BASELINE — Empathy Lock Protocol

What is BASELINE — Empathy Lock Protocol

BASELINE shows one needle on a dial that runs from 0 to 100. A teal arc marks the deviation band, sometimes fifteen points wide, sometimes five, and the response always starts outside it. Below the dial sits a tray of question cards, each carrying a number. Ask a card and the response shifts by that amount; a forecast line on every card already says where the needle would land, so nothing is guesswork. Land inside the band, press LOCK IN, and the subject is retired. Press it outside the band, or run out of questions while still adrift, and the subject escapes.

Under the interrogation fiction this is target arithmetic with state-dependent operations. SURGE doubles its own value while the response is above 50; DIP doubles while it is below 50; MIRROR replaces the response with 100 minus itself; STABILIZE halves the distance to 50. Because each effect depends on where the needle already stands, the same cards in a different order give a different answer, and the ordering is the real problem. The panel shows PAR, the shortest solution found, and you hold one spare card beyond it. Two modes: an endless shift, and a six-file Daily Baseline shared by everyone.

How to play

1. Read the teal arc first: it is the deviation band, and the case turns on whether the needle finishes inside it. The big number below is the response.
2. Ask a question by clicking a card or pressing 1 to 6. The faint line on each card forecasts the response you get by asking it now.
3. Watch PAR and the pips: from the second file on you hold one card more than the shortest solution, so a wasted question costs the case.
4. With the needle inside the band, press LOCK IN or L. Rewind undoes your last card, twice per case at 25 points each; three escapes end the shift.

Strategies that work

• SURGE and DIP are not up and down cards: they double the card's own value, sign included. A SURGE marked minus eight becomes minus sixteen above 50 and stays minus eight below it; DIP doubles only under 50. Check which side of 50 the needle sits on first.
• MIRROR sets the response to 100 minus itself, so plan it backwards. With the band at 27 to 39, find which values between 61 and 73 your delta cards reach, then close with MIRROR. Played early it flips your side of 50 and silently switches SURGE and DIP.
• STABILIZE moves the response to 50 plus half its distance from 50, rounded: 92 becomes 71, 71 becomes 61. It brakes, it does not steer. Keep it for a bad overshoot when the band sits near the middle, and forget it when the band sits at 12 to 18.
• Stop the moment you are inside the band. An unused question is worth 40 points, while precision is capped at 50 and falls by about 50 over the band half-width plus one, per point off centre. On a wide band, a card spent to gain three points loses money.
• Rewinding costs 25 points and cancels the 30-point clean-case bonus: a 55-point decision, more than a spare card is worth. Save it for cases where the alternative is losing a life. The speed bonus starts at 40 and falls a point per second, so hesitation costs real points.

A little history

BASELINE was written for puzzle-me.com and has no older ancestor to claim. Its family is target arithmetic: reaching a goal from a starting value with a limited set of operations, the skeleton of a television numbers round. Two changes turn the sum into a puzzle. The target is an interval, not a single number, and the operations depend on the current state, so they do not commute: the ordering carries the difficulty. The dial borrows its look from the empathy tests in Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its 1982 film, Blade Runner.

Frequently asked questions