A general tied to a tree
A general has been captured. They have tied him to a tree. He has nothing left to fight with, so he recites a poem.
秦时明月汉时关. The moon of Qin, the pass of Han.
Golden light comes off him.
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The poem is real. Wang Changling wrote it in the Tang dynasty. It is called 出塞, going out to the frontier. The light is not. It comes from a Chinese short drama, made for a phone, where poems carry levels. Later in it a poem by Li Bai is judged. A Legendary Verse of the Ninth Level.
Nobody in the Tang measured a poem by how brightly it glowed.
A poem with a level. It should look strange. It looks familiar.
Two ladders
I asked Claude. I had guesses of my own and I wanted them checked.
China did rank people by verse. The Tang imperial examination for the jinshi degree made candidates compose. By the middle of the eighth century a poem and a rhapsody were the standard paper. Two centuries before that, a critic named Zhong Rong wrote the 诗品, the Gradings of Poets. He sorted more than a hundred dead poets into upper, middle, and lower.
So the ladder is older than the drama by about fifteen hundred years.
Then Jin Yong. From 1957 he serialized martial arts novels in Hong Kong newspapers, and read today they look like game design. A slow boy nobody rates learns a set of eighteen palm strikes, a few at a time, and the teacher is paid in cooking. A secret manual is the loot. It turns up sewn inside the belly of a white ape. One technique comes in seven numbered levels.
The West has a ladder too, and it is also built from poetry. Strabo describes three honoured classes among the Gauls. Bards, who sang. Vates, who divined. Druids. Caesar writes that some druids trained for twenty years, memorizing verse that was never written down.
That ladder walked into a game. Dungeons & Dragons got a bard class in 1976, drawn from the Celtic bard, the Norse skald, and the southern minstrel, with a charm worked through song. By 1978 the rulebook said you reached bard only after levels as a fighter, then as a thief, then study under druids. The numbered levels themselves came out of tabletop wargames, through a campaign called Blackmoor.
Two poetry ladders. Separate roots. Same shape.
The map in miniature
They cross. In the mid 1990s a handful of Chinese students abroad took a Western form, the MUD, a text dungeon you share with other players, and built one out of Jin Yong’s martial world. They called it 侠客行. The structure came down from Dungeons & Dragons. Everything inside it was Jin Yong.
Jin Yong has a novel by that name. He took the name from a poem by Li Bai.
A student project from 1995 sounds like a footnote. It is the place where the two ladders meet.
Other lines run the same way.
A monkey. Hanuman leaps the sea to Lanka. Sun Wukong crosses 108,000 li in one somersault. Son Goku is how Japanese reads the three characters of Sun Wukong’s name. In 1988 a device over a villain’s eye reads a man’s fighting strength as a number. 戦闘力. Power level.
A deck of cards. Paper cards in China. Cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks in Mamluk Egypt. In fifteenth-century Italy, a game with a ranked row of trumps. In Paris in 1781, a story that the trumps were Egyptian secrets. In 2006, Persona 3, a Japanese game where each friendship is one of those trumps and has a rank you raise.
Some games refuse the ladder, and they are on the map for that reason. Tetris only gets faster. You never get stronger. Contra hands you a better gun and takes it back when you die.
We stopped before Marvel. The list never ends.
Who brought which dot
Tarot. Jin Yong. The MUD. Dragon Ball. The bard. The druid. Those six were mine. I knew each of them already. I had never put them on one table.
Claude checked them and carried them further. The examination. The Gradings of Poets. Strabo. The year the bard entered the rules.
It also broke a few. Playing cards are usually said to begin in Tang China. The evidence is one ninth-century line about a “leaf game,” and the leaves may have been pages of a book. The oldest cards anyone can prove are from 1294.
A human hunch. Cheap checking.
The stone
There is a scene in Jin Yong’s 天龙八部. An old master has set a problem on a Go board. The man who guards it has studied it for thirty years and never solved it. The strong players who try it all fail.
A young monk named Xu Zhu is watching. He plays badly. One of the players is about to kill himself over the board, and Xu Zhu wants to break the spell. He shuts his eyes and puts a stone down anywhere.
It kills a large group of his own stones.
The board opens.
The move looked worthless. So no master had ever tried it.
What looking used to cost
Nobody knows what a connection is worth before looking. That used to decide everything, because looking was expensive. One of these hunches, checked properly, was a week of my life. So you chased the ones that looked safe from the outside. The strange ones waited. Most of them are still waiting.
The old filter never tested whether a hunch was true. It tested whether it looked worth a week. The interesting ones fail that test.
In 1986 an information scientist named Don Swanson read two piles of medical papers that did not cite each other. One pile said fish oil makes the blood less thick. The other said people with Raynaud’s syndrome have blood that is too thick. He put them side by side and proposed fish oil for Raynaud’s.
He called it undiscovered public knowledge. Every fact was already in print. Nobody had read them together. Three years later a small trial found that it helped, in the primary form of the disease.
Swanson did that by hand. One man, reading. That reading is what got cheap.
The limit
Cheap looking also makes cheap wrong answers.
Take Hanuman and Sun Wukong. Both leap impossible distances. Both change size. Both get inside an enemy’s body. Both have a tail that causes trouble. And there is a real road between them. The monk Xuanzang did travel to India. A Chinese Buddhist text translated in the third century tells of a king whose queen is carried off and who makes an ally of a monkey king.
In 1923 Hu Shih argued that Wukong came from Hanuman. The same year Lu Xun argued for a Chinese water spirit, an ape called 无支祁. A hundred years on, the scholars have not settled it.
Claude can lay all of that out in a minute. It cannot say which line carries weight. That is a person’s job.
The whole map
The full map is the Insanecyclopedia.
Some of it makes sense. Some of it may not. That is what it is all about.
Somewhere on it there is a stone that looks like a bad move.
That’s the whole of this one. It belongs to a book I’m writing in the open, AI Has No Morality. It Has Yours. Subscribe and I’ll send the next piece when it’s ready.
If it gave you something, pass it to someone.
BØY (Chaiharan) has spent 30 years in tech, building products, recovering disasters, and turning around the things nobody else wanted to touch. Based in Bangkok. Writing a book in public about what AI reveals about the humans who use it.