Re: [s-d] DIS: the Quantum Crisis

[Ed Murphy <emurphy42@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ais523 wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 14:40 -0800, Ed Murphy wrote:
>> There was also the Quantum Crisis (major economic revamp turning
>> out to have failed due to a bug in a vote-affecting ability).
> I didn't know of that one. Care to relate its history?

I told most of it the other day in a-d, but here goes again:

The proposal in question repealed points, and enacted Marks which were
used for officer salaries and such.  There were also a number of
playing-card-like abilities [1], one of which was attempted on this
proposal.  Several months afterward, someone noticed a bug related to
that ability, which meant the proposal had actually failed.

Zefram [2] spent a few months working out different possible
gamestates [3] based on different possible interpretations of key
events.  After coming up with over a dozen possibilities just for
who held which offices (much less the rest of the gamestate), the
issue was patched via a primitive form of ratification:

  * All but one player (call em X) announced "I resign Promotor (if I
    hold it), naming X as my successor".  This effectively collapsed
    the "who is Promotor?" part of the gamestate.  (For the B
    audience, the Promotor initiates voting periods.)

  * Similar for player Y and Assessor (resolves voting results).

  * X and Y then processed a proposal to the effect of "<the earlier
    proposal> is legally deemed to have been adopted, regardless of
    all other factors".

IIRC, at least some players didn't bother with the collapsing process
while patching the Annabel Crisis, but the probability that that patch
didn't work has evidently been deemed too low to worry about (or else
the players who thought otherwise are long gone by now).  Under the
current rules, collapsing is unneeded, because any message claiming
to resolve an Agoran decision self-ratifies if not challenged (even if
there was no such decision, or if the wrong people were processing it).

[1] I think they were called Powers, and the current concept of Power
    was limited to rules and called Mutability Index.

[2] Which places this some time in 1996 or 1997; eir other periods of
    registration were 1993-95 (before my time) and 2007-present (too
    recent).

[3] Eir interim updates generally had subjects like "Quantum Report",
    hence the popular name of the crisis.

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