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

[Rob Speer <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

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

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.

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.

-- 
Rob Speer