Subject: Nomic: what's left

From: Joel Uckelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 02:18:39 -0500

What I have now for record-keeping works as far as I can tell, though it 
doesn't yet produce any of the non-essential stuff (e.g. indices and a 
Logical Ruleset). I intend to add these things as time allows.

A rough sketch of what needs to be done before we can start:

I need to load the rules into the SQL database, which I cannot do until the 
rules have numbers, which I cannot do until I know whether the rule numbers 
matter for precedence, which I won't know until we have precedence rules, 
which in part depend on how the judicial rules look--and the judicial rules 
aren't yet written.

On an unrelated note, we also need a name, though I guess we could start 
without one.

As for the matter of completing the initial ruleset: reading back through 
suggestions from the summer and thinking about what sorts of problems we 
faced with regard to dividing up responsibility for game duties gave me an 
idea. Every game action--that is, every action which affects the game 
state--needs to be recorded somehow. That involves work on someone's part. 
We could take advantage of that fact by construing every action as a 
command to some officeholder, player, or other game entity, to do 
something. For example:

Josh makes a proposal. Under the proposed system, Josh's action of making a 
proposal would constitute an order to note that a proposal was made, 
directed at whomever is in charge of noting such actions--let's call this 
person the Notary. If the Notary fails to take action on Josh's proposal, 
he can request that the courts compel the Notary to do so. If the Notary 
persist in ignoring Josh, he has further legal recourse, and so on.

In such a system, it remains impossible to violate the rules, as 
such--rather, the rules provide consequences for certain commissions and 
omissions. This would eliminate the weird problems we had before of sorting 
out events that occurred on their own, since all events would be tied to 
Orders. Does anyone else see this as a good thing? Let me know--if we want 
to do this, I'd like to know before I load the rules into the database, as 
that will unfortunately require some tedious text formatting that I have 
little choice but to do by hand (just this once, though).

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From: Dan Waldron <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 10:30:25 -0400 (EDT)

It's a good thing.  Lets do it.
DW