Zinc is Overpowered

[Mushroom Catalog]

Zinc. Is. Overpowered.

Very.

For the sake of explanation, I will be leaning on my very limited knowledge of how computers work. I know this doesn't actually apply to people's brains. It's a metaphor.

Say that a Zinc Feruchemist's mind loops 60 times a second. Each "loop" is known as a frame. Now say the brain takes inputs 60 times a second as well. This will not change.

The Feruchemist stores at 50 percent. They now are storing 30 frames each second, meaning there are only 30 frames left for them. For every 2 inputs, 1 frame will run. To them, the world is running 2 times faster than they can process it. It appears to speed up, and if they move, it will also appear 2 times as fast to them. However, it will take 2 times as long for them to make themself move, as the brain will take 2 times longer to send any signals to the muscles.

Say the Feruchemist does this for 1 minute, meaning they stored up 60 seconds of 30 fps. this is 1800 frames in the zinc mind. Now, their mind is back at 60 frames per second.

Now, they tap all of that zinc in a single frame. To them, the world stops, as their brain runs through 1800 frames. They get that much thinking done in an instant. They can't move, although they could start to send signals to their muscles. Their muscles won't move to their eyes, as they still have 1799 frames to go before they take another input through their eyes.

A zinc Feruchemist could store any amount of zinc, and pull it out in an instant, with no repercussions.

Now, a zinc compounder burns and stores over and over. They can just pull out however much they wish in an instant, and think as much as they need. And, mid tap, they could just put it all back in since Feruchemy functions through connection and not neurons.

And then, since brains run faster than that... 

Zinc Compounders really could just ninja their way out of most things because they can sit there and plan for a rusting long time.

[Kidpen]

Zinc Compounders are definitely powerful, but I don't think they're too much more powerful than most other compounders. Steel Compounders could move faster than the eye can see. Gold Compounders basically can't die, barring extreme circumstances. I think a Zinc Compounder could probably be killed just as easily as most other Compounders.

[Quantus]

41 minutes ago, Mushroom Catalog said:

Zinc. Is. Overpowered.

Very.

For the sake of explanation, I will be leaning on my very limited knowledge of how computers work. I know this doesn't actually apply to people's brains. It's a metaphor.

Say that a Zinc Feruchemist's mind loops 60 times a second. Each "loop" is known as a frame. Now say the brain takes inputs 60 times a second as well. This will not change.

The Feruchemist stores at 50 percent. They now are storing 30 frames each second, meaning there are only 30 frames left for them. For every 2 inputs, 1 frame will run. To them, the world is running 2 times faster than they can process it. It appears to speed up, and if they move, it will also appear 2 times as fast to them. However, it will take 2 times as long for them to make themself move, as the brain will take 2 times longer to send any signals to the muscles.

Say the Feruchemist does this for 1 minute, meaning they stored up 60 seconds of 30 fps. this is 1800 frames in the zinc mind. Now, their mind is back at 60 frames per second.

Now, they tap all of that zinc in a single frame. To them, the world stops, as their brain runs through 1800 frames. They get that much thinking done in an instant. They can't move, although they could start to send signals to their muscles. Their muscles won't move to their eyes, as they still have 1799 frames to go before they take another input through their eyes.

A zinc Feruchemist could store any amount of zinc, and pull it out in an instant, with no repercussions.

Now, a zinc compounder burns and stores over and over. They can just pull out however much they wish in an instant, and think as much as they need. And, mid tap, they could just put it all back in since Feruchemy functions through connection and not neurons.

And then, since brains run faster than that... 

Zinc Compounders really could just ninja their way out of most things because they can sit there and plan for a rusting long time.

Eh, from a practical point of view Zinc compounding to that extent would mostly just grant a very limited form of A-Bendalloy where you couldnt Move inside the bubble.  

[+Invocation]

1 hour ago, Mushroom Catalog said:

Zinc. Is. Overpowered.

@ZincAboutIt You're OP now.

[+Artemos]

Using feruchemical zinc actual accelerates your metabolism a lot. You'd start to starve yourself after a while.

Quote

we don’t know... why tapping mental speed tends to make one hungry, of all things...

But yeah, you'd be able to get out of a lot of problems by simply thinking fast enough. Won't help you if your body isn't fast enough to get out of the way of the bullet fired at you, though.

[Halyo_Alex]

1 hour ago, Artemos said:

Using feruchemical zinc actual accelerates your metabolism a lot. You'd start to starve yourself after a while.

But yeah, you'd be able to get out of a lot of problems by simply thinking fast enough. Won't help you if your body isn't fast enough to get out of the way of the bullet fired at you, though.

I'm guessing because it speeds up how fast your brain actually works, it burns more calories and stuff doing all that high-speed processing. Hence making you hungry, since you're using up all that energy.

[+robardin]

22 hours ago, Mushroom Catalog said:

Zinc. Is. Overpowered.

Now, a zinc compounder ... can just pull out however much they wish in an instant, and think as much as they need. ...

Zinc Compounders really could just ninja their way out of most things because they can sit there and plan for a rusting long time.

If you know about ninjas, you'd know that they're not just clever folk well practiced in planning stealthy operations. They're also good at the execution part.

Think of a very clever and convoluted plan to do something seemingly impossible, along the lines of, I don't know, the plot of Ocean's Eleven (a heist movie). Now concede that a zinc compounder could formulate that plan more or less instantaneously, at will (which is still not necessarily true, as the "input information" required may not be there - zinc doesn't grant nigh-infinite knowledge, only mental insight). Even so, that wouldn't be the same as actually being able to pull the heist off, especially in a small amount of time.

You, the zinc compounder, are simply not physically capable of executing that plan; at best, you have worked out a good way to assemble an optimal team to go and try to do that plan.

Or to use your computer system analogy, an infinitely fast clock speed on a CPU does not equate to infinite memory store, optimal algorithms or data structure use in the programming, or the right kind of data input for the desired output (if it is even possible - no amount of zinc compounding will get you to "the last digit of pi", or to get around Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem).

[+robardin]

19 hours ago, Artemos said:

Using feruchemical zinc actual accelerates your metabolism a lot. You'd start to starve yourself after a while.

But yeah, you'd be able to get out of a lot of problems by simply thinking fast enough. Won't help you if your body isn't fast enough to get out of the way of the bullet fired at you, though.

"In an eyeblink, I worked through all billion possible outcomes based on all possible moves from this instant on. I was rusting doomed."

[Quantus]

1 hour ago, robardin said:

"In an eyeblink, I worked through all billion possible outcomes based on all possible moves from this instant on. I was rusting doomed."

I think a really big distinction here is the difference between Accelerated Mental Speed and Accelerated Mental Capacity.  Speed alone is like a pause button, it gives you more time to deliberate, but it does not (necessarily) give you any particular increased mental abilities.   It's easy to say "Id just flair Zinc and in an eyeblink Id calculate all the possible outcomes of all the possible moves", but if you froze time and gave me all the deliberation in the world, I most likely would still not be able to actually perform those calculations. In most cases I would not even know where to begin, and for those things where I have the knowledge/education to pull it off, I would not be able to do it all in my head, which is what Zinc alone would require.  For Zinc to be truly OP as this thread proposes, I think it would need to be paired with Copper so that you could actually hold all those billion possibilities and know you arent just rechecking possibility #159,489 for the 5th time.  

[+robardin]

22 minutes ago, Quantus said:

I think a really big distinction here is the difference between Accelerated Mental Speed and Accelerated Mental Capacity.  Speed alone is like a pause button, it gives you more time to deliberate, but it does not (necessarily) give you any particular increased mental abilities.   It's easy to say "Id just flair Zinc and in an eyeblink Id calculate all the possible outcomes of all the possible moves", but if you froze time and gave me all the deliberation in the world, I most likely would still not be able to actually perform those calculations. In most cases I would not even know where to begin, and for those things where I have the knowledge/education to pull it off, I would not be able to do it all in my head, which is what Zinc alone would require. 

I once posed this objection as well, and had this WoB thrown back at me:

Quote

Alteroden

With [Feruchemical] zinc, you get mental speed. How is that any different from [Feruchemical] steel, except without [physical] speed?

Brandon Sanderson

I think of the mental speed actually turning you into... Let's say you sped up your body, and you wanted to figure out some really complex equations.

Alteroden

So it lets you have intuitive leaps.

Brandon Sanderson

Right. It basically turns you into Ken Jennings. That's how I imagine it.

Kurkistan

So it's not like bullet time?

Brandon Sanderson

No... It'll bullet time a little bit, it certainly will, because you're thinking faster than everyone else, but it has applications beyond bullet timing. Bullet time is really--

Kurkistan

That’s steel’s thing?

Brandon Sanderson

That’s kind of steel's thing. They kind of overlap on that one, because the steel thing... But yeah. It's more like "I think fast, but my reaction speed is not sped up".

Shadows of Self Chicago signing (Oct. 12, 2015)

So you get not only the speed-of-thought bit, but also the boost to making intuitive links and leaps between thoughts/ideas.

It does not turn you into Ken Jennings in the sense that you would suddenly have a wealth of trivia knowledge you didn't have before - rather, the speed at which Jennings can see two separate hints in a clue and put them together, combined with what he knows, to get the solution, far more rapidly than someone else with the same information might ever do. (Note that Brandon was once roommates with Ken in college, so this "I knew all that but would never be able to piece it together in a buzzer-beating situation" is a little bit of a personal frame of reference he is putting out there!)

Edited October 2, 2019 by robardin
added URL links

[Mushroom Catalog]

1 hour ago, robardin said:

Think of a very clever and convoluted plan to do something seemingly impossible, along the lines of, I don't know, the plot of Ocean's Eleven (a heist movie). Now concede that a zinc compounder could formulate that plan more or less instantaneously, at will (which is still not necessarily true, as the "input information" required may not be there - zinc doesn't grant nigh-infinite knowledge, only mental insight). Even so, that wouldn't be the same as actually being able to pull the heist off, especially in a small amount of time.

That's fair. 

36 minutes ago, Quantus said:

I think it would need to be paired with Copper so that you could actually hold all those billion possibilities and know you arent just rechecking possibility #159,489 for the 5th time.  

This would definitely help with doing that kind of stuff. But simple kind of chess strategy sort of thing going on, except you don't have a timer, would still be possible. I don't disagree, but it is still possible to use it effectively without other powers.

[Quantus]

23 minutes ago, Mushroom Catalog said:

That's fair. 

This would definitely help with doing that kind of stuff. But simple kind of chess strategy sort of thing going on, except you don't have a timer, would still be possible. I don't disagree, but it is still possible to use it effectively without other powers.

It's definitely possible to use, but significantly more limited than some are describing (here and elsewhere), and there are going to be limits.  Basically you could pull off anything you could yourself do entirely in your head, without benefit of writing anything down for notes or calculations.  

47 minutes ago, robardin said:

I once posed this objection as well, and had this WoB thrown back at me:

So you get not only the speed-of-thought bit, but also the boost to making intuitive links and leaps between thoughts/ideas.

It does not turn you into Ken Jennings in the sense that you would suddenly have a wealth of trivia knowledge you didn't have before - rather, the speed at which Jennings can see two separate hints in a clue and put them together, combined with what he knows, to get the solution, far more rapidly than someone else with the same information might ever do. (Note that Brandon was once roommates with Ken in college, so this "I knew all that but would never be able to piece it together in a buzzer-beating situation" is a little bit of a personal frame of reference he is putting out there!)

Well, that changes the landscape, i was definitely stuck in the bullet-time speed of thought side, but if it also includes Intuitive Leaps, that's does open up a lot of additional capability.  Thanks!

That leads me to several other questions:

• How long can you burn Zinc before you would need to also tap/Compound F-Bronze to restore your mind?  If Zinc burns calories at an increased rate, it would follow that your brain would also need rest at the same increased rate.  
• What are the limits of these Intuitive Leaps?  Is it still limited by your own knowledge and just represent a sort of sub-consciou data-based statistical analysis (Im thinking Dune Mentats, here) or is there a Fortune/Spiritual Realm mechanic going on here where you are actually peaking into the Cosmic Truth of the Spiritual realm the way Atium works.  

 

[+Artemos]

6 hours ago, Quantus said:

• What are the limits of these Intuitive Leaps?  Is it still limited by your own knowledge and just represent a sort of sub-consciou data-based statistical analysis (Im thinking Dune Mentats, here) or is there a Fortune/Spiritual Realm mechanic going on here where you are actually peaking into the Cosmic Truth of the Spiritual realm the way Atium works.  

 

I really don't think that tapping zinc gives you access to any information you wouldn't otherwise have, especially Spiritually. There's already another metal for Fortune, after all. My interpretation of "intuitive leaps" has always been akin to being able to skip steps in a mathematical equation. Like, if you've got a system of three equations and three unknown variables, you'd normally have to manually go through and row-reduce, substitute, etc. etc. to solve for the unknowns. But, while tapping zinc, you might just think, "oh, the information is all there," and intuitively leap to knowing those values (provided you have a strong intuition of linear algebra. Like with Surgebinding, it enhances skill, but can't create it.). In a similar vein, it would make a detective's job easier, but only after they've collected all the evidence.

Another interpretation is that your "intuitive leaps" are simply an outsider's perspective of your speedy brain. In this, zinc does nothing more than accelerate the processing speed of your brain, so you can solve those equations and follow those algorithms faster. Like a teacher complaining about a student not showing their work, an outside observer would simply see you making many more leaps than a normal person.

Those interpretations may or may not be the same thing. The analogy to Mentats is pretty good, I think.

[Zapata]

12 hours ago, Artemos said:

I really don't think that tapping zinc gives you access to any information you wouldn't otherwise have, especially Spiritually. There's already another metal for Fortune, after all. My interpretation of "intuitive leaps" has always been akin to being able to skip steps in a mathematical equation. Like, if you've got a system of three equations and three unknown variables, you'd normally have to manually go through and row-reduce, substitute, etc. etc. to solve for the unknowns. But, while tapping zinc, you might just think, "oh, the information is all there," and intuitively leap to knowing those values (provided you have a strong intuition of linear algebra. Like with Surgebinding, it enhances skill, but can't create it.). In a similar vein, it would make a detective's job easier, but only after they've collected all the evidence.

Another interpretation is that your "intuitive leaps" are simply an outsider's perspective of your speedy brain. In this, zinc does nothing more than accelerate the processing speed of your brain, so you can solve those equations and follow those algorithms faster. Like a teacher complaining about a student not showing their work, an outside observer would simply see you making many more leaps than a normal person.

Those interpretations may or may not be the same thing. The analogy to Mentats is pretty good, I think.

Well, we have a POV of 

Spoiler

Wax tapping the Bands of Mourning for zinc.

It shows that zinc allows the user to think faster. someone tapping zinc could go though scenarios in their head in a fraction of a second.