CWW's Proposal

Title Page

SCP-001: The Prisoner

Submitted to the Overseer Council on December 14th, 2193

by Dr. Cosimí-l Wy-loW*n, ECRG director

Proposed Documentation

Item #: SCP-001

Object Class: Archon

Special Containment Procedures: The universe must continue to exist.

Description: SCP-001 is the hypothetical anomaly for which the universe's continued existence is both necessary and sufficient for its containment.

Technical and Historical Background

A fundamental tenet of Formal Containment Theory is the 1:1 correlation between anomalies and their ideal containment procedures, provided that "anomaly" and "containment" are sufficiently well-defined. Early research into practical applications of FCT led to the creation of the MEGEPRO¹ algorithm. Given a description of anomaly, MEGEPRO can deduce containment procedures for it.

While MEGEPRO's reversibility (i.e. deducing anomalies from given containment procedures) has always been known, this functionality was regarded as a curiosity, as MEGEPRO's obvious use case was to find containment solutions for already-existing anomalies.² Additionally, MEGEPRO is incapable of defining containment procedures for the universe itself, as the universe is not an "anomaly" in the FCT framework.

In August of 2171, the Experimental Containment Research Group ran MEGEPRO with the newly released FHSCM³ as containment procedures with q=0.53, resulting in a 70,421-word description of an anomaly. As there was no expectation that the experiment would prove more than a curiosity, Director Wy-loW*n set about reading and interpreting the results in their personal time.

RE: Documentation

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RE: Provenance

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RE: Relevance

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Afterword

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Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Short for 'Method for Generating Procedures'.

2. Specifically, adjusting the parameter q, where 0≤q≤1, allows imprecise descriptions of anomalies to be converted into broader classes of "good enough" containment procedures. q is rarely set greater than 0.62 in order to accommodate human error and imperfect information. Values above ~0.8 almost always return procedures that are far too expansive and intricate to enact as written.

3. Foundation's High-Specification Cosmological Model. The FHSCM is the most detailed analysis of the nature of the universe to date, including the distributions and states of matter, energy, dark matter, dark energy, and higher dimensions. The Complete Standard Model of particle physics (colloquially known as the "Theory of Everything"), as well as a survey of infospace and its inhabitants, are also included.