Subject: acka-research-digest V3 #228
From: [email-masked] (acka-research-digest)
To: [email-masked]

acka-research-digest    Sunday, September 27 1998    Volume 03 : Number 228

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Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 07:02:25 -0400 (EDT)
From: K 2 <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: CFJ 671 (Altra the Firecat)

Duncan Richer wrote:

> Altra the Firecat has been selected.
>
> Call for Judgement 671 - September 27, 1998
> Subject: Zero-Division
> Initiator: Studge (sent 27 Sep 1998, 06:30 Acka)
> Judge: Altra the Firecat
> Judgement:
>

> Rule 340 (Conventions) says:
> >VI. Whenever division is performed in Ackanomic, and the denominator
> >of that division evaluates to 0, then the result of that entire
> >division shall be 0.

this section limits its aplication to when the denominator is 0. If we ever have 0
active voting players or 0 yes/no votes on a proposal it will effect the proposals
outcome but no when we have 30 players and 17 that usually vote.

K 2

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Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 07:25:14 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mueller <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: CFJ 671 (Altra the Firecat)

At 07:02 AM 9/27/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Duncan Richer wrote:
>
>> Altra the Firecat has been selected.
>>
>> Call for Judgement 671 - September 27, 1998
>> Subject: Zero-Division
>> Initiator: Studge (sent 27 Sep 1998, 06:30 Acka)
>> Judge: Altra the Firecat
>> Judgement:
>>
>
>> Rule 340 (Conventions) says:
>> >VI. Whenever division is performed in Ackanomic, and the denominator
>> >of that division evaluates to 0, then the result of that entire
>> >division shall be 0.
>
>this section limits its aplication to when the denominator is 0. If we
ever have 0
>active voting players or 0 yes/no votes on a proposal it will effect the
proposals
>outcome but no when we have 30 players and 17 that usually vote.

Isn't division being performed in CFJ 671 in Ackanomic?  Why would 340 not
affect division in places it wasn't expected?

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Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 17:30:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Brian Raiter <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: Proposal 3612 rejected

> This is *absolutely* unacceptable.  This is like the third time in
> about a week that the bot has lost votes.

I agree that such *would* be unacceptable. However, that is not the
case.

For the "bot" to lose votes, this would mean that I had received an
email or web submission and not processed it. This *has* happened in
the past, to be sure. I believe it has happened twice in the last year
or so (whenever it was that I had enough automation so that I did not
have to do everything by hand). Once to Mr. Tambourine Man, and once
to Niccolo Flychuck. In both cases I had to retrieve the lost votes,
and retabulate everything that was affected.

There has also been a few occasions where somebody clearly remembers
voting on a proposal, and neither they nor I have records of it. I
suspect some of these are misremembrances, some are emails that were
sent to a wrong address, and some are probably emails that were never
delivered (for whatever reason).

Email does, very rarely, get lost on the internet. There is nothing I
can do about that, of course. Occasionally email is for some reason
undeliverable. In such cases you will receive a bounce message. For
example, during the time yesterday that the mailing lists were down,
nomicbot was also unavailable, and any emails sent to it would have
bounced. Again, there is nothing I can do about that. (I can try to
prevent outages, but when they do happen, I have no way of knowing
that you are trying to get email to me.)

There have also been several other occasions where people have claimed
that the bot has lost votes, but it turns out that they never sent it,
or they accidentally voted for a different proposal, or something of
that nature. (Interestingly, no one ever claims that the bot has lost
a proposal submission. Almost half of the bot's email contain
proposals, so you'd think the problems would be similarly split.)

> I voted yes on this (of course) at the earliest opportunity, but it
> has me down as abstaining.

Please, before you burn me at the stake, help me try to track down the
source of the problem, and we can see what's what.

I can tell you right now that I did not receive any votes from you
for the proposals in the range of 3606 to 3612 inclusive. If you did
in fact vote on these, the votes were not received by me.

If you use the web form exclusively to vote, then I can be more
specific. (The form, requiring a name and password, leaves more of a
"paper trail" in our access logs.) In this case I can tell you that you
did not visit any of the tabulator web pages at *any* time while
Proposal 3612 was up for voting. Proposal 3612 was distributed on the
17th, at 15:17 EDT. You accessed the web form on the 15th, and then
not again for over a week. In fact, the next access was on the 24th
at 21:48 EDT, six hours after Proposal 3612 had left the voting
queue. Both of these accesses correspond exactly to two submissions I
have in nomicbot's archives.

If you still think your vote was lost, it would help if you could give
me more specifics so that I can narrow the search. The email logs are
huge, and do not contain much in the way of private information.

breadbox

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Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 18:33:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mueller <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: Quorum failures

At 06:16 PM 9/27/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Proposals 3609, 3611, and 3612 all failed to meet quorum. No other
>voting results before yesterday were in error (praise be), and all of
>these proposals were rejected anyway, so the rules are not in error.
>(I note, though, that in the remarkably unlikely alternate thread of
>CFJ 371, this means that Studge is still not dictator. Too bad.)

Rule 107 (Quorum)

"The head count for a given proposal includes all players who legally cast
a vote on that proposal and all players who were
eligible to cast a vote on that proposal at the end of that proposal's
voting period but did not do so. 

Then, quorum is met if either (a) at least 60% of the players in the head
count have cast a vote, or (b) at least 36% of the
players in the head count have voted YES, or both. In no other
circumstances is quorum met."

Translate through CFJ 671 being true: if 0% vote, or 0% vote yes, then
quorum is met.

Studge

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Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 21:47:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: Gabe Drummond-Cole <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: Proposal 3626

Um, I'm sorry to have to point this out, but I think this proposal is invalid.

It says:

>Proposal 3626
>Reorg VI
>saaremaa (Randy Hall)
>
>This is a Modest proposal.
>
...
>Create a rule titled "The Mithril Grapefruit", numbered 1401,
>with this text:
>
>"
>The Mithril Grapefruit is a unique, non-tradeable, prestigious entity.
>
>{{If the player known as K 2 when the proposal that created this rule
>was distributed voted YES on that proposal, then the Mithril Grapefruit
>is transferred to that player, otherwise this rule is amended to append 
>a space character, followed by the date that this rule was created (in a 
>consistent format with the rest of the rule) directly after the final
>occurrence of the word "until" in this rule}}
>
....

Rule 313 says:

I. The Right to Fair Voting 

A proposal is invalid if it calls for one or more effects that discriminate
in any way between players based on their voting actions on that proposal,
or any other
specific proposal or proposals identified in the proposal. Effects that
depend on the way players vote are allowed if they apply to all proposals,
or to all
proposals in one or more classes previously defined by the rules. [This
would be modest proposals, harfy proposals, etc.] This section defers to
section IV of
this rule. 

- --Anathema
  Dungeon Master - Religious Caste - Crazy French Scotsman - Really Weird

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End of acka-research-digest V3 #228
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