Re: spoon-discuss: Re: spoon-business: The Daily Recognizer (Tuesday morning)

[Wonko <dplepage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth Rob Speer,

> On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 04:07:48PM -0400, Wonko wrote:
>> Either all of them can affect my dimensions, or we only have one player (*A*
>> player is any entity who is capable of passing the Turing test -- emphasis
>> added)
> 
> I'm not bothering to look at these rules in detail at the moment, but
> there had better be something in the rules that stops the DimShip rule
> from applying to itself. Otherwise the "current location" it displaces
> from is the virtual location, because for all the rule knows the virtual
> location _is_ the current location - which would bring everything
> crashing down the first time someone set +1 Buoyancy of Entropy. You
> don't need five ships for that.

There's nothing to stop it from applying to itself.

> And if it doesn't apply to itself (a more favorable situation), then the
> five DimShips couldn't possibly work cumulatively.

Unfortunately, I think it does...

> Wonko, if you can demonstrate that the situation is somewhere in between
> - different DimShips apply to each other but not to themselves - then I
> will agree that you've won. I think, unfortunately, that the first
> situation is the most likely, and we'll have to reconsider everything
> from the past two weeks.

I'd have to agree...

> The ethics of winning a Nomic are interesting. For one thing, there are
> always ways to stop a Win. Assuming that a Win is the most valuable
> thing in the game, it should make sense for the other players to CFI the
> Win and judge it to be false ("rationale: because I don't want him to
> win"). But that would ruin something more valuable than a Win - the
> integrity of the game.
> 
> If Wonko has in fact exploited a loophole to make him win the game, I
> won't resort to cheap tricks to stop him. It wouldn't be especially fair
> - nobody (okay, one person, but he gave up) did that to me when I won A
> Nomic.

Wins are awarded anyway - you could just propose to take away my Win. I
think that actually happened once, way back in nweek 1, 'cause something
really screwy happened with the ruleset.

But I don't actually see why a Win is the most valuable thing in the game -
basically I get a pat on the back and we start from zero again... If in fact
I do have a Win, then from now on I'll probably be playing just for the sake
of playing the game.

-- 
Wonko
'I (may have) won B Nomic and all I got was this stupid t-shirt'