Re: [s-d] Toward a Platonic reconstruction of B Nomic's gamestate

[Daniel Lepage <dplepage@xxxxxxxxx>]

I just want to jump in here and point out that I don't believe that game
time stopped at the first emergency - game convention as well as rule 33
both dictate that later sentences in a rule take precedence over earlier,
so "the Pause is increased by one each day at 00:00:00 UTC" takes
precedence over "Pending events and deadlines with absolute dates and times
do not occur." The game is in fact still running, albeit in an
indeterminate state because rule 0 does not specify what happens if the
Emergency Coordinator fails to send out a refresh ballot.

That said, if you wish to reconstruct the game, nweek 20 should suffice.
The first test of the Emergency Procedure occurred during nweek 17, after
the gnome recycling exploit:
<
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/archives/spoon-business/spoon-business-200206/msg00042.html
>

You should be able take all changes from the nweeks 18, 19, and 20 ballot
recognizers and undo them. It will still be time-consuming.

-- 
Wonko

P.S. It's good to hear from you, Wild Card! How have you been?

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 4:46 PM, Craig Daniel <teucer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> We have available to us a complete archive of past messages to the public
> forum.
>
> Current tradition among B Nomic people (who cannot now be regarded as
> B Nomic players, or possibly even former players) is that this is a
> very Platonist game. This flies in the face of early B Nomic culture,
> but an understanding of our history that we would now recognize as
> "correct" in a demonstrable sense depends on the assumption that it
> is. This means that there is a clock bug which caused gameplay to stop
> after the first Emergency began, a fact not recognized at that time.
>
> There is, however, a woobleverse interpretation in which, at certain
> times in B Nomic history, Refresh Proposals could have effects on the
> gamestate via an ISIDTID mechanism. Again, this was not historically
> recognized as correct, because B Nomic began life as a game played in
> a pragmatic fashion, but to modern B Nomic platonists this simply
> means the pragmatic interpretation led people to attempt interesting
> things in a sort of fantasy alternate B, some of which, by virtue of
> being on the Public Forum, also had an effect on the underlying ideal
> B. (When Platonic Forms and self-amendment mate, their offspring
> involves the ability of us in the observed world being able to mess
> with the shadows on the cave wall so hard we actually change the
> forms. We're through the looking glass here, people.)
>
> Unfortunately the first ruleset I have easy access to is that of about
> nweek 20, which is when the public display of the ruleset first
> started to be on a static web page. That is viewable at
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20020811090059/http://www.nomic.net/~g6/static/rules.html
> thanks to the Wayback Machine. However, it is highly probable that
> nweek 20 never happened, and while these rules are undeniably part of
> the pragmatist version of B Nomic history (and, indeed, I played
> pragmatist pseudo-B for a while during what was later known as its
> First Era and thus may or may not have been a player of the
> Platonist's underlying game before anyone else who is currently paying
> attention; these rules are quite similar to the first ones I believed
> myself to be playing under), they are definitely not part of the
> underlying real B recognized by modern Platonic scholars of the game.
>
> I'm prepared to attempt a full reconstruction of B Nomic's gamestate,
> in both the standard reckoning where gameplay stopped early and the
> woobleverse reckoning where refresh proposals have been potentially
> effective all along. This will take days. Possibly many days. I will,
> however, need somebody who knows where to find an archive of the
> non-static B Nomic ruleset prior to nweek 20 to point me to the
> initial rules. Wooble, where'd you dig up your current probable
> ruleset from?
>
> This effort will yield four sets of possible B Nomic gamestate: a
> purely-Platonic non-woobleverse version which stopped early, a
> Platonic woobleverse version which stopped at the same time but has
> had other changes made to the ruleset despite the clock bug, and a
> semi-Platonic version in which Platonist versions of events are valid
> only for the period of time when B Nomic has traditionally accepted
> Platonic theories of Nomic gameplay. In this last, we all know what
> happened - B Nomic made it into its Fifth Era, then proved that even
> after the rise of Platonism capable of recognizing past gameplay as
> fictional, a clock bug had shut the game down. The semi-Platonist B
> Nomic is dead; details depend on precisely when you draw the cutoff
> between Pragmatist and Platonist eras. Finally, a fully-Pragmatist
> interpretation will be considered; in this, the general recognition of
> B's death caused it to be so, and B is once again dead - just slightly
> more recently (and more dateably) than in any Platonist version of B.
> Non-woobleverse Platonist B has also been proven dead as well, though
> this proof has been less rigorous than one might wish (did the
> introduction of the clock bug happen validly?). The present
> woobleverse of Platonist B, then, is the interesting one - if it's
> correct, wooble is almost certainly wrong about the present state of
> the ruleset, but it is almost certainly the case that the game is
> alive (if highly dormant!) and playable. The reconstruction of
> woobleverse B, therefore, will be my primary goal.
>
>  - teucer
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