[spoon-discuss] Return

[Daniel Lepage <dplepage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, I left town for two days, and much seems to have happened in my 
abscence. I'll be stringing out a list of responses in a moment (there 
are too many to put all in one message) but I'd like to start with a 
brief note on the possibility that somebody won.

It is my belief that Charters ceased to exist when their definition was 
removed from the game. Certainly, we took it as a given that objects 
such as the Cursed Sushi and DimShips winked out of existence upon 
their undefinitions; that alone seems to suggest that Charters did the 
same.

Orc makes an analogy to a proposal simply stating, "create an object X 
with the following properties". It is my belief that an object so 
created would immediately be destroyed, unless there was some portion 
of the ruleset which provided for its existence.

My reason for believing this is that *everything* about the game, from 
proposals to Gremlins to the Grid, exists solely because the rules say 
it does. There is no actual object called Barney which the ruleset 
merely records the behavior of; there is only a virtual object referred 
to by the rules as 'Barney', and thus part of the rules. If we were to 
repeal the definition of Barney, the 'Barney' that exists as far as the 
game is concerned would cease to exist entirely.

An object created directly by proposal is a bit of a sticky issue... I 
could see the claim being made that the r15, which states that when a 
proposal passes "The effects specified in the proposal occur in the 
order listed in the proposal.", implicitly defines objects created by 
said effects... But that's not the issue here, because Charters were 
not defined by a proposal which said, "let there be charters that do 
this:$BLAH"; they were defined by a rule which said, "There may be 
charters; charters are this : $BLAH". When that rule, or at least the 
portion of it that defined charters, ceased to exist, all Charters did 
as well.

The attempted wins other than mine all relied on preexisting charters; 
so they all failed.
The creation of new charters is, I admit, prohibited; so my win scam 
failed.

So nobody won. Let's just fix things and go on.

--
Wonko

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