Subject: Ackanomic Research Digest V2 #43
From: [email-masked] (Ackanomic Research Digest)
To: acka-research-digest

Ackanomic Research Digest  Wednesday, April 16 1997  Volume 02 : Number 043

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Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 01:19:14 -0400 (EDT)
From: John Frederic Mc Coy <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka:  P1912 rejected (Perfection)

On Wed, 16 Apr 1997, Acrobot wrote:

> Proposal 1912
> Perfection
> Vynd
> 
> Votes cast by active players:  14 / 19 = 73.684211%
> Yes:  9    No:  8     Present:  1   ...Proposal rejected.

Heh, I consider this a moral victory for those of us whole like to pretend
in the rules.

                                 - Vynd

[email-masked]

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Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 09:16:13 -0400
From: Malenkai <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: CFJ 374 (Malenkai)

snowgod wrote:

> There is no reseon why I can not put that same
> monitoring to use in my position as Customs Officer.

And there was no reason we could not assume that Wayne would always
be Tabulator and Promoter until he wasn't anymore.  Solutions that
depend on people, as opposed to processes, are well documented to be
inferior.  Why would we want a solution that depends on your performance
of duties (that we cannot easily monitor for compliance), when a more
elegant solution exists that does not have this requirement?  If this
is the way you think it should work, we need to add a clause that
says 'This rule is dormant if snowgod is not customs officer'.  This
is especially bothersome, given the apparent disregard for the rules of
Grab a Donkey, Fictionary, and Speed lately, I simply do not feel its
appropriate to tie performance of any duty to a specific individual,
especially when a simpler solution exists.

> I challenge anyone to come up with a better workable system (easily
> intelligable to the average joe) that will have the support required for
> implentation in internomic.

I do not subscribe to the implicit philosophy here that a bad solution is 
better than no solution.  My solution was better and people understood
it enough to debate it; I cannot speak for its Internomic support, but
given that it did not have consensus support here, I tabled it (I prefer
to get consensus on these sorts of things rather than ram something 
objectionable down someone's throat, I think its in better in the long
run).  You did not even RFC your solution here with me so that debate
could take place, *even after I pointed this out to you and your first
version was retracted*.

If you want do debate the technical merits of the two solutions, that's
fine, but I'm pretty much sick of this debate on a non-technical level;
its leaving a very bad taste in my mouth.  I wish those who support ETP
would simply respond to the technical assertion that a model based on
a wide-area networking cloud is superior to many local point to point
connections which require knowledge of the inner workings of the peer,
rather than hide behind language such as 'understandable to the average
joe'.  If one cannot understand the possible solutions to this problem,
one should not be waving the banner for a particular one.

Niccolo Flychuck wrote:

> Neither can we keep tabs of  the Internomic rules of other nomic.
> We may need to know who is authorized to trade, or to confirm a trade.
> The ETP is too complex and won't work well with a larger number of nomics.

The only extra-nomic information my solution would require, in its
minimal form, is which nomics are registered with Internomic, and which
members of those nomics are registered represenatives in Internomic.
We already do this now.  As for the argument that a nomic must be a member
of Internomic to trade, that is true, but becoming a non-voting member
of Internomic is trivial.  Its like saying you must be connected to the
Internet to communicate; its true that that excludes some entities, but
the simplicity gained *is* understandable to the 'average joe'.

Malenkai

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Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 10:13:07 -0500 (CDT)
From: Guy Fawkes <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: CFJ 374 (Malenkai)

On Wed, 16 Apr 1997, Malenkai wrote:

> The only extra-nomic information my solution would require, in its
> minimal form, is which nomics are registered with Internomic, and which
> members of those nomics are registered represenatives in Internomic.
> We already do this now.  As for the argument that a nomic must be a member
> of Internomic to trade, that is true, but becoming a non-voting member
> of Internomic is trivial.  Its like saying you must be connected to the
> Internet to communicate; its true that that excludes some entities, but
> the simplicity gained *is* understandable to the 'average joe'.

Not having been around to see your protocols, I cannot comment on them; 
however, there exists at least one (probably several more if I think 
about it long enough) highly sticky situations that could arise with an 
ETP system where the various trading nomics don't particularly care about 
each other's rules.

Let's say, for instance, a Micronomian wished to send an Ackanomian a few
unstable subatomic particles as a gesture of goodwill.  The Micronomian 
makes a trade offer to Ackanomic which is perfectly legal according to 
the ETP of Ackanomic (which in this instance pays no attention to the 
ETP of Micronomic), and the recipient acks the offer.  Now according to 
our ETP, the recipient is the owner of the particles.

However, some time later, the Micronomic ambassador arrives and informs 
us that the offer to trade the particles was regrettably against 
Micronomic rules and so could never have been made.  What happens?

From the Ackan viewpoint, the trade was completed legally; however from 
the Micro view, the offer was never made, and so the trade never even 
began.  (This situation could get even more interesting if the 
"smuggling" error was detected by Micro after our statute of limitations 
had expired, making the "illegal" trade an integral part of our game state.

If you can tell me where to find your proposed ETP, I would greatly 
appreciate it.  At any rate, I'd love to hear a way a set of ETP rules 
that did not require anyone to monitor a foreign nomics rules could solve 
this problem.

Guy Fawkes

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Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 07:33:09 -0900
From: Phil Ackley <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: CFJ 374 (Malenkai) 

>snowgod wrote:
>
>> There is no reseon why I can not put that same
>> monitoring to use in my position as Customs Officer.
>
>And there was no reason we could not assume that Wayne would always
>be Tabulator and Promoter until he wasn't anymore.  Solutions that
>depend on people, as opposed to processes, are well documented to be
>inferior.  Why would we want a solution that depends on your performance
>of duties (that we cannot easily monitor for compliance), when a more
>elegant solution exists that does not have this requirement?  If this
>is the way you think it should work, we need to add a clause that
>says 'This rule is .....

[blah blah blah etc]

I am calling a politness moon against malenkai for this message.  The trend
towards eleitism and "I'm the only one capable of deciding what's good for
ackanomic" (and not just talking about malenkai here) is really starting to
bother me.

snowgod

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

Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 13:57:08 -0400
From: Malenkai <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: CFJ 374 (Malenkai)

Guy Fawkes wrote:

> >From the Ackan viewpoint, the trade was completed legally; however from
> the Micro view, the offer was never made, and so the trade never even
> began.  (This situation could get even more interesting if the
> "smuggling" error was detected by Micro after our statute of limitations
> had expired, making the "illegal" trade an integral part of our game state.
> 
> If you can tell me where to find your proposed ETP, I would greatly
> appreciate it.  At any rate, I'd love to hear a way a set of ETP rules
> that did not require anyone to monitor a foreign nomics rules could solve
> this problem.

I will attempt to dig and polish them up over the next few days.  In
my solution, the trade had to be in accordance with the rules of
Internomic and Ackanomic.  If the trade made it to Internomic illegally,
but made it through Internomic legally and into Ackanomic legally, I
would define that as smuggling (its not our problem, let the source
nomic handle it, although this is an area of much interest and needed
exploration).  If the trade made it through Internomic illegally, but
into Ackanomic legally, I would call that a sticky wicket :).  However,
the Internomic trade rule was so simple, it would be hard to do it
illegally; it was nothing more that the trade system acka uses:  The
public forum is the cloud, and there are 4 primitive operations:
offer trade, ack trade, nack trade, and timeout on trade.  In Acka
trading, each player does not set up an exchange protocol with each
other player, and worry about that player's personal game state.

Malenkai

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Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 13:31:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: John Frederic Mc Coy <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: CFJ 374 (Malenkai)

On Wed, 16 Apr 1997, Phil Ackley wrote:

> >snowgod wrote:
> >
> >> There is no reseon why I can not put that same
> >> monitoring to use in my position as Customs Officer.
> >
> >And there was no reason we could not assume that Wayne would always
> >be Tabulator and Promoter until he wasn't anymore.  Solutions that
> >depend on people, as opposed to processes, are well documented to be
> >inferior.  Why would we want a solution that depends on your performance
> >of duties (that we cannot easily monitor for compliance), when a more
> >elegant solution exists that does not have this requirement?  If this
> >is the way you think it should work, we need to add a clause that
> >says 'This rule is .....
> 
> [blah blah blah etc]
> 
> I am calling a politness moon against malenkai for this message.  The trend
> towards eleitism and "I'm the only one capable of deciding what's good for
> ackanomic" (and not just talking about malenkai here) is really starting to
> bother me.

I agree.  I am the only person qualified to decide what's good for
ackanomic, and I resent implications to the contrary. :)

> 
> snowgod

                                      - Vynd

[email-masked]

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Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 14:42:00 -0400
From: Malenkai <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: CFJ 374 (Malenkai)

> The trend towards eleitism and "I'm the only one capable of deciding
> what's good for ackanomic" 

I do not want to participate in a flame war, but I must respond to an 
accusation of 'elitism', because I am not an elitist.

I RFC *all* controversial pieces of legislation.  Moreover, if someone
objects strongly, as ThinMan did to the private-voting-results RFC, I
table it or attempt to reach consensus.  In the case of ETP, Mohammed
and I produced different RFCs, after which Mohammed, myself, and Niccolo
Flychuck proceeded to have a debate.  In my opinion, a consensus was
not reached on those RFCs or a solution to internomic trade, thus I
tabled mine.  Another example would be my discussion of CFJ 364.  I
did not *decree* that it went to jury, I detailed my reasoning as to
why I thought that was the proper interpretation, and encouraged anyone
who disagreed to CFJ the matter, or speak up.  That is not a sign of
elitism; I find it is an implicit duty of all officers to make these
interpretations that concern the duties of their offices.

Later, ETP was proposed as a proposal without RFC to me, despite my
demonstated interest and insight into the problem.  When I objected to
this, as well as the actual solution that was proposed (with details of
the problems), I was told that it was 'an oversight'.  That's fine;
perhaps it was sent to me and I lost it, that has happened before.  
However, after the first version of ETP was retracted, it was reproposed
*without* the requested RFC process, yet with the same flaws, and I do
object to that, but I do not see how those objections can be construed
as 'elitist'.  I feel I have objected to ETP in a civilized manner,
much as certain players objected to the Voting Gnome in a civilized
manner.

Moreover, I am attempting to propose a WAN cloud model as opposed to
the current peer-to-peer inplemetation, and generate debate from those
who support the current implementation.  I do not find this response to
those attempts constructive, but must object strongly to construing these
attempts as 'elitist'.  Until someone points out the inferiority of
this model to ETP, however, I will personally conclude that it is a 
superior implementation, but again I cannot see how this conclusion can
be construed as 'elitist'.

I personally do not see 'players other than malenkai' acting in an
'elitist' manner either.  I'm not sure what this is all about, but if
someone has a problem with any perceived elitism, please discuss it with
me privately.

Malenkai

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

Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 17:27:26 -0500 (CDT)
From: Thierry Joffrain <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: CFJ 374 (Malenkai) 

Oh the good old elitism thread surfaces again. Cool.

Malenkai as an elitist? Nah, I don't think so. A bit strict on procedure, be
they formal or not... perhaps.    ; )     But then it's procedures that make
the game work. I know that personally, I'm awful at doing things "by the
book" all of the time. Still, without people like Malenkai (among others)
Acka would be an anarchic tribal system instead of a codified civilization.

As may have been observed, I don't like RFCs for example. They may be great
for the rule set, for getting (almost) all the bugs out, but it's like
airline food. Sure, it has all the nutritional stuff you need, but it's like
eating dehydrated, sanitized and sterilized plastic. Gimme real food that I
can enjoy! (stereotyping, airline food is getting better) Doesn't RFC stand
for Repulsive Food Contest? <g>

Mind you, for the sake of diversity, I sure hope we have some elitists among
us. We had a royalist party a while back and though my democratic blood was
worried frozen at the time, looking back on it that was great.

Since this is Acka research, how would everyone feel about using the
organization rules to create "Friends Of The Acka Monarchy" club? And "This
Isn't An Elitist Club, We Just Like Better People More" club? Or the "Acka
RFC Enthusiast Association"?

And I should also add that I have mixed feelings about the use of the jury
rule. I'm happy people are seeing uses for it, but also wondering if I've
(again) started an avalanche that'll come down on us. Fun fun fun.    : )

Calvin N Hobbes
who remembers when Mr M was an Ackababy just a few days old -- and my,
hasn't he grown, wasn't he cute, in the old days I used to walk uphill to
school both ways, etc etc

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

Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 18:58:33 -0400
From: Malenkai <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: G&C RFC

Niccolo Flychuck wrote:

[about the G&C reorg]

> There's another addition I'd like to see:
> "
> A game acording  to the rules that were in effect when the instance of the
> game started unless specified otherwise.
> "

I believe there is a verb missing somewhere in this amendment; I'm not
sure what you mean or where you want it to go.  Unfortuantely, I
submitted the proposal, if this is not a major flaw, perhaps it can be
done as an amendment.  Do you mean "a game is *played* [according...]?

Malenkai

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End of Ackanomic Research Digest V2 #43
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