts that if an event exists that would give rise to a paradox, or to any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes.

---

^{Interesting: Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov | Time travel | Tipler cylinder | Temporal paradox}

^{Parent commenter can toggle NSFW or delete. Will also delete on comment score of -1 or less. | FAQs | Mods | Magic Words}

[u/TimTravel → u/angelsrallyon]

That's what I'm trying to explain. That's NOT a theory, it's a category of theories. It doesn't explain what's likely to happen.

[u/angelsrallyon → u/TimTravel]

That why we have writers who can make their own decisions. i'm not sure what the problem is. Also, a Theory does not explain what is likely to happen. A theory describes WHY something happens. A Law describes WHAT happens. but that is besides the point.

For example, in your alice example, under this principle, asking what would happen in that senario would be as nonsensical as asking what would happen if two pieces of matter occupied the same space, or if something went faster than light, or if an unstoppable force met an immovable object. The point is that it can't happen under this world view because it tautologically can't by the definitions put upon it.

In your situation, Alice simply could not go back and change the past. She may try to go back and try to find out who did it, but if Bob knows this, he can try to cloak himself somehow, and would either be seen, or not be seen while stealing the dollar. The fact that she goes back in time cannot change what has occurred. if she goes back, it is because the dollar was stollen.

In fact, if both parties were intelligent enough, Alice would never be stollen from and would never have to go back in time, because bob knows he will be caught if he tries. If he does try and gets caught, it is because Alice caught him in such a way that it did not prevent him from stealing the dollar.

A situation where bob is caught and then decides not to steal the dollar simply would not happen.

In a situation like the one we are in now, where writers will have power over their own universes, i believe this definition is sufficient for giving people leeway, but not too much power, and eliminating time travel paradoxes. Since, by definition, these writers will have complete control of the story, they will be able to enforce these laws in any way they see fit, and they can decide what the likely outcome will be for themselves.

[u/TimTravel → u/angelsrallyon]

Ah, now we're getting somewhere.

Alice doesn't intend to change the past. She intends to find out who stole her money then go steal it back in her present time.

The problem is that you could say "Hermione hacked into the computer because her future self gave her the password.". This effectively gives an oracle to NP. It lets her Contessa: her future self tells her the path to victory and she follows it and gives the answer to her past self. This is a consistent timeline.

There have to be laws of physics even in fictional universes. They can be very strange indeed but they have to exist. In deterministic universes there have to be hypothetical versions of them with different initial conditions and in probabilistic universes there have to be other timelines, at least hypothetical timelines.

There is a notion of believability: how closely the universe follows its own rules. If you don't have a model of time travel which can evaluate the believability of your fictional universe then all events are arbitrary and there's no such thing as causation and it turns into a series of suppositions instead of a story. If you throw out any notion of believability you could have Thomas the Tank Engine turn into Antispiral and kill Superman for no reason. A good model of time travel will prevent Contessaing but allow mild help from the future.

[u/Ace_Dangerfield → u/TimTravel]

Man, you really live up to your name. This is an excellent explanation, I'll take it into account while writing my piece this week!

[u/TimTravel → u/Ace_Dangerfield]

Wow, thanks! I just assumed whoever got her would do Back to the Future style or something but it's cool you're going with something like this.

[u/autowikibot → u/TimTravel]

Markov chain:

---

A Markov chain (discrete-time Markov chain or DTMC ), named after Andrey Markov, is a mathematical system that undergoes transitions from one state to another on a state space. It is a random process usually characterized as memoryless: the next state depends only on the current state and not on the sequence of events that preceded it. This specific kind of "memorylessness" is called the Markov property. Markov chains have many applications as statistical models of real-world processes.

Image ⁱ - A simple two-state Markov chain

---

^{Interesting: Markov chain Monte Carlo | Continuous-time Markov chain | Absorbing Markov chain | Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm}

^{Parent commenter can toggle NSFW or delete. Will also delete on comment score of -1 or less. | FAQs | Mods | Magic Words}

[u/[deleted] → u/TimTravel]

Copy+pasting an explanation of time travel mechanics and how they almost always make no sense.

Where are you copy/pasting from?

[u/TimTravel → u/[deleted]]

A discussion I had a few weeks prior to this one.

[u/angelsrallyon → u/TimTravel]

In character hermione has a lot of wards and a powerful Obliviate, not to mention polyjuice if given prep and a lot of utility (reparo and such). while not a powerhouse on her own, her abilities should make her a powerful part of a team. Her intelligence also makes her a good leader. I'm pretty sure we have little to no feats on the real mad-eye.

I dont want to limit it to bloodlusted Toph... hmm, there was once a thread where i gave Toph Adamatmuim armor(marvel variety) to supe up her tier because of metal bending. Would that be a big enough bonus?

Do you know if i can just change characters here? i unfortunately already submitted the five.

I already filled in the form, do you know if i resubmit it if i want to change it?

[u/TimTravel → u/angelsrallyon]

You're supposed to keep the link to edit it when you're done but if you message mrcelophane you can probably resubmit without problems.

Well-armored Toph would be good enough I think.

I'll take your word for it on Hermione. I only read each book once and that was as they were coming out. I'd specify she starts with some good equipment to help balance her. As the submitter you should do some research on logical helpful equipment for her to help out whoever gets her.

[u/xahhfink6 → u/angelsrallyon]

There was a link at the end which you should have saved to edit it. If you didn't, check your browser history and you should be able to find the page :-)