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A Requiem to Efficiency

Wistere
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Synopsis
This is the story of an acolyte of efficiency and his journey through high school.

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Chapter 1 - Prelude

I firmly believe in the idea of minimal effort. Not in the sense of doing the bare minimum to survive, or to generalize it a little, doing the bare minimum to accomplish a goal. If that were the case, I would get nowhere, constantly setting goals so that I actually could get somewhere I'm proud of.

A minimax strategy does not accurately describe how I live, either. Minimizing the maximum loss is useless in a sandbox as large as the universe. Minimax assumes the worst case scenario, and that simply isn't reasonable in practice. Gains and losses are simply positive and negative versions of the same thing, so the same assessment could be argued of maximin strategies.

I play in the undefined and proverbial game of life through my breed of optimization. What is the expected satisfaction I can derive from this action in the present and the future, when compared to the amount of effort spent? That is my main method of judgement for which action I should take.

Mathematically speaking, life could be defined simply as a rooted tree. To me, to be satisfied is to be successful. Resources such as money, feelings such as love, and experiences such as triumph can be converted into units of satisfaction. They take into consideration the potential effects of such assets or liabilities throughout my lifetime, averaged with the effects weighed by their probability. The exact conversion is hard to define and fluctuates a lot. These units are used when it comes to assigning each node, or each decision, a cost. Each node corresponds to the situation after an action, and is assigned a profit according to the same satisfaction units. Essentially, I would just need to take the next action on the branch which yields the most points.

In the case of an occasional tie, I would simply select through minimax. So far, I've not reached a point where I couldn't decide what to do after that.

I'm no nihilist; I'm indifferent to concepts like cosmic purposelessness. I simply try to live my life as efficiently as possible, with all consequences in mind.