ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/2014.06.ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au.tar/ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/tmp_amd/malcolmr/nomic/nomic_world/summaries.txt

Text File | 1994-05-11 | 43KB | 803 lines

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Hello Bud and Peter,

I thought I would send you a brief note attempting to encapsulate the
some of things that have been going on in the month or so that game 2
has been going on.

Firstly, I get the impression that this game is running *fast*. How
many proposals did you discuss during your 1+ year game, Bud? In the
first month (we began Oct 9), we have voted on 53 proposals. 23 passed,
27 failed, another 8 or so are up for vote at this time. There is,
contrary to the impressions I received from players of previous nomic
games, a distinct possibility that someone may eventually win on points -
or at least there would be, if a judgement had not been passed to the effect
that the meaning of "achieve" in "achieve a score of N points" is "achieve
*exactly*"! May I ask you, Peter, was it your intention that the exact meaning
of "achieve" in this context be interpreted by each set of players as the
situation arose for them in each game? Or is this possibility a novel one
for you?

I do not intend to offer transcipts from the bulletin board in the game.
The archive for game two is already quite enormous (146K - 600 notes or
thereabouts), and I can get it to you if you're interested. And, of course,
you are both very (*very*) welcome to log in anytime and check out the
situation.

At a very rough guess, legislation has concentrated generally in 3 areas:
scoring (the largest category by far), procedures for proposing and voting
on proposals, and dealing with new and old players. This should not
come as any surprise to you, Bud, as a quick perusal of the archives of
your game (thanks for those, btw) tells me that these three areas
attracted much if not most of the attention of your players also.

Before I deal with the 3 areas, however, it is interesting to note that
a similar pattern to that which developed in game 1 developed in game 2
also, seens at the appropriately abstract level of description (if you'll
pardon the Hofstadter-like disclaimer -:).

In game 1, you will recall, a slow, cautious start to the game was followed
by an explosive attempt to break the deadlock. A similar pattern was observed
in game 2. In game 1, the deadlock was the result of the unanimity requirement,
and it was spectacularly broken by Lindrum's attempts at a constitutional
coup d'etat. Game 1 was dissolved in the ensuing crisis. The deadlock in
game 2 was caused by a combination of two rules: supermajorities, and what
we call the 10-point rule, ie, the rule that awards 10 points to players who
vote against proposals that pass. We began with about 15 players. A block
of six points-grabbers developed, blocking all proposals, all hoping that
one of their number might relent so that they might be rewarded. In the
period Friday Oct 9 to Tuesday Oct 20, 9 proposals, most meritorious,
either failed, or would clearly do so.

My attempt to break this deadlock occurred early Wednesay morning, Oct 21.
I offered a points incentive to yes voters in excess of what the 10-point
rule offered to vote no. I offered the incentive to players prepared to
vote yes to Simple Majorities, and to another proposal that would later
be the cause of much confusion and controvesy, Early Decision (which allowed
proposals to be tallied before the seven day voting period had elapsed if
(i) 3 days had expired, and (ii) enough votes had been cast to *ensure*
the proposal either passed or failed, if no player changed their vote.
Changing one's vote is permissible in our game.). The game exploded. In
the ensuing chaos, 20 further proposals were added in the following 18
hours, many offering fantastic points incentives to vote for them, others
proposing to outlaw such activity.

Thus, the first and greatest focus of legislative activity has been scoring.
After numerous amendments, the scoring situation has been modified
considerably from your original idea, Peter. The Prisoner's Dilemma feel
of the original situation has been dissolved, to be replaced by a system
that rewards "political vision" by intensifying the Bandwagon Effect: it
rewards you for voting with proposals that pass, and it rewards you for
voting against proposals that fail. Further modifications are in the
pipeline. Additionally, a 1 point penalty has been imposed for invoking
judgement.

The second major area of legislative activity has been modifying the
procedures for proposing procedures. A system of seconding has been
introduced, wherein a proposal must be scrutinized and publicly approved
by a seconder before it can be put to the vote. The role of the seconder
is supposed to be to examine the proposal for possible bugs and conflicts
with existing rules. There is a points incentive for seconders to do their
jobs well: a 2 point bonus to the seconder if a proposal s/he seconds
passes, and a 2 point penalty if it fails.

Lastly, several proposals have been adopted that deal with the problem
of players entering and leaving the game, an area unaddressed by the
Original Rules. Basically, loopholes that would have allowed players to
avoid penalties by leaving the game and rejoining have been closed. These
loopholes are part of a wider challenge to all of us at Nomic World: that
of adapting to what is really a very different style of Nomic play than
has ever been attempted before.

As an example of ther subtleties that that can be involved, I include a
post from last week:
-------------
110,219 conflict: vote YES to 1041 (Steve, Oct 30 12:39)

I believe that at this time, rule 219 (Win by Paradox) is wholly void
and without effect. I therefore believe that it is important that the
proposal (1041, by Ilt) to transmute 110 succeed. Here is my reasoning:

Rule 110 states that the state of affairs that constitutes winning the
game may not be changed from achieving n points to any other state of
affairs. However, it makes one specific exception to this: rules which
determine a winner when play cannot be continued may be enacted etc.
It might appear that this exception allows rule 219 to have its
intended effect. However, rule 219 oversteps its authority in this respect
since it goes further than just specifying a winner when play cannot
continue - it states that a winner may be determined by the judgement
of an action to be equally legal and illegal, or an action whose legality
cannot be determined with finality.

In the Original Rules (Suber's dinner-table version), the discovery
of such an action would have stopped play, because of the turn
structure of the game. With this new style of game, that is no longer
the case. In other words, this conflict is yet another subtle problem
arising out of our switch to this form of play.

Since 219 specifically mandates the selection of a winner under
circumstances explicitly prohibited by 110, I claim that 219 is
currently wholly void and without effect. Since I think that 219
is a fantastic rule, I think 110 ought to be amended to allow a
winner to be determined when an action is judged equally legal and
illegal, or when its legality cannot be determined with finality.

Fortunately, Ilt has already (on Oct 27) proposed to transmute 110.
I previously opposed its transmutation. I now support it, and hope that
you will do likewise: otherwise, one of the most interesting facets of
the game, winning by paradox, will disappear from our game.
-------------------

The only other area which requires comment is that of judicial reform.
Lindrum's crisis introduced to game 2 a strikingly different conception
of Judgement. Instead of the sweeping powers judges enjoyed in game 1,
judges in game 2 have been restricted to declaring certain propositions
to be either TRUE, FALSE, or UNDECIDED. Judgements have been explicitly
restricted to decisions about game-custom, the interpretation of terms
within rules and such. Judgements are not rules and may not conflict
with rules. So far, this new system has worked very well, I believe.
At this time, a proposal to extend the scope of judgements to answer
YES/NO questions is being voted upon.

To conclude, it has been a wonderful first month. I have enjoyed playing
this game immensely, and always look forward to logging in to find out
what's been going on. It will be fascinating to see where we go from here.

Please get in touch with me if you have any questions, comments, ideas, etc.

******************************************************************************
* __  ___  ___ \    /  ___  |  *
*|__   |  |__   \  /  |__   |  *    "Open the pod bay doors, please, Hal."
*___|  |  |___   \/   |___  o  *
*[e-mail]*
******************************************************************************

Greetings again, Nomic players everywhere!

The time has come once again for a summary of play of Nomic World,
the world's largest game of Nomic, now into its fifth month.

I should begin with an apology. It had been my intention to produce
one of these summaries of play every month. However, the last summary
was due on or about Dec 9, a particularly intriguing and controversial
period of play as I hope to outline below. I didn't want to produce
a play summary until matters had sorted themselves out, and then it was
Christmas, and then New year...but this is beginning to sound like
a trail of excuses, so let's go to the videotape:

As things stood in the last summary, our 50th proposal had just been
tallied, and game 2 had just ended uncontroversially with one player
scoring 100 points. After the controversy of game 1 (which ended in
a consitutional crisis), this came as something of a relief. However,
those of us who hoped that this augured well for the simple determination
of winners in future games were to be utterly disappointed. January finds
us in game 6, and none of games 3, 4 or 5 ended without some dispute over
who actually won. We still await judgement on game 5.

At time of writing, 162 proposals had been tallied, with 101 of these
successful. As you can imagine the game is getting complicated! Here is
a summary of the focus of legislative change. As before, scoring and
the judiciary have been major preoccupations. A proposal to totally
overhaul the Judicial system is currently being voted on.

Scoring
When I last wrote, new scoring rules, known for some reason as the
Political Correctness (PC) rules, had just been introduced, which
rewarded players for voting with the majority. That is, a random
(1-10) points for voting FOR proposals which pass, or AGAINST those
which fail. With about 10 proposals a week being tallied, it didn't
take long for scores to approach the 100 needed to win. Very quickly
it was decided to scale down the PC rewards, and proposals 1070 and 1080
reduced the the reward to 1 point. There matters were to remain for
some time.

PC encouraged different voting patterns to the system it replaced.
Since it paid, if only a little, to be on the winning side, the
political battle over proposals tended as often as not to become
one of perceptions. The best way to get a proposal passed was convince
people that it was going to pass anyway, and then let the Bandwagon
Effect do the rest. Conversely, even a single post the discussion
board against a proposal could sow enough doubt to bring a proposal
down, for once players began to think that others might be voting
against, their own tendencies to vote against were correspondingly
increased. In discussions of Prisoner's Dilemma type situations,
this phenomenon is known as reverberant doubt. In any case, PC
produced results that tended to be either very one sided or very close.

PC was eventually repealed completely by proposals 1149 and 1150.
At present, scoring for proposals is described by rule 1111,
which awards (YES votes - NO votes) to the proposer. With points
for voting abolished for the first time, except for a brief hiatus
before PC was adopted, voters are now free at last to vote with
their consciences, assuming they haven't...ahem...been bribed.

Two other scoring rules, or at least rules about points and their
distributions, were also passed in this period. 1071, the Points
Trading Act, allowed players to trade points between themselves
in any manner they saw fit. The PTA has sharpened the political
and bargaining aspects of the game considerably, although as far
as I am aware, no one has yet used PTA to do anything spectacularly
corrupt like suborn a judge or buy a lot of votes. Nomic players
are good citizens, although their interpretations of what constitutes
good citizenship often vary widely!

The other change of note was the conversion of Nomic to a zero sum game
by proposal 1102. Under the system introduced, all players pay a 1 point
tax to a central pool whenever revenue is required to pay points awards.
The slow drift towards a Nomic economy with points as money continues.
This is best shown by two developments, the first now well established,
the second still just a vague idea.

A series of rules has been introduced, beginning with 1109, that allow
the creation of specific player functions within the game, called Offices.
At present there are 4 Offices - Custodian, whose job it is to make available
an up to date copy of the ruleset to all players; the Nomic Doofus and the
Nomic Doofus Appointer (Doofus is a curious word whose etymology I have
never satisfactorily been able to establish, but the title of Doofus is
awarded by the Appointer to the person the Appointer feels has behaved
in the manner most recently deserving of derision). Finally, the job of
Scorekeeper is to Officially be responsible for scoring, since this
is now a task complicated enough to warrant that sort of attention. The
Custodian and Scorekeeper are each paid a weekly salary. Thus, we have
witnessed the rise of a professional class within Nomic.

Another intriguing idea floated in the last few days has been the idea
of a Nomic Stock Exchange, wherein players can buy shares in other players
whom they think are "going concerns", ie likely to score well. Share value
depends on a players score. The concept of speculating in player futures
is still being developed, but if adopted it will add a whole new dimension
to play.

The Judiciary:

It has been a turbulent couple of months for the judicial system, during
which it has been repeatedly put under strain. A number of incidents,
which I will describe later, made evident the flaws in the judicial
system which I outlined in a letter to the game's inventor, Peter Suber.
After seriously circumscribing Judicial powers after the fiasco in game 1,
the new Judicial system served us well initially, but the cracks have begun
to show: the current system is too slow, and lacks credibility, authority
sometimes neutrality, and occasionally, competence. Some Judicial Reform
proposals (1146-47) were adopted, and have addressed some of the problems.
However, at time of writing, the Common Judgement Act (CJA), a proposal to
completely abolish the judiciary and replace it with a system in which the
players vote to determine those matters which up until now have been
settled through Judgement is currently being voted on. I'm told that the
Ancient Roman legislature used to vote on judgements too. So apparently
there is no progress in human affairs after all. An alternative proposal,
which more or less seeks to create a professional legal class, hopefully
neutral and authoritative is also being developed should the CJA fail.

Other Stuff:

In Nomic as in Real Life, the politics is often more interesting than
the legislation. As I said before, none of games 3,4, or 5 ended without
controversy. Here's a brief summary of those games:

Game 3:

It has become convenient, even mandatory, for us to see the implementation
of the game as quite distinct from the game state itself. That is, we
view the rules, scores, game custom, history, etc, as a sort of platonic
essence which the software we use represents to us more or less accurately
(usually more, but occasionally less). This was never better demonstrated
than in game 3, which ended in chaos when one player began to explore
the limits of the interactions at the boundary where the Platonic Essence
of the game meets the cold hard facts of implementation.

The rules placed no limit on the number of calls for judgement (CFJs)
a player could make, and rewarded Judges 1 point for each Judgement they
delivered. One player, Joev, saw an opportunity to display a loophole
in the rules: makes hundreds of CFJs, thousands maybe, all the same,
until all players could grab a lot of points just by delivering Judgement
on their share of the CFJs.

Well, the rules certainly allowed it, but after 919 CFJs the game driver
fell in a heap and crashed the game. The game could not be restarted without
erasing the CFJs. What to do? The CFJs were legally made, but the software
couldn't live up to the law. Perhaps inevitably, as when any legal system is
confronted by its inability to follow its own prescriptions, pragmatism
prevailed, and the CFJs were erased. But not before a few players had
accepted their multiple invocations. One of these, Blob, thereby scored
enough points to win. However, by a sort of extra-legal social contract,
we agreed to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. The question
of whether Blob really won game 3 is one that is destined to remain, forever
I suspect, legally indeterminate.

Game 4:

Game 4 witnessed the first really big conspiracy of the game - 6 players
working together on a complex plan to exploit a hole in the rules to
score a lot of points. The hole was in the seconding rules: these rewarded
players who second proposals that pass, and penalize those who second
proposals that fail. But the rules did something extra. They also rewarded
players who publically *refused* to second proposals that eventually failed.
That created an opportunity: a small group working together could devise,
say, 10 truly awful proposals - the most reprehensible, calamitous and
destructive proposals they could think of. Individuals in the group would
then propose these proposals, and the group, as a whole, would refuse to
second them. When the proposals failed, the refusal points would far
outweigh the penalties for proposing proposals that fail.

The Terrible Proposals, as they were known, were almost works of art.
The guiding principle behind their construction was not merely
catastrophe, but *unrepealability*. This could be tricky, because the
proposals had to be effective even against the safeguards already in
the rules designed to protect the game from rules destructive of play.
The trick turned out to be to design TPs that were completely destructive
of play in practice, yet allowed a theoretical continuation of play.
Hence, there were TPs that would have required all future proposals to
have been written in Basque, or to contain copies of pages from the
Vlaidvostok telephone directory, or that would have extended the voting
period on proposals from one week to 53 years, and so on.

The attempt to get the TP scam outlawed plunged the Judicial system
into a crisis from which it has yet to really recover. Judgements and
counter-Judgements flew furiously back and forth, as did arguments
for and against. Judges were accused of bias, or blindness. The points
from the scam were initally withheld, long enough for a non-conspiracy
member to win game 4 independently. They were eventually awarded in
game 5. Whether this was really according to the rules or not is another
question history cannot answer. Fairly soon it became a fait accompli.
Public resistance, or public consent, is stronger than the law.

The Future:

This summary is already far too long - so, just a quick word about
the future. Legislation recently enacted may see Nomic World moving
in new directions. The Committee Act allows players to start sub-games
of Nomic, with rules (called ordinances) applying only to members of
the committee, and completely different sets of Initial rules. The
possibilities are endless, but some the most obvious applications are
simpler games for new players, and testing out radical proposals
in smaller groups before trying them out in the big game. Two committees
have already been formed. One has just one initial ordinance (ideal
for new players), the other is more complex and apparently devoted to
writing fairy tales. With committees in place, the future looks bright,
and once again, rather unpredicatable. Come and join us on Nomic World!
(Details below.)

Look forward to seeing you,

******************************************************************************
* __  ___  ___ \    /  ___  |  *"If it's not worth doing, it's not worth
*|__   |  |__   \  /  |__   |  * doing well."
*___|  |  |___   \/   |___  o  *                     -- Donald Hebb --
*[e-mail]*
******************************************************************************

Summary of play on Nomic World: Jan -> present
----------------------------------------------

It's been another two months since my last summary (I just can't seem
to find the time to get one out once a month), but anyway here it is:
what's been happening in the world's longest running, and most fiendishly
complicated evolving game of legislation!

When I left you last, our 162nd proposal had just been tallied. The pace
of play has been slower in the last two months - we have now tallied
our 229th proposal. Of these, about 140 have passed. However, the
relationship between proposals and rules has been complicated by the
introduction of multi-part proposals. Some proposals have introduced
7 new rules.

One such proposal was the committee proposal, which has introduced
a completely new dimension to play. Committees are subsets of Nomic
players who agree to abide by the committee's ordinances. At present,
there are four active committees:

The Ab Initio Committee began with precisely one ordinance. Paradoxically,
the complete freedom so created has made it harder not easier to think
of new ordinances. Perhaps this should not surprise. Art requires some
formal structure. Play is still quite slow in the AI committee.

The Fairy Tale Committee, as it's name implies, is dedicated to the
collective writing of fairy tales, beginning (I believe) with "Once
upon a time..."

The Mutation Committee has been by far the most active of the committees.
In the Mutation Committee, ordinances are treated as organisms, with
lifespans, subject to mutation and division by the committee members,
and to death by inactivity. Mutation occurs by deleting up to 3 words
from an ordinance and inserting up to 8 words. What is more, actions
in the Mutation Committee can be performed without the consent of any
other committee member. Not surprisingly, in such a "high-radiation"
environment, the mutations have thrown up ordinances bizarre and
grotesque. One of my personal favourites: "That the word 'Vladivostok'
may never be inserted or deleted from an ordinance." (Think about it!)

The newest committee is the Fantasy Rule Committee, and its creation
heralds an intriguing new variation on an old type of game. There are
many games based on the "the last player to make a legal move is the
winner" idea - but the way the Fantasy Rule Commitee has interpreted
"legal move" is I think truly novel: a legal move in the FR Committee
is the making of an ordinance consistent with the previous ordinances.
The last player to make a consistent ordinance wins the game. Strategy in
such a game would seem to be to make ordinances which rule out as
much of the remaining conceptual space as possible. I'm looking forward
to seeing what novelties this committee can come up with.

--------------------------------

In the last summary, I spent some time describing the problems that were
at that time besetting the Judgement system. At that time, a proposal
to abolish the Judiciary and replace it with a system wherein matters
of interpretation were decided by vote was being voted upon. That proposal,
the Common Judgement Act, failed. However the cause of Judicial reform
was not given up, and a new Judgement system, known facetiously as the
Slightly Less Radical Judicial System (SLR) was developed and adopted.
Under it, Judges have been restricted to a subset of players known as
the Experienced players, Judge selection has been changed so that eligible
Judges apply to Judge those issues which interest them (largely solving
the problem of Judges not delivering Judgements), and delivering Judgement
is subject to a 5 day limit from time of selection. Players may propose
to change Judgements, so the Nomic public now constitute a Court of Appeal.
So far, the system seems to be working reasonably well, although I suspect
that it has not yet faced its crucial test.

On the scoring front, for the first time I can report that rules about
scoring have not been a focus of legislative activity, although storm clouds
are gathering once again on that front. Since the last update, Nomic
has ceased to be zero sum game: players seemed to want more "cash" in the
"economy". To that end, various other methods of scoring may soon be
introduced. Players may soon be able to buy bonds and save their points
between games. And in an intriguing developed, a proposal to run an
on-going, multi-player Prisoner's Dilemma every week is currently being
voted on. Points from the PD games will be exchangeable for Nomic points
at a rate of 25 to 1. This may be the first such iterated, multi-player
PD ever played (outside of the ones we face every day in real life).

The last two months have seen a marked decrease in major controversy.
For one thing, game 5 stretches on and on, with no end in sight, since
the points threshold to end the game was raised from 100 to 5*(P+1),
where P is the number of players. The scrapping of points trading is
partly responsible for this. Thankfully, points trading has now been
reintroduced - but so has a curious rule which awards the game to the
player placed *second* when the points threshold is exceeded by some
player. The inspiration for this rule comes from Douglas Hofstadter's
curious game Mediocrity (for more about which see Metamagical Themas,
Ch 6.) The result of this combination of rules should be interesting: players
will aim to *nearly* win, but not quite. Even points trading can only help
them so far.  Another reason for the decrease in controversy has been the
(regrettable, in my opinion) raising of quorum. I didn't quite realize
when I proposed it, but quorum actually defines the minimum size of a
conspiracy. Since quorum was raised from 20% to 30%, the minimum size of a
conspiracy has become too large.

Nevertheless, one fascinating attempt at a conspiracy did occur
during the last two months. The idea behind the conspiracy was to exploit
a previously unnoticed loophole in the rule about the voting period for
proposals. The loophole allowed the voting period to be set by a Judge to
be 5 minutes rather than a week. Once this was achieved, a small group of
players should have been able to ram through legislation officially
enshrining their own power and privileges, even after the loophole had
been closed - providing they were quorate in number. In the event, the
new, larger quorum, and more importantly, the ethical qualms of several of
the conspirators, defeated them: needing the consent of 14, they could
muster only 8 or 9. Had quorum still been 20%, it might have been a close
run thing. As it was, the attempted coup by the Junta (as it was known)
was never realized. This was probably for the best, but I can't help
thinking that conspiracies are the most interesting part of the game, and
that we are discouraging them just a little too heavily at the moment.

New players are very welcome, and with the new committees need not
bury themselves straight up in the complexities of the current ruleset.
Hope to see you on Nomic World soon!

******************************************************************************
* __  ___  ___ \    /  ___  |  *
*|__   |  |__   \  /  |__   |  *    "Open the pod bay doors, please, Hal."
*___|  |  |___   \/   |___  o  *
*[e-mail]*
******************************************************************************

Summary of Play on Nomic World: Mar 10 -> April 27
--------------------------------------------------

It is now more than six months play commenced on Nomic World, the world's
biggest game of Nomic, and yet the game continues to produce surprises
and interesting ideas to play with. I think this says something good about
the basic Nomic concept.

One of the things I most enjoy about Nomic is the possibility for individuals
to deal with issues that exist in society, but which ordinary people
people never get to grapple with. In the past six months, Nomic players
have had to consider, among many other questions, the separation of
the legislature and the judiciary, questions concerning citizenship
and rights, the legal authority of Judges, and numerous questions about
the interpretation of words and phrases in laws that in Real Life only
a senior lawyer or QC might get to consider.

The major issues before us now are, for the first time in the game,
genuinely economic in character. Firstly, there is the fundamental
question of how one constructs an economy from scratch. The introduction
of genuine monetary units preserved between games has, of course, been
a crucial first step. The conception of points as money contained a deep
flaw in that scores are reset when each game ends, effectively wiping
out all the "cash" in the economy. But even given a monetary unit,
of which there are now two in Nomic World, further questions suggest
themselves. For there to be an economy, there must be objects of value
which players wish to purchase. Points to win the game are an obvious
commodity, but are there others? Whatever commodities there are to be,
they must have an abstract value, since Nomic World produces nothing
concrete. Suggestions for such commodities have included such things as
political power (buy extra votes!), territory and other virtual assets
such as personal boards, scoring and voting systems etc, documents
about Nomic world (including these summaries!) and the like.

In parallel with the development of the economy has been the slow
slow emergence of business or corporate law in Nomic World. To date,
not much corporate law has been written, but legislation allowing
the effective corporation of committees as independently scoring
entities has already been introduced. I find this interesting less
because of any actual legislation that has so far been written or
proposed, but because it shows how corporate law may have developed
in the Real World - as ad hoc additions to and extensions of the
personal law between individuals in a society. Perhaps this accounts
for the fundamentally kludgy nature of so much corporate law
(disclaimer: I don't actually know much about the law, corporate
or otherwise, but I sometimes get the impression that it is always
one loophole behind in catching up with the corporations).

                           ****************

Moving on to less conceptual matters, the last 6 weeks did, finally,
see the end of the Endless Game, Game 6 (which I incorrectly referred
to in my last summary as Game 5). Ironically enough, the game ended
less than 12 hours after one of the winners of the game posted a note
claiming that game *couldn't* be ended. For this she was pronounced
Official Nomic Doofus, a title reserved for those who perform actions
of truly noteworthy stupidity.

Game 6 provided perhaps the most interesting end to a game since game 1.
Not only that, it achieved this interest without controversy over
the actual result, which was uncharacteristically clear cut. The interest
in the manner of the end of the game springs rather from the way in which
a number of new rules and customs interacted with each other to produce
the actual result.

The raw materials for the end of game 6 were a number of new rules.
Firstly, the points threshold for a game to end was increased from
100 to 5(P+1), where P is the number of registered players at any time.
At the time these events took place, P = 29. Hence, 150 points were needed
to end the game.

I say "end the game" rather than "win the game" because of the introduction
of a second rule, inspired by Douglas Hofstadter's game Mediocrity.
This rule stipulates that whenever one or more players exceeds the win
threshold, the second placed player is actually the winner of the game.
This is an extremely subtle rule. Obviously you have to score some points
even to be in the hunt, but a brute force win by points accumulation or
by points trading is ruled out. So the only way to win is to negotiate some
deal with your co-competitors for 2nd place, which means making it more
attractive for them to allow you to win than for them to pursue any
other alternative. Obviously, this takes some political skill.

The final ingredient was the lottery that Geoff has been running. The
lottery is not legislated: players offer points to Geoff equivalent to
the number of tickets they wish to purchase in that week's lottery. The
week that game 6 ended, the most popular lottery yet run was held, with
a prize of 23 points. The scores at that time were:

Storm    97
Joev     85
Evantine 45
Steve    39

Who might be expected to come out of the situation as the winner of the
game? The game cannot end until some player scores roughly 150 points
(this value varies as players are registered and deregistered). It might
appear that, in order to win, one of Storm or Joev must convince the other
to accept points from some of the lower placed players (and convince the
lower placed players to offer them!), perhaps in exchange for some sort
of deal.

However, when Steve (that's me) was announced as the winner of the 23
point lottery prize, the available options changed suddenly, and a
window of opportunity was created for an unexpected outcome. After the
lottery the scores looked like this:

Storm    97
Joev     85
Steve    62
Evantine 45

I was mildly surprised when Storm and Joev approached me with a plan
to make them *joint* winners of Game 6. Storm and Joev would offer me
51 and 39 points respectively, pushing my score to 152, and them into
equal second, one point ahead of Evantine on 46 points. I had to think
relatively quickly, since in a few hours, a new player was due to be
registered, and this event would push the winning score to 155. It seemed
too perfect to resist. I struck a deal (whose nature I will not reveal now)
and agreed to help them. Joev and Storm were duly installed as joint
winners of Nomic World's longest game to date.

                           ********************

Otherwise, matters have on Nomic World have been punctuated by a number
of interesting debates. The issue of the meaning of the word "should"
raised its head - perhaps not surprising as a totally satisfactory
account of the use of the word "should" has eluded philosophers of
lannguage for much longer than 6 months! Players divided among those
who maintained that statements in Nomic World claiming that some event
should or should not occur were strictly meaningless and without truth
values, based on an understanding of "should" claims as purely subjective
claims. Of course, a (small) objectivist school developed to defend
the Absolute conception of the Good. My own reaction was to skirt the
onbjectivist/subjectist quagmire, and defend a different conception
of "should" claims in Nomic World, in which they are understood to be
domain relative. Hence we can understand a statement like "X should do
p" to mean a number of different things depending on the context. The
"should" might mean "should (legally)", or "should (morally)", or
"should (rationally)" or even "should (according to the rules of
etiquette)". Some of these statements can be considered to have objective
true values, particularly those which seek to apply a law such as
"If a player breaks this law, then they should be punished". Note that
the "should" here is the "should" of legality, not morality.

On another semantic front, the problem of the meaning of "rule change"
had made another of its periodic reappearances. It's been a while since
the last time, when "rule change" more or less inherited the meaning
of "proposal". The trouble is that the phrase seems to be undergoing
yet another semantic shift, and is right now hovering in some no-go
territory midway between "proposal" and "event which changes the rules".
To make matters worse, some of the Initial immutable rules still refer
to "rule changes" as if the term were synonymous with "rules". These
rules now seem completely outdated and quaint. In some cases, it's hard to
know how to interpret the rule. Take for instance, this claim from
rule 113: "Rule changes can even amend or repeal their own authority."
On one current understanding of "authority", this word refers to
something like the mutable/immutable status of a rule, or its precedence.
On this understanding, only rules can have authority - proposals cannot
until they have become rules, and it's hard even to make sense of the
idea of some event which changes the rules as having authority. Events
just aren't the right sorts of things. We're still puzzling over this one.

                        ********************

About committees I have not a lot to report. No new committees have
been created in the last six weeks, despite numerous interesting
Petitions of Intent. And the recent drop in player activity, partly
attributable to a mistake in my last summary as to the connection
address (oops!) has kept committee activity low. In just one way,
however, this is fortunate, since it allows me to devote some space
to the following exchange from the Fantasy Rule Committee, in which, you
will recall, the last eligible player each round to post an ordinance
consistent with all the previous ordinances for that round is the winner
of that round of play. I hope the following will entertain.

Davidb started the current round of play off with this:

A limerick has five lines, you see
and line four rhymes with line three.
Lines one, five and two
Also rhyme it is true.
Now make your rules limericks, like me.

Gulp! A round of play in which all the ordinances have to be limericks?
The Fantasy Rulers were undaunted. This from Joev:

For the fr committee to offer
points to a prince or a pauper,
Joev must declare
That the offer is fair;
Only then may the points be so proffered.

Well, this blatant grab for power had to be stopped...I responded:

With Joev I am bound for collision
Why should it be just his decision?
Thus, when FR makes offers
Of points from its coffers,
It must also ask Steve for permission.

Then, an attempt to win the round outright. I wanted to effectively
prevent further ordinances without contradicting a previous ordinance
(also, of course, a limerick) that each rule (ordinance really, but
we allow for poetic licence :-) must allow further rules:

Ho! Fantasy Rulers all! Grieve!
Few options for you will I leave.
Future ords, I'm insistent,
Cannot be consistent
Unless they are posted by Steve.

Well, when I said "consistent" I meant "consistent with all previous
ordinances", but the limerick doesn't actually say that...it just
says "consistent". Joev found a truly sneaky way past the restriction:
[NB: the reference to Chuck at the end is to the current Judge of FR
committee ordinances - effectively the referee for this round of play]

I'm a bit of a wimp, you shall see;
For I make my restrictions "maybes",
And once in a while,
You just have to smile,
'Cause my logic gets slightly crazy.

Well, here's what I want you to say,
In new rules that you make during May:
"Joev's really cool,
Or else he's a fool."
(But I guess if you don't, that's okay.)

Excuse me, I feel a spell.
"I hurt PAIN my SNEAKERS HELL SMELL!"
"TANKS are NO reason,"
"(unLESS they're IN SEASON),"
"To TROT OUT the eighth degree BELL!"

"Since firm and coherent it's not,"
"My rule's not consistent," I thought.
"Steve's rule I've obeyed,"
"A rule have I made,"
"I hope Chuck my logic has bought." :) :)

Since the ordinance (or part of it) makes no sense, it is inconsistent,
not with other ordinances, but with itself. Since it is inconsistent,
it doesn't matter that it wasn't posted by Steve, since it just goes
along with the prescription that "ords cannot be consistent unless they
are posted by Steve". Nice work, Joev! My next challenge, so far unmet,
is of a more practical nature:

In an attempt to get ords which make sense
I'm applying my intelligence:
Other ordinances get
to be part of a set,
Over which this ord takes precedence.

Now mark this restriction well! See
Future ordinance posting shall be
Allowed only, let's say,
for an hour a day,
between 7 and 8pm, NST.

Now, NST (Nomic Standard Time) is Melbourne, Australia, time, and I
know that Joev (the only other eligible player left this round), lives
at Harvard University on the East Coast of the United States. Between
7 and 8pm here is between 4am and 5am there...;-)

                           *******************

Finally, here is the correct connection address for Nomic World:

telnet 130.194.64.67 5000, or
telnet dec15.cs.monash.edu.au 5000

A current, or recently current set of the rules is available via
anonymous ftp from

monu1.cc.monash.edu.au

in the pub/nomic directory.

To subscribe to the Nomic mailing list, send mail to

[e-mail]

with no subject and "SUB nomic" in the message body. If you wish to
send mail to the Nomic mailing list, mail to

[e-mail]

                         *********************

This will probably be my last summary. In 6 weeks time, I am headed
overseas for 6 - 9 months for a holiday. I will try to arrange for
someone to take over the responsibility of producing these documents.
Thanks to all those who have written to me to say how much they like
the summaries - I have, for the most part, enjoyed writing them.
With any luck, Nomic World will still be around when I get back. Until
then,

Cheers,

Steve Gardner

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