All work and some play (Advanced students) on Charms

Professor Wright

May 09, 2019 8:56 PM

All work and some play (Advanced students) by Professor Wright

Gray was in a triumphant mood as the Advanced class gathered for their lesson, but not for any reason relevant to them. Instead, his mind was on the contents of his portable desk.

Right now, said desk was folded up, a box of about the right size for shoes, if shoeboxes had been customarily made of wood, or had locks on the front. Inside, under the writing slope, there was a brief, businesslike letter informing him that a story he had submitted had been selected for publication, and that payment was enclosed. The payment itself was hidden in one of the secret compartments of the desk, a small paper wrapper which opened to disclose a single shiny gold galleon.

A single galleon was, of course, very little in the grand scheme of things. The worst salary he had ever made would have still paid him more for an equivalent amount of work. It was, however, the first galleon he had ever made from a serious, snobby, literary type of journal, and that was a much more promising step in the right direction than could be expressed in terms of the value of a coin. He had scraped publication in such journals a few times before, over the years, but previously had only been paid in copies. This time, he had actual money and would receive a copy (additionally giving him other people's material to read) once the copies were printed.

That he had not particularly enjoyed producing such content was irrelevant. Nobody he could write for now wanted to read what he wanted to write, so unless he planned to spend the rest of his life as a teacher (admittedly, not the worst life - that would be that of a private tutor) he would just have to learn to like writing what people wanted to read, because he rather liked getting money.

He was not, and never had been, a person of demonstrative character, so he was nowhere near to capering around the airy, white-walled room with its row of windows to one side of the desks and row of bookcases, filled with both books and other objects that might be of interest or come of use in a Charms class, as his Advanced students arrived. He was, however, finding it difficult not to slip into a somewhat self-satisfied smile, which might have seemed ominous to some of them. If it did, it probably did not make them feel any easier to then note that the blackboard already had writing on it, writing which challenged all comers:

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A BROOM?

“Hello everyone,” he said cheerfully when the moment for class to begin came and went. “I assume you’ve all read the blackboard by now, and been wondering what it means, so I’ll jump right into our lesson today.”

Gray twirled his wand idly, and pens leapt out of the cup on his teacher’s desk and began to recognizably dance along the edge of it. “All of you should be able to do this by now,” he said, telling them nothing they didn’t already know yet. “Make an object dance. But have you ever thought about how the object knows which movements to make? The charm I just used didn’t include steps. I’m not waving my wand around like an orchestra conductor - and who knows what they’d do if I did, because I know nothing about how to dance.” He considered exhibiting a bit of vague shuffling just to prove his point, but decided that would err on the wrong side of how far he was allowed to relax in public. “The pens just dance on their own - as many of you have probably seen a broom do, in your homes.” He flicked his wand; the pens marched back to their cup and leapt back inside before going still.

“Obviously, brooms and other objects we sometimes enchant to do work for us are not sapient, so they are not really smarter than you are,” he acknowledged. “If something reaches a place where you’d consider it alive, the spell that made it that way is usually Transfiguration. However, if you enchant them properly, they can perform relatively complex tasks on their own, without you showing them each step. And while we aren’t exactly sure how yet, enchanted objects that have to work together - a mop and a mop bucket, for example, or pieces of a puzzle assembling itself, or an enchanted stove and saucepan helping with the cooking - must, logically, have some simple ability to ‘communicate’, for lack of a better word. All of this is done without the witch or wizard consciously planning it, preparing for it, or even thinking of it. It’s just in the spell.”

His expression turned serious for a moment behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “This is one of the things,” he added, “which should always remind you - we know many safe and predictable ways to use magic, but we don’t always know exactly how the results come about. We work with forces we know about but don’t fully understand - we shouldn’t take that for granted. You all know something by now about the kinds of things that can happen by pure accident, never mind by those who choose to use magic to express power - we have a responsibility with these things.”

He suspected he was wandering too close to philosophy for his rather, on the whole, practical-minded students, but philosophy was a part of Advanced classes. The Advanced students were trusted to know about the most dangerous forms of magic, and to know what questions to ask about those forms, and when to ask them, but they were still children. Reminding them of the dangers from time to time could not sound like a bad idea to him.

“There are some theorists who believe that if we could devise a charm which left our mops and mop buckets running long enough,they could develop societies,” he said, completely straight-faced. “Most Transfiguration theorists dislike that idea, but some of those who study chessmen are more open to the idea. This has particular bearing when it comes to things like, say, flying broomsticks which are charmed to maintain their own twigs - could you construct a broomstick which would go out of its way to replace a twig which was broken beyond repair? How would it acquire material? Would the charm be able to, essentially, cast a charm - or even arguably jump fields and perform a sort of conjuration? And could we develop a broom-repairing charm which focused so on maintaining itself and updating its features as they age that it began to pose a threat to humanity?”

He realized this speech could be taken multiple ways. “That’s not an outcome any theorists or charms researchers are trying to make happen,” he added. “And it’s extremely unlikely. However, we know perpetuating charms are a real possibility, even outside of those things that brush against the Dark Arts: permanent sticking charms from Ancient Rome have been found clinging to fragments of otherwise destroyed buildings. The Fidelius Charm can also hide a fact - and objects related to that fact - from the world, which gives philosophers all sorts of headaches and probably gives the people who study the nature of reality migraines. Good thing that one’s uncommon, really.” Even if it made great writing inspiration. “The point, however, is that charms can endure, and charms can do things the caster didn’t think of when casting the charm, including things the witch or wizard doesn’t know how to do, to an extent. Combining these traits could prove very dangerous, which is why we’ll only touch on that in short papers on different thought experiments I’m going to ask you to write during this unit.

“Your practical assignment is going to involve something that some of you are probably familiar with - dolls.” He lifted a clear box up to the top of his desk, revealing it contained a doll-sized chair and a small jointed wooden mannequin, of the kind used for learning to draw humans. “You’re going to try to charm the doll to perform a task - it could be folding towels you put in the box, acting as though it's washing dishes you put in the box, sewing or assembling little doll-puzzles or drawing if you’re ambitious - I have doll-sized things that they could use for any of these tasks or others,” he added, pointing to a large box, neatly divided into sections holding different objects sized in proportion to the mannequin. “If you’re less ambitious, you could just enchant the mannequin to dance a particular dance. Over the next week, we will chart how the object responds to being asked to perform the same task each class, if it grows more skillful - if it remembers being enchanted to do that before, in some sense, for lack of better words. Later in the unit, we’ll introduce a second mannequin and you’ll try to enchant them to work together. Finally, if we succeed in convincing the mannequins to complete more complex tasks together, we’ll introduce a third and chart how quickly it learns to do the task to the same standard as the other mannequins. Today, you’ll start the enchantments on the first mannequin, and you’ll write down hypotheses about how the next phases will go - one copy for yourself and one for me, keep you honest if something doesn’t go the way you expected it would. Talk to each other as you compose your charms - “ Advanced students were also considered old enough to know how to put together simple elements of charms to achieve specific tasks, though Gray sometimes wondered if they really should be, given how explosions happened here and in Transfiguration from time to time - “and plan your tasks, work together on your hypotheses, and as always, all the books are open to you for inspiration,” he said, gesturing to his bookshelves. “I’ll be around for questions and making sure nothing explodes past the point of reason - good luck everyone.”

OOC: Much of this lesson was based on the article “Artificial Imagination: Teaching machines creativity and common sense” from the May 2019 edition of Scientific American. I highly suggest reading it should you happen upon a grocery store where this magazine is carried - it includes a robot learning that ‘running’ is the common denominator among tasks it was given and beginning to run in place until it was given a direction, and two other computers apparently developing something along the lines of a simple language to help each other identify an artwork they had each seen different pieces of. I also based part of it off the idea of the “paperclip maximizer” - a thought experiment about what would happen if you created an A.I. which was programmed to make as many paperclips as possible, and how said A.I., unfettered, would react when it ran out of material and how it would sort out how to prioritize which resources to preserve in order to break others down for transformation into paperclips and etc., to the point of “could the A.I. somehow turn most of the matter in the universe into paperclips, and once it could no longer find anything from which to make paperclips without compromising whatever keeps it functional, what would it do then?”

(TLDR for this OOC note: “I know jack-all about computers, but the little I do know makes AI sound cool! Oh no - sorry, Zev’s author - let me help you up there - sorry - I knew you were probably going to cringe when you realized which field I was mutilating today, but I didn’t realize you were going to cringe that hard. Sorry.”)

If you want to chat theory and results and whatnot, do let me know, and feel free to speed-work-out interactions during the upcoming F&F to work out your ideas for longer posts! You may also post in the “future” (the later ‘phases’ of the experiment) if you wish, though if you do, please indicate how the earlier phases went in your narration. Have fun!

16 Professor Wright All work and some play (Advanced students) 113 Professor Wright 1 5

Natalie Atwater

May 24, 2019 6:17 AM

I prefer no work and all play by Natalie Atwater

Soon enough it would be summer. Natalie was unsure whether to be happy about that or not. On the one hand, she wouldn't have to study and do homework and go to classes. She'd be able to swim and boat and snorkel and surf. The Pecari did those things in the water room now but she got to do more of them in the summer. Or at least, she hoped that she would.

On the other hand, Natalie also had to attend a lot of parties. She didn't mind socializing with people, it was just that she didn't look forward to socializing with boring stuffy ones. Plus, there was all that pressure to find a suitable husband. It wasn't as if Natalie didn't want to get married or even that she wanted to wait until she was older. Indeed those options never truly occurred to her. Instead, the problem was that she and her parents had very different ideas of what was considered suitable.

Honestly though, why should her parents care about the personality of the man that Natalie married so long as he was from a good family and treated her right? If anything, they should want her to marry someone with a compatible personality so she'd be happy. Someone like Luke, but from the right sort of background. That was rather why Natalie could never have seen the other Pecari as anything but a friend.

The problem was Kelsey. The fact that Kelsey was-or rather seemed-perfect. The fact that Father and his family didn't really get that Natalie was not Kelsey and what was right for her sister-and therefore the ideal of all that was the right way to be-was not going to work for the Pecari.

As Natalie walked into Charms, her attention was drawn to the question on the board. This might have been one of the simplest questions she'd ever been asked. Which was nice for change considering all the deep thought probing questions Advanced classes usually threw up, especially with Professor Wright.

Anyway, of course Natalie was smarter than a broom! Brooms were simple things of wood and straw whereas she, while not an intellectual, was a human being with a brain and all the other complexities that entailed.

However, it all went down hill from there. The Pecari tried to listen as Professor Wright prattled on. Eventually, he got to the point and pulled out what he called a "doll" even though it wasn't like any Natalie had ever played with but the assignment actually sounded pretty interesting.

She received the wooden figure and looked down at it, unsure of what she wanted to make it do. Natalie turned to the person next to her "What do you plan to do with yours?" Maybe the other person had some ideas.

11 Natalie Atwater I prefer no work and all play 371 Natalie Atwater 0 5