Benedict Jacka

Divination can be used for more than combat and social interaction – it also helps with movement and with certain types of codebreaking.

Second Sight

By focusing their vision into the short-term future, diviners can sense their surroundings.  They observe the various futures in which they move in different directions, and see what happens.  Some directions end in a collision, others are unobstructed, and by piecing together the different possibilities a diviner can assemble a mental map of an area.

Diviners can’t literally see in the dark.  They wouldn’t be able to sense “there are a bunch of Lego blocks on my bedroom floor” – instead what they’d sense is that walking barefoot in that direction leads to sudden pain, hopping on one leg, swearing violently, and falling over.  This means they can’t, for instance, read in pitch darkness, as all they’d see would be varying futures of them staring blindly at nothing in particular.  However, they can sense things that wouldn’t be visible to the eye even in broad daylight – if the floorboards ahead were rotten and about to break, they’d see themselves crashing through them if they walked in that direction.  This particular ability makes diviners quite good at climbing, leaping, and similar feats of physical agility, as they can sense whether a handhold is stable, whether they can clear a jump, and so on.

The same technique, slightly modified, is also useful for stealth.  It’s easy for a diviner to tell whether a particular action will set off an alarm, and by the same token it’s only slightly harder for a diviner to tell whether a particular action will attract somebody’s notice.  Diviners who practice this skill learn to categorise futures in terms of whether they’ll be detected, visualising the possible futures in terms of areas of movement;  these directions will lead to detection, these ones won’t.  Of course, this is limited by the diviner’s ability to perceive whether they’ll be detected – if the consequences of detection aren’t immediately obvious, the diviner will have to look further into the future to tell whether they’ve escaped notice or not, which narrows their focus.

One of Many

The stealth abilities of diviners lead in to one of their signature tricks – the ability to pick out correct solutions out of a great number of possibilities, which makes them very good at guessing codes and passwords.

The problem with path-walking is its narrow focus – you can only study one future at a time.  This is fine when you only have two or three choices to pick between (such as which direction to turn in) but is less effective when you have thousands or millions of choices (such as inputting a code).  The solution is a specific subtype of precognition, grouping futures to pick out the one desired.  If a certain group of futures are similar enough, it’s possible to group an almost unlimited number of them together, matching like with like.  The futures that aren’t identical stand out against the crowd – it’s like spotting one white thing in the middle of a thousand black things.  This only works if the ‘wrong’ futures are almost identical – one ‘access denied’ message from a wrong password is the same as any other, but one wrong person looks completely different from another wrong person.

Divination in codebreaking is a complex subject, and there are various tricks and counter-tricks designed to make a system impregnable to diviners (and others designed to let a diviner access just such a system).  Further details are beyond the scope of this article, and will be covered elsewhere.

The last entry studied the use of path-walking in divination:  this entry will look at its short-ranged counterpart, precognition.

Broad Focus

Like most divination spells, precognition is more of a mental technique than a magical one.  It functions in the opposite way from path-walking:  instead of looking at one future in the long-term, precognition looks at a lot of futures in the very short term.  The goal with precognition is to gain a limited and superficial impression of all your short-term futures, gaining a vague idea of what’s most likely to happen in the next few seconds.

The obvious problem with this is that all the short-term futures are different.  Trying to look at each one individually is a hopeless task:  in the time it took to study even a tiny fraction of them, events would have moved on and all the futures would have shifted again.  Instead, what precognition does is look for common elements in the futures.  You don’t look at a future in detail:  you sort futures in bulk according to whether they have a certain easily recognisable element or not.

Assembling a Pattern

The best parallel for precognition is the way the eye sees colour.  If you see a pattern of a hundred red tiles and a hundred blue tiles, you can lean in and study one tile in detail . . . but you can also look at the pattern as a whole, seeing the shape it makes.  The eye easily picks out things of a certain shade:  if you have a collection of a hundred blue things on a red background that spell out a giant letter then you don’t have to look at them one at a time to figure out what the letter is, you just read it.

Precognition works the same way.  The diviner trains his inner eye to ‘see’ the element he’s looking for in the same way that a normal person searches for red or blue or green.  The thousands of possible futures make a mosaic, and by stepping back and looking at the overall shape rather than the individual tiles the diviner can see the pattern.  Some futures are good, some are bad:  by backtracking the diviner can figure out what he needs to do to end up somewhere in the middle of the good ones.

Knowing what to look for takes practice, however – developing precognition to any useful degree requires the diviner to spend a significant amount of time training their mind’s eye to pick out one particular thing.  For diviners with an adventurous streak, the first thing they train themselves to detect with precognition is usually danger.

Spider Sense

Defensive precognition is a signature ability of diviners, and for good reason:  it’s very effective at what it does.  A diviner trained in defensive precognition is constantly looking into the short-term futures, searching for threats.  Any kind of serious attack registers on the precognition as a spread of futures showing threat and injury, and the diviner instinctively alters their actions to move themselves into the futures where they’re not hurt.  As long as the diviner is paying attention and as long as there are available futures in which they aren’t hurt, then they can keep themselves safe.  A diviner can run back and forth across a highway blindfolded, cars zipping by at eighty miles an hour and missing them by inches, without the slightest danger – to bystanders it just looks like outrageously good luck, but from the diviner’s point of view luck’s got nothing to do with it.  They know which way safety lies, and they go towards it.

For all its power, defensive precognition has limits.  The degree to which a diviner can see danger is limited by their skill at sorting futures and the speed at which they can process information – they might see a threat too late to respond in time, or they might just not be paying attention and miss it.  There’s also the issue that the usefulness of precognition depends on the diviner being able to take some kind of action that reduces the danger.  When every possible action leads to the same danger, precognition isn’t terribly effective:  if you’re next to a bomb with three seconds on the timer, then all precognition will tell you is “you’re about to be blown into tiny pieces.”  But for all its limitations, defensive precognition is powerful, and a trained diviner is very hard to hurt.

There are many ways of using divination magic, each with their advantages and disadvantages.  This entry and the next will look at two of the extremes:  the very narrow (path-walking) and the very broad (precognition).

Narrow Focus

Path-walking is generally considered to be the second-longest-ranged ability available to diviners.  It’s also one of the most difficult, and requires an extremely delicate touch.

Path-walking can be best described as stringing together a very long chain of if-then conditions.  Normal divination just looks at a single possibility:  if I open that door, what happens next?  Path-walking keeps going:  it looks at what would happen if you open the door, then walk down the corridor, then turn left, then open the door at the end, then look along the shelves, and so on.  It’s a lot like assembling a chain one link at a time.

The main disadvantage to path-walking is that it only works as long as every link in the chain is formed out of a predictable event.  Any significant concentration of chaos or unpredictability is an impenetrable barrier:  you can path-walk up to an unpredictable part of the future, but you can’t path-walk beyond it.  It would be like crafting the next link out of sand:  as soon as you put any weight on it it would collapse.  This is why a diviner can see up to unpredictable situations, but can’t see beyond them in any kind of detail.

The length of time into the future that a diviner can path-walk is limited by the diviner’s skill and by the total uncertainty of all the links in the chain.  Even if each link is mostly predictable, the total uncertainty will eventually accumulate to the point where no further information can be gathered:  it’s like building a tower out of uneven blocks.  Small imperfections in the construction multiply until the whole thing falls apart.

(The observant reader will note that for this reason, path-walking is largely useless if the diviner is in an unpredictable situation already.  There’s no way to build a chain since you can’t get a stable first link.)

Clarity of Vision

The best way for a diviner to minimise the limitations of path-walking is to place themselves in a highly predictable and stable environment.  Out in a busy street, a path-walking diviner would be lucky to see a few minutes ahead:  in the middle of a crowd they’d be lucky to see a few seconds.  But if they’re alone in a house then there’s very little to disturb them.  A room with a closed door and windows is a very stable environment:  you can leave it for months without any significant change.  It’s not timeless, of course – nothing in life is – but the changes are very, very small, enough to make an exceptionally good divining platform.  In situations like this, a diviner can predict quite long chains of events with extremely high accuracy, so long as they don’t go beyond the static area.

Human Contact

Despite the obvious problems, path-walking has some application to conversation.  A diviner can’t predict the entirety of an interaction with another human being (not unless the person in question is so set in their ways that they make a plant look responsive) but they can get a decent prediction of the first thing the person is likely to do.  So a diviner can figure out, for instance, which of a series of conversational openers is likely to work best, so long as the target’s reaction to those openers would be immediately obvious.

A diviner who’s really good can continue using the same technique during a conversation, constantly looking ahead to observe the futures as they shift with each exchange.  This is much like driving your car through city streets at rush hour while simultaneously navigating on a GPS phone which keeps updating every few seconds.  Still, it’s a handy trick, so long as you don’t mind the occasional crash.

Divination is one of the more poorly understood types of magic; this article will look at some of the common misconceptions about seers and practitioners of probability magic.

What Are The Limits?

One uncommon (but regular) question asked by novices who understand the basics of divination magic is why diviners aren’t invincible.  After all, they can see the future – shouldn’t they be able to solve any problem, defeat any challenge, avoid any danger?  There are two answers to this question:  a short one and a long one.

Short Answer

The precognitive abilities of diviners are limited by available time and by intrinsically unpredictable events.

Long Answer

Say you’re playing chess on a computer against a chess program.  The program always plays at the same level of difficulty.  Whether you win or lose depends wholly on how well you play; the program simply reacts to your choices.  You’d expect to almost always win (if the program’s skill level is below your own) or almost always lose (if the program’s skill level is above your own).

Now let’s change the scenario.  Instead of playing unaided, you have a ‘cheat’ program, called Diviner.  Diviner lets you predict the chess program’s moves on an if-then basis.  So if you type in a king’s pawn move, Diviner might tell you that your opponent will respond with its queen’s knight.  You can then input another move in response to that, and Diviner will tell you the program’s move in response to that.  You can map out the entire game, and Diviner’s predictions are always 100% accurate.  Given enough time to run the predictions, you should win every game.

Now let’s add a chess clock that places a time limit on every move.  This limits the usefulness of the Diviner program – you can’t spend hours at a time analysing every possible move.  Instead of using Diviner as a sledgehammer, you have to use it more like a scalpel, picking the places where it could most effectively be used in the limited time available.  Diviner is still a major advantage, but it’s not as good as it was.

Now let’s change things up again.  Instead of playing against a nonintelligent program, you’re playing against a human being.  Now Diviner’s predictions aren’t 100% reliable anymore, because creatures with free will are – by definition – not entirely predictable.  Your opponent might make a bad move because he’s having an off day, or because he’s chosen a suboptimal strategy, or because he wants to make you feel like you’ve got a chance to win.  On the other hand, he might have a sudden flash of inspiration and choose a brilliant move that neither you nor he had noticed before.  Diviner will still accurately predict his moves most of the time, but not 100% of the time – and the further you try to predict the moves in advance, the less accurate the predictions get.

Finally, instead of taking it in turns to move, we’re going to make it so that the game is played in real time:  both you and your opponent can move whenever you like.  Now if you stop to use Diviner, your opponent might make another move while you’re trying to figure out what to do, and the predictions Diviner was making are going to be suddenly obsoleted by the changing conditions.  You’re going to have to run Diviner and the chess program side by side, and if you get too caught up in Diviner you won’t be paying attention to what’s actually happening in the game.  In this last situation, how useful the Diviner program is depends completely on how you use it.  If you use it badly it’ll actually make your play worse, because you’ll be wasting time on useless predictions while your opponent’s beating you.

All In The Technique

Almost all human-on-human interaction involving divination falls into the last category, which makes applying divination magic in complex situations very difficult.  A diviner not only has to be efficient and quick with their predictions, they have to know when not to use divination: in time-critical situations it’s often better to act first and use magic later.

This is the reason speed of prediction is so important for a diviner.  When time is in short supply, then how quickly you can sort through possible futures is much more important than how clearly and how far into the future you can see.