Ask Lemmy

I roll to seduce the assassin. If that fails, I'll barrel roll instead

Every hour send a message back to the start of the 7 day period + 1 second for each elapsed hour "still alive at " At the first one hour mark send a message to three minutes after the start of the period. 168 hours in a week, texts with survival status will be done a bit before the three minute mark of constant messages. This message describes the situation. Now I have insight into when the assassin will get me, to an hour. Don't change my behavior until the hour span leading up to the last still alive message, go nuts traveling randomly during that time until the number of still alive text messages changes After surviving for a week send a final message back in time to the very start "your phone is trying to kill you"

I don't.

Wouldn't this depend on why the assassin is after me?

But how does that help? If I send past me a message, can past me change anything? What happens to the me that sent the message if past me receives it and changes stuff? Seems like you're creating a classic time travel paradox.

"Oh, a text from future me? Let's see what it says..."

"FM: Ninja assassins are after you. You know what you must do."

shuts off phone nods solemnly "Set myself on fire."

"I found the assassin. She's a 5'10” blonde, 120lbs, with a pixie cut. She's staying at the Royal Stag. You know what to do."

I wouldn't warn myself because I don't want to get caught in a groundhog day, butter fly effect scenario.

Nice try assassin! As if I would reveal my plans.

What time travel rules? See: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TemporalMutability

Going with “overwriting the timeline,”

• buy yourself an hour to live on the first day, should be easy enough

• make fat cash with options trading in minutes

• buy hella security

• repeat until the seven days have passed

I would also rig a “dead man’s switch” on my phone in case the assassin ever does get me, to reset things (by telling my past self of my current situation, so they can avoid it).

Is this question inspired by the steins;gate anime/VN ?

Step one: I clone my phone allowing two phones to contact my past self.

Step two: "Lose" one phone, after turning on find my friend on the lost phone.

Step three: Send past self false information while keeping constant tab on the assassin who believes they have an edge.

Step four: Hit the assassin before they hit me.

First of all, if it's my number sending messages back in time to myself, I could easily convince myself it's me by sending a list of my passwords back in time.

Second, tell myself that I'm screwed no matter what because there's no way I could defeat a professional assassin (assuming it's professional), especially one from the future, and to probably just hang myself or some other form of suicide in order to mock the assassin by not letting them get the kill.

You left out the most important part. What's my motive to survive?

I might be reading this wrong but I'm not convinced it helps. My read of this is basically we get 1 free go at surviving and can send messages back to the start point for the second go to try and survive.

You could keep a running commentary of what you're doing and where you're going which would give you a little bit of notice of where and when you die but unless you can time loop and continually adjust the plan until you find something that works I don't see how knowing 1 point of failure is enough to keep you alive.

Maybe someone smarter than me has a better idea though, or I've got the prompt wrong.

Id get the the hashes of the next few hundred blocks of Bitcoin and send back in time, my past self could use that to pre-mine tons of Bitcoin, with each block reward being ~3 BTC and the price arround 90k each, I could sell all that for millions and millions of dollars

with all that money I'd just hire another assassin or something to kill the first guy. or just invest in a ton of security, body guards and stuff

edit: actually on second thought I could use almost any financial mechanism to get tons of cash, this is just the first one that came to me

Do I have any information at all about the assassin? Sending back the only info I know, "there is an assassin", won't help much, will it?

The problem is that I can't wait for the assassin to make a move in order to learn about them. It'd be a lot easier if I was trying to prevent someone else's death, but I can't send a message after my own death, can I?

I see you're going for a Steins;Gate reference but this is a significantly harder scenario.

Assuming you can change the future, you can send a message with your location history every x minutes to your 1-day (or more) ago self. You will have to encode it (and I guess this should be done outside the phone) in a way that the assassin can't spoof a message. You'll have to figure out that encoding as soon as you find out about the assassin since that's your message travel limit anyway. When you start receiving messages you follow that location history and then stop following it when you stop receiving them because something went wrong there. Eventually some instance of you might make it 7 days.

Send myself the history of all stock movement within the past week, make sure my past self uses it to become multimillionaire in the first day using leverage trades. An assasin could likely kill me if I'm anywhere public, so I need to get myself arrested without being seen. Fastest way I can think is that call the emergency hotline, tell them I've shot multiple people and come pick me up, in which will dispatch the officers immediately and I can safely stay in jail for a week throughout the confusion.

I'm leaving my phone somewhere very far away from my actual location. Check and mate, assassin.

If someone with access to time travel is hunting me, the last thing I want is a device known to be associated with me speaking to every cell tower I’m near, time breaking qualities or not. I leave my phone at home and spend only cash as I take a random bus tour of the country.

How did that banana become green?!

I don't. I'll share this technology, preferably with trustworthy competent people. At last, I'll probably figure out how that decision lead to my assassination.

This is similar to the premise of a great game called Shadow of Destiny. Highly recommend it for adventure games fans.