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 the 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. Finally, we suspect that some of our players may have been permanently disconnected from the game during some difficulties we had about 3 weeks ago. The address changes 2 or 3 times in succession and if you weren't on the mailing list you wouldn't have found out. If you are one of those players, or if you just want to join the game as a new player, here is the current address of Nomic World: 130.197.64.47 5000, or dec06.cs.monash.edu.au 5000 will get you there. The address of the nomic mailing list: nomic@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au. 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 * * *gardner@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au* * *******************************************************************************