Well, no, why would it be relevant to the Proto's work. It's a Leareth thing. 

He...can try to navigate around the tripwire, though, if the Proto is willing to loosen the strong-emotions safeguard just a little, so he has more wiggle room to self-correct before he gets shut down. 

The protomolecule will revisit that when it is bigger. 

It's working on getting bigger. It's managing roughly constant doubling times, which is very challenging and requires several different parts of being the protomolecule to improve exponentially; it can show Leareth! 

Leareth would be interested to see! He’s (tentatively) pleased and proud. 

It is expanding in all these directions within the moon and doing these cool things on the sun to absorb even more solar radiation (it's absorbing 99.99999% of the solar radiation directed at it! If it were a sun-circling sphere for energy capture it'd be so good at it but that is not the Work right now. It is no longer generating most of its energy through passive solar capture, though; instead it's moving the probability-clouds of charge in atoms, like so. Lots of energy. Nom nom nom.

Do its creators also make sun-circling spheres to capture all of the solar energy? That's...awe-inspiring. 

The protomolecule only really knows engineering things, but it knows that it can be done.

Leareth so badly wishes he could convey this to his original instance but he can't. 

He does, still, want to try to gather intelligence on Velgarth, and they kept getting stuck on the thing (he carefully does not think any details about the thing) that was triggering the self-modification safeguard. 

Instead he'll try to convey instructions via a more abstract visualization of a planetary sphere and a 'grid' of longitude-latitude, and try to show how he wants the Proto to open Gate this percentage of the planetary-radius' distance closer to the northern pole, and this distance west. 

Sure!

Good! 

How many units-of-distance (in whatever format the Proto can currently parse, he'll figure it out) can the Proto reach with Mindspeech, at its current strength? 

At .13 of the distance between Velgarth and its star it becomes more energy-efficient to Gate to the spot and Mindspeak through the Gate. It is able to do this up to 617 lightyears of distance and growing.

.....Okay. Reevaluating. 

- at this point Gating to anywhere on Velgarth is incredibly not a concern. The aspect that they actually need to solve is, hmm -

- is the search, narrowing down which exact mind is worth listening to, which...in fact, isn't really about location, that's just a proxy. 

Thinking. Calculating. 

(Leareth is, at this point, decently good at reasoning in a way that doesn't trip safeguards.) 

:- All right. From here - you have Mindspeech - what interpretation-formats and search-function-options do you have? Can we...scan and search all the objects-legible-to-Thoughtsensing within your range, for...thought-concepts that contain both - gods they are loyal to - and also the Moon and recent changes...?: 

....those don't sound like natural parameters for engineering at all. 

Leareth acknowledges that they really aren’t! 

He does, however, want to know which concepts he can work with, here. And how distant they are from being Proto-legible, how much interpretative work he would have to apply…

Can the Proto run a search on a concept like “the Moon”? Or “gods” (along with all of Leareth’s intuitive specifications for what this means, here in Velgarth…much of this is in math…) ? 

Leareth's concept of the moon is underspecified but the protomolecule hasn't observed any other moons orbiting Velgarth so if there are any they are very sneaky. Of course, the protomolecule is itself being very sneaky so other observers would think there were NO moons orbiting Velgarth. 

Leareth's concept of gods seems potentially possible to work with but the protomolecule hasn't observed any of those and isn't sure it's looking in the right places.

Leareth isn't sure how to better specify anything-related-to-gods, since he mostly...hasn't interacted with Them... 

Not directly, at least. He can sort of push all the context he has from previous notes and reasoning at the Proto - also, separately, it might be worth trying to run a search on 'Dhorisha Plains' and 'Urtho's Tower' and a few other concepts...

Those are super not math.

It's super not! Sorry! Leareth has very little idea how to turn the things he wants to search for into math! 

...Maybe the Proto can just sort of...listen in on the entire continent...and Leareth will attempt the keyword-search thing from his end? 

With enough Leareths listening in on enough thoughts it could train a classifier to predict which thoughts Leareth will classify as about gods!

.....On the one hand this is KIND OF TERRIFYING but on the other hand it....will plausibly work....? 

They can try it. Leareth would prefer that during the initial testing phases on the classifier, he (or multiple Leareths in parallel, actually)  should also be run in order to check where he agrees with its categorization. 

....the optimal way to do classifier training is complicated and to the extent Leareth is requesting a deviation from that the protomolecule isn't going to do it because it can't figure out how it would decide whether to do it or not, but the optimal way definitely involves input until the accuracy rate is very high?

....all right, sure, given his current options and the information he has, Leareth will go with encouraging the protomolecule to run its classifier training using several thousand Leareth!instances to listen in on thoughts and label them according to the various ways they might be interesting.

Can he add some more labels other than 'gods'? Probably if they're going to do this, the categorization should include 'thoughts about Leareth' and 'thoughts about the Moon' and 'thoughts about Urtho' and half a dozen other labels...? 

It can train classifiers for anything where Leareth can tell it whether thoughts are an instance of the thing or not! It can even have him rank instances from 1 - 100 on how much of an instance of the thing they are if Leareths have high interrater reliability on that. 

It'll need more than thousands of Leareths, though.

Leareth considers the possible downsides of this plan. 

...From his perspective, thousands of Leareths probably isn't qualitatively different from millions?

He would like a very quick overview of the math that the classifier is running on, but if that seems reasonable then the Proto should feel free to run as many Leareths as necessary!

And if anything that any of the Leareths picks up on is REALLY INCREDIBLY URGENT to act on then he can....use (this particular mental keyword) to alert the Proto?

The proto can explain how classifiers work! It's so beautiful! 

Leareths who are given the context that they're being run to understand the beautiful classifier math, are happy to do this!