This post is about wizards, muggles, magic, and basic mathematics.
It’s speculative. You have been warned.
Act III Has Begun
So Act II is done and ~27k Poets have been claimed with Pages. Act III has begun and there will be a two-week period ending Oct. 23 for participants to understand and explore the game before one can feed and stack Pages into Poets.
Over the two-week period, there will be a gradual reveal of the game mechanism. So far, trait categories of Position, Form, and Presence have shown up (conveniently abbreviated as pfp, ha!) :
We speculated in Theory II that Poets have roles as it is not possible they are all the same, and that Poets can change/mutate. We have also discussed on Lost Spaces that genes may drive changes to latents, somewhat be akin to biological genes with dominant or recessive aspects (and perhaps being able to be switched on/off).
Breed and Half-Blood Poets
Muggle x Muggle = Muggle
Wizard x Witch = Wizard/Witch
Wizard/Witch x Muggle = Half-Blood
Let’s explore the Breed category that was just revealed. Here is the distribution of Breeds (log-scale for easier visualization, 10^0 = 1):
The 30 Breed traits appear to be composed of 6 more basic components that form a “primary” portion and a “secondary” portion. For example, the iana breed is composed of “ia,” in the primary component, and “na,” in the secondary component. It appears that the same component cannot be in both primary and secondary spots. Consequently, there are 6 choices for the primary spot and then 5 choices for the secondary, making 6x5 = 30 unique Breeds:
In fact, Pak has lent credence to this two-component Breed idea:
The rarest breed has a “zee” and “ia” in it, either in the primary or the secondary component:
Some of the rarest Breeds appear to also have some “coloration”:
Here come the speculations. As @DelNFT has noted, what if Breed rarities can be changed if Poets breed with each other? We know from Harry Potter that:
Muggle x Muggle = Muggle
Wizard x Witch = Wizard
Wizard/Witch x Muggle = Half-Blood
What if some of the basic component traits encode for “wizardry” or “magic casting abilities”? Of course, not being able to cast spells is also perfectly fine too as Muggles play a key role.
What if the relatively common zeeren crossbreeds with a very common naia to get a rare zeeia?
What if zeeia x zeeia = zeezee (?)
We have not seen duplicate components.
If common poets can somehow breed/merge, then the very rare zeeia could become less rare while zeeren and naia will become rarer. So in a ways, all Latents are “half-bloods”: while we don’t know what the words mean, Breed appears to have a two-component structure.
The possibility of dominant/recessive components may also be quite intriguing to consider with this structure (remember, there are also 256 genes that somehow come into play). A simple example using Punnett squares shows how blue eyes (recessive) becomes covered/hidden by a dominant brown eye gene:
We don’t quite know how this would play out, or whether it is even correct, but it sure is fun to think about poets interacting with each other down the road(map). What is amazing with Pak is that sometimes the performance art is like a magic show: there is logic and process behind it but the quick sleight of hand makes us not pay attention to what is directly in front of us. At the same time, there is an element of “belief” in a world that we can’t see, yet know is there or is latent.
Lost Spaces
We will be discussing all of this and more on our weekly @theLostSpaces and of course, I will announce it @ShortsHoward along with co-theorists @FriendlyJameson, @DoughBoi, and @StrongheartdX so please do follow us. We look forward to hearing from you.
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great writeup, thanks for sharing your perspectives!