“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”
-Albert Einstein
As surprising as it may sound, Pak is also comprehensible.
Poets have started to be claimed with Pages and traits are incoming. We will start with this tweet related to the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment:
Looking more closely, you can see differences in the red boxes from the original Wikipedia page:
We see that the Wiki page from Pak refers to the Current act (II), that random poets can be redeemed and Pages can be swapped. There are rarities (some revealed and some unrevealed) we know of:
Revealed rarities: Class, Origin, Latent, Genre, Age
Unrevealed rarities (unknown/speculative): Ego, Polarity, Presence, Breed, Prime Value (more below)
On Genre, “Ioh” is the most popular and the best way to visualize is through a histogram (thanks to @ps2):
The distribution of age is highly nonrandom with a concentration of poets in the 0.25-0.40 age range:
The Prime Hypothesis
So what does “Download as Prime” mean? We will call it the Prime Hypothesis. Pak first referred to “primes” during burn, calling high-tier burns “primes.” These high-tier burns of Pak pieces allow for hundreds of times more $ASH to be minted than burning other NFTs. Cubes for example are high-tier burns or primes.
Within each Poet’s image, there is in fact a prime number, so each Poet has its token # you see and a prime number hidden in the image (it is represented in the last line if you open the image in Hex and then convert to ASCII). A simple way to do this is to go to the Poet Decoder website referenced below, made by a fellow Poet, and upload the OpenSea high-definition image:
The ASCII for a latent will read "I see you X" and the “X” is always a prime number. Pak’s PQMZ origin has a prime number of 2.
Prime Hypothesis: the rumored rarity trait of the Poet is how many prime numbers exist before X.
In Pak’s case, since 2 is the second prime number, Pak’s origin has a prime value of 1. If your Poet has a prime number of 3, then its prime value is 2 (as 1 and 2 are before it).
Poet prime values are in fact randomly distributed, as they should be (source: @ps2):
Everything Pak does is purposeful and so are the names/titles, including primes, which have double (or more) meaning in this case as both something primed for burn (in 365 days after Act II) and with prime values that could represent some order. Of course, this is a hypothesis and highly speculative and fun. I find it humorous that in the original Wiki page, Pak left the header portions:
Attention from an expert in psychology? Check. It’s comforting to know that what Pak designs operate from principles and everything is purposeful. Everything will be comprehensible in time.
A few other speculations:
Poets can age, that's why many are skewed towards the younger side
Poets can be finalized at some point in the future (from a function in the Lost Poets smart contract)
Origins and their latents could work together, somehow, or with other Origin/latents. Remember the Leaderboard, whatever the game is it won’t be zero-sum and could indeed be quite collaborative as one of Pak’s goals is to ensure inclusiveness
Poet images are likely to change over time (speculative) given this was made from a GAN and layering aspects could be created to alter them. So what you see right now is NOT what you get. Pak has noted that while with The Fungible they could not alter the image after-sale, but with future collections not tied to a global auction house there will be more freedom
Genre is also not randomly distributed at mint: for some Origins like the one I have (#0461), most of the Genre traits of latents are Ion and there are zero latents with Ioh (the most popular genre)
Lastly, if you see any latents from my #0461 family, please do give me a shout - would very much appreciate that. Keep on speculating my frens….
Thank you for reading and hope you enjoyed it!
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Hey, nice writeup. Thanks for crediting the images; you give them good framing. I've been posting more of my explorations on https://twitter.com/fantastic_sci.