Re: [spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] All right Glottie, here you go:

["Glotmorf" <glotmorf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/5/02 at 9:39 PM Wonko wrote:

>Quoth Glotmorf,
>
>> On 10/5/02 at 12:57 AM Orc In A Spacesuit wrote:
>>
>>> If not doing so would cause the destruction of anything, I do the
>>> following:
>>>
>>> For every object, entity, item, value, score, and thing, other than
>>> players,
>>> I change it's name to it's original name plus " X", where X is an
>integer
>>> equal to the X of the last element I successfully changed the name of
>+1,
>>> if
>>> I can for that object, entity, item, value, score, or thing.
>>>
>>> I highly suggest that Dave ignore this whole mess.  Maybe even issue a
>>> writ
>>> or something, I dunno.  Thank goodness my uber prop fixes this whole
>mess,
>>> too bad it's not done yet.
>>
>> See, there's a couple problems with the whole naming-one's-points thang:
>>
>> 1. Giving a point a name would be a change to the game state.  There's
>nothing
>> that says one can give a point a name.  Therefore, giving a point a name
>is in
>> violation of the default case.
>>
>> 2. My CFI said that all those interchangable parts ceased to exist as of
>the
>> beginning of nweek 24.  Which means, if my statement is true, the points
>are
>> already gone and therefore not there for you to name.
>>
>> As for not destroying anything, Dave's sanity was sounding a bit brittle
>there
>> for a time...
>
>Here's my argument, reached after much deliberation:
>
>Rule 6 states that all 'things' in the context of the game are entities.
>Rule 2 states that all entities must have uins.
>As of Rule 6's enactment, there were things without uins that suddenly were
>entities.
>There are two ways this could have been solved:
>1) The unnamed entities could cease to be entities
>2) The unnamed entities could be named.
>
> (1) is obviously illegal - they're defined to be entities by the rules,
>and
>there's nothing that can be done to undefine them as entities without
>breaking those rules.
> That leaves us with (2). As there is no rule which forbids the naming of
>entities, (2) is a viable option, and indeed, must have happened, because
>all entities must have uins.
>
>However, rule 2 only states that all entities must have uins. It does not
>say who must provide these uins.
>
>As per rule 25 ("The Administrator is responsible for all game duties not
>assigned by the Rules to other players."), the duty then falls to the Admin
>to name all unnamed entities uniquely.
>
>What you have done, Glotmorf, is not destroy the gamestate, but merely give
>the Admin a lot of work to do.
>
>My advice to the Admin, which is probably unneccessary as what I'm about to
>say is pretty obvious, but I'm going to say it anyway:
>    Issue a blanket statement to the effect that you hearby name all
>unnamed
>entities in a random arbitrary order such that each of these entities is
>now
>named, "XXXX n", where XXXX is the type of object which that entity is, and
>n is the number of entities of that type that have already been named, plus
>one.
>
>
>So Glotmorf, was this actually the intent of your Rule 6? Or was it
>something you realized after the fact?

After the fact.  No evil master plan there, though it made an interesting doomsday device.  I was just going through the ruleset looking for things to clean up in an M-Tek prop, and that hit me.

I toyed with an SOE, thought about just adding it to the cleanup prop, and decided to go Bokononist. (Reference to Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle", which had a largely Nihilistic religion called Bokononism.  Among the teachings of the Bokonon was that, when someone commits suicide, he should use the benediction, "Now I shall destroy the world.")

Before Wonko's crash and burn, I was starting to have something of an existentialist crisis...I was thinking that I didn't have the time and energy and drive to engineer a win, so what would be my reason to keep on playing? UIN's Disinterested rule started to make a little more sense to me.

Then Wonko tailspun and left me in the lead.  I can probably stay in the lead if I work on it, but I'm still trying to decide if I want to spend that sort of manpower.  For some reason, a clean slate looked awfully appealing.

If we're going to use sophistry to make my CFI go away, we might use a variant of Wonko's possibility #2: If an object exists, it is by definition independent in existence of other objects, even otherwise identical ones.  Therefore, the prospect of uniquely identifying the object is there.  However, if it is not necessary to uniquely identify each of a class of objects -- if the object serves its function without confusion even if it's not identified -- then one can assume that the objects are in fact uniquely identified, inasmuch as, should they be sentient, they could probably distinguish themselves from one another.  Consequently, we can continue to use said objects without naming them, since an action that is indistinguishable from a legal action is legal.

But hey, we haven't even had a judge assigned...

						Glotmorf


_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss