The Culture + 40k

> only post sublimed races can use grid-fire on a tactical level

That's because Culture ships are run by AIs capable of fighting and ending battles in less time than it takes humans to blink, and gridfire takes multiple seconds to spin up.

It'll be fully capable of hitting 40k ships, though, because compared to Culture Minds, they're slow and stupid.

>while also trying to rape the enemy's AI into committing suicide with Effectors

Jesus christ, that seems unethical even for war.

The Culture Minds get corrupted by Tzeentch while their people get corrupted by Slaanesh. The galaxy burns and the Dark Gods laugh.

Now that would be interesting to see. Holy shit, talk about dystopic...

This, honestly.
Everyone seems to forget that AI are prime targets for demonic possession- thats why the Imperium uses servitors.

This can't possibly be long enough since the last time we've had this exact same thread.

This is what 40k fags always have to fall back on because the Culture is a ludicrously more powerful setting than anything in 40k by the numbers. I don't buy it: the existing races in 40k are not instantly and immediately consumed by Chaos, and the whole way the Culture functions means they are not going to encounter it unaware nor is their entire society ever going to vulnerable to it. Look at what happens in Excession.

Just being clever, or fucking and doing drugs, aren't enough to fall to Chaos - but it is the Good Clean Fun part of the Culture that fits the least in 40k. A mind is a lot more than an AI as calls it, and honestly there's no reason to image the Chaos Gods could even get to the nonphysical bits of a Mind. They certainly aren't in the Warp, and in terms of feats the Chaos Gods seem considerably weaker than what a Sublimed civ is capable of.

The one time we saw it happen, the two Minds involved had a vendetta between them, so I we're not really sure how common it is.

In conventional war, the galaxy gets raped.

The question is whether or not Chaos can corrupt the Culture's people and Minds.

Yeah, the Culture honestly has a pretty good chance of distracting Tzeentch forever with Infinite Fun, turning Slaanesh into a being of gentle BDSM and non-decadent artsy orgies, sending Nurgle to fat camp, and turning Khorne into Whorf if not outright extinguishing him. They have massive populations and incredibly good mental health and social safeguards, so it would be pretty easy for them to reshape the Chaos gods with the mass of well balanced and happy souls guided by self correcting god-machines.

I'm more interested in seeing Inquisitors get slap droned so they can't hurt anyone.

The population would just get tempted and corrupted within like an afternoon. It would be like throwing a very fat, pampered rooster to the dogs.
The minds and SC would have a fighting chance, though.

Some culture warships seem to consider ethics to be nothing more than a common courtesy to thrown aside in times of war.

Like, the Culture talks about ethics and consent all the time. But they are also anarchists and aren't really comfortable with actually enforcing any of that with anything stronger than public ridicule, and force as a very unfortunate last resort.

Unfortunately winning the Idran war gave them a sizable population of hyper-intelligent sociopaths that are just looking for people they can get away with hurting without losing too many friends. When they aren't looking for Space Nazis to punch, they effectively make up the edgy sub-Cultures. The warship in surface detail has it's Avatoid chill in industrial nightclubs, and (pretends to) torture people in order to piss off the less warlike Minds, and also make itself look more attractive to human women who may or may not be looking for a bad boy to replace the Abusive asshole she just escaped from. As far as he's concerned if it all works out in the end, he's the good guy, the people he kills are bad guys, and the people who he didn't kill are grateful, even if they never want to talk to him ever again.

This pattern of "Culture Warship Mind is actually a huge asshole." repeats itself over and over. The biggest differences seem to be how well they disguise it, and how ruthless they turn out to be when they let go of everything and become the Killbot they were never allowed to be in polite society. Mistake Not, from the Hydrogen sonata, is probably the best, both at hiding it's own sociopathy, and flipping out and killing things when the time comes. Culture Drones also exhibit this behavior pattern, but tend to be much cruder when it comes to hiding it, and have much more limited weapons.

Minds think humans are cute, but sometimes it's the kind of cute that you could easily imagine yourself squeezing to death. Iain M Banks is a lot more fucked up than anybody on Veeky Forums gives him credit for.

>Like, the Culture talks about ethics and consent all the time. But they are also anarchists and aren't really comfortable with actually enforcing any of that with anything stronger than public ridicule, and force as a very unfortunate last resort.

That is...deeply uncomfortable.

Society creates fucked up minds. A good society will have those minds put on a mask and daydream about doing bad things to people and allow them only to do actual bad things to people where doing bad things to people needs to actually be done.

>force as a very unfortunate last resort.
This isn't actually true. It's just that minds will stop most actual harm before it actually happens unless all parties are consenting. So if you try to kill someone without a lot of planning they'll probably stop it from happening.

If you do manage to kill or hurt someone nonconsensually, they'll get a drone to look after you so you don't do it again.

>How would a wargame fluff do against the literal book form of nuh uh I win.
Gee I dunno.

To be honest, that kind of discomfort is what makes these books so fucking great. Not many sci-fi books can make you feel like this. And in fact, many of the events in the books can be read as metaphors for the power of literature itself, as well as a critique and vindication of leftism. It's fucked up sometimes, but it's also fun sometimes, and you'll feel better when it's over. People talk about these books, but you can't understand them until you've read them.

That's still a form of Force. Often a field of literal force preventing you from moving in a dangerous manner if you persist in your violent actions.

But this is considered an unfortunate last resort, because it's a violation of the NAP or whatever. Anarchy has to be allowed to be hypocritical sometimes, or it isn't real anarchy anymore.

You are spot on about how society creates sociopaths though, and how the difference between good and evil seems to be how society deals with that "problem." As far as the Culture is concerned, a sociopath is just a weapon for killing other sociopaths which won't play by the rules. (which Sociopaths seem to love anyways, so what's the problem) this is more or less the point behind Use of Weapons. The Culture uses Zakalwe as a weapon, and he's man who grew up in a hostile environment and has a hard time thinking in any terms other than how to get an advantage over other people by any means necessary. For Zakalwe and the culture, it's just coercion and murder all the way down. There is nothing sacred in his life that he hasn't used to hurt somebody with, himself included. But both are allowed to feel better about themselves despite this because they ultimately have a net positive effect on the world around them. In fact, just a tiny fraction of vindication would matter more to Zakalwe than the forgiveness of all the gods worshiped by all the civilizations of the entire galaxy. That's why he can't help but keep fighting even when it's absurd.

If we're transplanting Culture groups (a single ship?) into 40k's universe, I actually think the Culture will be at a serious disadvantage to start, not because of the Warp specifically, but just because physics in 40k is so radically different from either the real world or the Culture's home universe.

The Mind would instantly either figure out the physics or be overcome by Tzeentch. Who would win between the Culture and 40k is a matter of debate but that the war would take any more than few minutes shouldn't be.

To be specific, I think a lot of Culture tech would just stop working in the setting. However, I also think that one of the first things the transplantees would do, would be to initiate a shitload of physics experiments to try and decipher the rules of the new universe.

So as I see it, the Culture would have an "incubation period" where they would be much weaker than normal as they try to understand their new surroundings and rebuild their technology base. They'd probably be limited to a single star system at first, and even after they figure out FTL transport in this universe, they will probably initially stick with the same kind of FTL used by the Tau--which is slower than that used by any other races. Eventually they'd probably construct their own custom Webway just like the Emperor tried to do, but they could potentially be working and fighting defensively for years.

And at least *one* Mind is going to succumb to Chaos, even if only to find out what it's like.

if none of their tech works then obviously they are all going to die pretty quickly.

the minds work primarily by shunting their mental processing into another dimension where they can think at FTL speeds. if they lose that feature then it's pretty bad news for the culture.

>That's still a form of Force. Often a field of literal force preventing you from moving in a dangerous manner if you persist in your violent actions.
Please. If I wear my personal armour that stops you penetrating my skull with a bullet, am I breaking the NAP?

The Minds stopping harm happening by putting a protection around others is in no way a violation of NAP.

Culture citizens aren't weak willed or prone to corruption. What could you possibly corrupt them with?

The problem is wether or not the mind will be able to maintain its hyperspace structure or will most of its functions drop back into its real space shell

If the Warp didn't exist then the Culture would wipe the floor with every race and still have time for lunch.
But since the population is full of degenerate hedonists and the Minds, especially those working in Special Circumstances, are wrapped up in their plans, Tzeentch and Slaanesh would have a field day with them.
So really it all comes down to whether or not the Culture can magic up some Clarketech BS that can protect them from the Warp before their own society does them in.

They will create a warp god of freedom and fullfilling oneself

Yes, and that's why Minds will prefer to do that instead of Immobilize you. But sometimes the slap drone doesn't have that level of control, and has to instead just paralyze you.

The Culture tries to do things with the least amount of force, and Minds accomplish this paradoxically by using the most powerful tools at their disposal. But sometimes you have to make do. And drones Violate the NAP all the damn time, with or without the permission of Minds, who might have to resort to some extreme measures to stop them.

Fights between minds and humans aren't fights at all. Your gun suddenly stops working, Your knife is displaced out of your hand. Ect ect ect. But a fight between a mind and a drone, or a mind and another mind, can get pretty brutal, even if it happens in ways that aren't visible to human eyes.

The lighting on this is a mess.

They're still pretty drastically smarter than anything going. It'd just shunt their reaction time from microseconds to some other fraction of a second.

This is the warship in Excession:
>It ran a systems check.Totally unharmed, apart from the self-inflicted degradation to its engines.It slackened off the power, dropping back to normal maxima and watching the readouts; significant degradation from here in about a hundred hours.Not too bad.Self-repairing would take days at all-engines-stop.Warhead stocks down to forty per cent; remanufacturing from first principles would take four to seven hours, depending on the exact mix it chose.Plasma chambers at ninety-six per cent efficiency; about right for the engagement system-use profile according to the relevant charts and graphs.Self-repair mechanisms champing the bit.It looked around, concentrating on the view astern.No obvious threats; it let the self-repairers make a start on two of the four chambers.Full reconstruction time, two hundred and four seconds.

>Entire engagement duration; eleven microseconds.Hmm; it had felt longer.But then that was only natural.

You cannot win the tech game. Even if you arbitrarily decide Culture tech doesn't work it will take them slmost no time to build tech that does, and better than anything else in the setting. And like, the antimatter would still work. The effectors, the lasers, the plasma. They don't need more than that.

Culture vs 40k comes down to "Does Chaos magically win lol" and that's it.

>the minds work primarily by shunting their mental processing into another dimension where they can think at FTL speeds.

Wow. Yeah, no way that would work in 40k as-is. If they get time to figure the local universe out, MAYBE they could regain access to that technology by combining it with Gellar fields or pseudo-Webways. Using that tech without any kind of protection though, is basically like being an Unsanctioned Psyker.

What if the Warp is just what happens when a dimension collapses from over use?

And that's without taking into consideration all the ways the Minds can get the desired effect without even using a visible show of force.
Gurgeh got manipulated into destroying an entire civilization and didn't even realize it until the end when he finally put the pieces together. The Minds are so far ahead of baseline humanity that they could push a man to crash his ship into a star and have him convinced to the last moment that he had decided to do it all on his own.
NAP really doesn't count for anything when you can manipulate someone so thoroughly that they aren't even aware that they're doing what you want them to do.

Mentally, a Mind is much more powerful than a Chaos God has ever been shown to be.

I've no idea why we're pretending the Culture adhere to anything like modern day NAP thought

I think that might devolve into a "pre-ethical god is cretinous, but Strong" situation. Depending on how you assume things work it might not matter that the Mind is astronomically more intelligent or willful. It might still get corrupted.

Machines are not immune.

On the other hand it might also truly become the Omnisiah, or a better subject of the term than the real one ever was or could be.

Yeah, the Ad-Mech that actually listened to it would be heretics, but their machine god would be much smarter and actually working towards what was actually a very directed, very efficient "divine" purpose of improving things with SCIENCE, and rationality.

If it didn't get eaten by Chaos. I guess it really depends on if it can find some way to harness available physics and resources to use as a defense (probably) and whether it's thought and actions feed chaos. (Possibly not, some things clearly do not, although it's new friends in the Ad-Mech still would with their buzz of activity. The mind is more than smart enough to realize this very, very quickly however.)

I'm just using it as a figure of speech. I think Ancaps are the dumbest form of Anarchism, because they try to pretend it's not hypocritical to make rules. I like their taste in pornography though.

When I said "Violates the NAP or something." I was making a joke about how it's impossible to be an effective anarchist and have rules that you don't sometimes break. And yes, totalitarians and authoritarians break their own rules all the time as well. They just are less honest about it (at least in public).

It's easiest to compare it to the NAP we know because whatever NAP they like to work under is clearly convoluted to the point of lunacy considering what the Minds get away with.

In practice, the kind they teach to humans seems to be somewhere between the NAP and Consent Culture, but also with a few things that might seem really weird to the adherents of either.

Don't rape or murder people, and if you take something without asking, give it back before they notice it's gone.

I am not also sure if they have the same definition of rape as we do. Esp since most sex seems to happen under the influence of many drugs, and lying or gentle manipulation isn't seen as a violation of anything. A better rule of thumb would be "Don't force yourself on her, or give her any drugs she wouldn't give herself under the same circumstances. And call her the next morning if you want to be invited to the next orgy." Is probably closer. Non physical harassment may or may not cause a concerned drone to use it's fields, either to push you away, or just dampen all the noise you were making, but never in a way that a clever human can't find a way around. And when a Mind wants to talk to you, nothing will be able to stop it until you've heard it out. The culture has no problem with PUAs, it just applies evolutionary pressure on them until they become as attractive to you as they think they should be.

>The culture has no problem with PUAs, it just applies evolutionary pressure on them until they become as attractive to you as they think they should be.

Now I'm imagining a Culture Mind devoting a preposterous amount of resources to getting one guy to become an actually interesting person rather than just negging women.

It would probably do this by enlisting the help of the most beautiful woman on the entire Orbital to play hard to get with him. And it would probably be part of an even bigger game being played with other Minds in "The only slightly less interesting times game."

It would in fact, make a great romantic comedy, I can't believe that Banks didn't have enough faith in his own Ideas to write more stories that didn't involve Special Circumstances being dicks. Heck, the framing device could be a human asking the Mind if life on an Orbital was really boring compared to life on a ship, and being told that it absolutely was not, because humans are a constant source of entertainment, even when domesticated by Utopia.

I mean, an unfractured c'tan could beat them.

And the chaos gods could too, If they actually cared

Gork and mork would be fine too

There is little a nearly godlike being could do against actual gods

What about Culture vs City? The City is nowhere near it's prime but it's got a rather strong implied military, where they give the equivalent of a single detective/drone a gun that can shoot through several km of solid super space age metal on a low power shot and they build shit by siphoning matter/energy from other dimensions.

Seems like it'd be a case of quarantine the city off and poke at it to see what the fuck the deal is.

Given enough time the Culture could deconstruct the City down to its constituent elements, and considering the distances they can work from, it would be a serious effort for any of the ground units in the City to stop them.
That being said, if the City has active defenses and some sort of space force, with the tech it has on hand for its most advanced military units, they could put up a pretty good fight. But as far as I know, Blame! never touched on that.
The Devil is in the details and I don't think we have very much of those.

Not sure the chaos gods are anymore "true gods" than a mind is. Labelling something a god is basically just a comparison of the entities ability to affect changes vs a baseline humans. The most godlike things done in 40k would be mass genetic mutation, screwing with passage of time and blowing up planets? None of that seems umreasonable for a Mind to pull off if it wanted to.

Yeah they never really go into details for anything but Safeguard, who are more of just cops/antivirus, but if you look at the level of tech if they had an actual military beyond that it could be able to compete via teleporting an army of those niggas with rifle (compared to the handgun) GBEs and gravitron shields in range to fuck them up.

But for all we know Safeguard (which, to be fair, are able to curbstomp most settings themselves) could be the extent of their military.

Well the chaos gods are like legit snap fingers you're dead gods, it's just that 99.9999% of their power is focused on fighting each other, not on the materium.

And the c'tan fought the old ones, which where an entire race of emperors on steriods

Yeah, Banks is only Atheist in that he rejects the hierarchy imposed by religious though. He seems to have no problem with godlike beings. Even literal heaven (the sublime) and figurative hell (torture simulations)

40k seems to have a similarly cynical take on religion. Gods and demons are just higher dimensional beings of vast power and intellect. And culture Minds are on a similar scale. The biggest problem the Culture would have with them would be being outnumbered and possibly outgunned. But if they last long enough to start mass producing inter dimensional weaponry, they could defend themselves from demons, and if they manage to create a large enough population of happy people (or happy AIs), they could create their own warp entities that could even dwarf the emperor himself.

So it's possible a single GSV might not last very long, but a group of culture ships expecting a fight could easily start gaining a foothold, and even becoming a superpower without anybody noticing. Assuming hyperspace is equivalent to the warp, they probably already have the equivalent of Geller fields that far surpass the Imperuim's dangerously over-rated models. They could be fighting in the warp and only a few of the most sensitive psyckers would notice.

The real horror is what the Culture would turn into after winning the war. If the Idrans were enough to turn them into a bunch of sociopathic assholes, what would happen if they were able to reform the chaos gods?

Slanesh and Tzneech enjoying their new jobs. Khorne and Nurgle rendered harmless. Gork and Mork haven't noticed they're stuck in an entertainment simulation. Emperor and surviving Eldar gods finally allowed to die in peace. Boardgame fluff advancing.

The emperor was the culmination of a bunch of psykers over the course of a few hundred thousand years, and was of little enough power that a big ork could challenge him.

That's less physical brains and brawn than the physical size of New York, if you stacked them together

Culture warships work at lightsecond distances and can tweak your mind from that distance without you even noticing they were there. They've access to energy levels that could blow up stars, and are smart enough to talk people into committing suicide if they feel like it.
Gods? Please. Come back when they actually do something impressive that can't be done with a piece long range modifying equipment and large amounts of energy.

>If the Idrans were enough to turn them into a bunch of sociopathic assholes
Most of them aren't sociopathic assholes. The majority of the ones who did turn into those either toned themselves down, mothballed themselves, or just got PTSD. One of the Minds that controlled a habitat long past the war commits suicide along with an alien assassin because of the billions he killed during part of a war. That's just a number to you, but he was smart enough to know the lives of everyone he was snuffing out.

That's basically what the acceptable PUA community is now anyway. Like that is Neil Strauss these days.

An unfractured C'tan is Tuesday for the Culture. And not even the whole day.

Well yeah, but my point is, the Culture has to live with the guilt of the Idran war, and this sometimes manifests as a slightly higher incidence of sociopaths. Post chaos Culture would be even weirder.

What about the void dragon?
Took two gods at the height of their power to put him to sleep.

Let's not forget the whole complete mastery over machines thing.

Culture might not stand a chance against something of that magnitude. They're strong, but even in their own universe there are entities more powerful than the entirety of the Culture.
Although I don't think the mastery of machinery thing counts in this scenario. Isn't tat because it has a special bond with Imperium technology?

If he can control Minds from a longer distance than they can tag him, sure. If not then same deal.

Well we know very little about the dragon, we just know it took big e and vaul to put him to sleep, and that something has been keeping the imperial technology afloat.

If it was a shard that big e and vaul fought, culture is screwed, if it wasn't and was the full dragon, less screwed but still screwed

Have we all forgotten about the necrons sun gun and Death Star? And that they actually haven't pulled out everything they have.

I know they are hiding titans somewhere

It looks like he has kept things working across the Milky Way.

That's a bit more than a few lightyears

>sun gun
The Sleeper Service reconfigured its engines to extract multiple times the total mass-energy of our sun from the grid. It is roughly the size of Connecticut.

Culture Minds have held their own against probes from elder universes trying to rewrite their thoughts, by going in and putting themselves back together at a similar rate. A Culture Mind already fights by subversion more potent and quick than any corrupting force shown in Chaos' arsenal, and stuff like scapcode would be as much a threat as background radiation. Effectors are electron manipulators that can read and control the thoughts of several planets of people and AI from light years away if not contested by another Mind, and that's the low end of their power.

>Effectors are electron manipulators that can read and control the thoughts of several planets of people and AI from light years away if not contested by another Mind, and that's the low end of their power.

That's definitely POSSIBLE, but I wouldn't call it the low end of their power. More like over clocking the system in ways that are only possible with a highly advanced model, and also making a lot of noise that will be visible to anybody in hyperspace.

Again, a lot of Culture wank seems to confuse the super awesome thing a modern Equiv Tech warship could do under optimal circumstances if it really wanted, with something that's easy enough for anybody to do.

They mention but never go into detail about something called "Gravity Furnaces". Considering The City is large enough that it should have collapsed into a black hole by now, it's safe to assume that if you broke it/them/enough of them the entire city would become a black hole.

The Culture would either succumb to Slaanesh or win with little effort.

part of the problem is that the Culture theoretically could spit any given super-science project from every GSV, but doesn't in the books because its not on a war footing. For example, The Sleeper Service mentioned, is a retired civilian Ship that slapped its oversized engines together while its minders were distracted. The other example I used, a drone successfully resisting the Excession, just temporarily, is what's relevant to Minds resisting the gods of Chaos. The other bit was less thought out, and I tend to go off the general capabilities of a GSV, not a warship, but I admit its contingent on being uncontested and in essentially optimal conditions.

>Sun Gun
During the Idiran-Culture war Culture ships would hide themselves by sitting inside suns.

Slaanesh will succumb to the Culture. The Prince of Pleasure demands excess and strife for perfection, the Culture enjoys proportion and ease of grace. The cult's sadomasochistic ritual orgy is really blunted when reduced to the tuesday sex, wine, and cheese party.

Pretty much any Culture ship with a Mind could use its effectors like that though. I mean the warships are honestly just the general purpose ones with Minds more suited to military action.

the celestial orrery and the more exotic weapons might be surprising to the Culture, but only as physics experiments. I'm straining to think of a way for the Necrons to strike at a Mind, let alone really damage a ship. Culture ships slam around at several thousand times lightspeed, I don't know how fast inertialess drives go.

Lineguns are supposedly really good at killing Minds, they fire linear singularities, and are really hard to stop with most fields. And they can even be man portable (provided the man is big enough)

The hard part is hitting anything with them. The projectile only travels at relativistic speeds in a straight line. A bunch of them in a small enough volume of space probably make for great area denial weapons though, and IIRC they have scored kills, both during the Idran war, and during simulated wars with other equiv tech powers.

The other problem is like, you use your superweapon to kill a Mind. It works. They figure out how it works...

That sounds pretty similar to the GBEs from Blame!, and as relativistic weapons they're essentially daggers when fighting a Ship. Their standard method of projecting force onto the enemy is FTL teleportation, so staying well away from and ahead of a Linegun or GBE while maintaining an attack shouldn't be much trouble.

I'm still of the opinion that Slaanesh would grow a billion times if the culture showed up.

Back when they were a thing, inertialess drives were able to 'cross the galaxy in the blink of an eye,' GW has since realized that this makes necron victory inevitable and retconned them, with only a rogue mention in the Shield of Ba'al books since 5th Edition.

Actually, that's one place where 40K wins hands down, in that the Imperium, who have shitty warp technology, can manage 9 megalights. The Culture considers 200 kilolights to be pretty quick.

Yes, but because the Chaos Gods are influenced by mortals, the sheer volume of happy, congenial souls caused by displacing the entire Culture might well make Slaanesh a very tame pleasure god by comparison.

Yep, cultureverse is slow-slow-slow.

Shame they only have to find one helpful eldar ranger to get the webway, and then they have the necron solution down pat.

Ends badly for everyone. 40k can't compete with Culture tech. The Culture can't survive with an injection of grim-dark.

I'm of the opinion that inertia less drives exist but they act as they would in real life, only allowing necrons to reach C

They let necrons turn on a dime though, but they still have to use the web way if they wanna get anywhere fast

Problem is Culture FTL isn't limited to long distance travel.

I.. know? I am saying this single strategic disadvantage (almost not worth mentioning because any single culture vessel can destroy the entire imperial navy) won't last anyway.

By 40k standards they're already corrupted and decadent.

Sure, but being mentally strong doesn't necessarily correlate to psychic strength in 40k. Necrons for example.

My plastic dad can beat up your transhuman dad.

Nuh huh, Star Wars totally beats Star Trek.

Implying the 40k universe isn't a simulation being run by a mind in the background while it works on something important

>not even a Mind can progress the plot

B-but Firefly beats them all!

This isn't quite how Chaos Gods work.
Close but not quite.

All the Minds would get corrupted.
It'd be an enormous shitshow.

Pretty sure thats how they originally worked before becoming sapient in their own right. Now instead of beimg made of X they derive power from X.

They could go for total blanking of their population and covering al the Minds in nullification fields. Though it will cut them from warp FTL or at the very least severely restrict it.

There are though other methods. At the very least what Tyranids do. Though it is hard to say why it is so rare. There may be some unpleasant caveats.

The Culture is the Mary Sue of space, uh, cultures.
Which is sort of the point.
The problems encountered in the books are of the kind that can't be solved with brute force.

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