What if there are few dials?

What if there are few dials?

Could one dial be enough? With just one, all you can do is make the whole reel sharper or flatter. With one dial per character, 60 in all, you can at least say "the more common the character, the wider its slot". This text was written by an AI like that. Its reel never changes, so it is a jumble of common characters.

Text written by the AI: Once upon a timehhoaehd ⏎ ya l th ⏎ sewa"s,ee s

Why?The reel should change depending on what came before. After "th", "e" is likely. After a period and a space, a capital letter is likely. Think of learning a language: the list of characters is what you memorize, and the 63,000 dials are the know-how for using them, like "e often follows th". The bar below shows where those 63,000 dials actually are.

Learn moreEven setting the slots separately for each single previous character would take 60 × 60 = 3,600 dials. Using the boards and the clue-finding you will see in Chapter 5, this AI looks back up to 64 characters with about 63,000 dials. But one piece of know-how is not written on one dial. Each piece is spread over many dials, and each dial helps with many pieces. The reel in this scene was worked out from how often each character appears in the stories.