They also suggest the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are largely unobservable, such as producing ultraviolet racing stripes on someone’s heart or imbuing “a resident of Iowa with the power of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals. The first individual would be unaware of their Jokerism; the second would be an Ace but never known it.” (One might argue that communicating with narwhals might make one a Deuce.)
In the end, Tregillis and Martin came up with three ground rules: (1) cryptos exist, but how many of them exist is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable card turns would be distributed according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) viral outcomes would be determined by a multivariate probability distribution.
The resulting proposed model assumes two apparently random variables: severity of the transformation—i.e., how much the virus changes a person, either in the severity of a Joker’s deformation or the potency of an Ace’s superpower—and a mixing angle to address the existence of Joker-Aces. “Card turns that land sufficiently close to one axis will subjectively present as Aces, while otherwise they will present as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors wrote.
The derived formula is one that takes into account the many different ways a given system can evolve (aka a Langrangian formulation). “We translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete dynamical system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of outcomes,” said Tregillis.
Tregillis acknowledges that this might not be a good exercise for the beginning physics student, given that it involves multiple steps and covers many concepts that younger students might not fully comprehend. Nor does he suggest adding it to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for senior honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open-ended research question.
DOI: American Journal of Physics, 2025. 10.1119/5.0228859 (About DOIs).
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