lost Epic in Nexus
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It's very boring but flying makes it better. When he has his equilibrium back she can drop him and he can fly himself.

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Yep! It is very boring and it takes most of the rest of the day but then Pen has a teleport! "We'll go out tomorrow," he says, landing.

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"'Kay. Will checking for Jane in wherever going, in case is a boring world but have a Jane. Lots Downsided worlds like that."

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"Okay."

And the next day they go out to the world he's started all his leaps from, and - "worldleap out, check for Jane with the brainphone, if there's no Jane teleport right back, right? That way if it's a mean world I'll know right away and I can start summoning you right away. Then we can go back to the new world together and check if it's adjacent to anywhere we know."

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"Yeah 'kay."

And out she goes and back she comes, no Jane no teleport-breaking meanness.

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Hug. "Okay, this time take me with you with the teleport and we'll check for adjacencies."

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She does that.

No such luck.

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"It's okay. We'll find one eventually. We can do, say, five every day, and if nothing else after a while we'll start getting duplicates -" he's been leaving beacons - "and we'll be able to guess how many neighbors this world has."

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"Is a math thing?"

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"Yeah! Want me to try to explain how to do it?"

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"Okay!"

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"Does your world have, hmm, deer? Horses?"

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"Yeah."

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"So imagine we wanted to know how many deer there were, but we couldn't catch them all. So instead we go catch, say, a hundred-forty-four deer, and we leave little marks on them so we'll know if we see those deer again. And then some other time, we come back, and we grab another hundred-forty-four deer. And to make it easy we'll say twelve deer have our marks. So now we can say that the first time, we caught one twelfth of the deer population, and that means a hundred forty four is one twelfth of the deer population, and that means there's probably around seventeen hundred twenty-eight deer."

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"Why a hundred forty four?"

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"..Samaria use base ten?"

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"Um," she wouldn't actually remember what bases are but she is wearing an eidetic memory necklace, "yes."

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"Okay, you catch a hundred deer, then you go catch another hundred deer, and ten have marks, so you know one tenth of deer have marks, so you can guess there are a thousand deer."

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"What if next time you catching deer is half of them or none, not always ten?"

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"If it's half then you know a hundred was half the deer population, so there are probably around two hundred deer. ..incidentally, all of this assumes the deer population mixes thoroughly enough, but I think that's a correct assumption for leaps with a worldleaper even if it plausibly isn't correct in the analogy - and if no deer are marked then you catch more deer, and if after a thousand no deer are marked then you know there are lots of deer. Or your markings washed off, but I don't think anyone's going to go destroy my beacons and if they did I could conjure 'beacons I've put in this world'."

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"I mean if you catch deer more days."

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"Are you keeping on marking or are you just looking for ones you marked the very first time?"

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"Just first marking."

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"Then your population estimate should be based on the average of all of your later samples, unless you've got worries like that some deer died or that the deer mixed more thoroughly over time."

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"Why assuming worlds mix?"

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