...no questions, huh.  All right then, onwards.

When Keltham was inquiring into spellsilver refinement, he was told that among the things they'd tried were:

- Using the ash of bones from different animals, and some varieties of people, in case those had more potent alchemical properties than the ash of ordinary random bones.
- Prayer.
- Using fire instead of acid.
- Having a step in the process performed by 'godrelated people' - possibly clerics but why didn't they just say that, well, anyways.

Alas and alackaday, none of this worked.

The students here may now recognize this as a variant of their own frantic flailing on the 2-4-6 game.  To be clear, it's much more respectable and dignified to frantically flail around with random experiments in your current broken 'specification-language' of experiments, than to not try anything.  They would have been ill-served, in the 2-4-6 game, by pulling back after their tenth failed attempt to do nothing but think; the Keltham-Environment was still walking around, and there's no point in not running tests when the Environment is right there and cheap to query.

But when you haven't yet found the Answer Outside Your Previous Language, the brilliant hypothesis to test - what can you possibly do besides frantic flailing at a process that just keeps on returning the same answer?  Some of the candidates here did figure out something to do besides just frantic flailing - or it looked to Keltham like they were following that track, anyways.

...no questions, huh.  All right then, onwards.

When Keltham was inquiring into spellsilver refinement, he was told that among the things they'd tried were:

- Using the ash of bones from different animals, and some varieties of people, in case those had more potent alchemical properties than the ash of ordinary random bones.
- Prayer.
- Using fire instead of acid.
- Having a step in the process performed by 'godrelated people' - possibly clerics but why didn't they just say that, well, anyways.

Alas and alackaday, none of this worked to improve spellsilver refinement.

The students here may now recognize this as a variant of their own frantic flailing on the 2-4-6 game.  To be clear, it's much more respectable and dignified to frantically flail around with random experiments in your current broken 'specification-language' of experiments, than to not try anything.  They would have been ill-served, in the 2-4-6 game, by pulling back after their tenth failed attempt to do nothing but think; the Keltham-Environment was still walking around, and there's no point in not running tests when the Environment is right there and cheap to query.  Still, If you imagine 'YES' as meaning 'YES, that didn't improve spellsilver refinement', everything the refiners tried got the same old frustrating YES.

When you haven't yet found the Answer Outside Your Previous Language, the brilliant hypothesis to test - what can you possibly do besides frantic flailing at a process that just keeps on returning the same answer?  Some of the candidates here did figure out something to do besides just frantic flailing - or it looked to Keltham like they were following that track, anyways.

...no questions, huh.  All right then, onwards.

When Keltham was inquiring into spellsilver refinement, he was told that among the things they'd tried were:

- Using the ash of bones from different animals, and some varieties of people, in case those had more potent alchemical properties than the ash of ordinary random bones.
- Prayer.
- Using fire instead of acid.
- Having a step in the process performed by 'godrelated people' - possibly clerics but why didn't they just say that, well, anyways.

Alas and alackaday, none of this worked to improve spellsilver refinement.

The students here may now recognize this as a variant of their own frantic flailing on the 2-4-6 game.  To be clear, it's much more respectable and dignified to frantically flail around with random experiments in your current broken 'specification-language' of experiments, than to not try anything.  They would have been ill-served, in the 2-4-6 game, by pulling back after their tenth failed attempt to do nothing but think; the Keltham-Environment was still walking around, and there's no point in not running tests when the Environment is right there and cheap to query.  Still, If you imagine 'YES' as meaning 'YES, that didn't improve spellsilver refinement', everything the refiners tried got the same old frustrating YES.

When you haven't yet found the Answer Outside Your Previous Language, the brilliant hypothesis to test - what can you possibly do besides frantic flailing at a process that just keeps on returning the same answer?

Some of the candidates here did figure out something to do besides just frantic flailing, as they zoomed in - or it looked to Keltham like they were following that track, anyways.

...no questions, huh.  All right then, onwards.

When Keltham was inquiring into spellsilver refinement, he was told that among the things they'd tried were:

- Using the ash of bones from different animals, and some varieties of people, in case those had more potent alchemical properties than the ash of ordinary random bones.
- Prayer.
- Using fire instead of acid.
- Having a step in the process performed by 'godrelated people' - possibly clerics but why didn't they just say that, well, anyways.

Alas and alackaday, none of this worked to improve spellsilver refinement.

The students here may now recognize this as a variant of their own frantic flailing on the 2-4-6 game.  To be clear, it's much more respectable and dignified to frantically flail around with random experiments in your current broken 'specification-language' of experiments, than to not try anything.  They would have been ill-served, in the 2-4-6 game, by pulling back after their tenth failed attempt to do nothing but think; the Keltham-Environment was still walking around, and there's no point in not running tests when the Environment is right there and cheap to query.  Still, if you imagine 'YES' as meaning 'YES, that didn't improve spellsilver refinement', everything the refiners tried got the same old frustrating YES.

When you haven't yet found the Answer Outside Your Previous Language, the brilliant hypothesis to test - what can you possibly do besides frantic flailing at a process that just keeps on returning the same answer?

Some of the candidates here did figure out something to do besides just frantic flailing, as they zoomed in - or it looked to Keltham like they were following that track, anyways.