acka-research Digest Wednesday, December 02 1998 Volume 03 : Issue 285
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From: John Frederic Mc Coy <jmccoy@umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Acka: Proposal 3849
Date: Wed, 02 Dec 1998 09:44:35 -0500 (EST)
On Wed, 2 Dec 1998 devjoe@wilma.che.utexas.edu wrote:
> Proposal 3849
> Infinitesimalia
> /dev/joe
> Due: Wed Dec 9 02:17:06 1998
>
>
> Create a new rule numbered 103 and titled "Infinitesimalia", with the
> following ITSY_BITSY-delimited text:
>
> ITSY_BITSY
> Whenever, in a single message, a player performs more than one of any
> combination of public actions and posts of rule-specified text that cause
> some game effect (called "player-initiated events" in this rule), these
> events occur in the order they appear in the message, separated by
> infinitesimal lengths of time (so that they occur "in order" but also
> still all occur at the time the post is deemed to occur). If a player
> uses some sort of shorthand to perform several actions in a single
> statement, and doesn't specify an order for the events to occur in,
> then the order is determined randomly.
>
> Within each infinitesimal time between these events, all automatic events
> in the rules that occur as a direct or indirect result of the preceding
> player-initiated event will occur, and the next player-initiated event
> will not occur until there are no more automatic events waiting to
> be processed.
>
> Whenever more than one automatic event is triggered as a direct or
> indirect result of another event, the order of these events is determined
> as follows:
>
> 1. The rules which cause these events are considered in conflict, and
> Rule 102 is applied to determine which of them has precedence, and
> that one is chosen to occur first. If Rule 102 is not sufficient to
> determine one event that has precedence over the others, one event is
> chosen randomly. If only one event remains, that one is chosen.
> 2. The event chosen in step 1 occurs.
> 3. All automatic events which occur as a result of the event in step 2
> occur, as well as all events which occur as a result of those events,
> etc., which may result in one or more separate instances of this
> procedure happening for those events, which complete before this
> procedure ends.
> 4. If there was more than one event to choose between in step 1, this
> entire procedure is repeated, excluding from the set of triggered
> events under consideration in that iteration the one event which was
> chosen in this iteration's step 1.
>
> This rule takes precedence over all other rules.
> ITSY_BITSY
>
> {{[ Whenever something in the rules triggers, all those things happen, and
> anything triggered off of that happens, etc., and when all that is through,
> whatever we were dealing with before continues, and the series of events
> in a public message has the lowest priority of all.
>
> This may break a few things, but considering the apparent brokenness of
> the rules that has appeared in the Museum/forgery-scam-win issue, they are
> already broken, and this seems to normally be the way things work, or are
> designed to work. If this *does* break anything, please fix it; without
> this rule as a start, we'll never sort out all our timing issues.
>
> Also, this *finally* codifies the long-standing game custom about things in
> public messages happening in sequence but in no actual time, i.e., all
> happen at the time stamped on the message. ]}}
>
>
What happens when a player action triggers something which cannot be
completed immediately?
For example, many of us have posted a message along the lines of:
I go to the Library.
I enter *that* room.
I go home.
Now, as I read this proposal, here is what would happen. The player goes
to the Libarary no problem (assuming he's not in Gaol, etc). Assuming the
room isn't closed for some reason, he enters it. And then... one of two
things happens.
The first possibility is that everything stops, and waits for a random
determination to be made, in accordance with the rules. Lets say the
Speaker is indisposed that weekend, and doesn't get around to it for two
days. In the meantime, the playe's "going home" action just sits in the
queue, waiting for the random determination to happen. This could be
highly inconvenient. The player can, of course, send another, seperate
message, where he says that he goes home. And so he will. But what if he
wants to go to, um, Alfvaen's house now. So he sends a message, and he
goes there. And then the next day, the random determination is made, and
suddenly his original going home action comes out of limbo and sends him
back to his house again.
The other possibility I see is that this new Rule 103, with its powerful
precedence and well defined chain of events, would make things happen like
this: Rule 103 says "2. The event chosen in step 1 occurs." In this case,
the event we are talking about is a random determination, in accordance
with the Ackanomicon rule. Its the only automatic event (that I know of)
that would be triggered by entering *that* room. So it would be chosen by
step 1, and then step 2 would cause it to occur. The fact that no random
determination had in fact occured would be irrelevant, Rule 103 says that
it occured, and Rule 103 has precedence over our rules on random things
and the timing thereof. I'm not sure if in this case the results of the
random determination could still be reported later (although their effects
occured as soon as the message was recieved by the list) or what.
This is only the first example I can think of. Perhaps we might decide
that an event requiring action by another player is not "automatic," but
if this is the case then we need to call it something else and explain its
place in this rule. In any event, I am sure that there are other
situations where a seemingly "automatic" event cannot or does not occur
normaly occur immediately after it is triggered. All of these would be
broken in some way or another by this new rule, I think.
Vynd
jmccoy@umich.edu
------------------------------
From: Gabe Drummond-Cole <blafard@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: Acka: Proposal 3805 accepted
Date: Wed, 02 Dec 1998 18:10:13 -0500 (EST)
Hoist by my own petard!
>>Proposal 3805
>>It takes way too long
>>Pol Pot
>>Due: Wed Dec 2 17:32:55 1998
>>
>>
>>In rule 1250.22, replace "10" with "5"
>>
>>{{[shorten the length of bacon games]}}
>>
>>{{If any game of bacon has any players with more than 5 points, the game
>>immediately ends and the player with the higher score is the winner.}}
>
--
Trent
Crazy French-Scotsman, Daring Adventurer, Dungeon Master, Really Weird,
Rules-Harfer, Worker Caste, Weird
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End of acka-research Digest V3 #285
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