#synergetics

Synergetics Cyberscale Skin

Concept art for Guild Wars 2.

The brief was to design a skin for the base Skyscale based heavily on Asura technology and aesthetics.

Thanks to the wonderful teams at ArenaNet and Volta for the opportunity to work on this and other skins, it's been really fun taking a crack at one of my favourite games.

chaos theory was my first tattoo.

the first actual theory which changed my life.

my question for you is what is the value of variance and is there a way to predict the variability or the patterns which may form in chaotic systems?

i love your work, it is true art for me

Ohh that is a lovely tattoo!

And I am glad you like my stuff. 👌

I agree, chaos theory has had also a large impact on my -or our, in a way- life.

It is deeply satisfying to see order in chaos, to find elegant simplicity in complexity.

And somehow, for us it has also ensured a feeling of safety and certainty in times of utter lack thereof.

Finding certainty in uncertainty - this brings us closer to your question on variance:

For introduction concepts to answering I can recommend Hermann Haken's stuff on synergetics: self-organization and emergence, which describes that patterns in a system emerge which its elements don't offer themselves. But which patterns, well, my concept about information weaving could explain how information can re-distribute iitself, which might be a part of the answer to your question. Emergence is like a form of "gravity"; quantum gravity, a re-distribution of information density, equivalent in their interpretation to the concept of probabilty intensity distributions in quantum theory. Given that elementary particles are a collection of certain "information geometries" I regard as "complex information weaving sequences", this quantum gravity interpretation is about the distribution of information density in its weaving patterns, and, this is a major leap of thought: The other side of quantum gravity brings us straight to the issue of Navier-Stokes and turbulences, which are, per my interpretation, complex interference patterns, still obeying given 'symmetries' I regard as "butterfly clones" - pairs of possible anthitetic states. (Could also be related to virtual pairs in Feynman diagrams) In a way these turbulences are feedback-loops. The conversation of energy, as in Netwon's second law, "Every action creates a reaction", becomes non-linear, and hence probabilistic and chaotic. And well, this brings us to non-linear causal networks and quantum logic.

Iterative approaches.

And additionally, currently I develop an algorithm that tries to do that - how to 'tackle chaos to unravel itself' - it's a recursive iterative combinatorial approach and highly adaptable to the input you feed it with.

So, to summarize my answer: Predictions might be possible, but I can't say to which degree of exactness and accuracy. Yet, I "sense" a way, and it is primarily "imitating the chaos you want to unravel" - and letting these, the object of study and your imitation of it, interact - somehow you also use self-reference as tool. It's like you throw that chaos in a view between mirrors and it dissects itself.

Lol.

Actually the one is nested into the other. That's what makes this equation work out in the end.

Disorder Distorter - twisted means of ordered disorder [Synergetics*]

*Synergetics is the study of interaction. According to this field of study, systems [social, biological, chemical and physical] can become so complex that at a special point they simplify themselves. "Microscopic chaos creates makroscopic order." (Hermann Haken, discoverer of Synergetics.)

Taimi says she "knew Blish from college." Even the wiki - which has a VERY firm stance on 'speculation' - agrees that this means Blish was a member of the College of Synergetics.

I have a different proposal.

When we met Taimi back in S1, there were two older asura keeping eyes on her: Zojja, and a Dynamics asura named Vorpp. This is the Vorpp who did experiments on the Secondborn (including Canach) from Caithe's memory seeds in S2, but we didn't know that at the time.

THING OF NOTE: Vorpp (he's on the wiki as Emissary Vorpp but ahaha there's like zero things there) does portal things. I dug around some maze-like wiki pages and discovered that he's the one who reverse-engineered some of Scarlet's portals so we could find her lair and beat her up in one of the S1 missions. There's a whole achievement (and, notably, as far as I can tell, he's the first one to have come up with a communicator device like Taimi's - obviously inferior, but still).

But. This is very obvious evidence that portals is a field of Dynamics. Which only makes sense, because asura gates were created and are maintained by the College of Dynamics.

My POINT HERE is this: Taimi was still hanging around and involved with Vorpp of Dynamics even though she was a member of Synergetics.

And Vorpp's field of expertise is portals. And also very Inquest-like experiments on Secondborn sylvari.

Utter and rock-solid and extremely true headcanon: this is how Taimi knows Blish.

Blish is a portal specialist. Taimi "knows Blish from college." Blish is a member of the Inquest.

We all assume that Blish was Synergetics because Taimi knew him in college. But that's not necessarily true!! My 100% headcanon is that Vorpp was Blish's college mentor before Blish went off and joined the Inquest. Vorpp's experiments on Secondborn likely happened before Blish was even born (that was in 1302 and Taimi was born in 1313, so if they're anywhere near each other in age...) but Vorpp's tastes and morals likely remained the same, which would help explain why Blish and Gorrik were so 'eh' about being in the Inquest (my other headcanon is that they only joined looking for something to help Blish, but they didn't have to be so casual about it - this would explain that).

I feel like I need to obsessively defend this headcanon, simply because the wiki definitively says Blish was Synergetics. But that's derived SOLELY from the fact that Taimi says she knew him in college, but she never specifies which college.